Looking in the Pot and Tasting the Food

I've been researching an article about Ontario "Training Schools" over the last couple weeks and sometimes it causes me to despair about the human race. One example sticks out in my mind where a survivor talks about as very young boy who being hauled in front of a court where it came out that his parents beat him unmercifully on a regular basis. Touched, the judge promised him that where he was going no one would abuse him ever again. A month later he was being repeatedly raped by a guard in a facility paid for by our taxes.

The problem isn't that an individual got his jollies abusing children. We've known for a very long time that a small but significant fraction of the population is like this. That's why we had similar things happening in churches, schools, families, the scouts, etc. The problem has always been one of power imbalances. When the child complained, no one would listen to them because the person that was abusing them had too much power.

Power can come from a lot of different sources. Priests had too much prestige in Roman Catholic communities for anyone to take complaints against them seriously. Prison guards work in an institution where authority figures are so indifferent to the well-being of their wards that they don't care about what happens to the people they abuse. (I suspect that the indifference comes from the fact that the training schools were so starved of resources that the only people who could survive as managers were people who were indifferent to the suffering of the people under their control.) Indifference doesn't create sadism---but it certainly won't make any effort to stop it from happening.

I suspect that most people haven't really thought about where moral behaviour comes from. They think that if you just don't lie, steal, etc, you are an ethical person. But that's not really the case. That's just what it takes to be a "conventionally good" person. Really good people---among other things---need to be curious. I suspect that the judge who sentenced the boy to the training school never bothered to follow up people he'd sentenced to places like that in order to find out how they were actually treated. Perhaps he'd gone through the motions but been satisfied to just accept whatever "pleasant words" that the higher administrators had given him. (Every large institution has someone who's job it is to put a "positive spin" on whatever happens there.)

I remember reading that years ago when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was Governor of New York State he asked his wife, Eleanor, to inspect conditions in the state prisons. (He couldn't do the job himself because of his mobility problems due to a bout of polio.)

He asked her about the food. “Did you inspect the kitchens? Were they clean? Were the prisoners getting enough to eat? Was the food nourishing? Was it reasonably tasty?” Eleanor was complimentary, and assured her husband that she toured all the kitchens. Then she produced the weekly menus that she had received from the wardens. 

“But did you look in the pot, Eleanor? Did you taste the food?” he asked.  She had not, and thereby learned valuable lessons: just because the menu says “beef stew” does not mean that it is properly prepared.  She needed to look in the pot and taste it to make sure it wasn’t just cornstarch gravy and a few stray potatoes and peas.    

That was the problem with the judge who sentenced this young boy to a long term sentence of being repeatedly raped. He didn't look in the pot, he didn't taste the food.

Eleanor Roosevelt. She learned to look in the pot and taste the food.
Public Domain Image c/o the Wikimedia Commons.

I'm not going to fixate on the individual judge, however. That's because part of being a moral human being involves being aware of the subtle forces that control all of our lives. People don't get promoted to positions of authority by being the sorts who "look in the pot and taste the food". That's because those are the sorts of people who "rock the boat" and "make waves". And people don't build careers by questioning what goes on in the institution they serve.

Here's a clip from a movie that shows the exact moment when someone "looks in the pot and tastes the food" and sees the "picky details" of the machine that is making him rich. It's from Schindler's List, which is the true story of Oscar Schindler---who is the only member of the German NAZI party who ended up recognized as a "righteous Gentile" by the nation of Israel.

Schindler was not a "conventionally good" person. He was a criminal who set out to become a war profiteer. He was a flagrant philanderer who had a serious drinking problem---one that eventually killed him. But his one HUGE saving grace was that he refused to turn his head away and ignore the crimes being done around him and decided that he would "do his bit" to try to save as many of the people slated to be killed by the NAZIS as he could.

Oskar Schindler, from a German historical plaque.
Another person who looked in the pot and tasted what was in there.
Image c/o Wikimedia Commons. 

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Part of what I am trying to do with this blog is to take people by the hand, lead them into the kitchen, take the lid off the pot, and, give them a taste of the things they haven't bothered to look into. It's not something that has endeared me to many people. Most folks don't want to "look into the pot" because if they do so they fear that they might feel forced to make a fuss. For someone in authority, doing so can be a "career limiting move". For people who become "activists", it can become a significant cost in their personal life in terms of time and treasure. Even if someone does nothing at all, they will begin to have niggling concerns that they are not really as good a people as they used to think that they were. But I think that it is still a very worthwhile thing to do. If you think so too, why not consider supporting me on Patreon or Pay Pal? 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Book Review: German Communities in Southern Ontario

Fred Dahms. Photo provided by author.

In what is probably one of the worst cases of timing that I've ever seen, I received a book useful to plan "day trip" excursions in Southern Ontario a week or two before the world went into social isolation and tourism ceased to exist as a human activity. It's titled German Communities in Southern Ontario and written by retired Geography professor Fred Dahms. That's too bad, because my wife and I both enjoyed reading the book and if we could, we'd probably be planning on a little "day trip" to look at old buildings and enjoy a meal at a local pub based on the work that Dahms has done.

Just to "fully disclose" any personal connection, I will admit a certain fondness for the German community of Ontario. I grew up around old order Amish people and probably the first non-English language I ever heard was the German spoken by the local "plain people". They babysat us as children. I also remember ploughing a field in the cab of a tractor while my neighbour used a team of heavy horses to do the same thing next door. We hired them to do carpentry work. And one winter they did the chores for my dad because he was too sick to do them himself. In exchange, they cut a "reasonable" amount of wood for their sawmill from our 60 acre woodlot for as long as he lived. (This is how I was taught to do "deals" with other people---on the basis of community-building through trust and looking out for the other person, instead of "sharp dealing" and formal contracts.)  One day we saw a crowd of people arrive on the neighbour's land while we ate breakfast. At lunch a frame structure had been erected. At supper there was a barn.

Of course, Mennonites and Amish are only part of the German community that settled Ontario. There were plenty of immigrants who were Roman Catholic. The Town of Formosa, for example, was a "hot bed" of Catholic education (the town's name was coined by a visiting Jesuit---it's Latin for "beautiful").

The Church of Immaculate Conception in Formosa.
Photo by Fred Dahms. Used with his permission.

This isn't to say that this is just a book for the "church tour" crowd. Being Germans, they also brought a very healthy beer drinking culture to the province. 

The Commercial Tavern, Maryhill

Interior shot of Harley's pub in Mildmay.

There's lot of information about how to plan a "mini-vacation"---local festivals get mentioned in passing that can be looked up on line for future trips. Also the odd bed and breakfast in a historic site get mentioned too.

The Maryhill Inn---now a bed and breakfast.

As I said to begin, it's not an ideal time to publish a book for day-tripping. But eventually the pandemic will end and we will begin to go out for tourist jaunts. When we do, this book will be a good way to plan some local trips. It's available for purchase at the Bookshelf downtown (who may be closed right now, but I believe are doing deliveries---.) It's also for sale at the Amazon.ca website.

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I don't expect anyone to put supporting news blogs "high up" on their priority list in today's crisis. But if it isn't a big deal for you and you enjoy reading about local stuff, why not buy a subscription through Pay Pal or Patreon? One thing that I hope a lot of people have learned through the present situation is how important their local community can be. Things like the Backgrounder build the sense of solidarity that we all need a lot more than trips overseas or "bling". 

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Furthermore, I say unto you we need to deal with the climate crisis!

The Institutions of Cruelty: The Oxford Regional Centre

In my multi-part discussion about eugenics I've been talking mostly about individuals up until now. But as I've pointed out with regard to Dr.s Helen McMurchy and Frederick Tisdall, there is also an institutional side to the issue. I've mentioned in passing that most of the characters mentioned so far lectured at the Macdonald Institute at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph. I think it's important to realize that many of the young women who were taught there then went on to professional careers in fields like nursing. Indeed, my mother was a Registered Nurse who graduated from Victoria Hospital in London Ontario during WW2 and I can remember her talking about the "dull sub-normals" (ie: the "feeble-minded"), how they would "out-breed" the intelligent members of the population, and, how this was going to cause problems for humanity. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find out that the people who taught her nursing had in turn been graduates of the Macdonald Institute. 

This leads me to another way of looking at this problem. I've found that there were also a lot of institutions in Ontario that seem to have grown out of the general "social Darwinism" way of looking at the world. I'm expanding beyond eugenics here, because as I hope previous articles have shown, there seems to have been an equal push to "institutionalize" people at the same time that there were voices arguing for sterilization. Ontario never did actually formally legalize sterilizing people against their will---as happened in Alberta. But as I have pointed out, Dr. Helen McMurchy argued strenuously for the creation of institutions where the "feeble-minded" would be separated out from the general community. I also showed how Indian Affairs were actively using "euthenics" to try to alter the culture of First Nations people's so they would become "less dependent" on the government. That's why they hired people like Dr. Frederick Tisdall to test nutritional supplements on people who were starving rather than give them the same amount of relief that were available to members of the settler community during the Great Depression. The use of residential schools and adoption to white families were also attempts to destroy Aboriginal culture in order to end the "Indian problem".

In this article I thought I'd expose readers to one of the institutions that we grew up around and explain exactly what it was meant to do, what it did in fact do, and, how that has affected the world we live in today.

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The Oxford Regional Centre

I spent a few of my teenage years in Woodstock Ontario and recall that at that time one of the few places that teens could get summer jobs was at the Oxford Regional Centre. Then it was a home for what we now call "developmentally disabled" individuals, but then were called "mentally retarded". This institution was founded in 1906 in Gravenhurst and was originally a rural property of 100 acres with two cottages on it where 58 people suffering from epilepsy were housed. At that time it was called "The Hospital for Epileptics".

The Oxford Regional Centre, Woodstock Ontario.
Undated, unattributed photo from a government of Ontario website.

It's hard for modern people to understand, but until relatively recently epilepsy was viewed with horror by the general public and a great deal of discrimination was levied against people with the disorder. Perhaps the best way to understand this situation is to compare them to people with various psychiatric disorders now---like some of the visible folks who congregate downtown and who talk to themselves loudly and act in peculiar ways. In most cases, the real problem isn't the behaviour that these people manifest---which generally is at most a minor inconvenience to others---but rather the disproportionate emotional discomfort that people feel in their presence. I suspect that this is an unconscious reaction to the question that such illnesses pose to our sense of self-identity. Any disease that affects behaviour in such a subtle, yet profound way poses an existential question about what exactly it means to say that we have "free will" and what it really means "to be me". These can be very scary questions to contemplate---.

In 1919 the hospital was moved to Woodstock and then renamed "The Ontario Hospital", and by 1932 it had 486 patients and 120 staff members. In 1939 a "chest disease division" was created to deal with tuberculosis patients. This was a necessary addition because this disease was often transmitted between patients in hospitals, so it was decided that they needed to be quarantined from others. In 1958 a large new building was opened for tuberculosis patients. By this time the two categories of patients came to over 1500 individuals with 860 staff members.

Tuberculosis is another disease that people have traditionally dreaded---unfortunately, with good reason. It is contagious, and it will kill you. It was---and still is---very common in many parts of the world, and still a significant threat to public health. Even now it is endemic in First Nation's communities today, as a recent official government of Canada website states:

For most people in Canada, the risk of developing active TB is very low. However, the rates of active TB are higher among Canadian-born Indigenous people. The rate of TB among Inuit in Inuit Nunangat was over 300 times the rate of Canadian-born non-Indigenous people in 2016. The TB rate is over 50 times higher among First Nations living on reserve than non-Indigenous Canadian-born people.

Dr. Trudeau, a TB survivor himself.
A US postage stamp, and as such, public domain.
Image from the Adirondack Almanack.

It was also an issue of wealth and class. As a recognized expert on the treatment of TB, Edward Livingston Trudeau, stated

"There is a rich man’s tuberculosis and a poor man’s tuberculosis. The rich man recovers and the poor man dies."

Another famous doctor, Norman Bethune---who suffered from the disease himself and was treated at the clinic named after Trudeau---stated in a journal article:

We, as a people, can get rid of tuberculosis, when once we make up our minds it is worthwhile to spend enough money to do so. Better education of doctors, public education to the point of phthisiophobia, enforced periodic physical and X-ray examinations, early diagnosis, early bed-rest, early compression, isolation and protection of the young are our remedies.

I think it's a good idea for readers to stop and think a bit about this point. Tuberculosis used to be a

A statue of Norman Bethune in a meditative pose
from outside of U. of Toronto Medical School.
Image copied from an original photo from the blog
A Sibilant Intake of Breath and used under the "fair
dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.

real scourge in Canada. It still is for the Innuit and on people living on Indian reservations. I suspect most of us assume that the reason why it isn't a big deal anymore for most of us is because of modern medicine. But that's not really true. As the quote from Norman Bethune shows, tuberculosis isn't a disease of nature, per se, but rather one of irrational wealth allocation. If you jam together too many people, who aren't eating good diets, in unhealthy conditions, you get TB. Modern medicine does help, but to a certain extent that's like giving supplementary vitamins to someone who is starving. That's why even though we have modern medicine in the North, we still have lots of TB.

Controlling the spread of TB by putting people into centralized hospitals---like the "chest disease division" of the "Ontario Hospital" is the right answer to the wrong question. That's because the solution to diseases like TB isn't isolation, but rather ending poverty. And this wasn't something that people at the time didn't know, instead, it was something that powerful people didn't want to admit.

In 1968 the epileptic division was closed and patients were either sent out into the community or placed in other facilities. This was the result of new treatment options and the realization that except for very rare, extremely debilitating forms, the patients didn't need separation from the community.

In the post war period a combination of new therapies (ie: antibiotics) plus a decline in poverty among the general population due to the growth of the welfare state made it easier to treat existing cases of TB and dramatically reduced the number of cases in the general population. As a result, the "chest diseases division" was closed in 1972.

In 1974, the treatment of the mentally ill and mentally challenged was transferred from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Community and Social Services, and the name of the facility changed from being "The Ontario Hospital" to "The Oxford Regional Centre". At it's height of operations, it had 1,500 residents and continued in operation until it closed in 1996.

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Here we are in a country on a war-footing in the middle of a pandemic. I'm not going to ask for money (although I'm not going to turn it down), but I would suggest that people try to help one another in these trying times. It's not much, but for my part I'm making a habit of calling people on the phone just to let them know that there are people out there who care about them. 

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At this point in time it's important to emphasize an issue that I've mentioned before with regard to Helen McMurchy and her idea that the state should institutionalize the "feeble-minded". As Ivan Brown and John P. Radford point out in their article The Growth and Decline of Institutions for People with Developmental Disabilities in Ontario: 1876–2009, 

Today, it is almost impossible for us to understand the scale on which asylums were part of the way the more economically advanced countries of the world were organized. There were workhouses, poorhouses for people who could not pay their debts, insane asylums for people with mental health problems, orphanages, hospitals and asylums for those with limited intellectual capacity, and many others.

(Journal on Development Disabilities, Vol 21, # 2, 2015, P-11.)

These facilities grew dramatically as Ontario's population increased and peaked in the early 1970s. The Oxford Regional Centre was what was called a "Schedule One" facility. These were large institutions with many buildings that housed a lot of inmates and which were directly managed by the government. (In addition, there were many much smaller "Schedule Two" facilities which were run by non-profit boards and subcontracted---like universities and public hospitals.)

The "Schedule One" facilities for "Idiots", "Mentally Retarded", or, "Developmentally-Challenged"
---the technical term changes depending on the decade. (Brown and Radford, P-19)
Click on the image for a clearer picture. 

The thing with these institutions is that they tended to be very expensive to operate and didn't do much to get the inmates to move out into mainstream society. Part of the problem was that there never seemed to be enough money to actually pay for any programs that actually would help people make the transition.

Another issue was that these institutions were supposed to be as "self-sufficient" as possible.  By this was meant that they should raise as much of their own food, fuel, etc, as possible in order to control costs. Unfortunately, this put administrators into a bind because the inmates most ready to leave the institution were also the ones who most helped the make the institution the self-sufficient. If they were allowed to leave and go into the community, who would grow the food and cut the firewood?

As a result once admitted, people generally stayed until they died, which was often decades later. And once you built a facility, new inmates kept getting admitted every year. This meant that the government was either committed to a constant expansion of the program---or the one already in existence quickly became over-crowded.

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I've found it very hard to get quotations from people with personal experience of any of the institutions that I've called "cruel". I've heard stories only to be told at the end "but don't put that into the story". I had one academic request that she vet anything I write before I publish it. (I gently told her that that would be unethical and no real journalist would agree to such conditions.) I asked for a review copy of a documentary that another woman had done on different type of facility, and I distinctly got the impression that she was really angry with me for even wanting to write about what went on there.

I get that abused people feel a lot of pain and they want their privacy. But there is also a "public good" aspect to journalism. People really do have to know about what does or doesn't work in society---and who gets hurt when things go wrong. Otherwise we keep making the same old mistakes over and over again.

That's why I've found it really hard to come up with first-hand examples of what happened in the homes for the mentally retarded in Ontario. There were obviously problems, because there were very substantial class-action lawsuits that were settled for millions of dollars. Here's a story about one for $36 million that was settled in 2016.  But I haven't found any details in any of them. I suspect that there were non-disclosure agreements. In addition, because of their disability I suspect that it's hard to get and publish first-hand accounts of what happened in places like the Oxford Regional Centre. It might be that people aren't very good at expressing themselves and it might be that care givers are trying to shield individuals from dredging up painful memories. Either way, it's hard to find "quotable quotes".

Having said that, I did find one article that gives a hint. The year that I was born, 1959, the late Pierre Berton published a story in the Toronto Star about his visit to a "Schedule One" facility in Orillia. It makes for fascinating reading. Here are a few quotes that I offer by way of a description.

Pierre Berton, photo by Martin Tosoian, Penguin Random House Canada.
(I couldn't find a public domain photo of Berton.)
Used under the "fair dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.

There are 2,807 others like him, jammed together in facilities which would be heavily taxed if 1,000 patients were removed. More than 900 of them are hived in 70-year-old buildings. There is nowhere else for them to go.

---The paint peels in great curling patches from the wooden ceilings and doors. Gaping holes in the worn plaster walls show the lath behind. The roofs leak. The floors are pitted with holes and patched with ply. The planks have spread and split, leaving gaps and crevices that cannot be filled.

The beds are crammed together, head to head, sometimes less than a foot apart. I counted 90 in a room designed for 70. There are beds on the veranda. There are beds in classrooms. There are beds in the occupational therapy rooms and in the playrooms that can no longer be used for play. On some floors the patients have nowhere to go except out into the corridors.

The stench here is appalling, even in winter. Many patients are so helpless they cannot be toilet trained. The floors are scrubbed as often as three times a day by an overworked staff but, since they are wooden and absorbent, no amount of cleansing will remove the odors of 70 years.

On one floor there is one wash basin to serve 64 persons. On another floor, where the patients sometimes must be bathed twice or three times a day, there is one bathtub for 144 persons — together with three shower outlets and eight toilets. Prisoners in reformatories have better facilities.

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I suspect that the reason why the government shut down these facilities was some mixture of the public beginning to find out how awful they were and the bean-counters realizing that the whole system couldn't survive over the long haul. At the same time, the emerging consensus was that developmentally challenged individuals were suffering a lot more from social stigma and isolation from the community than they were from their actual ailment.

When the Regional Centres were being closed down the term "mentally retarded" was being changed to "developmentally disabled". This wasn't a complete "one-to-one" mapping of the same individuals, however, as there was an understanding that a large number of disabilities were causing problems for children. According to the Centers for Disease Control website development disabilities can arise for a broad range of reasons, including:

• maternal infections during pregnancy
• fetal alcohol syndrome
• Down syndrome
• Fragile X syndrome
• autism
• untreated jaundice
• various problems in pregnancy such as low birth weight, etc

These different causes and problems come with a broad range of clinical responses, but most outcomes are made worse if the children are institutionalized and improved if they are integrated into the community. To a certain degree this has been recognized by modern government programs, and there are mechanisms aimed at integration. Of course, things could be much better, but I suspect that on average the present situation is a huge improvement over the situation that Berton described in his 1960 article. 

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I think that this is as good a point to walk away from this story as any other. Unfortunately, there is more to say about public institutions in Ontario, so I'll probably be talking about them in the future.

I've made the point in a previous opinion piece, but I think it bears re-emphasis. Cruelty comes about when ideology blinds us to the actual human being in front of us, and, terrible things happen when the people making the decisions are completely separated from the poor schmucks who have to carry out the orders from "on high". Ideology dictated that it was necessary to "protect the race" from the damage that "inferior individuals" would inflict on society if they were allowed to interact with everyone else. And the accountants and politicians who decided to "save money" ended up forcing administrators at the "Schedule One" facilities in Ontario to treat the people under their care like animals on a factory farm. The result was organized, institutionalized cruelty on an industrial scale.

I think that this whole experiment should tell us all that it's really important to investigate what the actual consequences are for other people when we base policy on the beliefs we hold. We also need to understand exactly what the implications are for people on the "front line" when we make decisions that affect them and the people they serve.  

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Furthermore, I say unto you we must deal with the climate emergency!

Alvin Kaufman, Dorothea Palmer, Dr. William Hutton, the Parent's Information Bureau, and, "the Great Birth Control Trial"

Alvin Kaufman, from the Eugenics Archive.
Original photo from "Waterloo Hall of Fame".
Used under the "fair dealing" provision of
the copyright Act.

Alvin Kaufman (1888-1979) was a wealthy industrialist from Berlin (now Kitchener) Ontario who came from a family that owned various businesses including a significant one in the rubber business. People will most likely associate him with Kaufman Footwear which was founded by Alvin's father and which he took over in 1920.

He was very much a member of the "establishment" and held various important positions in the community including:

• chairman of the Kitchener Planning Board
• member of Kitchener Hospital Board
• member of University of Waterloo Board of Governors

For the purposes of this article, he was also famous for his support of access to birth control in Canada.

He founded and financed an organization called "The Parent's Information Bureau". This was quite a big project as it published fairly large library of pamphlets that advertised the idea of liberalizing access to birth control to Canadians of all classes. It also created a network of fifty visiting out-reach workers (mostly nurses) who would go to poorer homes across Canada to distribute information about birth control and sold birth control devices to poorer women "at cost".

Strictly speaking, this activity was illegal. The law against educating people about and selling birth control devices was generally ignored at pharmacies, however, because the customers tended to be upper-class men.

Dorothea Palmer.
Alas, I couldn't find an original
source citation.

One of the Bureau's out-reach workers, Dorothea Palmer, went from house to house in a predominately French-speaking, Roman Catholic, Ottawa suburb named Eastview. She was charged under the then current birth control law, which stated:

"Everyone is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to two years imprisonment who knowingly, without lawful excuse of justification, offers to sell, advertises, publishes an advertisement of or has for sale or disposal of any medicine, drug or article intended or represented as a means of preventing conception." (Section 179 of the 1892 Canadian Criminal Code)

However, instead of simply letting Palmer plead guilty, pay the fine, or, go to jail, Kaufman and the Parent's Information Bureau decided to hire some exceptionally groovy lawyers and put the law on trial instead of just the defendant. It's relatively hard to find information about things that happened this long ago without a great deal of time-consuming digging, but luckily there's an article by Bill Stephenson about the event in the Maclean's Magazine archive.

The key point at issue that the defense was arguing was sub-clause two of the law that stated that no one could be convicted of the crime if it could be shown that “the public good was served by the acts alleged”. With this in mind, among a great many other witnesses, Parker's legal team put Kaufman on the stand:

A. R. Kaufman, founder and head of the PIB [eg: the "Parent's Information Bureau"], was the next to testify. He told the court that he had first become interested in birth control as an aid to happier, healthier living when he noticed that in his own factory there was a direct relationship between absenteeism and large families. The less time between children, the more time the wage-earner lost through illness or other causes. In other words, those families which needed the most earned the least.

In a survey in 1929 to see how he could ease distress among such families, he discovered that many mothers had no idea how to space children. He therefore hired competent medical people and set up a clinic in his own factory, giving family-planning data to all who asked for it. So gratifying were the results that women all over Ontario began writing him for information. Thus the work had expanded. Some twenty-five thousand requests for boxes had been processed to date. (Stephenson, Maclean's, Nov 23 1957)

To make a long story short, the Parent's Information Bureau made their case, and charges were dropped against Dorothea Parker. Generally, most people (including myself) would consider this a very good thing for women's rights. But I do think it's important to understand what was motivating Kaufman in the work he was doing.

I think it's clear that Kaufman was a through-going Social Darwinist who was primarily concerned about keeping the genes of the human race "strong" rather than about making life easier for working class and poor. To understand this point, I'd draw reader's attention to a pamphlet that his organization published that was written by the Dr. William L. Hutton---who was at one time both the Medical Health Officer for Brantford and Director of the Brant County Health Unit, and, famous for his pioneering study of the effects of water fluoridation and tooth decay. (Hutton also was an occasional guest lecturer at the Macdonald Institute of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.)  He was also (along with Kaufman) a member of the Eugenics Society of Canada. The pamphlet he wrote was titled A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded, which was subtitled "Prepared at the Request of The Association of Ontario Mayors at their Annual Conference, Orillia, June 1936".

It starts out by assuming a social Darwinist framework, which can be seen from the first two subtitles: "Nature Eliminates the Defectives" and "These Same Laws Apply to Man". It then goes on to argue that modern society has inverted the natural order because more intelligent, upper class individuals use modern birth control techniques to limit their family size while "feeble-minded" lower classes don't.

At this point, Hutton defines "feeble-mindedness" in a way that modern readers should take pains to understand. He says:

Because of their normal physical appearance, they appear to the casual observer to be persons of usual capacity, but they require supervision, for they suffer from arrested development of the mind, and they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows. In cities they tend to drift towards the slums. In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance. They often live in conditions of extreme squalor. 

I'd like to draw reader's attention to two points that I made in my first article on this subject. If you recall the graphic that I posted there, the definition that people used to identify the "feeble minded" was extremely broad.

It called anyone who was only able to do "complex manual work"---which I would assume includes being a plumber, pipe-fitter, machinist, blacksmith, etc---was a "moron". Only people who could do work "requiring reason and judgment"---which I can only assume would be things like being a doctor, lawyer, or, businessman---would be considered a "real human being".

The key point to pay attention to is in that phrase "they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows". Remember that according to social Darwinism everything is supposed to be settled by competition---it's not a bug, but a feature of the system.

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Time for the blue print. If you think that what I do is worth reading, why wouldn't it be worth paying for? All I ask is that people subscribe at a dollar a month. It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Hutton makes clear that he isn't concerned about what he calls "idiots" and "imbeciles", whom he says

"most frequently owe their defect to birth injuries, accident, or, disease. In other words, idiots and imbeciles frequently come from normal parents who have the prevalent one, two or three-child family. On the other hand, the high-grade defectives (the feeble-minded) frequently come from sub-normal families in which the birth rate is high and in which feeble-mindedness is prevalent and plainly inherited".  (p-4)

He then goes on to describe the feeble-minded as having the intellectual capacity of "ten or twelve years of age" and says of them:

"We would not think of permitting children of ten or twelve years of age, to assume the responsibility of providing for and training other children, and yet we permit the feeble-minded with the intelligence of such children to do this very thing. We misunderstand them to our own undoing, and fail to recognize that it is to their benefit as much as to our own for the intelligent electorate to control their reproduction." (p-4)     

Through a rhetorical "sleight of hand", Hutton then goes on to talk about the cost of housing people in mental hospitals in Ontario. This is intellectually dishonest, because he started off talking about what he labels "idiots" and "imbeciles", which he says actually cannot be prevented through sterilization because they are mostly the result of accidents and disease, and who's parents could not be identified as potential parents of these "defective" children. Secondly, it brings in a totally extra group of individuals---the mentally ill---who again couldn't be identified through their parents, and who often have problems clearly caused by abuse rather than genetics. Finally, the very framework that he uses to identify the "feeble-minded" is not one where they are incapable to caring for themselves, but rather that they cannot compete effectively against the normal population. Remember, earlier on in this document he said that one of their identifying characteristics is "In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance". This would imply that they are actually able to support themselves in times of full employment. Their problem isn't being able to take care of themselves, it is not being able to beat out other people when there simply isn't enough to go around. That is a totally different thing!

Raising a complete non-sequitor, Hutton starts quoting numbers from mental hospitals and suggests that the only alternative to sterilizing the "feeble-minded" is to put them in a mental hospital (a false dilemma). Then he quotes statistics from England and suggests that if Ontario put every feeble-minded person in a hospital bed, the result would be between a doubling and tripling of the mental hospital facilities in the province. He then says that this would result in an extra cost of $20 million/year to the taxpayer (that would be $380 million in today's money).

(Just for fun, let's do a comparison between Hutton's hypothetical numbers and our current situation. In 1936 Hutton wrote that Ontario had a population of 3.6 million, and now has a population of 14.6 million. He was proposing spending  $5.56/person/year [that's $103/year in today's dollars.] According to the Canadian Mental Health Association in 2017 the Ontario government spent $3.5 billion on mental health issues, that's $240/person/year [that's $13 in 1936 money]. As a means of comparison, the average bricklayer [ie: a job for a "moron"] in Toronto earned $1872/year in 1936.)

I think that what people should pay attention to, however, is the way Hutton is trying to use concern about fiscal policy to drive social policy. I've taken the time to "geek out" on the numbers in order to emphasize that financial arguments are often used to drive social policy that has a profoundly negative effect on individuals. A similar situation happened when the provincial government decided to "deinstitutionalize" mental patients in the 1970s. Originally, in that case the intent was to put most of these patients into group homes where they would be more integrated into the community, which would help them with their treatment. Unfortunately, governments of the day decided to shut down the expensive hospitals and largely pocketed the money saved instead of setting up just as expensive quality group homes to replace them. The result are the hordes of mentally ill individuals haunting our streets and warehoused in grotesquely expensive prison cells. Beware of social policy once it gets in the hands of the bean-counters!  

Indeed, I've been trying to point out the formal reasoning problems (eg: the "nonsequitor" and "false dilemma") and the failure of inductive reasoning (eg: the misuse of economic data) to show that according to the "steps" system of human classification, Dr. Hutton himself could be shown to be incapable of "work using reason and judgement". That would mean that he too could be called a "moron" and encouraged to not have any children. (What's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, no?)

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There's a scene in the movie No Country for Old Men where two career army sergeants are having lunch in a diner. They've gone to the woman's parents to introduce the man and announce their engagement. The couple is biracial and the man asks the woman if her dad had a problem with his race. She replies "No. He probably would, but he's just so happy that I'm not a lesbian that he doesn't mind you." The man replies "Isn't it great when one prejudice cancels out another---".

I think that that's really how we should understand how the laws against birth control unraveled in Canada. One prejudice canceled out another. It wasn't that people decided that women should have the right to control their own reproduction so much as that the wealthier classes were afraid that the "feeble-minded" were going to swamp the gene pool. Luckily it never came to the situation we saw in NAZI Germany, where the government forced sterilization on some people. Kaufman and Hutton were pragmatists and their own experience showed them that given their druthers poor women would gladly forgo extra pregnancies if they could. As a result, they never went completely "Herrenvolk" and advocated enforced sterilization.

The length on this post is "red-lining", so I'll save other comments for something in the future.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the climate emergency must be dealt with! 

The Origin of Cruelty

I've been doing a lot of research on social institutions lately as I work on a series of articles inspired by a past exhibit at the Guelph Civic Museum on the influence of eugenics in Ontario. Whenever I look at stuff like this the same question keeps coming to mind: "How can people be so damn cruel?" After a lot of reflection, I've come to the conclusion that cruelty is generally the result of two artifacts of human society: ideology and the division of labour.

Modern anthropology would seem to indicate that concern for the well-being of others has been part of the human psyche from the very origins of humanity. I'd heard about this before, but this You Tube video from an excellent series explains one part of the evidence quite nicely.

This isn't to say that ancient societies were idyllic. There also seems to be evidence that fighting between tribes of stone age humans was endemic, if low-intensity. If memory serves, Gwynne Dyer says in his book War that if modern America were involved in low-intensity warfare of the sort that has been documented in stone age societies, it would be suffering about a million casualties a year. (It all comes down to percentages---very few people get killed in tribal warfare, but that is still a very large percentage of their population compared to modern wars.)

But tribalism is part of what I'm talking about under the label of "ideology". And that gets me to one of the main point I'm trying to make. Human beings are generally nice to other human beings. The problem comes about once we start to label others as being in some sense "less than human". And, I believe, that is what happens when we stop thinking about human beings as individuals with their own specific, personal history and instead as "place holders" for ideas that we have about the world. 

I recently got into one of those dumb back-and-forth arguments on Twitter about housing in Guelph. A couple local politicians were concerned about the tendency of Council to routinely turn down high-intensity housing proposals being put forward by developers. They believe that this makes all housing more expensive because it means that the supply is not being filled fast enough to meet demand. (Something I generally believe is behind our housing crisis.) I offered the opinion that a large part of the problem comes down to people who already own their own homes not being able to put themselves in the shoes of those who do not. I also wrote that a huge part of the problem is that most of the land in Guelph already filled exclusively with single-detached homes and no one living in those neighbourhoods wants to allow some of it reused to build apartments. 

One person pushed back at me and said that people can still buy their own home if they want to---they just have to be willing to save up for a down payment and do without other luxuries. When I pointed out that my home has quadrupled in value over 25 years and almost no one's wages have gone up that much, he countered that interest rates are now lower. He also said that people can buy a place out of town and commute. He also said that they can just rent a house and save up for a bigger down payment. 

At that point I realized that this fellow wasn't really talking about Guelph. He wasn't even talking about home ownership. That's because there really aren't any places within reasonable commuting distance where someone can buy a house that much cheaper than in Guelph. And beyond relatively nearby commuting distance, the cost of transportation begins to nullify the money saved purchasing a home. As for renting, that makes no sense as rents have gone up dramatically too, which means that the days of saving lots of cash by renting are over. (The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Guelph---if you can find one---is $1785.)  

As for the idea that interest rates are much less nowadays, that misses the point that if you borrow through the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation loan insurance program, you have to have 5% down for anything under $500,000 and 10% over---. That means that for the average-priced Guelph home---$570,000 as of today---a person would have to have a down payment of $31,000. (Not going through CMHC is not really an option, as private mortgage insurance is really pricey.) Let's assume a mortgage rate of 2.8%, with the minimum down payment of $31,000. That means that over 25 years, the people buying that home would be paying about $2,500/month and end up paying out about $210,000 in interest. (I bet that interest money would go really nice in a retirement savings plan!)  

Just to put this into perspective, the median household after-tax income in Guelph is $61,835.80. That mortgage would leave the couple about $30,000/year to pay property taxes, heat, utilities, repair, transportation, food, clothing, pay off student loans, put money aside for retirement, etc. How someone can suggest that this is a sustainable state of affairs for people who aren't making substantially more than the average, or, who have some sort of inter-generational wealth (ie: help from mom and dad) is beyond me.

The obvious question that this guy totally was missing was that even if someone could afford to buy a home by borrowing to the maximum, living on potatoes and boiled cabbage, and, commuting four hours a day to get to work---why the heck should we expect people to do this in the first place?

But that wasn't the point. I think the fellow I was arguing with wasn't concerned about what is happening in Guelph or how miserable the housing crisis is making life for working class and poor people. He was arguing from an ideological perspective. By that I mean that subconsciously he didn't really care about people who can't afford to find a place to live, or, the impact that this has on their lives. And because of that, the facts that anyone could throw at him were totally irrelevant.

Instead, he was talking about some sort of moral absolute, some ideal that he feels is more important than whether or not someone ends up sleeping in their car, or, never amasses any savings over her lifetime to retire with some dignity. In his case, I suspect that it could have been some sort of vague combination of the ideas that a: the 'free market' should be making decisions about the city, not planners or Council; b: that any problems people face in their life end up being caused by their poor personal choices, not because of forces outside of their control; and, c: that everyone who works hard should be able to live in a single detached house with a back yard where they can have their neighbours over for barbeques and play catch with their children. (I'm not suggesting that these three ideas are consistent, coherent, or, compatible. Ideological reasoning isn't really reasoning at all---it's pure emotion and not much else.)

Making decisions based on the way you think the world should be---even if that contradicts the facts---is ideological thinking. And part of not paying any attention to the facts involves being indifferent to the people who get crushed by the world your ideology creates.

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I put out this Op Ed because people tell me that they like them and because I wouldn't be able to get a "deep dig" out otherwise this week. But if you like, why not subscribe? I'm happy with a buck a month and that's easy to do through Patreon or PayPal. 

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Hand-in-glove with the problem of ideology is that of division of labour. By this I mean the separation of the decision-makers from the folks who get affected by those decisions. I've noticed this time and time again when I research some sort of atrocity: someone far away from the "front lines" makes a decision but they never are forced to look the person they are jerking around in the eye and explain exactly why it is that this is happening. Instead, some poor flunky has to be the guy who tells such and such that they are just "sh*t out of luck". Moreover, said flunky has been given very clear instructions that they are never, ever supposed to tell the person who is out of luck exactly why it has to be this way.

I've noticed that when you find some front-line person can't tell people the real reason why they are doing something there is a specific conversational "tick". That is, they ignore the specific question and then look away. This happens so often that I call it "The X-Files answer", because in that television show characters often used to do that in response to Scully and Mulder's uncomfortable questions. I've had supervisors at work, a lawyer for police services, members of the planning department, etc, all do this with me. As near as I can tell, it's what relatively decent people do when their job puts them in a position of having to do or say something that makes them feel really uncomfortable.

One really nasty part of this is that people routinely "internalize" the dictates of an institution to the point where no one has to tell them what to do. Instead, they can predict what the result of being honest or "doing the right thing", so they anticipate and avoid "career limiting behaviour". I remember reading an account of this by someone who'd been a journalist in the old Soviet Block. He said that no one had to actually censor what you wrote because you just knew that if you passed an invisible line you'd stop being promoted. After that was another line, beyond which you'd lose your job and never get another one. (The same sort of thing probably exists here but I've just never seen it in my life because I'm such a "wild man" that I never got onto the "first rung" of a career ladder in the first place.)

But why do people high up in the food chain make decisions that ruin other people's lives? In a lot of cases, I think it comes down the ability of mathematics to abstract decisions out of context. People in business talk about "the bottom line", but people rarely put much thought into what exactly that phrase means. I'd suggest that in many cases it is simply a way to allow decision-makers to avoid thinking about the human cost of a decision. When someone says "we have to get payroll costs under control" they are avoiding the fact that they are talking about impoverishing specific human beings. I saw this where I worked. "Getting payroll under control" really meant getting rid of decent paying, full-time jobs with benefits and converting them to lower-paid, precarious jobs without benefits.

I don't want to fall into the trap of looking at one specific person in a chain and then blaming them for all the problems. The managers who push the human cost downstream by using numbers-based management procedures are themselves facing pressure from governments or customers who themselves are reducing everything to a number. The former are concerned about "tax payer revolts" and the latter about consumers that are always "looking for a deal".

I had a conversation with a local store owner before the last provincial election. He said that all his friends and business connections were enthusiastic about voting for the Conservatives. I said that a Doug Ford government would be a disaster because his party routinely screws things up, runs up big deficits, etc. The point is that no matter how much Conservatives cut government services, the savings made are always less than the revenue they throw away through tax cuts for people who don't need them. I said that this is a syndrome that is very clear if you look at past provincial and federal governments. (The only explanation I can think for this is that conservative politicians are the most driven by ideological thinking---which means that they routinely ignore expert advice.) The fellow I was conversing with was gobsmacked to hear this. He thought for a while and said "I guess all these people hear is that their taxes are going to be cut---".

The politician's need to be seen as "a tax fighter" and someone who "fights waste" can twist and pervert even the best of intentions. Consider mental hospitals. In the 1970s activists were concerned that they had been so chronically under-funded that they had become nothing more than the warehouse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A report suggested that for the price of warehousing these people the government could put most of these people into the community through the creation of group homes. The government follow through? They shut down the hospitals, pocketed most of the money saved and "never got around" to building those group homes.

There are benefits through disability pensions and welfare---but the rules governing these programs are Byzantine to say the least. (Are all these regulations designed to keep people entitled to support for  from getting it? Ask that question from someone if you want to get an "X-Files answer".) People with mental illness, for some reason, have a hard time navigating complex bureaucracies. The payouts aren't enough to live on anyway, which is why so many of the folks begging on the streets are obviously mentally ill. But because the folks who make that decision to screw these people over---tax payers, politicians, accountants, middle-management, etc---rarely have to look these people "in the eye", the whole merry cruelty machine keeps grinding up the folks who end up in it's clutches.

And now a comment by Monty Python's Flying Circus.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!