Here's the thing. A lot of important Guelph issues are really complex. And to understand them we need more than "sound bites" and knee-jerk ideology. The Guelph Back-Grounder is a place where people can read the background information that explains why things are the way they are, and, the complex issues that people have to negotiate if they want to make Guelph a better city. No anger, just the facts.
This instalment of my book is a bit of housekeeping to answer a common question I get about how I spell certain words borrowed from the Chinese written language. I think that it's mostly true, but if anyone who comes from China wants to correct me, I'd welcome the correction!
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Spelling
Some folks who read this book are going to be surprised by the way I spell a few words. For example, most books write “tai chi chuan” instead of “taijiquan”, “Taoism” instead of “Daoism”, “Lao Tsu” instead of “Laozi”, “Chuang Tsu” instead of “Zhuangzi”, and so on. What I am doing is using a modern, official method of transliterating Chinese words called “pinyin” instead of an older system that was invented by Western missionaries and academics. The reason why I use it is because it's the way the Chinese government wants us to spell it. Since China has been horribly “screwed over” by Western imperialists for a very, very long time. I think it's only polite to spell their language the way they want.
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Generally Western books about Daoism follow a 19th century transliteration system call “Wade-Giles”. (This is the “tai chi chuan”, “Taoism”, etc.) But it was replaced by the new pinyin system in the late 20th century. This is not just an arcane issue for translators, though. Written Chinese is very different from Western languages in that it is not based on sounds but ideas. This means that anyone trying to learn how to read and write in Chinese doesn't have the option of “spelling out” the letters of a word and then using the sounds to figure out its meaning. For hundreds of years educated Chinese people have understood how the use of letters instead of picture-graphs makes it much, much easier to learn. But traditional Chinese has one huge advantage over Western letters: it allows people who speak different dialects to use the same written language. Ancient Latin mutated into several different languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, and so on. Chinese did the same thing: Mandarin, Hakka, Yue (Cantonese), Jin, and so on. Now people who speak and write French cannot understand oral or written Portugese because both are based on the sound of the spoken language. But in China, people who only speak Hakka and others who only understand Mandarin can read what each other writes---because the language is based on ideas and pictures instead of sound.
Since traditionally only a small percentage of Chinese citizens were literate, the extreme difficulty of learning the written language wasn't considered a big problem. And the huge size of China almost guaranteed that any attempt to create a standardized spoken language would be doomed to fail. The ability of the written language to transcend the emergence of dialects was a tremendous asset when it came to keeping the nation from falling to pieces (like the Roman Empire did in Europe.) To a large extent, the “idiosyncrasies” of written Chinese allowed the nation to survive.
But now is now and China needs universal literacy if it is going to function in the modern world. So the government embarked on the very ambitious project of making Mandarin the standard language. And once people learned that, it allowed them to make learning written Chinese much easier. That is, it is easier to teach adult learners the European letters, then the pinyin spelling for each of the common characters that ordinary people use, and, then learn the characters associated with that pinyin. Pinyin also is important in being able to use various modern technologies such as computer keyboards. (Try to imagine using a keyboard that worked using traditional characters----!) This means that European letters are now integral to using Chinese in various settings. As a result, all children in mainland China are now taught pinyin as part of their elementary school education.
What this means is that pinyin is not just a transliteration system for Westerners, it is now a basic part of the Chinese language. And as such, using the old Wade-Giles transliterations is not only insulting, but quite wrong. This is also why I try to use pinyin instead.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
I've always had a sort of "love/hate" relationship with journalism. A lot of my friends are professional reporters. But I've also found myself absolutely appalled by what gets published in newspapers or broadcast over the airwaves and Web---even the stuff that is quite mainstream. I've had people ask "Why?", so I thought I'd take a post to give at least some of the reasons.
First of all, let me be perfectly clear. A lot of people complain about the "lamestream media" and "fake news". I have been known to use those terms myself---but they mean very different things to different people. For the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) types, what they mean by "fake news" is news that disagrees with whatever nonsense they are trying to promote. And "lamestream media" means whatever news source that publishes news that they don't want to hear. I mean something very different. For me, "fake news" is news that isn't supported by the facts. And the "lamestream media" is a news service that is more interested in ratings, continued access to important news makers, not offending advertisers, and, building the careers of "star journalists", than the facts.
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I recently came across an interesting episode of The Big Think's YouTube channel titled Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign?One particular part of the show really caught my attention. Neil Degrasse Tyson talks about two specific problems with professional journalists: their need to be the first to break a story, and, their belief in an extremely simplistic definition of "balance".
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The COVID-19 pandemic coverage we all seen lately is a classic example of how the rush to be the first to report an issue does a profound disservice to ordinary citizens. Dr Tam has been reviled in some quarters because she said that ordinary folks shouldn't wear masks. Then she said they should, but a simple cloth mask worked fine. Then she said that a multi-layer mask was important. Some people asked "Why couldn't she make up her mind?"
More recently, we've seen the same process at work with regard to one of the vaccines.
"The AstraZeneca vaccine is safe."
"Well, it can cause blood clots in a very small number of people."
"It's not the preferred one."
"Let's not give out anymore shots."
"It's not that dangerous to people when used for the second dose."
"Let's give it to people for their second shot if they've already gotten it for their first."
Again, some folks are upset about this "flip flopping" and suggest that scientists don't know what they are talking about---. The point is, however, if you really understand how science works, this sort of "flopping back and forth" is exactly what bleeding edge research is supposed to look like. Indeed, if this sort of thing hadn't happened I would have been afraid that the authorities were hiding something from the general public.
I would expand Degrasse Tyson's point and suggest that a lot of other types of news is pretty much like science reporting. We get the "fast-breaking" stories, but rarely the over-views that emerge among the majority of experts. For example, we often hear about how out-of-control housing prices have become---but rarely anything about how zoning regulations have effectively made high and medium density development illegal on the vast majority of municipal land all across North America. As a result, we simply have more demand for housing than we have supply---which leads to high prices.
Just like Degrasse Tyson suggests with regard to science stories, the Back-Grounder attempts to find the expert consensus on issues instead of the "bleeding edge" debate. The idea is that almost every important story has a background that underlies the day-to-day events. And if the reader can learn about that, they will be able to make sense of what is happening in the immediate here-and-now. For this reason, I find that a great many of my stories keep being read and exciting people's interest---long after I first published them. That's because almost all the important stories that affect people's lives are the result of long-standing structural issues. These don't go away when reporters decide a story is no longer "the flavour of the week".
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The other issue that Degrasse Tyson raises is the reflective tendency of journalists to bring in an opposing point of view for "balance"---no matter how little credibility it might have in the expert community. This was probably the behaviour that made me the angriest. I tried time and time again to point out to reporters that all sources aren't equal and they need to check to see if someone really knows what they are talking about---to no avail. As long as they clearly attributed a quote, they took absolutely no responsibility for whether something they printed was actually true. Eventually, politicians learned that reporters do this, which is why it took years and years of Donald Trump bullshitting the American people before some of them would finally start telling readers and listeners when he was fibbing.
I understand why lamestream journalists do this. First, they are generally run off their feet because they need to keep up the competition to be the first to break a story. You cannot be the first and also be the most accurate---the two values are directly at odds with one another. Secondly, if your news outlet won't give journalists the time and resources to do lots of research, the only way to generate news is by getting quotes from primary sources. And the vast majority of news makers are not going to give a reporter repeated access if the stories produced identify when they lie, confabulate, or, bullshit.
So this secondary problem is a result of the primary one. Access to news makers for quotes is only really essential if you don't give your reporters enough time to do research themselves. But doing research takes much, much more time to do than just asking for a couple of quotes so you can hammer out some copy before the next deadline. (This is why I only write one real story a week instead of trying to come up with "breaking news".)
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There's a third issue that I want to raise that doesn't come up in the Degrasse Tyson clip. That's the pernicious role that "opinion" plays in the lamestream media. There is a rock-like, core belief among all the reporters I've met that there is an absolutely impervious wall that separates "opinion" from "news". The idea is that "opinion" is just "opinion" and there's no reason at all to subject it to something like truth-testing.
I can understand where this is coming from. I remember from my first philosophy course at university the specific class where the professor introduced the radical concept that "all opinions are not equal". The point is that if an opinion isn't based on true evidence or consistent with the rules of logic---it is pretty much worthless. A lot of people in my class had a hard time accepting this idea. And they had a point, our democratic society is based on the idea of "all men are created equal". Moreover, throughout human history there have been people who have treated people unfairly and refused to consider their opinions.
But the key point to take from history isn't that all opinions are equally valuable, rather that we should only use rational reasons for dismissing some of them. Dismissing someone's ideas, for example, because of the colour of his skin or because she has internal reproductive organs is totally irrational. It's identified as such in informal logic by being called "the ad hominem fallacy", or, the attack against the person making the argument versus the argument itself. But refusing irrational prejudice by accepting all opinions as being equally valid is clearly a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Even if the basis of the opinion isn't the result of a reasoning flaw, there is also the issue of the assumptions that the person starts from.
Moynihan, Wiki Media
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Part of the problem is the growth of an entire industry devoted to the creation of "alternative facts". There are several elements to this.
The first was probably the elimination of the "Fairness Doctrine" from US news. This was a law that existed from 1949 to 1987 that said that broadcasters had to do two things: provide a minimum amount of coverage of important social issues, and, ensure that different points of view were given equal access. This law was, in practice, hard to "fine tune" into creating a perfect balance. But it was able to prevent the spread of out-and-out inflammatory propaganda of the sort we saw with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.
Secondly, there has been a concerted campaign to create a universe of fake facts. This includes things like alternative "think tanks" to push policy based on ideology instead of analysis, pseudo-grassroots organizations that are really controlled by a small number of individual donors, and, a whole world of nuttiness on line. One of the most wacky is the creation of a "conservative" alternative to the Wikipedia, called the "Conservapedia".
To just get a flavour of this last thing, I did a search on it about "climate change". This was the first part that I got from it.
Climate change is the new name used by liberals for their global warming hoax, which they coined as it became obvious that there is no crisis in global warming. The modification in terminology is identical to what liberals did in redefining "evolution" to be "change over time," which of course is a meaningless expression just as "climate change" is. Numerous past predictions of climatic catastrophes have failed to hold up.[1]
I've left the hypertext links in the quoted section so you can see sort of "references" people use to back up their assertions. If you follow back the reference (ie: the "[1]"), you will see two references to Fox News, one to the Wall Street Journal, and, one to LifeSiteNews. The last one has an absolutely appalling rating with NewsGuard.
I'm making a fuss about all of this because I believe editors are missing something tremendously important, namely that a key part of whether or not people believe something comes down to whether or not they see or hear it from a wide variety of sources. We've allowed a whole environment of "alternative facts" grow up around us, and the lamestream media contributes to this whenever it allows people to spout nonsense on their op ed pages.
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Editors don't fact check what they put on their opinion pages. Instead, they tend to use an unconscious notion of what "conventional wisdom" says about things in general.
To understand this, consider the fact no responsible journalist would ever print an op ed that argued that Jews should be exterminated in death camps because of the international conspiracy identified in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. My point is that they wouldn't do it because the Protocols is a piece of nonsense created by the Imperial Russian secret police in 1903, but rather because they have a general belief that it's not OK to write bad things about Jewish people. (There was that whole unpleasantness in World War Two, after all.) That's what I mean by "conventional wisdom".
The problem is when you get into other things that are less obvious. The example that Degrasse Tyson uses is climate change. The editors and publishers of the mainstream media took far, far, far too long to look at the evidence and refuse to publish nonsense about something that will probably kill a lot more people than the Holocaust. That's because they were waiting for conventional wisdom to change before they used editorial control to push for a facts-based narrative in their papers. In doing so they were ignoring the fact that what they decided to print in the "mainstream news" has a great deal to do with creating the conventional wisdom that they were relying upon to justify what they printed.
This is why the Guelph-Back-Grounder doesn't believe that there is a distinction between "news" and "opinion". Both of them should be logical and based on facts. That's why I use logical arguments and put in hypertext links to offer evidence. I get the odd person who opines to me that what I write is "slanted" and "not objective". But I usually respond by asking "What exactly do you find fault with in my argument?"---and haven't gotten a response yet. I don't think that this is because I never make any mistakes, but because the person complaining doesn't have much experience seeing journalism try to reason through things and come up with something that is a closer approximation of reality.
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That's enough of a rant for one week. Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, and, get vaccinated ASAP. Other than that, enjoy the warm weather---you know it's not going to last.
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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!
In modern times “philosophy” has become a purely academic pursuit. Professors at universities write papers for each other where they discuss very abstract concepts. I'm not going to say that this is a totally worthless pursuit, as some of the ideas that they develop end up becoming extremely important for science, literature, politics, and so on. Human society cannot evolve without creating new ways of thinking about the world, and someone has to do it.
But philosophy used to also be about how to live a life of meaning and purpose. In the late Roman Empire there were schools of philosophy that helped ordinary people. The most famous were Stoicism, Cynicism, and Skepticism. Each of these were systemic ways of looking at and living in the world. They allowed followers to find meaning and coherence in turbulent times. Unfortunately, they were suppressed by the Christian church once it became the official---and exclusive---religion of the Roman Empire. Philosophy continued in academic settings, but it was never again allowed to escape into the lives of ordinary citizens.
At roughly the same time, philosophy also arose in India and China. India's most famous examples are Yoga and Buddhism. In China, some examples were Confucianism, Moism, Daoism, and Legalism. In India it's practical philosophies became overlaid by religious thinking to the point where for most people their original teachings pretty much disappeared. In China this also happened to Daoism. Confucianism continued to exist as a practical way of life, but it became entwined with the Imperial bureaucracy, which stopped innovation in its tracks---making it more of an official ideology than a living, breathing philosophy. Moism (a socialist/utilitarian/scientific worldview) was effectively exterminated after its followers lost a literal war with Legalism (a totalitarian worldview based on the rigid rule of law.) Legalism's success at founding the first Chinese Empire proved a Pyrrhic victory, though, because it's extremely harsh treatment of ordinary people resulted in rebellions that quickly destroyed that dynasty and it's governing philosophy. Confucianism reasserted itself as the dominant school and defined what it means to be “Chinese” for millenia afterwards.
(Of course, this is all a grotesque over-simplification, but people have to start somewhere and this book is not an academic historical treatise.)
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OK. There was this thing in the past. Why should anyone care today?
When I was a child one of my teachers used to write sayings on the blackboard every morning. One that stuck out in my mind was “Be a live wire and you won't get stepped on!”. At the time, I thought that it meant that people shouldn't be afraid of standing up for their rights, asserting their interests, or, showing off their abilities. It struck me as an advertisement in favour of the value of being “pushy”. As a child, I thought that this was a bit odd, as my family had always taught me that that was being rude.
Why did that teacher write it on the black board?
Totally unconsciously, she was promoting a “practical philosophy”. In particular, she was promoting a sort of optimistic, liberal, 20th century view of “individual progress”. Contrast that with this similar piece of folk wisdom: “The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down.” That is a Japanese proverb that seems to suggest that it is dangerous to be a “live wire”. Not only will being “live” not keep you from being “stepped on”---it will positively ensure that you will be.
Which one is right?
Well, that's an important question because depending on how you choose, you will live your life in a particular way and either reap the benefits or suffer the consequences. The practical philosophies that I mentioned above---Greek, Indian, and, Chinese---are all coherent collections of ideas about how you should live your life. They all suggest that it is better to follow an internally consistent series of maxims instead of simply bouncing through life following whatever random ideas your culture (eg my elementary school teacher) chooses to insert into your consciousness. This book is an attempt to expose the reader to one of those schools of practical philosophy: Daoism. My hope is that some of you will see the great wisdom that I have found that it brought to my life, and how it helps me navigate the day-to-day problems that I face.
And in the case of that maxim that my home room teacher wrote on the black board, a Daoist would probably have written “Be like water”. That is, find effective “work arounds” for life's problems instead of either vainly fighting against impossible odds or just doing what everyone else does.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
I'd wanted to get a primary source for the Texas Republican party resolution opposing critical thinking skills, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the Wayback Machine. So I'll have to settle with a secondary source. Here's the exact language (the last paragraph directly deals with critical thinking---but the three earlier ones might be of interest too):
I'm not about to say that the sky is falling because some politicians in Texas voted for a dumb resolution during a policy convention. But I think it is important to understand that right from the very beginning of critical thinking various parts of the community have fought to suppress it. Indeed, the most famous of early critical thinkers---Socrates---was executed because he was supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens.
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Talking about corrupting the youth----.
Snyder makes the point that the most push back she gets is from students who complain that her reading assignments are just too darn hard. I don't think that in my time high school students were much better at working through difficult concepts. If there is any evidence of this, it is probably only because there was such brutal "sifting out" of the student body. This involved "the great cull" in grade nine when the students who were deemed "not high school material" were shunted off to special places where they learned to be barbers, hair stylists, brick layers, etc. The majority of the rest were put into the four year program with only a small minority entering the five year stream with the expectation they would head off to university. My limited understanding is that nothing like this sort of process currently happens at public schools.
But having said that, there certainly are a lot of philosophers who demand a little more attention than the average teen is used to. Consider the following quotes I found from Immanuel Kant, who was someone I found very hard to understand when I was at university. If memory serves, his academic prose is turgid and boring as Hell. But having said that, his ideas are really worth thinking about.
I do think, however, that we should be very concerned about whether or not we are creating a generation of people who have the attention span of a gnat.
I'm a little concerned about this because my read of history says that in the past people seemed to have had a lot more toleration for what we would call "boring stuff" today. Take, for example, the difference between the front cover of the Globe and Mail newspaper in the early 20th versus 21st centuries.
Comparing these two front covers, it seems obvious to me that publishers and editors at The Globe and Mail definitely think that readers are a less willing to read dense stories and are instead much more addicted to "eye candy".
People seemed a lot more willing to listen to long political speeches in times past too. Consider the Lincoln/Douglas debates that were held in 1858. These were between the Republican and Democratic candidates to be the Illinois representative to the US Senate. The format consisted of one candidate opening up with an hour-long speech, followed by the other having an hour and a half speech, followed by a half hour response by the original speaker. There were seven different debates, with one candidate starting first half the time and the other the other half.
Compare this with the first Trump/Biden debate, where the format supposedly consisted of six, fifteen minute segments. They were each supposed to answer questions put to them by the moderator and only had two minutes for response followed by thirteen minutes of "back and forth".
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My gut instinct about this change is that this has come about for a variety of reasons. First of all, the velocity of human life has increased dramatically. Secondly, we all have a lot more things fighting for our limited attention. Also, technology has dramatically increased our ability to add audio and visual elements to what used to be a pretty-much print-driven communications system.
McLuhan, Wiki Media
I'd draw reader's attention specifically this last point. The famous philosopher of media, Marshall McLuhan, said that "the medium is the message". Social media neatly fits into this point of view.
Twitter restricts the length of a post to one or two sentences and doesn't lend itself to back-and-forth conversations. That means that it has an inherent bias towards cliche, provocation, and, prejudice. Donald Trump loved it.
Similarly, Instagram has a bias towards images. That's why if you look at the top "influencers" on that medium, they tend to not much more than celebrities posing like models. And like famous people posing to sell perfume, clothes, watches, etc, they charge fees for "product placement".
The prognosis isn't entirely negative. The explosive growth in podcasts seems to have created a whole new industry that involves creating "deep dive" stories about abstruse subjects---Pushkin Industries comes to my mind. And the same thing can be said about You Tube channels---probably the Green Brothers' Crash Course series are the best example of this. There has also been an explosive growth in "long-form" news blogs, most notably the Vox media empire.
The problem is, however, not that individuals cannot find good stuff on line---it's that there is also lots of bad stuff too, and it's really popular. And, as this pandemic has pointed out, there are lots of situations where it isn't enough to just let the smart people do the right thing, the dumb ones have to do it too! And if you are teaching critical thinking to a room full of kids who spend a lot of time looking at models on Instagram or watching dumb videos on TikTok, it is inevitable you are going to get a lot of complaints that they just can't get Kant.
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Another point I raised was whether or not the reason why Snyder isn't getting any more grief from parents about what she is teaching is whether the ones that might complain have simply removed themselves from the educational system. Here are a couple of graphs from the Fraser Institute that suggest that much more people are either sending their children to private schools (the Fraser Institute calls them "Independent"---I suspect for ideological reasons) or homeschooling than when I was a child.
There's another wrinkle that needs to be understood. In 1985 the government fully-funded Catholic schools in Ontario. According to 2017 numbers from the Ontario Government, in grades Kindergarden to twelve, the numbers break down this way:
Publicly funded, secular schools: 1,368,125
Publicly funded, Catholic religious schools: 638,576
Private schools of all types: 138,412
Homeschooling: 8,565
Add together the students who go to a Catholic or private school, plus the ones who are homeschooled, and you get 785,553, or, 36% of the total student body.
I don't think that it strains credibility to suggest that the small number of parents who would have given Marie Snyder grief could easily fit into that 36% of the population who have removed their children from the public school system. This might make the lives of both teachers and parents in the public system easier, but I think this might not bode well for the future of Ontario. There is a standardized curriculum for Catholic, private, and, home-schooled children, but I suspect that critical thinking is probably not really encouraged for many of them. If it was, I suspect it would cause a lot of drama for the people in charge because the kids might question the whole reason why they have been removed from the public, secular system in the first place.
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I think that this is enough info for one week. Remember to keep on wearing your mask, keep your distance, and, get your vaccine. It may look like we are near the finish line---but don't forget that the Indian mutation is gaining on us fast! We still have to keep the pace up if we are going to miss having yet another COVID wave hit us.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
In this instalment, I start to explain something why I think this book can be useful to read.
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Why Should You Read this Book?
There are a significant number of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”. These are folks who do not want to live a life of materialist consumption. They believe that “Whoever has the most toys when they die wins” isn't much of a way to live a life.
At the same time, these folks do not want to be associated with any sort of institutional religion. That’s because many of the religious institutions that purport to be the arbiters of all value in our society seem positively unhinged. Setting aside the most odious examples of abuse of power---such as the sexual abuse of children or using ministries as mechanisms for amassing personal wealth---many mainstream churches have emphasized the trivial and ignored the substantial. Religious organizations often seem to be totally obsessed with sex. For them, any expansion of civil rights for homosexuals and transgenders is abhorred and abortion is considered a form of murder. Thoughtful people find this emphasis bizarre. They often know people with non-traditional sexual orientation and don't understand why they are to be so feared. And anyone with a passing knowledge of biology can't understand why a world that is so profoundly profligate with life would be concerned about whether or not a fertilized human egg fulfills its potential and becomes a baby.
In contrast, anyone with eyes to see notices the existential threat of climate change. They also see the tremendous imbalance of wealth that neo-liberalism has caused. A small percentage of people have much more than they need---and many more others have to struggle just to survive. Our governments are also engaged in endless “low-intensity” wars that only affect a few brutalized veterans here, but spread misery to untold millions in other nations.
People see these problems and cannot understand why what seems to be the loudest, most self-confident, and, most influential religious institutions fixate upon sexual orientation and abortion while ignoring the mountain of injustice and misery that surrounds us. It is true that there are many religious groups doing great work. The civil rights movement in the sixties, for example, was sustained by the black community's churches. Without the enormous amount of “street level” ministry that many religious institutions offer, many poor and destitute people would have nowhere to turn. But for all that is good with some religious institutions, this isn't enough to overcome the bad that many people see coming from many powerful religious institution’s bizarre definition of what is and is not of ultimate value to human beings.
A large part of the problem is that the world that traditional religion springs from is profoundly at odds with the day-to-day life of most people. The political vision embodied in Abrahamic1 religions is rigidly hierarchical and authoritarian. God is an absolute dictator who enforces his laws through the use of an eternal concentration camp known as “Hell”. Modern people inhabit democracies where leadership is through consensus building and power flows from the bottom up instead of the top down. Free expression is encouraged---not only as a human right, but also because truth is seem as flowing from a conversation between equals who each bring their own personal viewpoint to a complex issue. Science---who's amazing insights and creations we take for granted---is also based on the free flow of ideas and argument over competing hypotheses.
This divergence between the religious worldview and the modern life experience is probably best summed up by way religious conservatives view hypocrisy. Modernists view it as a deadly sin, because it allows individuals experiencing cognitive dissonance to avoid reassessing their cherished beliefs. If a priest simply cannot follow his vow of celibacy, for example, the experience gives him a chance to rethink his definition of what it means to be a human being. Perhaps we are not spiritual souls trapped in flesh who have total control over our behaviour in all situations. Instead, maybe we are products of evolution who have very strong instinctual drives that need to be accepted and integrated into life. The honest man can work through this calculus and change his life. In contrast, the hypocrite dismisses the cognitive dissonance as an example of “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. From the “inside out” this feels like an example of humility by a “fallen human being”, but from the outside in, it can seem like a lack of moral courage and duplicity.
In contrast, conservative religious people seem to believe that the greatest sin is rebellion. That was the sin of Satan, after all. Yet the problem with this is that so many of our most cherished institutions are the result of rebellion. The USA was founded by a rebellion. The parliamentary democracy that it rebelled against was itself the product of an earlier, English rebellion against an absolutist monarch. The computer that I am writing this book on is itself a product of several scientific “rebellions” against an old way of thinking. It is obvious to anyone with eyes to see that rebellion is not an isolated act of will, but rather one of the key agents of human progress. If people have to choose between hypocrisy and rebellion, the forward-looking, clear-eyed, honest people of today will choose rebellion every time.
I have written this book to help people understand that it is possible to develop and pursue a life of value without turning your back on reason and personal experience. In my own case, the values that I have adopted are Daoist. There are other options out there too. This is the way of non-religious values. They are provisional. What this means is that they are always open to debate, and if in that conversation someone is able to convince you that one of your beliefs is not supported by either reason or experience, then you should be willing to change it. This may---and in practical terms does---mean that there are different sets of plausible values besides the ones that work for me. Other people have different life experiences that lead them to see things differently. It might be that there ultimately is only one really coherent set of values, but the fact is that if there is, none of us have the time and energy to figure them out. We all live a short life and have only limited opportunities. Maybe our culture will slowly and painstakingly work itself closer and closer to this ultimate set of values---but that's not going to happen in my lifetime. So we must pay our money and make our choice. This book explains my choice and invites others to make their own.
In the last article I published on this subject, I discussed how important group decision-making through a specific type of conversation (or "dialectic") is in making rational decisions. This is such an important issue that I want to "dig down" even deeper and talk about the importance of "community" to the quality of decisions we make.
I start the conversation by offering a quote from Wendell Berry, who's something of a spokesman for traditional rural values. The idea that we carry our history on our shoulders is something I know about.
I grew up on a small-holder (only 200 acres) farm that in many ways was partially based on subsistence agriculture. (That is, we raised or bartered for almost all our food and a great deal other things, like wood.) In that sort of world, your reputation was literally something you depended upon for your livelihood. This is such an important issue that I'm going to share three examples to illustrate it.
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When I was quite young I remember looking out the window during the winter and seeing a group of Amish people with teams of horses and bobsleds going into our woodlot. I asked my dad what was going on. He informed me that many years ago he'd been very sick for a long part of one winter and some members of the Amish community had undertaken to do his barn chores in exchange for being able to harvest a "reasonable" amount of wood from our bush for as long as he lived. There was no contract protecting their rights to get the wood, and no detailed language to protect us from them destroying the bush by over-logging.
Another time my father sold an old tractor-pulley operated buzz-saw to a
neighbour. The two of them dickered a bit over the price, but not the way people are used to hearing. I forget the details but it went something like this:
Dad: "You can have it for $25".
Neighbour: "No, that's too cheap. How about $100?"
Dad: "Don't be silly. It's old, it doesn't owe me anything, and, it's just taking up space. It's best that someone who can use it gets it. How about $50?"
Neighbour: "I don't want to take advantage of your good nature. How about $60?"
Dad: "If you insist, OK."
Finally, years later after I'd graduated from university I was desperate to find work (it was during that awful recession in the 1980s that was probably the hardest time to find work that has ever happened in my lifetime.) I ended up with a temporary gig picking apples. The farmer came out one day and offered me a full time job managing his farm. I was surprised.
Myself: "But I don't know anything about fruit orchards."
Farmer: "That's OK. I can teach you whatever you need to learn."
Myself: "Then why me?"
Farmer: "I've seen that you're not afraid of hard work. And I've heard about your family---you have a very good reputation in the community. My son doesn't want the farm, but my grandson does. I need someone to run the place until he's old enough to take over."
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What's going on in these three interactions? Why would someone undertake a life-long commitment without a legal contract? Or sell something by trying to talk the buyer into paying less than he wants to? Or offer a job to someone that freely admits that they don't know anything about how to do it? I'd suggest that what was at play is the reputations that individuals carry "on their shoulders" within a closely knit community.
What's a community? That's a key point of what I'm getting at. When and where I was young, it was primarily a group of people living in the same geographic location who felt a sense of obligation towards each other. That's what the three examples above are all about. My father, the Amish wood cutters, and, the fellow buying the buzz saw were working out the details of social obligation. In both cases, each of the parties was getting "value for their money" in that they negotiated what each side considered a "fair exchange". But more importantly, because each side refused to "drive a hard bargain" or take advantage of the other person's weakness, they were keeping the bonds of community strong. That was because on some level---often totally unconscious---they all realized that they depended on the sense of community to support them during "hard times".
With regard to the old farmer who offered to hire me to manage his farm, I suspect that what motivated him was an understanding---again perhaps unconscious---that I understood and was willing to participate in this sort of community supported social network. If he'd brought in someone from outside, there would be no way that this person would have understood the way people in that community did business.
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This sort of community networking didn't "just exist", it was enforced. People used gossip to share information about each other, and if someone tried to "opt out" by doing things like "driving a hard bargain" or by being a "freeloader", they paid a price. I first realized this when I bought my house and had to deal with Guelph trades people for the first time. Unfortunately, my experience as a home owner tells me
that in our community there are a wide variety of people who work on homes---some of
whom are incompetent and/or border-line criminals. Our experience on the farm was that you just hired the same guys as everyone else and you could trust them to do a good job for a fair price. I suspect the reason why is because if they ever got caught ripping someone off, their reputation would be shot and no one would never hire them again.
This sort of informal punishment would---according to "hushed" stories told by my parents---sometimes get out of hand and take an ominous turn. During a polio epidemic brought on by an anti-vaxxer fundamentalist church, I heard about a cross being burnt on the front lawn of the Pastor's home. I also heard about a police constable who was rumoured to have assaulted a local teen. Supposedly, this led to an informal parade of motor cars with people in sheets and pillow cases urging him to resign and leave town---which he did.
Please note that this village was absolutely lily-white except for the very odd First Nations family. There was absolutely no racism involved. (At least by then. There had been a very large community of escaped slaves in the 19th century---I often wonder about why they all left. Probably not entirely because of the climate. 😒 ) Having said that, it doesn't require a great deal of imagination to understand how this sort of thing can get wildly out of hand so these issues are much better handled by the legal authorities.
For better or worse, the city is much, much, much different. Guelph is big enough that trades people can be anonymous, which means that it really is up to you to figure out if you can trust someone. And if they do a bad job, they won't pay a price for doing so because there will always be some other people who haven't heard and are willing to "give them a go".
I couldn't find a solution to this problem until I discovered the Better Business Bureau's (BBB) tradesmen score card service. It is a formal system for creating the sort personal history that was served by gossip in my home town. If, for example, an electrician or plumber "pulls a fast one" on a customer, they can complain and them they get a bad rating (ie: from A+ to F). Moreover, if you look at the company name on the website you can see a "back and forth" between customers and business that you can use to get a feel for how seriously they treat complaints.
This is a formal solution to the decline of community. It's something that has been used over and over again on the Web through things like Yelp and the ratings on businesses like Ebay.
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The only real way to be able to learn "the metal" of a person is through learning about their personal history. This is what is known as "social capital". If someone has a good reputation in their community, they have a lot of it. If they have a bad reputation, then they are "socially bankrupt".
Behavioural economists are very interested in this concept because they recognize how important it is to the entire economy. Just imagine how a whole range of businesses depend on trust to be able to function. If we couldn't be sure about restaurants, no one would ever try something new because they'd be afraid of food poisoning. I often buy things from the other side of the world---I'd never do that if I thought that there was a good chance that someone would just rip me off. Obviously, being able to trust strangers is incredibly important for global trade.
China has a real problem with this, because generations of Communist control has taught ordinary citizens the many players they cannot trust: party officials, businesses in bed with these officials, the courts, the police, and, just about every other aspect of society. The government understands how much this harms both the economy and Chinese culture. In response, they have come up with a strangely Orwellian "solution". (Don't forget, they are still the Communist Party of China. 😏 )
The Social Credit System still seems to be in beta testing, but bye-and-large it operates like our credit score system---only with added criteria. This includes things like how quickly people pay their bills including taxes, whether they jerk around businesses by doing things like booking reservations without showing up, and, whether they are bad neighbours (things like eating on transit, not sorting their trash, etc.) If, on the other hand, someone does good things like donating blood, helping out with charities, etc, they can get positive scores added to their balance.
There are consequences to this sort of thing. People with low scores can find themselves denied tickets on trains and airplanes, spaces in educational facilities, denied jobs, etc. In contrast, people with high scores receive the opposite---they can go to the head of the line for medical services, good jobs, nice apartments, discounts on consumer goods, etc.
I doubt if the Chinese model is going to work very well. I certainly wouldn't recommend this specific system. But it is interesting that even a repressive, authoritarian regime like China's can see the need for some way of building social capital. (I suspect that this is an out-growth of traditional Confucian philosophy---but that's another story.)
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Let's get back to Marie Snyder and her high-school students. The reason why I'm raising this issue is because rational decisions
require a certain degree of trust in the particular individual you are
talking with. That's because when we work together in a group to work through problems and make decisions we need to have some understanding of how much we can trust what another person is saying.
For example, consider the case of people who "confabulate". I suspect we all know people who do this---I certainly do. These are folks who make up all sorts of crazy-ass nonsense but talk as if they know for an absolute fact that this stuff is true.
The point of this scene from the once popular sit-com Cheers is that the character Cliff (the fellow in the letter carrier uniform) is such a notorious confabulator that he can be relied upon to come up with some sort of nonsense no matter what the question. That has obviously been the basis of a bet between Norm (the guy sitting next to Cliff) and Coach (the bartender).
If communities have to make a collective decision and people like Cliff are part of the process (which, unfortunately, they usually are), it is tremendously important for people to be able to identify them so they can ignore what they have to say. That is why, for example, we award people credentials so strangers can get an idea of whether or not someone really does know what they are talking about. It is also why I have always opposed the idea that people in large national and provincial organizations should directly vote for it's leadership. It's simply impossible to form a useful opinion about someone based on a leaflet, website, or, few lines in an email.
And it is also the reason why social media has become such a "dumpster fire". The sad fact of the matter is that it is filled with Cliffs who spout all sorts of nonsense and there is no real mechanism in place to help the general public identify them so they can be safely ignored.
We really shouldn't just accept that "this is just the way it is". We have the BBB's tradesmen report card system. We also have trades licenses. We have credentials that let us know whether or not the guy designing a vaccine has a Phd in the relevant field, and, those two letters "MD" or "RN" after the names of the people giving me the shot. Engineers wear the ring. The list goes on and on. (For example, I can add "MA" after my name---for what that's worth.) And we know that print and broadcast media used to have rules that stopped them from being able to tell bold-faced lies. Why can't we come up with some sort of similar regulations that will police the Web and stop the spread of dangerous nonsense from it?
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
This week I start a new literary supplement. It is the last book I published and it's about the ancient Chinese school called "Daoism". It's supposed to be an introduction, so I'll just jump right into it because it will explain itself to the interested reader.
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Who am I?
I'm not some ancient Chinese sage. Instead, I'm a white Canadian who is past middle-age moving towards being a senior citizen. I don't know any oriental languages. I've never lived in or even visited China. I'm not even a scholar of anything Chinese. I have a Master's degree in philosophy, but I have worked for about thirty years as a porter in an academic library. Nothing about that would give anyone a reason to read my book about Daoism.
Well, there is other stuff too. Many years ago I decided that I was out of shape and should follow an exercise regime. I thought martial arts were cool, so I looked around for one. I had never heard about this thing called “taijiquan”, but there was a club in town and it looked like something I could do to get more fit. Maybe later on I'd switch to something better, like tae kwon do or karate. It turned out that taijiquan was more interesting than I had thought. There were a very interesting bunch of people involved with the club and I started hanging out with them. Eventually I ended up going with them to events at the school's “head office” in Toronto.
There I met the founder. He was a strange immigrant from China who didn't speak a word of English. He did bizarre things like insisting on sleeping on the floor of the studio with a telephone book as a pillow. He also liked to eat and would often ask us to go out after classes for meals. I'm a bit of “joiner” and I eventually volunteered to do some stuff for the organization.
One day this guy---Moy Lin Shin---asked me (through a translator) if I'd like to “join the Temple”. I asked what it involved and the first thing he said was “well, for starts, it costs $300 to join”. That stopped things for me right there. I said “well, it might be a good idea but there's absolutely no way I can afford that”. (At the time I was working as a janitor for minimum wage.) Next week he came to me again “if you want to join the Temple, there's a 'special introductory offer'. You can join for $30”. I thought “what's there to lose?” Eventually I got ushered into this hot little Daoist Temple that had been built into an apartment in the heart of Toronto (the Fung Loy Kok), told to wear some very heavy robes over my street clothes, and went through this elaborate ceremony that involved me kow-towing in front of an altar and offering three splints of wooden incense on a brazier.
I did some other stuff for the school and spent a summer helping out as a live-in volunteer at a retreat centre in Orangeville. But eventually I found myself in the middle of some very strange inter-personal dynamics in the organization and decided that I was no longer interested in the Taoist Tai Chi Association of Canada.
Then something very interesting happened. After I left Mr. Moy went kinda berzerk. I was told that he sent telegrams (yes, they still existed back then) all over the world saying that I was “persona non grata”. That struck me as totally bizarre because I really wasn't that important to the taiji school or the temple. It was only many years later that I found out why he flipped out.
.........
I came across this group called “the Taoist Restoration Society”. It was a non-profit that was trying to help preserve and restore Daoism in China. It had the support of quite a few scholars and a very impressive website. One of the features that they had was an “ask an expert” question and answer forum. One day someone asked an expert how one would go about being “baptised” as a Daoist. The professor said that that was impossible as Daoism is an elitest religion that doesn't have “followers” like members of a Christian church. Instead, it is more like what we in the West would know as a monastic order. At that point, I stepped in and describe the ceremony I'd gone through and asked what that was if it wasn't something like a Christian baptism. The academic responded by saying that that hadn't been a “baptism”, instead it had been an “ordination”.
I was dumbfounded.
Later on, I connected on line with a scholar of religious studies who was researching the Fung Loy Kok Temple. When I explained my background to him, he got very excited and eventually travelled to my home to interview me about my experience. He told me that Mr. Moy had only asked a very small number of people to “join the temple” and that it was extremely rare for anyone---let alone a Westerner with no Chinese---to go through that ceremony at any Temple in any country. I literally had had no clue about this. It explained why Moy had reacted so explosively to my defection.
Well, that's a cool story, but so what? Not much. But there are other things. A strange thing about my defection from the Taoist Tai Chi Association was that I ended up sticking with the practices that I learned there. I kept up the regular taijiquan practice. I pursued various meditation techniques for decades. I went to workshops from other schools and learned stuff like the Yang sword routine. I even joined the Canadian Taijiquan Federation for a while and went to events when possible. I also spent time trying to learn from non-Daoists. I had a Roman Catholic hermit as a spiritual director for years. I've also gone to Zen meditation retreats, classes inspired by other Buddhist traditions and so on. I've also spent a lot of time studying books about Daoism. I happen to have a Master's degree in philosophy which allows me to use some of the academic “tricks of the trade” to try and learn as much as possible. Working at an academic library and having access to the Internet haven't hurt either.
It wasn't that I really thought of myself as a Daoist through most of this period. Indeed, I was more interested in Buddhism or Sufism. I even seriously contemplated becoming a Roman Catholic. (I gagged at a class for potential converts that exposed me to what “popular Catholicism” really looks like.) I did “sign the book” and become a Unitarian---but I eventually drifted away from that too. There always seemed to be something keeping me from completely integrating into these systems of thought and communities of believers. So when I found out about my “ordination”, I decided that I might as well hang my hat on that hook as any other.
I recall reading somewhere (although I've never been able to see that reference again) that there is a custom among some Daoists to follow a practice called “cloud walking”. This involved travelling from temple to temple in order to learn from the different communities in China. In fact, the temples didn't even have to be Daoist, as it was assumed that “all religions are one” and that there was much a person could learn from studying with Buddhists and even Christians and Muslims. Since I have spent my life trying to learn from any number of different spiritual traditions, I see myself as someone who has spent decades “cloudwalking”. And because my last name, Hulet, is supposed to mean “member of the Owl Clan” in old Welsh (at least by family tradition), I have taken on the religious name of “the Cloudwalking Owl”.1
If that little snippet of an autobiography peaks your interest, then maybe you should go on and finish the rest of the book.
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1People who know something about traditional Daoist naming systems might bridle at my taking on this name. Traditionally lineages have a “name poem” and people's religious names are assigned sequentially from the words in it. That means that anyone in that tradition can hear a person's name, look up the poem, and tell which person has seniority over any other. The tradition that Moy came from, the Yuen-Yuen Institute in Hong Kong, doesn't follow that system. It is more of a “reformed” type of Daoism. It was formed by refugee Daoists who fled because of Communist persecution. Since these refugees had come from lots of different schools, sticking to a lineage poem system made no sense and it was discarded.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
There's been a lot of news lately about sexual harassment of women in the Canadian Armed Force.
I suspect people have lots of ideas about this---one way or another. I've never been in the military, and I'm certainly not a woman. But I think it's important for people of good will to raise issues about problems even if they don't directly affect us. This helps give them more visibility while at the same time taking some of the pressure off those who have had this happen to them.
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I like to watch old movies and television shows because the give me a chance to see how much society has changed over the years---and in a way that isn't "filtered" and "processed" by commentators pushing some sort of agenda. This isn't because they were trying to expose problems in their society but rather because they tend to show what people were oblivious to in times past.
You Tube helps with this because people often put up old television shows that have no copyright concerns anymore. Lately I've been watching one about submarines called The Silent Service. Generally there isn't much to say other than I never, ever want to be stuck on a submarine during a war. But one episode had a couple scenes in it that just about had my eyeballs pop out of my head. I'll let readers take a look at them to see what I'm talking about.
(If people have a tendency to be triggered by sexism---especially if have been assaulted themselves---you should be warned that this clip can be disturbing. My significant other, who is a veteran who served in the Missouri National Guard during the First Gulf War, was so disturbed when she saw it that she couldn't finish watching.)
Take a moment to think about what is shown in the above clip. The woman (who only is identified as "Nanny") isn't identified as such, but I can only assume is an enlisted person in the Women's Royal Australian Naval Service, or, WRANS. She is performing an important service. She is in uniform (or the studio wardrobe's vague attempt at creating one.) The men harassing her are officers, in their uniforms, and, their commander (ie: the submarine captain) is watching all this take place.
The behaviour seems almost designed to destroy morale among allied enlisted troops and undermine the discipline of the navy! Don't think that this incident is just something a writer dreamed up, though. The US navy was up to their eyeballs supporting this show. Each episode was introduced by a retired admiral. And almost every episode had a epilogue where someone key to the incident was brought on---often in full uniform---to talk about it. Moreover, the producers not only were given access to wartime footage, they were also given access to an active duty navy submarine to shoot new footage. On some level, therefore, the behaviour modelled in the clips was considered "OK" by the Navy brass.
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Lets really think about what is happening in these two scenes.
First, "Nanny" was physically grabbed by these young men. Secondly, she makes it very, very obvious that she doesn't want them to do it---but they continue anyway. Moreover, she specifically appeals to their commanding officer to force them to stop, but he doesn't. When she complains, she is told "It's just a joke. Where's your sense of humour?" and about her and all the other women personnel "They love it and you know it."
Secondly, as officers these idiots are "modelling" behaviour to the lower ranks. They are expected to "set an example", but the one that they are setting says that it's OK to abuse fellow service people if they are women. The problem is that people who don't know much better will see this and figure "it's all OK". And when that happens things will escalate as people push the envelope farther and farther. Eventually someone will get raped. Even if this didn't happen (and don't kid yourself---it probably did), the women got the message loud and clear that they are second-class service people and that they simply could not trust their comrades or superiors.
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Justice Louis Arbour
We have come a long way since The Silent Service aired, but we still have a long way to go. Today, no one would simply write, shoot, and, air scenes like the ones I've included above. And that is progress. As Francois de la Rochefoucauld said "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue". We've gone past the point where the military couldn't even see how anyone would think it is wrong to assault women, but they still don't want to do much about it.
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Justice Marie Deschamps
I toyed with speculating about why it is that the military (and the police, for that matter) have such a hard time treating women like equals. I have some suspicions, but the government has announced that retired Justice Louise Arbour will be making an inquiry. I'll let her do that job. Let's hope the result doesn't end up stuck on a shelf gathering dust like the report retired Justice Marie Deschamps wrote six years ago.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
