To Change a Mind Is Immensely Difficult

Last week, a website that was brilliant in its simplicity made the rounds of a ton of my facebook friends, Shit Harper Did. Next to a coal sketch of Stephen Harper smiling creepily while cradling a freaked out kitten, is a generator of summaries of news articles describing the destructive, polarizing, alienating, and anti-democratic activities of the Harper Government™. Among the terrible things that appear is Harper sabotaging international talks on carbon emission reductions and climate change, cutting funding for scientific research while muzzling the ability of government-employed scientists to speak to the media about their work independently of party-controlled public relations officials. He has also doubled annual spending on prisons in a country with falling crime rates. His handling of the G8 and G20 meetings in summer 2010 was needlessly provocative, grossly expensive in direct spending and lost revenue, and ridiculously handled.

I was glad that after I posted this site, the number of reposts among my friends skyrocketed. To see the popularity of anti-Harper propaganda like this at first made me hopeful that he would be out of power within a few weeks. Then I thought about who my friends were.

That phrase is usually trotted out to disparage a group of people, but I mean it in a more literal sense. My friends were already against Stephen Harper. They never voted Conservative in the first place, and they certainly weren’t about to now. Apart from a few exceptions, my social circles tend to involve people who are already left-leaning. We’re academics in the humanities, artists, journalists, activists for unions and marijuana legalization, young people in the technology industries. We’re people who live in the centre of cities, many of us don’t own cars unless we have to for work purposes, and few of my friends have work that requires cars. Even most of the lawyers I know are most interested in labour, criminal, entertainment, and contract, or else they went to law school and decided never to be a lawyer. We are not the demographic that votes Stephen Harper.

This idea first started making sense to me when Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto. All my friends were amazed that Ford won with the massive share of the vote that he did. But when I looked at the district-by-district breakdown, it was plain what had happened: the centre of the city, split among several diverse and dynamic candidates, went in their various directions indicated by their diverse and dynamic personalities. All the suburbs went Ford. None of my friends knew anyone in the suburbs. Neither do I, apart from some of my students, who commute to school from their suburban homes. We ask ourselves questions like "How could anyone vote for Stephen Harper?" and expect to hear only confused rage and disgust, because we only ask it around our friends who never consider voting for Stephen Harper. The most productive way to ask this question is with genuine curiosity and respect towards someone who enthusiastically votes for Stephen Harper.

There’s no way our venting anger on the alleys of facebook or in Toronto’s gay district is ever going to change a single Conservative vote. And that’s a shame, because voicing rage against the stupid and bigoted activities of the Harper Government™ and receiving adulation and praise in return feels so wonderful. What will be utterly painful and wretched is to go out to ridings that are in close contests and campaign against the Conservative party in places like Ajax, Orleans in Ottawa, or Mississauga. You’ll have doors slammed in your face, Conservative party activists hurl abuse at you, and go home feeling demoralized and dejected every day. But if you want to change minds and actually achieve political goals, a requirement is talking articulately with people who don’t already agree with you.

I, meanwhile, will just write this blog post that I’ll link on facebook and entertain my friends who hate Stephen Harper and like to complain about him.

Wars and Dictators and Elections and Eyebrows

A Political Note on Libya

A few posts ago, I was exasperated with Barack Obama’s waffling on support for the Libyan revolutionaries to the point where I was giving up on him. Having seen a vigorous no-fly zone manned by efficient Americans and angry Frenchmen, I am no longer giving up on him (the poster still hangs on the wall by my kitchen). Like he said in his books, he believes in the democratic institutions of his country and the world, even when they move with an aching slowness.

Actually, what’s been exasperating lately, though to a lesser degree, is the perspectives of my leftist comrades. Robert Fisk is a brilliant journalist and author, and in an otherwise balanced (and also exasperated) column, he writes, “Yet again, it’s going to be regime change.” My friends and political columnists who lean left and America-skeptical have begun leaning against Libyan intervention, that the no-fly zone is another grab for oil, or Middle Eastern influence, or something. If it’s not always mentioned, I find it an undercurrent to some of the discourse critical of the intervention.

But Libya is not Iraq. The anti-Gaddafi rebellion didn’t need Western help to begin. These are the revolutions of the Arab world. While it’s probably going to be a mixed bag of success, continued repression, and half-measured compromise, it’s still a vibrant revolution of Arab people. Westerners didn’t manufacture this revolution, but we can still aid it as best we can. A dictator like Gaddafi isn’t talked out of power. I’m no longer willing to say that there can always be a peaceful solution to political repression.

I’m willing to accept the paradox that sometimes you have to start a war for peace. Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben-Ali are just three more names on the list of overthrown dictators of people who wouldn’t live under their rule anymore. They join Slobodan Milosevic, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Chun Doo-Hwan, Rafael Trujillo, Porfirio Díaz, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Boneparte, Louis XVI, and George III.

No matter how much we may complain about the Tea Party’s racism and insanity, and no matter how justified we may be in our fight against the destruction of organized labour in the United States, it was anti-Iraq-Invasion protesters who first put a Hitler moustache on a sitting President.
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A Political Note on Canada

I’m looking forward to this election, because I think Stephen Harper will finally lose some seats again. I don’t think the Conservative Party will ultimately lose the plurality in parliament, but if their numbers are reduced to the mid-130s or (if we’re lucky) mid-120s, it might be enough to cause an insurrection in the Conservative Party against Stephen Harper.

I’m registered to vote in Hamilton Centre, one of the safest NDP districts in the country. But when I hear that Harper is losing support in Quebec, and that a lot of seats in Saskatchewan are in play, I couldn’t be happier. Harper has demonstrated contempt for Canadian political institutions and for Canada’s parliament, as well as open hatred for every other political party. Holding Harper in contempt of parliament wasn’t just a political ploy: the reason he’s the only prime minister ever to be held in contempt is because of the seriousness of the charge. It carries with it a nominal restriction from running to be an MP for five years, which Harper has ignored. He treats the Canadian government as if he owned it, and there were no checks on the power of his office. He treats his own back-benchers and party activists like cogs in the Stephen Harper machine.

I posted on my facebook wall a link to an article that compared Stephen Harper’s methods of governance to that of Richard Nixon, and found them brothers in arms. Then a friend sent me another article demonstrating that Nixon’s policies on the environment, engagement with China, infrastructure and scientific investment, and even civil rights were more progressive, humanitarian, and superior to Stephen Harper’s.

I’ll be so happy to see him go.
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A Political Note on Senses of Humour

A sign that I think the Liberal party might have a chance of making some serious gains in this election is that they’re giving away a particular free gift with small donations: Stick-on Ignatieff Eyebrows. I’m glad their campaign is finally loosening up and is able to make fun of Michael Ignatieff’s stick-in-the-mud pretentious image. I’m waiting for the media clip where he tries them on himself.
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A Political Note on Exasperation

I know one of the excuses that have been heard for just giving the Conservatives a majority is that the increased frequency of elections in the past decade is hurting Canadian democracy. If anything, the greater means of maintaining accountability of politicians in parliament without a single majority party should keep leaders in a more moderate, compromising position which takes more concerns of Canadians into account. Harper hasn’t learned those lessons, and is just becoming more authoritarian in his party and the bureaucracy. If this is his authoritarian streak in a minority, I’d hate to see what he would do to the country with an unchecked four year mandate.

Canada Could Use a New Species of Conservative

The only politician whose twitter feed I follow is Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement. The vast majority of politicians’ twitter feeds are written by PR interns, and consist almost entirely of announcements of speeches and press conferences, or links to press releases that state generic party policies, except with greater vapidity.

But someone retweeted Tony Clement joking about some absurd piece of popular culture. Intrigued, I read through his profile and discovered a fan not just of sports, but of science fiction. I discovered a man who seems to be a genuine nerd for technological innovations. We have quite a few common follows as well. Clement follows a lot of my more noteworthy journalist friends, which is probably expected for a politician to follow reporters who may soon work on him. But he also follows some of the same weird celebrities I do, like David Lynch, Leonard Nimoy, Conan O’Brien, and Kanye West.

After I spoke with my friends who read far more tech news than I do this weekend, I became incensed at the CRTC ruling having the effect that independent internet service providers, although nominally allowed to compete with large companies whose physical networks they used, would not be permitted to offer more bandwidth than the ISP plans of those larger companies. This would severely restrict internet access in Canada, making it practically unaffordable to many businesses and individuals. Coffeeshops, for example, could no longer offer free wifi, and probably lose their shirts along with the lagging customers buying endless coffees, pastries, and sandwiches while they sit in a warm coffeeshop on a freezing winter afternoon.

So I sent a twitter letter to Tony Clement. In eleven tweets, I explained my major complaints and my idea that a truly pro-business government would encourage investment in the bandwidth infrastructure for small ISP businesses to thrive, possibly even without having to rely on the networks of large telecom corporations. That was the main positive contribution to my critique.

I was chuffed when I got home today to check my e-mail, and found a direct message in my twitter inbox from Clement. It was a quick notice to watch his website for a more detailed statement on the ISP ruling, but nonetheless, it was a direct message to me from a minister of the party whose platform I am largely the most distant from in the entire parliament of my country.

Mind you, the actual statement was pretty underwhelming in terms of spelling out any actual position the government was taking on the issue. But they did acknowledge that the ruling conformed to the lobbying efforts of a major network owner, without naming that company, which was Bell. I will likely never be a fan of Stephen Harper, but if Clement listens to the knowledge of well-informed Canadians who understand how harmful the bandwidth restrictions unfolding from this ruling will be to the country, there will be at least one Conservative in the party who I think is pretty okay.

For most politicians, pretty okay is like getting a high A. Not an A with distinction (that’s an alright), but it’s about as high as a politician can get until I become the industry or education minster in about twenty or so years.

Overcoming the Sentimentality of My Country

The last two weeks have been quite heavily packed with activity, most of it having to do with work. I’ve been so busy with teaching, writing philosophy essays and thesis chapters, and taking part in the hiring process for our department’s new position that I haven’t had time to blog, and hardly had time to drink. I even missed the New Years Day edition of the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, and when I miss Craig Charles, you know I’m working seriously hard.

But I came across an article that has gotten me rightfully upset, or at least a tad cross. The Sentimentalists is the novel that won the Giller Prize last year, and its publication history seemed at first to be an uplifting tale of the surprising success of a nearly defeated underdog. Johanna Skibsrud wrote a novel, and couldn’t get it published by any of the big houses, so she eventually went with the small Gaspereau Press, who printed a limited run. The book was sent to a few influential critics who liked it enough to include on the Giller longlist, and it found itself on the shortlist, then took the top prize. There’s a softcover run on a major publishing label, and triumph was had.

This article sums up all the underhanded dealing that has resulted in this remarkably corrupt Giller win. I think I have something to add to this debate, however, which has less to do with the corruption of the Giller judges and the idiocy of Skibsrud’s publishers, and more to do with my ideas about Canadian literature generally. I didn’t know much about The Sentimentalists when it initially won the Giller, but having this accolade made me at least slightly interested in reading it. The books that I picked up on the gift card Mother sent me for Xmas (Bolaño’s Antwerp is done, Berlin Alexanderplatz is in progress, and Finnegans Wake looms before me, and I might blog my thoughts on it, like I did with Proust last year) are still not read yet. But once I read that article, The Sentimentalists stopped being interesting for me. Here’s why.

It’s rural, it’s cold, and its central character is a Canadian stereotype, the cruel buffoon. In other words, The Sentimentalists embodies everything that I’ve come to hate about Canadian literature, and that everyone else in the world who knows anything about Canadian literature hates about it too. I think this image of Canadian literature as being about rural, isolated existence is popular, but I think it’s exactly what keeps people from being more attracted to Canadian literature. The article I linked is right when it says that the rural Canadian novel doesn’t even represent the country anymore, now that Canada is more urban and suburban. Canada is also far less white, less Christian, and far more technologically savvy than the traditionally defined ‘Canadian novel’ makes it out to be.

The most interesting point of view for me is trying to work out how a fiction with a Canadian identity can reflect that urbanity without sounding like an American big city novel; or how we can reflect our multiethnic population without becoming a typical immigrant novel. I don’t really have a program, and I don’t want one, because I no longer believe that programs and manifestos really inspire creativity. They’re just easy to follow in a superficial history course.

Creative experimentation is probably the best route, but I do have ideas about basic ground rules of what not to do, and an inkling of what the most productive paths of development might be. Very clearly, what not to do is rely on the old stereotypes of the Canadian novel, the kind of survival themes that Margaret Atwood talked about in her thematically eponymous book, or the rural settings that aren’t as important to the lives of Canadians anymore. And it’s best not to fall too much in line with the major American fiction archetypes like the urban decay novel or the Western. Books about the underbelly of downtown Vancouver or the exploration of the Rockies or the North could definitely be interesting, but maybe not the most progressive.

Science fiction elements might end up being interesting, because sci-fi life is the kind of direction human civilization is moving in right now. We may not have underwater bubble cities, but we do have Wikileaks and hacker culture.

There’s a political attitude in Canada that I think is best called necessary humility. We’ve always been politically independent, but we live in the shadow of the United States. So while we’re part of the former dominating class of Earth’s powers, Canada has never really dominated anyone. I think that gives us a perspective on the shifting alignment of the world that’s more of a detatched observer than an angsty falling empire, like the USA. A Canadian can take a more ironic perspective on the shift of global power to China, India, and Brazil than any of the former world powers like America, Europe, or Russia could. They’re all losing something, but we’re not.

And there’s enough people of Asian and African descent in Canada for several generations that immigrant narratives don’t apply to them, but they’ve diversified Canada to the point where they can’t be known as the traditional culture of the majority. A third-generation Indian or African living in Toronto, Montréal, or Vancouver is part of a very different kind of settler community than the white folks were. So I don’t really know what’s going to turn up out of Canada in the future. But as long as it’s not more rural pablum like The Sentimentalists, I’ll probably be happy.
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I heard Imelda May’s music on the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show for the first time this weekend, and I was suitably impressed by a fiery smart beautiful Irish woman who sings ridiculously frenetic rockabilly. She also does a cover of “Tainted Love” that blows Marilyn Manson AND Soft Cell away, along with the versions by Inspiral Carpets, and definitely better (and better looking) than the Pussycat Dolls version.

The G20 Riots Are a Calculated Political Theatre Piece

Blogging takes a backseat to thesis writing, research, and manuscript editing, so I haven’t followed through on my promise to tell a bunch of funny and insightful stories about my conference trip to Montreal. Taco Tuesdays at NL Girl House, Rue Sherbrooke will have to be immortalized somewhere else for now. There are more pressing issues at hand.

This time last week, I was considering going to Toronto today to join the G20 protests. I’ve talked a fair game about my more radical political views before, and now I had a chance to put some of my philosophy into action, at least in terms of political theatre. Watching events unfold in that city, I’m glad I stayed home, from the perspective of my physical safety. From the perspective of my political beliefs, I’m a little regretful.

Admirable, if smug, leftist activist leaders deride militant protesters as accomplishing nothing but property destruction, violence against people, and the counter-productive public relations that depicts all leftists as thugs, morons, and arsonists. Anti-capitalist groups worthy of praise deem the Ontario and Canadian governments as needlessly provocative, the extent and secrecy of their emergency police powers showing that establishment forces were spoiling for a fight, and are glad to have struck a genuine blow against those struggling for a more fair society in which all people can prosper and live freely.

I can’t disagree with ideas like that, especially when I see video like this.



I examine this situation and perceive a clear narrative. Everyone knew that this G20 meeting would be focussed on global austerity plans for many of the world’s richest nations. These rich nations, Canada included, have long been manipulated by a piratical investment banking establishment into running their governments at massive deficits, funding enormous national debts from which global financial institutions make the most profit. There are even ways in which an investment bank can profit from the complete collapse of a well-off country’s economy: buying insurance against the collapse of a country’s economy. And those economic collapses happened because of over-reliance on financial strategies invented by investment industry chicanery anyway.

Austerity economies in the world’s richest countries would only lead to increased suffering for poor human populations inside and outside those countries. The investment industry also profits from the deregulation of capital investment that comes with austerity economies. So naturally, advoactes for the poor would protest these plans at the most visible moments to communicate their message that there must be other ways of organizing an economy. Such a moment is a G20 summit where these international arrangements are taking shape. However, there is always a militant fringe to the leftist advocacy movement (just as there is for any political movement: observe, for example, the rural militias of the United States). This militant fringe usually causes property destruction, but has lately been overwhelmed in public relations by the sane organizations. I think one of the main reasons few militant anarchists have appeared at recent summits is that these summits have been held at isolated locations, and travelling there is very expensive. Most people who don’t believe money should exist have very little money for travel, so the militant left fringe can only arrive in small numbers.

However, the downtown core of Canada’s largest city is extremely accessible, and it’s cheap to get there. Everyone in Ontario comes to Toronto. Even a hitchhiker would find it easy to get a ride to a city as central to a country’s life as Toronto. Ask a driver if she’s going to Kananaskis and she’ll ask you for directions, and whether that’s the real name of a town. Knowing that huge numbers of people will be able to assemble for protests, the government then creates an enormous security apparatus, effectively shutting down an entire city for a long weekend. Every government spokesperson justifies the expense and enormity through talking points about the ineviably violent nature of leftist protestors.

A climate of mutual provocation is created. A brutalizing government can justify its large-scale security apparatus in an absurdly conspicuous location, while using the spectacle to discredit leftists and their sympathizers as violent criminals. Meanwhile, brutalized leftist protesters can decry the inevitable government crackdown and win sympathizers for their own causes who deplore government and police overkill. Watch the video again, and you can see both narratives unfolding. The police act in a manner that’s inherently threatening, standing in a street with full riot gear. And the protesters are singing the Canadian national anthem, an act of patriotism aimed at the police, who they hope to depict as having betrayed the democratic ideals of Canada. They sing the words to ‘O Canada,’ but what they communicate is, ‘Charge! I dare you!’ And the police gladly oblige. Both government and police, peaceful and militant leftists, have set a trap for each other, and each oblige the other by walking into their enemy’s traps.

My old friend Sheena is a journalist in Toronto who’s been reporting formally and informally on the protests / riots / crackdowns. She tweeted something earlier today that I found quite insightful. She was incredulous at protesters marching down the streets of Toronto chanting ‘These are our streets!’ when most of them had travelled in from other cities around the country. Again, it’s easy to travel to Toronto.

You could hear a statement of solidarity with the people of what they consider a besieged city, as when people around the world declared themselves New Yorkers after September 11, or how sympathizers with the revolutionaries of May 1968 would delcare themselves Parisians. Or one could hear the insincerity of a group of protesters callously manipulating their audience into sympathy by means of a charismatic image.

Yes, Toronto has become a war zone, with hundreds of people imprisoned by a police force with authoritarian levels of special powers. But a leftist today is savvy, knowing that police brutalization will play directly into their larger goals of discrediting a police force and a conservative government. In order to win, sincerity must be embraced and denied. A protester who travelled from other provinces, other countries, must genuinely believe that Toronto is their city, the site of this confrontation that is a defining moment of a political movement. And that protester must provoke the security apparatus that has been built to brutalize them, must manipulate their audience into believing in their cause, that their opposition to capitalism and the police institution is genuine. That’s why a protester sings the national anthem at a line of riot police: they know the cameras are there, and they know what an amazing image that is.

The advocates for global capitalism and heavy industry have long known how to manipulate the undecided masses into believing that advocates for social justice and environmental responsibility are enemies, terrorists, evil. Nixon created the blueprint for that when his administration destroyed the liberatory movements of the United States in the 1960s. They manipulated ordinary people’s fear of change, fear of the end of the old, comfortable order (comfortable because it’s old).

But advocates of social justice and environmental responsibility have learned these techniques of manipulation as well. We manipulate ordinary people’s fear of repression by state power, fear of democracy being hijacked by corporate interests, fear of surveillance, fear of death. I say this not to discredit social justice and environmentalism. The word manipulation carries nasty connotations, but it’s the very tool of politics and society itself. Read this again and substitute persuasion for manipulation.

Tools for achieving a political end are ethically neutral: they can be employed by any advocate of any cause. The ethical worthiness of a movement should be judged on its goals, not its methods. The cause of the protestors of global capitalism is the betterment of life on Earth.

Lessons from History, Or When Not to Read Too Closely

I was reflecting on last Tuesday’s John Ralston Saul talk at McMaster this weekend, and another idea occurred to me. The actual subject of his talk was understanding Canada as a Métis nation, a life grown of pluralism that was founded in the historical situation in the country for many years, where the indigenous peoples and the English and French settlers were on a level playing field. This shifted, he said, in the nineteenth century, as European philosophies of racial nationhood took hold. But he said that Canada had a very special essence in this founding atmosphere of pluralism and multiple identities.

I found Saul’s talk very intriguing and useful. But my social scientist, cultural theorist, and historian friends thought differently. They raised questions and commented to me that Saul’s theory was naive. They raised the valid point that his romanticizing the early indigenous-settler relationships as a creative multiplicity of identity and lifestyle (and it was quite romanticized) papered over the genuine terrifying harm that settler-descended people had done to the indigenous. They argued that history was much messier than Saul’s simple story, and I agreed with them.

But I hold firm that Saul’s talk was intriguing and useful - as philosophy. As history, it missed major complications that made a mockery of his account of the Canadian story. Of course, the complications of history as it actually occurred always make a mockery of any simple story. The point of a simple story is not to be an accurate retelling of events, and anyone who thinks that is the point doesn’t understand the messy muddiness of how history works.

A story like Saul’s is told not to recount the past, but to create the future. A plural Canada whose people embrace contradiction and multiplicity in their national and personal identity is a Canada where I would love to live. Saul told a just-so story to explain his philosophy of identity (because that’s what it was, not a genuine historical account). Such a philosophy is connected with Canadian history to give its audience an anchor in their own lives, a tool to apply the concept to their own lives, taking it out of the abstract and into actual application.

The problem with just-so stories that are delivered as interpretations of historical events is that they gloss over the events that don’t jive with the story. So those in the audience with a better mind for history than philosophy will dismiss the concept as poor history and leave it at that. It’s a long-standing problem for creative philosophers to find ways to articulate their concepts in a manner that people can latch onto them and incorporate them into their own lives. It can be tough to get our ideas out of the abstract.

Philosophy as Critic and Creator

Again, Brian Leiter’s blog has informed me of an intriguing essay and a sticky problem that contemporary philosophers face: the perception among many in wider society that the problems of philosophy are irrelevant. This essay by Jason Stanley describes a typical philosopher’s problem of trying to make the issues around which his discipline revolves matter. Stanley describes philosophy as the target of a prevailing attitude in the humanities today that understanding the particularities of cultures are most important for human civilization. Philosophy concentrates on the ancient problems such as whether there is free will, the nature of rational agency, what constitutes evidence, what is the truth of existence? These are the eternal questions, the questions that would appear to make mere gossip of what Stanley calls “the anthropology of the other.”

Yet philosophy, as it is traditionally understood, is devalued by its fellow humanities disciplines precisely because it does not engage in this anthropology. Stanley describes philosophers who seek ways of writing that escape the traditional eternal questions (Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, in my opinion John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein also) as anti-philosophers. Stanley sees a role for philosophy in this new environment as one in its ancient Western tradition: the critic.

Often, people find themselves slipping into the dogmas of their cultural upbringings, their colloquial traditions, that which seems so obvious that it would never be questioned. Where this happens, the critical voice of philosopher turns, showing people by reasoned argument that they are straying from the truth through their mere anthropology. The job of the philosopher is to stand up for what is right and true, defending universal justice in the face of those who would say, “Ah, that’s not how we do things here,” sneaking abuse and violence under the banner of tolerant relativism. This relativism ends all discourse over right and wrong, which the philosopher, with his eye on the truth, can restore.

But I want to take this further. Stanley is mistaken to build an antagonism, an opposition, between the philosophy of the traditional eternal questions and the traditional critics of philosophy that tend to align with cultural studies and anthropology. The ideas they represent are only anti-philosophy insofar as ‘philosophy’ is understood as investigating the eternal, projects above merely cultural traditions, matters of absolute truth, unpolluted by facts of simple practicality.

To understand philosophy as a cultural tradition is not anti-philosophical, it is anti-necessitarian. I agree with Stanley about the importance of philosophical thinking as a critical, subversive activity. The biggest problem philosophy faces, I think, is its tendency to believe itself to have this priviledged role as the only path to reasoned certainty; its tendency to believe that the truth is unified, absolute, more pure than the cultural collisions described in mere anthropology.

John Ralston Saul gave a talk at McMaster University today on understanding Canada as having an important cultural tradition of embracing hybrids, multiple mutually inconsistent identities, continuing negotiation among neighbouring communities, and adaptation to changing conditions of life. He contrasted this attitude (which he associated with the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Canada and its first immigrants who implicitly picked up their ideas) with the European attitude that unity of identity, science, politics, ethnicity, territory, and truth is the only good way to run society.

From the very beginning of one’s education in philosophy, one is taught to unify one’s thinking, that inconsistency is a major problem in one’s thinking and identity, that you cannot be two things at once. Such inconsistencies and multiplicities are against the very nature of reason and truth itself. This is the kind of thinking that is dangerous, that brings adaptiveness and flexibility to an end. Convinced that what is true now is true at all times, one will run into severe problems when the nature of the world changes.

One rhetorical point Saul made was to bring up the condescending point about the technology of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian shield. “If these people were so intelligent, said the intelligensia of Europe, then why didn’t they develop such a simple technology as the wheel? Have you ever tried to use a wheeled vehicle of the nineteenth century to get through the wilderness of the Shield? You’d end up with a lot of broken wood very quickly.”

The point is that what is right and true for one land, region, culture, people, civilization, may not be right and true for another. This is not relativism, but adaptation. One can defend those abused by the powers of a foreign land, but not because you have access to an eternal ethical truth that holds sway over the contingent culture. The abused themselves know that they are abused, and if they ask for help, it must be given. A violent man may say that this is what we do here, but not for long once those to which violence is done rise up.

The philosophy that most intrigues me is the creation of new concepts and new ways of life for changing times, and the changing problems that come along with time. Philosophy is the branch of the humanities that deals with thought at its most abstract, but this is not superior because of the purity of the abstract. There is no absolute purity, only purity of some quality, abstractness being only one such quality. Thought at its most abstract is least restrained by our habits of daily thought, what we have become used to thinking is possible and impossible.

Maximizing freedom of thought in philosophical creativity lets us build ideas that can take us to weird, alien places. The world may change in an utterly unpredictable way one day. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the better we can approximate in our thinking and planning the strange new world where we now find ourselves. Philosophy can be our first foothold in a contingent, dangerous world.

My Country's Democracy Has Failed

The major movement in conservative politics in Canada over the turn of the century was to unite the right, to unify the two right-wing parties, the Progressive Conservative and the Reform, into a single political party that could mount a successful challenge to the Liberal party hegemony. And they succeeded brilliantly. I disagree with virtually every Conservative party platform except the general idea of being very careful with government spending in hard economic times. But I have to congratulate them on accomplishing the considerably difficult task of bringing together two political parties who regarded each other with resentment, anger, and suspicion.

It was their unity as a party that enabled them to succeed in a federal system like Canada's. We simply do not have a political culture where parties can conceive of working together in a governing coalition. This means that any minority government is afflicted by petty squabbling, and an almost total lack of ability to govern. So any attempt at cooperation between the Reform and PC parties, like not running candidates against each other or appointing the other party to one's cabinet, was inconceivable. The united front of the new Conservative party had led them to election victory and the longest-lasting minority government in Canadian history.

And the Conservative party will probably get a majority in this election thanks to just the kind of deplorable petty squabbling on the left side of our parliamentary spectrum. All the possible leadership candidates after Paul Martin's retirement were going to shift the party leftwards, but Dion has emphatically done so. The Green Shift tax plan is a special mark of this, the centrepiece of his focus on environmental issues.

But the Liberals are being shouted down on the left by the New Democrats, with Jack Layton's campaign focussing on a request to the Canadian people to make him Canada's first New Democrat prime minister. His own program on childcare, healthcare, pacifism, and a carbon cap-and-trade system solidly anchors him on the left. And his higher presence than Dion's on television in central Canada makes him the more visible voice of opposition to Stephen Harper. Add to the mix the Green party's inclusion and left-leaning voters are torn in so many directions, their limbs are falling off. Of course, the Green's fiscal and social policies are quite conservative, reflecting their origin as an offshoot of the old Canadian rightist parties of people who simply differed in that they were environmentalists.

Two key conditions in Canada's current political climate are going to give the Conservatives an unfortunate majority this October. The main reason is the systemic problem I've just outlined: Anything But Conservative. I am just as opposed to the Conservative party plan for Canada as the majority of Canadians. But the sheer number of alternatives to Harper work against each other. The leftist and centrist vote in Canada is split practically evenly among Liberals, NDP, and Green. In an electoral environment like this, a Conservative candidate can capture his (and it will probably be His) riding with little more than thirty per cent of the vote. Quite likely, the majority of Conservative candidates will do so. The right has taken governmental power in Canada by uniting, and the left will lose it for the foreseeable future by dividing so terribly.

The most depressing of the two reasons is Dion's complete inability to control how Canada's populace perceives him and his message. From the beginning of his party leadership, the Conservatives have painted him as a nebbishy, weak-willed Woody Allen type unsuitable to lead a classroom, let alone a country. He has totally failed to communicate to the general public his intelligence, tenacity, assertiveness, and personal strength. New websites like ThisIsDion.ca are potentially effective, but they come too late to matter. Canadians have made their decision, and they have been bamboozled. His painful public relations failure will probably cost him the election, at least half the Liberal party seats, and probably his leadership of the party. He will be an unfortunate footnote in Canadian history: the first Liberal party leader never to become prime minister. Dion could have transformed Canada for the better. But he has already failed.