The Tyranny of Merit: Part One, the Theology of Deserving

In last week's video review I explained how an industry has been created to get teens from wealthy families into a small number of "prestigious" American universities---even some ways that are illegal. I ended up by pointing out how ridiculous the whole exercise really is because it is easy to get into lots of very good American colleges---if you have money. Now I want to introduce something that is related, but I believe deadly serious: The Tyranny of Merit.

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The phrase comes from a book with the same title by a professor of philosophy named Michael J. Sandel at Harvard University. 

The author and the cover of his book---from his Harvard website and Amazon.

Sandel argues that a key part of the rise of populist conservatism is because of resentment among people who feel that they've been "sold down the river" by smug university graduates who have taken over society and hog all the power and money. 

There are a lot of different issues here, so I'm going to try to work my way through some of them one after another to explain why I think Sandel's ideas are so important. In this article, I'm going to go into some depth about what I'm calling the theology of deserving.

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I can remember hearing politicians in the 1980s going on about the need to give people an education so they could find good jobs. At the time I was appalled to hear this because there are several problems with this line of thinking.

The first one is that when you educate someone you aren't magically creating a job for them to fill. In response to the oft-repeated cliche, I'd like to point out that teaching someone how to fish doesn't guarantee that there is anything left in the pond to catch! To cite a personal example, I was born at the end of the Baby Boom, which meant that when I graduated with a BA it was very hard to find a good job---simply because my older siblings already had most of them and the economy was going through one of its periodic "down cycles". This is easy to see on a graph I found at the Macleans Magazine website.

See that spike in the early 80s? That when my cohort graduated from college and university. Pretty hard to get a job with 13% unemployment! At that time all the traditional employers---eg: factories---had signs up saying "Not Taking Applications". I counted myself lucky because I was a young, single man who had a low-pay janitorial position. I felt this because when I was out in public polishing floors I met a lot of middle-aged guys with families to support who would ask if the company was hiring. 

During that recession I went to my home town for Yule and the local bar was offering free turkey dinners because of all the unemployment. My friends from high school and I got together. There was a wide gamut of different educational streams there---from engineering and heavy diesel mechanics, to fine art and philosophy. Most of us didn't have jobs. I remember one guy complaining, "I didn't have any fun at all when I was at college---and I still don't have a job!"

The notion that increasing the level of education in your workforce will create jobs is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between what makes an individual more competitive in their personal job hunt with what will help an entire population find work. If you are getting a good education and no one else is, then yes education can be a very good strategy for getting a job. But if everyone in your cohort is doing the same thing, all that is happening is the competition for those few jobs that do exist is getting hotter and hotter.

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The interesting question that flows out of the above is "Why exactly would anyone believe that education is a way of dealing with unemployment?" I would suggest to you, dear readers, it's because of a collective delusion that flows out of our religious and economic heritage. In other words, blame it on both Christianity and Capitalism.

For a very long time there was (and for all I know may very well still be) an argument between theologians about what is more important for salvation, grace or works? That is to say, is it more important to believe in God's mercy or to be a good person? In high school I talked about this with a friend who was a fundamentalist Christian. I asked him, "Who has a better chance of getting to heaven---an atheist who lived like a saint his whole life, or, a monster like Hitler who had a genuine 'death bed conversion'?" His position was the atheist saint goes to Hell and Hitler is now strumming a harp in Heaven.

The reason why any of this has any bearing on unemployment and higher education is because our society places a lot of emphasis on whether or not someone "deserves" a secure job, a decent life, etc. This why, for example, there is so much institutional anxiety about catching welfare "cheats" and making sure that people on unemployment insurance are out banging the bushes to find another job. 

It isn't because welfare pays such a princely sum of money. In fact, it's so low that a friend of mine used to say "welfare is its own punishment". According to the Maytree website, welfare rates in Toronto---as of 2019---ranged from $9,773 for the single person considered employable to $31,485 for the couple with two children.

And if the official unemployment rate is over 13% (ie: when I graduated with a BA), what is the point of forcing people to go through the motions of seeking gainful employ?

For that matter, what is the point of forcing someone who is sick to go into a doctor's office to waste her time writing a note for his boss? (After all, it's very simple to add up the sick days in a year to suggest someone might be taking too many---or not enough, for that matter.)

None of this makes any practical sense. As many folks have pointed out over the years, money wasted seeking out cheats and following procedures aimed at preventing cheating often costs so much money that it would make more sense to just accept a small amount of fraud as the price of doing business. In fact, the situation often seems to me like that of a store owner who decides to devote a huge amount of the company gross to eliminating all shop lifting instead of just accepting a small amount of "shrinkage" as the price of being open for business. 

It is hard to find information about the extent of welfare "fraud" in Canada. According to a background paper by the British Parliament's National Audit Office, this is because no level of government attempts to track it. But the authors do cite an Ontario commissioned audit by the global auditing firm KPMG from 1992 that would suggest that something like $70-100 million was lost yearly due to fraud of all types in our province. This sounds like a lot of money, but the Ontario budget for social assistance in 1992 was $6.2 billion, that means that if we accept the outside extreme of KPMG's number (ie: $100 million) and make that a percentage of the entire social assistance budget, we end up with fraud costing 1.6% of the total. Since retail sales businesses in North America accept a shrinkage rate of about 1.85%, it would seem that fraud really isn't an objectively important issue for welfare. (Incidentally, this is a classic example of why it is so important to see government expenditures as a percentage instead of just a gross dollar amount!)

But this isn't about saving money. Instead, for many people it comes down to a question of morality. They are offended at the thought that people they think don't DESERVE welfare, employment insurance, or, sick pay are getting it anyway. In this type of thinking, having food and shelter is "heaven" and it is the reward for a "saintly" work ethic. The idea that someone gets their "reward" without putting in the effort, diminishes their sense of right and wrong. The fact that there might not be enough jobs that pay a living wage---or even that don't---doesn't enter into their calculus. 

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The question of "deserving" becomes really hard to support when you consider the people in our society who don't do well at school. I'm not talking just about folks who aren't interested in university. There are also a lot of people who can't "make the grade" at a college or trade either. The problem is that these folks do necessary work but they aren't deemed "deserving" of a wage that will allow them to live a comfortable life. They can't afford housing, they often have to work at several jobs with no benefits, and, the work they can find is often precarious. 

But just how exactly are these people "not deserving" of a decent life? Is it because the work they do isn't important? Well, if so, why were so many of the positions they fill---healthcare worker, meat packer, delivery guy, farm labourer, janitor, etc---deemed "essential workers" during the pandemic? 

It might be that they don't have higher education, but maybe that's because they simply don't have the intellectual gifts necessary to make it through university or college. But how exactly does that fit into their "deserving" what they make at these crappy jobs? People are who they are, and you can't expect someone who isn't smart enough to go to school to do it anyway anymore than you expect a paralyzed man to win a marathon. 

This is where we get out of the realm of "works" and into "grace", and from there into the cloud-cuckoo land of "predestination". In Christianity the same sorts of problems with regard to salvation manifested themselves as does "deserving" in Capitalism. People who honestly looked at the issue of whether or not someone "deserved" to go to Heaven had to admit that people's behaviour was heavily influenced by their childhood and their environment. Seeing that, they had to admit that God didn't seem fair if he judged them just on their acts.

This led to the idea of "grace", which suggested that God's mercy fell upon the just and unjust equally, much like the rain. But this belief was simply too much for some people to accept, which resulted in the idea of "predestination", which taught that people's sense of "free will" was pretty much an illusion---and we are all doomed to either Heaven or Hell from before we were born. (How God decided who got what was considered a "mystery" too profound for ignorant people to ever understand.)

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I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole that is Christian theology. But I do want to show how fundamentally delusional it really is. That's what happens when you hold onto something that is fundamentally illogical and then expend all your mental effort to explain it while at the same time refusing to reject any of your initial assumptions (eg: that God, Heaven, or, Hell really exist). Thankfully, issues like predestination, salvation by works, and, grace no longer dominate social discourse. Certainly, they are no longer the excuse for horrific wars---like they were in 16th and 17th century Europe. 

But we still are in the grips of theological thinking in the form of trying to squeeze economics into religious shoes by talking about whether or not someone "deserves" to either make a living wage at an "unskilled" job let alone have a decent life with no job at all. I don't find it surprising that public debate goes this way, because our dominant worldview---Capitalism---has been described in religious terms from it's very conception. 

That's where things like "the invisible hand" fit in. Capitalism can be defended as simply being an organizing system that can be justified by being the most efficient possible. (I don't agree with this, but there is a seemingly plausible argument in it's favour.) But since the beginning, people have tended to see the fact that some people succeed in competition and others lose as being evidence of their inherent virtue or vice. And once you start to see success or failure in society as being a reward for good or bad behaviour, you are stuck on the conveyor belt that drives you into the weird world of theology.

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Of course, there's a 500lb gorilla in the room of this worldview. That is, what about people who are rich but didn't work for it?  According to the People's Policy Project, a crowd-sourced policy think tank, a very significant fraction of wealthy people made their money the old-fashioned way: they inherited it. Here's a graph from them that splits the US population into ten groups (a "decile") and gives the mean (ie: half the people above the number and half below) inheritance.

So following this chart, half of the people in top ten percent of the population received more than $367,400 in inheritances. (Numbers are in thousands. Because this is a mean instead of an average, we are ignoring the very small number of people who inherited tens or even hundreds of millions---which would skew the numbers far too high.) Obviously, anyone who inherits their wealth doesn't "deserve" it, do they? 

If you believe that people should "deserve" whatever money they get, where does inheritance fit in? It seems that we if we believe in the capitalist theory of "deserving", we end up in the same dead end of predestination whether we follow the road of poverty or wealth.

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My discussion has rambled a bit so far, which I think is inescapable because it's not easy to come up with a logical argument about things that make no inherent sense. All I can do is grab bits and pieces and hold them up to show how nutty they really are. 

Economics shouldn't be about morality and the concept of "deserving" doesn't hold up under critical scrutiny. No one really deserves much of anything at all. But it is the case that there is more than enough to go around, and if we could get rid of the insane notion that some people deserve more than others, we might develop national and international policies that would foster a greater level of equality in the world. And, that would be a good thing.

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That's enough for this kick at the can. Remember that pesky Delta variant, so keep wearing your mask and get your shot. 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!

Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Eight

In this instalment of Digging Your Own Well, I make some suggestions about what books someone interested in Daoism should read first.

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After a life time of reading, and, buying thousands of dollars worth of books the following are suggestions about what I think the basic library of Daoism should include for someone who is just starting out.

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The Tao Te Ching, translated by Ellen M. Chen, First Edition 1989, “New Era Books”, ISBN 1-55778-238-5 (pbk.)

Chen is an Chinese-born and trained scholar who taught at American universities. Her education immersed her in both Eastern and Western scholarly traditions, which means that she is able to at the same time understand the Laozi the way a Chinese person might, and also communicate it clearly to an educated native English speaker. What is even more important is that her translation comes with a commentary that explains the text according to her own personal Daoist worldview, which is religious. Chen sees Daoism as a religious movement aimed at integrating humanity into nature, which is identified as the Dao. As such she sees it as an outgrowth of the Shamanistic traditions of ancient pre-Chinese civilization. Moreover, she believes the appeal of Daoism for a modern audience is based on the pressing need to develop a modern worldview that will create a sustainable civilization. Having said the above, her commentary isn't preachy so much as insightful. She helps readers see some of the subtle complexity that is implied in the original text.

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Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, translated by Victor H. Mair, First Edition 1994, “Bantam Books”, ISBN 0-553-37406-0.

Mair is a well-respected scholar, which is important. But one of the things I really like about this translation is the way he has made both the “loopiness”, and, the innate common sense of the Zhuangzi available to the ordinary reader. For example, look at these two translations of the first paragraph of the chapter titled “Kengsang Ch'u”---the first by Herbert A. Giles and the second by Mair.

Among the disciples of Lao Tzŭ was one named Kên Sang Ch'u. He alone had attained to the Tao of his Master. He lived up north, on the Wei-lei Mountains. Of his attendants, he dismissed those who were systematically clever or conventionally charitable. The useless remained with him; the incompetent served him. And in three years the district of Wei-lei was greatly benefited.

Among the servants of Old Longears, there was a Kengsang Ch'u who had gotten a partial understanding of the Way of Old Longears. With it, he went north to dwell in the Jagged Mountains. He dismissed his attendants who were ostentatiously knowledgeable and distanced himself from his concubines were were insistently humane. He dwelled with rustics and made busy bees his servants. After he had dwelled there for three years, there was a great harvest at Jagged. ---[Mair doesn't end his translated paragraph in the same place as Giles]

Zhuangzi is supposed to be strange and startling to read. But in a lot of translations this doesn't come through. A simple thing like trying to translate the proper names into English makes a huge difference, as they are often meant to be bizarre and referential to the issue at hand. Mair's translation also gives readers a lot more information than Giles. For example compare “systematically clever” versus “ostentatiously knowledgeable”---what is wrong with being “systematically clever”? But we do know that “ostentatiously knowledgeable” means “pompous windbag”.

Also compare “The useless remained with him; the incompetent served him.” with “He dwelled with rustics and made busy bees his servants.” Obviously, Giles and Mair are both trying to translate something that is obscure in the original old Chinese, but Mair's version makes a sort of sense that Giles' doesn't. This is an important thing to remember. When you are translating an obscure, bizarre text---which the Zhuangzi is---the translator can easily fall into the trap of simply accepting anything that doesn't make immediate sense as being just “part of the paradox”. But are “rustics” “useless people”? And if pollinators are the limiting factor on your farm, wouldn't hiring country folk to manage bee hives help increase the harvest? Even if this isn't literally what the original ancient Chinese meant, Mair's decision to translate it this way makes for an excellent evocative metaphor for someone who sees something that the non-realized man would miss.

Follow Giles' example and translate obscure passages as “mystical mumbo jumbo”, and you end up with a book that reads like a fortune cookie. Mair, on the other hand, tries to make the seemingly strange and bizarre something that will make sense if you put effort into trying to understand it. As non-academics, none of us can actually read the original text and understand it. This means that we have to work with the translation in front of us. And I find that Mair's version of Zhuangzi is a valuable window into a very deep and profound way of looking at the world. Since I know that Mair is a respected academic and translator, I also know that there is at least a good argument for the way he has translated the text. If it is that hard to translate, I'll opt for the one that makes some sense to me rather than one that sounds like New Age snake oil.

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Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-Yeh) and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism, translated by Harold D. Roth, first edition 1999, Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-11564-3

This is a book that the vast majority of people interested in Daoism have probably never heard about. That's too bad, because it comes from the same source and time as the much more popular Laozi. Oddly enough, it has never actually been “lost” and rediscovered so much as it managed to “hide in plain sight” from Western scholars. The book was preserved as a chapter of the Guanzi. This is a large text that deals primarily with philosophical issues relating to state governance from distinctly non-Daoist points of view. People who wanted to read the Guanzi weren't interested in Daoist meditation techniques, and people interested in Daoist meditation would not have wanted to read the Guanzi. As a result, the book was invisible to scholars.

The fascinating thing is that it dates back to the same time as the Laozi and appears to have come from the same cultural source. People often naively assume that each of the key texts of Daoism was written by a single individual: Laozi, Zhuangzi, and, Liezi. But the fact of the matter is that all of them grew out of a conversation or dialectic within a segment of ancient Chinese society. In some cases, there seems to have been an oral tradition that then migrated to written. In all cases there were additions and subtractions as the texts went through different editions. In effect, there was a long process of “natural selection” that resulted in the texts we have today. So looking at the Nei-Yeh allows people to understand the context that the Laozi emerged from.

And, that context was one in which people actually followed specific meditation practices.
Those who can transform even a single thing, call them “numinous”;
Those who can alter even a single situation, call them “wise”.
But to transform without expending vital energy; to alter without expending wisdom:
Only exemplary persons who hold fast to the One are able to do this.
Hold fast to the One; do not lose it,
And you will be able to master the myriad things.
Exemplary persons act upon things,
And are not acted upon by them,
Because they grasp the guiding principle of the One.

(Nei-yeh, Chapter IX, Harold D. Roth translator)

“Holding onto the One” is the idea that people should try to remember in each moment that the Dao pervades and permeates all of the world and everything we do. It is easy to forget the way things interact and the subtle relationships and laws that govern those interactions. We get “lost in the moment” and forget that we are living human beings that can choose to “buy into” or “disengage” with every opportunity we are presented with---even if it means simply reminding yourself that you have a choice to get angry or not about some unavoidable indignity that the world is imposing upon you. And when we forget about “the One” we forget the subtle yet profound influences that we can exert without exerting ourselves. The wise woman realizes that the right word or the little push in the right place can create a huge effect as it cascades through our environment---but she can only do this if she holds fast to the idea that this is possible if she is sensitive to the subtle world around her. This is “holding onto the One”.

This is where Kirkland's annoyance with the idea of “philosophical Daoism” comes from. If you look at the other key Daoist texts---Laozi, Zhuangzi, and, Liezi---you will see that spiritual practices are an essential element of the tradition. This is not the same thing as saying that all real Daoism is religious, however. It is possible to believe in mental discipline through regular practice without submitting to the control of an ecclesiastic hierarchy, and/or, blindly follow fundamentally obscure texts and traditions. But it is true that a lot of people in the West who call themselves “Daoists” totally reject the idea that to be a Daoist involves some sort of personal, regular spiritual program. The Nei-yeh is useful because it shows that spiritual practice is not some sort of “add on” that those awful religious Daoists stuck onto pristine “philosophical Daoism”, but rather something that was integral to the idea from the get-go.

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The Book of Lieh-tzŭ: A Classic of Tao, translated by A. C. Graham, first edition 1960, Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-07236-8.

This is another book that most Westerners would not have heard of. I recall reading, however, that this is the classic book on Daoism that Chinese speakers would most likely know. That's worth something in itself. It is very much in the same mould as the Zhuangzi, indeed they both share some of the same stories. But it adds others that are equally biting in the way they attack conventional wisdom and suggest that people should pay more attention to the way things really are.

I'm suggesting the A. C. Graham version because as an academic translation it attempts to stay close to the original meaning of the book. To understand this point, compare these two versions. The first is from the most popular “translation”, the Shambhala book Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living by Eva Wong1.

Lieh-tzu left his home in Cheng and journeyed to the kingdom of Wei. While walking down a dusty road, he saw the remains of a skull lying by the wayside. Lieh-tzu saw that it was the skull of a human that was over a hundred years old. He picked up the bone, brushed the dirt off it, and looked at it for a while. Finally, he put the skull down, sighed, and said to his student who was standing nearby. “In this world only you and I understand life and death.” Turning to the skull he said, “Are you unfortunate to be dead and we fortunate to be alive? Maybe it is you who are fortunate and we who are unfortunate!”

Lieh-tzu then said to his student , “Many people sweat and toil, and feel satisfied that they have accomplished many things. However, in the end we are not all that much different from this polished piece of bone. In a hundred years, everyone we know will be just a pile of bones. What is there to gain in life, and what is there to lose in death?”

The ancients knew that life cannot go on forever, and death is not the end of everything. Therefore, they are not excited by the event of life nor depressed by the occurrance of death. Birth and death are part of the natural cycle of things. Only those who can see through the illusions of life and death can be renewed with heaven and earth and age with the sun, moon and stars.

Liezi, “translated” by Eva Wong, from the first chapter

Now let's look at Graham's version.

When Lieh-tzŭ was eating at the roadside on a journey to Wei, he saw a skull a hundred years old. He picked a stalk, pointed at it, and said, turning to hi disciple Pai-feng:

“Only he and I know that you were never born and will never die. Is it he who is truly miserable, is it we who are truly happy?

“Within the seeds of things there are germs. When they find water they develop in successive stages. Reaching water on the edge of land, they become a scum. Breeding on the bank, they become the plantain. When the plantain reaches dung, it becomes the crowfoot. The root of the crowfoot becomes woodlice, the leaves become butterflies. The butterfly suddenly changes into an insect which breeds under the stove and looks as though it has shed its skin, named the ch'ü-to. After a thousand days the ch'ü-to changes into a bird named the kan-yü-ku. The saliva of the kan-yü-ku becomes the ssŭ-mi, which becomes the vinegar animalcula yi-lu, which begets the animalcula huang-k'uang, which begets the chiu-yu, which begets the gnat, which begets the firefly.

[etc, etc, more and more transformations, ending in---]

The yang-hsi, combining with an old bamboo which has not put forth shoots, begets the ch'ing-ning. This begets the leopard, which begets the horse, which begets man. Man in due course returns to the germs. All the myriad things come out of germs and go back to germs.

Liezi, “Heaven's Gifts”, A. C. Graham translator

Compare these two passages. It's obvious that Wong is trying to simplify the text to make it more appealing to the general reader. But she takes huge liberties with it. For example, in her version Liezi picks up the skull and makes a comment saying that only Liezi and the student know about life and death. In Graham's version, Liezi says only he and the skull know. This is an enormous difference!

Things get worse after that. Wong dispenses with the original's long blah-blah-blah about transformations. But by doing so, it totally changes the meaning of the text. In Wong's version Liezi makes the vague statement that “death is not the end of everything”---which could mean that he supports some sort of immortality, or, that he is simply saying that just because you die doesn't mean that everyone else does too. She ends with another vague bromide: “Only those who can see through the illusions of life and death can be renewed with heaven and earth and age with the sun, moon and stars.” What exactly does this mean?

In Graham's version Liezi goes on about “transformation” (which is a tremendously important Daoist concept.) It is hard to understand exactly what he is talking about, because his knowledge of biology is so primitive compared to our own. Is he implying some sort of evolutionary theory? Or is he suggesting some sort of atomic theory whereby matter gets absorbed into the bodies of other creatures through the process of growth and decay? It is very clear, however, that what he is talking about is material and scientific in nature, not some sort of spiritual or metaphysical process of life after death.

Wong is an example of someone who practices Daoism and is a native Chinese speaker but who doesn't have the scholarly education to understand the ancient Chinese text and the complex constellation of ideas that it emerged from. As a result, she can't “tease out” the important subtleties that Graham does. The result is a “fortune cookie” translation that sounds profound, but really doesn't give the reader anything useful.

Another point. The four books I've mentioned so far are all obviously linked together in some way or another. We know this because they share sections. The passage from the Liezi is almost exactly the same in Mair's translation of Zhuangzi. You wouldn't know this if you had only read Wong's version. This is an important thing to learn. Daoism was an actual movement in ancient China and modern Western readers need to remember this. A lot of people are content to just read and re-read the Laozi over and over again without even attempting to study anything else. This is silly. There are other texts out there that people can learn from, so why not?

One last point about the Liezi. Graham's translation can be a bit of a hard slog for the general reader. It varies widely in readability and the translator intrudes a lot to explain things. Unfortunately, this is because the original text really is widely variable in quality. But the effort is worth it, because some of the passages are really interesting. For example:

There was a man who lost his axe, and suspected the boy next door. He watched the boy walking: he had stolen the axe! His expression, his talk, his behaviour, his manner, everything about him betrayed that he had stolen the axe.
Soon afterwards the man was digging in his garden and found the axe. On another day he saw the boy next door again; nothing in his behaviour and manner suggested that he would steal an axe.

Liezi, “Explaining Conjunctions”, A. C. Graham translator

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1Oddly enough, Eva Wong is a fellow initiate into the same Temple as I---although we have never met.

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

Operation Varsity Blue, or, the Delusion of Prestige

Over the weekend I watched a Netflix documentary about the College Admissions Scandal that was a big news story in 2019. I thought I'd do a quick review as a way of introducing another story I'm working and will publish next week---if possible.

Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal is a pretty good documentary about a pretty goofy problem in the USA. 

There some pretty big differences between higher education in Canada and the US, and some of them are intrinsic to this story. First off, unlike in Canada, there are a small number of universities in the USA that are considered "prestigious" and there is a great deal of competition to get into them. Secondly, again unlike here, admission to them is to a large extend based on two standardized tests called the SAT (this used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test, but now the acronym is understood to just be a name) and the ACT (American College Testing). Finally, college athletics are much, much, much more important in the US than they are in Canada. 

The story turns on the fact that there are a lot of teens from very wealthy families who want to get into the top prestigious schools but don't have the ACT or SAT scores to secure a spot. The parents are willing to pay to get a special "in" for their kids, so an industry has developed to help them. 

I'm not talking about expensive, private "prep schools" (ie: "preparation for college") that wealthy kids go to instead of public high schools. I'm not even talking about tutors that help children get a "leg up" over those that can't afford it. What I'm talking about are very expensive consultants whose only job is to walk a family through the admission process. Just to give you a feel for the industry, here's a table that I got from a website ranking what it considered the "best" of the pack---including some idea of how much they cost.

In addition to this, there is also a whole industry devoted to "coaching" students about how to do well in the standardized SAT and ACT tests. The price you can pay for this ranges from free on-line lessons from the Khan Academy non-profit to a $5700 package that includes one-on-one tutoring from Kaplan Test Prep. 

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The "bad guy" in the Varsity Blue scam is a fellow named Rick Singer, who had been a high-school basketball coach and move on to being one of these college admissions consultants. His claim to fame was that he realized that there were in effect two traditional ways someone could get into one of these "prestige" schools---and created a third.

The first is to just be a really good student. Singer called this "the front door". The second is by having filthy rich parents who can donate millions of dollars to the school. This is the "back door". What Singer realized was that there were two other ways to get in: hiring a ringer to write the SAT or ACT test for you, or, bribing an athletics coach to identify you as an elite athlete that he or she wants on the school team. He called these other options his "side door".

I won't go into the details, but it turns out that if you can bribe one of the proctors who oversees people writing a SAT or ACT test, they can fill out the test for you. And even if they don't actually know the answers themselves, a smart, experienced person can guarantee a very good score. 

As for bribing an athletic coach, there are a lot of "niche" sports like lacrosse, water polo, sailing, fencing, etc, at "prestige" schools. Almost no one follows these sports and they can be chronically under-funded. This means that no one will notice if you bring in a "nobody" as an undergraduate who never actually shows up for practice let alone in a game. Because the coaches are constantly scrambling to find enough money to continue to keep the sport alive, there is a huge incentive to play along with this scam because it means you can get the bucks necessary to meet payroll. And because the head of the college athletics department is generally only interested in the varsity teams that make big bucks for the school (ie: football and basketball), they simply won't care if the odd rich kid gets in the "side door" if that's what you need to do to keep the fencing program alive. (And, of course, if you can raise money this way for the program---there is a huge incentive to just pocket it for yourself!)

Singer got paid $25 million over seven years to help a relatively small number of teens get through his "side door" into the university they wanted.

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Watching this documentary it occurred to me that I'd come across this sort of thing before. Early on in Chinese history, the Imperial bureaucracy started holding examinations to pick the best possible people to fill administrative positions. And, if my read of Chinese literature in translation can be believed, a similar industry of tutors, exam coaches, and, exam ringers existed to ensure that the children of wealthy people got a "leg up" over the general public. The more things change, the more they stay the same.  😏

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The thing that really struck me about this story is its inherent absurdity. There are lots and lots of very good colleges in the United States. These kids could have found a perfectly good place to get a BA without having to cheat. And when they get to any school of higher learning, the quality of their education really does come down to what they do there. Moreover, as anyone who's been to university can tell you, undergraduate degrees are pretty much a dime a dozen. It's the graduate and professional degrees that really count on a resume---and you simply cannot "fake" or "scam" them.

What this means to me is that the key point isn't the education or the jobs that will flow out of the college that the students are seeking to get into. Instead, it's something totally intangible, the "prestige" that comes from it. As one of the experts quoted in the documentary explains, the word "prestige" originally meant 

"trick, illusion, imposture" (senses now obsolete), from French prestige (16c.) "deceit, imposture, illusion" (in Modern French, "illusion, magic, glamour"), from Latin praestigium "delusion, illusion".

This is where we get the words "prestidigitator" and "prestidigitation" that are used to describe stage magicians and stage magic, respectively. That's because originally prestige was assumed to be phony and illusory. It's only since the 19th century that the word signifies something of intrinsic value (except by Cynics like yours truly).  

As I see it, getting your kid into one of these universities is an example of what Thorstein Veblen call Conspicuous Consumption. That is, when someone buys something expensive or rare not because they think that they can use it or the extra cost has some intrinsic merit. Instead, they make the purchase simply to tell everyone around them that they can.  

I first came across this in my life back in 1978. I was a student and I met a young woman who told me about a little business that she and a friend had had while in high school. Her friend got very detailed, good quality models of horses and then put a great deal of effort into painting them so they looked very realistic. My friend's part of the gig was to make very detailed and accurate miniature leather saddles, bridles, etc, to go on the horse. When they'd finished they then sold them to a high-end fashion store in Toronto---Hermes---which resold them for ludicrously high prices. 

I'd never heard of this particular store, or even the concept of selling ludicrously rich gee-gaws to obscenely wealthy people. So Linda (my friend) showed me one of their catalogues. I remember seeing---of all things---an alligator skin chewing gum case for $75 (that's $310 in today's money). If memory serves, this was the cheapest thing in the entire collection! 

A second-hand (vintage?) Hermes chewing gum case on Amazon! Would you pay $300?

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This story is interesting mainly because the ordinary citizen has a great interest in and a deep contempt for the rich. This is a delicious story for us because it shows that money doesn't buy wisdom or even common sense. Beyond that, the subject really isn't important to anyone or anything. It does, however, serve as an introduction to a much more important issue, one that does affect everyone of us. But that's the subject of another story---one that I hope to put out next week.

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Until then, get vaccinated. Keep your distance. Wear your mask. We may be getting close to the finish line, but that pesky delta variant is still behind us---and it's getting closer and closer every day. 

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

Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Seven

In this instalment, I start to talk a bit about different books you can read about Daoism, and why some are better than others. 

 
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Recommended Daoist Texts

There are a lot of Daoist books, there are a lot of English translations of these books, and, there are a lot of academic books about Daoism. Unfortunately, IMHO, most of them are not terribly helpful for someone who wants to use Daoism in their life. As I see it, the problem comes down the fact that very few authors really have the necessary qualifications.

First of all, most translators are experts at one thing, and one thing only: translations. And, unfortunately, even most native Chinese speakers don't really have a clue about Daoism. So why would someone who has never made the effort to study Daoism be able to understand what they are translating well enough to make it comprehensible to readers and not lose a lot of the nuances?

Other books are written by sociologists and historians who study Chinese society. They often are also skilled translators. But they are rarely actual practitioners of Daoism or philosophers. This limits their ability to understand what they are studying and their ability to communicate what knowledge they may have with others who are interested in integrating Daoism into their personal life. Moreover, as academics their job is to tease out differences between ancient Chinese ways of looking at the world and modern ones, not identify similarities. This is useful for academic research, but can make books about Daoism almost impossible to understand by the general public. Moreover, university culture rewards writing that is boring, jargon-laden, and, obscure. This also makes many academic books extremely hard to understand by the general public. 

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Some academics see this as “a feature, not a bug” because they simply do not believe it is possible for non-Chinese, non-members of a Daoist religious sect to understand Daoism. Probably the most rabid exemplar of this position is Russell Kirkland. In his presentation “The Taoism of the Western Imagination and the Taoism of China: De-colonializing the Exotic Teachings of the East”, he makes some very strong statements about not only the quality of many “translations”, but also questions if it is even possible for anyone in the West to be a Daoist.

Perhaps an American today can indeed become "a Taoist." But if so, how and where can that really happen? Not, certainly, in an American bookstore, library, or classroom. I would say that if one travelled, for instance, to the Abbey of the White Clouds in Beijing, and underwent the spiritual training necessary to practice Taoism in the living tradition of "Complete Perfection," then a person of our society might be justified in claiming to "follow the Tao."

..........

If Taoism has something to offer the modern world, it is not to be found in the profitable inanities found on the shelves of American bookstores. Taoism is a religion of China, and it is studied by learning classical Chinese, by reading the great works of Taoism (which remain unknown to all but a handful of scholarly specialists), and by learning how to practice Taoism from real Taoists — from the living men and women of China who have maintained the ideals of Taoist tradition, and might be persuaded to teach a sincere Westerner what it truly means to live a Taoist life.1

I agree with Kirkland that there are a lot of terrible books about Daoism.2 But I think he takes his position far too far. He believes that there is no such thing as “philosophical” Daoism. His argument for this point of view is based on his belief that there never were any people in China who called themselves “Daoists” who would have said this distinction (ie: between “philosophical” and “religious” Daoism) exists. The problem with this argument is that while it might be demonstrably true, it is irrelevent. The categories of “philosophical” versus “religious” can be understood in sociological terms, which is what Kirkland is doing. This involves looking at the official theology, rituals, ecclesiastic organizations, historical progression of ideas, etc. In contrast, if you look at Daoism using philosophical terms---which is what I am trying to do in this book---you only care about the ideas, not the culture. So, for example, it doesn't matter from a philosophical analysis whether or not Zhuangzi is a minor figure in institutional religious Daoism (one of Kirkland's points) because all I care about is whether or not his ideas will help a modern person live a better life. Indeed, you can look at almost any text and try to understand the implicit philosophical ideas in it. This is why, for example, there has been a proliferation of books like Star Wars and Philosophy3 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale4
.........

Some books are written by Daoist practitioners. But many of them don't know English well enough to be able to be able to make their ideas comprehensible. Others have pretty good English skills, but don't have a wide enough education to be able to integrate Daoism into the world of Western ideas. This dramatically limits their ability to express complex, subtle concepts. Still others have gained their knowledge about Daoism from only one specific source, and have no knowledge at all about the broad range of different schools and sects in the Daoist universe. Many writers suffer from two or more of these problems.

Finally, very, very few people in general have an ability to express themselves in clear and precise language. Even worse, you can be an excellent writer and either not know much, or, be consciously writing garbage because you need the money and that's the only way you can get paid. Getting something published has very little to do with being a deep thinker and excellent writer. People get their stuff into print because they are very famous people and that will help sell books. Or, they support very popular “faddish” things that publishers think will sell books (hence the philosophy of Star Wars and Buffy.) Or, they are part of an academic institution that ensures that anything they publish will be subsidized by various direct and indirect methods. Both academic and trade publishing are businesses, and no matter how brilliant and insightful a book might be, unless there is a way of making money off it, it simply will not get into print. As a result, a lot of terrible books get published. Conversely, I suspect that many insightful and profound manuscripts languish in the drawers of writers.


1“The Taoism of the Western Imagination and the Taoism of China:De-colonializing the Exotic Teachings of the East”, Russell Kirkland, Presented at the University of Tennessee, 20 October 1997. Available at the author's personal website.


2He would no doubt be quite offended by this book.


3Yes, this is a real book. Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful than You Can Possibly Imagine. Jason T. Eberl, Open Court (March 23 2005), ISBN: 978-0812695830.


4Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale. James B. South and William Irwin (Editors) Open Court (March 21 2003), ISBN-10: 0812695313.

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

Doug Ford, Elections Finance, and, the Notwithstanding Clause

I never thought that I'd be writing a column defending Doug Ford, but even a stopped watch is right twice a day. So here it goes---.

The media has been all a flutter recently over Ford's announcement that he intends to bring in the Notwithstanding Clause to resurrect Bill 254, or An Act to amend various Acts with respect to elections and members of the Assembly. All the other political parties are upset about this. But I've gone through and read the Elections Finances Act and on the face of it, I don't see anything terribly wrong with either Bill 254 or Ford's decision to bring it back to life from the judicial graveyard.

Could he actually be right?!!! Public Domain image c/o Wiki Commons.

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The key element that people are upset about is the "limits to free speech" that the Tories want to impose upon people. When I looked at the legislation, the key points that deal with this are an expansion of the ban on political advertising from six months to a full year before the fixed election date.

Frankly, I don't have a problem with this. One of the big differences between the Canadian and American electoral system is the shortness of our elections. Do we really want to get into a situation like the US where the moment you get sworn into office you have to start thinking about the next election? If we don't, then we need to have a ban on political advertising that is so long that no matter how effective it might be to influence human behaviour, it will all be totally forgotten by the time the writ is actually dropped. A year sounds just about right.

The second part is the move to limit the amount of money that can be spent on what's call third party advertising. Commentators have made a lot of noise about how this legislation is aimed directly at unions because of things like the following.

But reading the legislation it's clear that the same legislation that will "reel in" Working Families Ontario will also do the same thing to groups like Ontario Proud. And that strikes me as a totally unmitigated good.

I don't think that either the judge, media pundits, or, the opposition parties have really thought through how damaging this sort of third party advertising can be to a democracy. That's because as a general rule political parties tend to be moderating influences on hysteria. For example, hard as it may seem for some of us to believe, Ford has actually purged a couple extremist wingnuts from the PC caucus. 

Here's one, Belinda Karahalios, in question period asking a question that supports the idea that the Covid pandemic is being used to promote a sinister socialist plot. 

And here's another. Randy Hillier has become something of a hero for the anti-lockdown types. Here he is at a stupid ruckus in Peterborough.

Third party advertising dramatically weakens the power of the political parties, because it gives people with no responsibility to anyone but themselves the ability to radicalize citizens. In contrast, political parties are "big tents" with all sorts of different points of view. That means the advertising they support needs to have some sort of broad-ranging appeal if the party is going to have any chance of forming a government. This mitigates against extremism. 

Consider the following two examples. 

I can remember---back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth---that the federal Conservatives under Kim Campbell aired an attack ad that focused on Jean Chretien's partial face paralysis. It went horribly, terribly wrong for them because many people thought it looked like the ads were attacking Chretien because of a minor disability. And because it was an official Progressive Conservative advertisement, the party was punished for airing it. Here's a CBC clip that talks about this incident.

In contrast, consider this third party advert supporting the Conservatives that was aired on line during the last provincial election. Please note, it is a LOT WORSE than focusing on Chretien's Bell's palsy. It is aimed at Kathleen Wynne---and is profoundly sexist and homophobic. And yet, because it was aired by a third party instead of the Tories, none of the sleaze stuck to Doug Ford or his candidates. 

If you put third party advertising on the Web and promote it through social media, the problem becomes far worse. That's because the sorts of folks who would have freaked about the following advert would probably have never seen it anyway because of the way the artificial intelligence isolates people into their own "filter bubbles"---which means this sort of sleaze is even harder to control without formal safeguards of the sort that Bill 254 puts into place.

Political parties with any scrap of self-interest (let alone decency) realize that they damage their brand if they directly associate themselves with this sort of awful public relations. That's why it is important that we not allow wealthy individuals to fund campaigns that whip people into a frenzy of hate while at the same time allowing the party they support to feign ignorance of what is going on. If they want to make a mess---they should have to wear it. As near as I can tell, that's what will happen under Bill 254.   

(The exceptions to this notion prove the rule. When Erin O'Toole took over the leadership of the federal conservatives he clearly stated that he wants to move the party away from things it has done in the past because they will never be able to form a government if they continue to be known as the party that voted against a resolution condemning Islamophobia, passed the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Practices Act, and, suggested during the 2015 election that they wanted the RCMP to set up a Barbaric Cultural Practices tip line. All of these were far from subtle "dog whistles" to the Islamophobes of Canada that the federal Tories are "their guys"---and in making these signals, they've pushed the party to the brink of irrelevance.)

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I'm a little annoyed with the legacy media and the opposition parties because I haven't seen the issues I raise in this article in anything I've read or heard. This is part of why I publish "The Guelph-Back-Grounder". It's a lot of work though, and like everyone else I can use a bit more money than I already have. So if you can afford it, why not subscribe through Patreon or Pay Pal?

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This feeds into another complaint raised about Bill 254. People are concerned about increases to the amount of money individuals can donate to official campaigns. While I'm not a great fan of this sort of thing, I'm not too upset that wealthy people can donate $3,300 to the party and the same amount to a Constituency Association or campaign every year. I did gag when I read that candidates can donate $10,000 of their own money to their campaigns and $50,000 for a party leadership bid. But I am reconciled to the idea that I will never get all I want from just about anything. 

Moreover, we need to remember how much of our elections are financed by tax payer's money. 

• Corporate and Union money is banned. 
• There is a subsidy based upon the votes a party receives at the rate 63 cents for every vote cast.
• There is a substantive tax rebate for donations to a party.
  
• 75 per cent on the first $427 of donations in 2021
• 50 per cent on the portion of your donation between $427 and $1,423 in 2021
• 33.33 per cent on the portion between $1,423 and $3,238 in 2021.
•  If a candidate gets over 5% of the vote, the Constituency Association gets back 20% of what was spent in the election plus 20% of the maximum that it could have spent under the rules.

Readers might be tempted to think that it would be more democratic if donation limits were kept low and you had to raise your money in small individual amounts from lots of individuals. Unfortunately, parties have found that the best way to do it that way is by scaring the bejesus out of people. And this has gone a long way to create the dangerous polarization we already see. (I wrote one of my most popular articles on this subject: Fundraising is Making Us Angry.) I'm not so sure that we really want to encourage the political parties to raise an even higher fraction of their money through "rage giving".

There are a lot of other things in the bill---such as new significant fines levied against people who break the rules. But I think the above is enough to show that I think Ford has a good argument. Of course, all of my opinions are provisional and I'm willing to listen to good reasoned, factual opinions that differ.

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One thing that doesn't butter my parsnips at all are the dire warnings about the use of the Notwithstanding Clause, or, Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As of writing this article, I have yet to see any pundit or reporter explain exactly how this works. I suspect that that's because if the average reader knew it, they'd be a lot less vulnerable to the out-cry that 'the sky is falling'. 

The first thing to understand is that our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is interpreted by judges, and judges are fallible human beings. They make mistakes. If you look South of the border, where judicial review of laws based on a charter of rights has existed far, far longer than here, you will find numerous examples where the Supreme Court has rendered terrible judgements. For example, it recently ruled that states could refuse the medicaid expansion promised under Obamacare. This basically hamstrung the program in a great many Republican states and denied millions of people access to health insurance.

Because the US has no Notwithstanding Clause, there wasn't a lot Obama could do. In contrast, if this had happened here, Trudeau could have used Section 33 to temporarily over-rule the Court and force states to insure the poor. And after a few years of having health insurance, the odds are that the millions affected would have been willing to do whatever necessary to ensure that their coverage wouldn't be taken away. Moreover, with the threat of a Notwithstanding Clause hanging over their heads, the odds are the Supreme Court wouldn't have made such a ridiculous decision in the first place.  

Note that word "temporarily" in the above paragraph. Section 33 doesn't give Ford the right to just ignore the Charter, he can only postpone the judge's ruling. At that point there is the option of invoking the clause to temporarily ignore the ruling again, for another five years, and, so-on. This can go on indefinitely until a new government decides to give up, finds a work around, or, some new development renders the judicial ruling irrelevant.

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One of the ideas I hear from the mainstream media is that if Ontario uses Section 33 once, it will be so much easier to do the next time that the Charter will becomes fundamentally worthless. This is the old "slippery slope" argument. Here's a little secret that I will share with you: the slippery slope argument is invalid. 

Human beings and institutions have the ability to set limits on how often something gets used. How much do you believe in the following slippery slope arguments?

• once you try smoking cannabis you've "opened the gate" to harder drugs, like heroin
• if we legalize gay marriage, what's next? People marrying their dogs? sex dolls?
• once you stop doing what the church says, eventually all sense of right and wrong disappears

These are all slippery slope arguments---and they are idiotic. Drinking a glass of water doesn't lead to drowning. And using the notwithstanding clause doesn't lead to North Korea. 

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

Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Six

In this instalment I take the time to talk about the different ways a person can approach a cultural artifact---like the Daoist tradition---and how this influences their reaction. 

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The Different Frames Used to Study Daoism

One of the problems I often see when looking at Daoism is the “frame” that people use to look at it. That is to say, people approach it from a specific viewpoint based on their particular interest or area of expertise. Unfortunately, these folks often have zero appreciation of people who come to the subject from a different point of view. The result is often like the parable of the blind men and the elephant: everyone touches a very different part and comes up with very different ideas about the beast.

For example, people with personal experience with an individual sect sometimes make very definitive statements about Daoism in general. This is because they don't know anything about other sects (and there are a great many), or, the consensus among the scholarly community about its history and literature.

Also, some academics who focus on the culture of Daoism believe that only someone who is fluent in Chinese and who has spent a long time assimilating into traditional Chinese culture can have any affinity to Daoism. Moreover, they believe that long study in Daoist Temples under Chinese Daoist masters is essential. Anyone who studies books in translation and follows specific disciplines is merely fooling themselves if they believe that they are really “Daoists”. The problem with this point of view is that it would seem to suggest that there is no objective “trans-cultural” core of Daoist philosophy or value in things like Daoist meditation techniques. It has mere aesthetic interest, but no more ultimate value than an ethnic cuisine or style of dress.

Other folks seem to see Daoism as primarily a mechanism for personal expression. One example of this are the folks who take it upon themselves to write “versions” of the Dao De Jing without educating themselves about the meaning of the original text. Another example are the guys who teach taijiquan as a “artistic dance” without trying to understand it as a martial art and holistic exercise system.

I don't really have much of a problem with any of these approaches as long as they aren't assumed to be the only one that has any legitimacy. Unfortunately, too many folks tend to assume that whoever isn't with them is---by definition---against them. I can see some merit in each of those frames. But in my own case I am approaching Daoism through the frame of practical philosophy. That is to say, I am looking through the entire tradition for ideas that have merit and how I can apply them to my everyday life.

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

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Nine

In part six of my conversation with Marie Snyder I wrote about the importance of group decision-making in the critical thinking process. In this instalment, we go back to this issue but from a different angle. Some of the biggest problems we find with how people reason is because they either suffer from motivated reasoning or outright lying.

Cartoon from xkcd, CopyLeft provision

Motivated reasoning is when one's objectivity gets overwhelmed by an emotional commitment to a specific group, ideology, religion, professional obligations, etc. Unfortunately, this is a very common failing among politicians who become extremely loyal to their political party, either because they are thoroughly indoctrinated into it's point of view, or, because they have built strong, personal connections to the party. Politics is much more about emotion and human connections than it is about facts, which means that politicians are probably worse than the statistical average when it comes to looking at a complex issue objectively. 

The difference between motivated reasoning and lying is whether or not the person arguing for something has the self-awareness to know that their arguments for a position are or are not reasonable. 

The system that Snyder introduces, Sortition, gets around this problem by randomly selecting members of the public to form a committee, instead of allowing politicians to select the members it wants to see on it. This means that the individual decision-makers get selected from a pool of people who aren't nearly as prone to either motivated reasoning or outright dishonesty---simply because they have a lot less "skin in the game".

Cloudwalking Owl · Sortition

Sortition has a long history and probably the example most people would think of is ancient Athens. But as I mentioned to Snyder, people shouldn't think that it has died out since then. Guelph had it's own experimentation with sortition in the late 20th and early 21st century.   

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The problem that the city faced was that scientists had found out that there was a build-up of pesticide residue in some of Guelph's stormwater detention ponds. These are the water bodies you sometimes see in subdivisions. They are engineered by the city to collect the rainwater that comes off things like roads, driveways, parking lots, roofs, etc. The problem is that these sorts of surfaces won't allow rain to seep into them. This means that if a sudden thunderstorm hits, they can create a mini-flash flood that can sweep into a stream or wetland. Not only does this sort of quick flood create erosion problems, the water itself is often a lot hotter than what's already in a stream or wetland---which will create a thermal shock that can kill wildlife. Moreover, it will often have pollution like oil that can poison aquatic life too. The common engineered solution is to dig a depression and channel this water to it. That way, when it rains the overheated, contaminated water can collect in a place where it can cool off, sediment can fall out of the water column, and, micro-organisms like algae can digest whatever chemicals (like fertilizer) are in it before it gets out into either a stream or the water table.

Google calls this a "stormwater detention pond", but there are subtle differences between these sort of things that have profound importance to civil engineers. For the purposes of this article, all you need to know is that it's an engineered low spot in a city that collects rain run off.

What had happened was when scientists looked into the water quality of these ponds they found that they had relatively high levels of certain pesticides, which was not a good thing. Moreover, when surveys were done of homeowners in the city, researchers found out that a surprisingly high amount of pesticides were being used on suburban properties---both by home owners and lawn care companies that serviced them. (I checked my memory by looking through a reprinted journal article that I found on-line:  Environmental Concentrations of Urban Pesticides.) Given the fact that almost all the pesticides that get applied to suburban yards were for cosmetic reasons instead of food production, reasonable people of all political persuasions decided that there needed to be some sort of law reducing their use.

The political problem was that if City Council decided to regulate or even ban the use of these pesticides, it ran the risk of facing a very strong backlash from both lawn care companies and home owners who had a strong emotional attachment to their lawns. 

The way it dodged this sticky trap was by creating a citizen committee using the principle of sortition. That way elected officials couldn't even be accused of selecting the wrong people to sit on the panel. It was formed by randomly selecting fifty Guelph citizens and asking them if they would take part in the process----only six people actually agreed to join, but that was enough.

In addition, six other expert consultants were added to the committee to help the members make sense of the technical issues: three were city staff members and three worked for a hired environmental consulting company. The result was a report that many considered a model of good public policy. (You can see the published report of the committee at this city on-line archive.) 

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I work really hard on these articles doing things like reading reports and searching for figures hidden in badly-designed websites. If you can afford it, why not subscribe? You get to choose how much you give, and it's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal. (Thanks Margot for being so awesome!)

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Another example of sortition that readers should be aware of happened in 2006 and involved creating a Citizen's Assembly by randomly selecting one citizen per riding who were then tasked with looking at the evidence and suggesting what sort of system the province of Ontario should use in future elections. Again, the system worked extraordinarily well at sifting through all the information, listening to the experts, and, prepared a good proposal and creating created a document that explained it things very well. 

Unfortunately, I suspect that they did too good a job. It became obvious to me that when their report was published and during the run-up to the referendum, that the Liberal government got cold feet and decided to not fund anything more than a token education campaign. According to a Canada.com article, Elections Ontario only budgeted $6.8 million for this task. 

It's hard to find information about past Ontario elections on line, but what I did find says that the Progressive Conservative Party head office spent a little over $8.5 million in the 2018 election campaign. Please note, this figure only counts what the PC head office spent. What each individual candidate's local campaign spent is added on top of this. Just by way of a comparison, Mike Schreiner's successful local campaign in Guelph spent about $41,500. There are 124 Electoral Districts in Ontario and three major parties. Kathleen Wynn spent about $92,700, Doug Ford about $66,000, and, Andrea Horvath spent $110,500. 

Let's be conservative with our calculations. Let's forget about the Green Party and just assume that there are two of major parties instead of three. (I suspect the average candidate spends less than a party leader. Moreover, in many Electoral Districts there are only two real contenders plus "also rans".) I'll use the Conservatives as the baseline $17 million for the head offices (ie: the Conservative head office times two), and, $16.4 million for local campaigns (ie: Doug Ford's campaign times 124 Electoral Districts times two parties). That comes to $33.4 million spent on promoting political party's messages---and that's what I suspect is an extremely conservative number! 

Given this context, $6.8 million to explain a complex change to our electoral system does seem like a small number. And indeed, according the article cited above, British Columbia spent twice as much as Ontario to do this.

Moreover, in a CBC article, one of the Assembly members, Arita Droog, complained that in a misguided attempt to be unbiased, the public education campaign that did exist didn't explain what sort of benefits would come from the proposed system. 

"It's so neutral, it's so unbiased, that it doesn't say anything … I understand their position that they want to be neutral and unbiased, but in doing so, they went beyond" providing useful information. [sic]

Indeed, if we can believe the above article, only two days before the General Election---which included the referendum---3 million voters didn't even know that there was a referendum on electoral reform. And that was 36% of the total!

To end the suspense, the referendum didn't pass and we still labour under the idiotic first-past-the-post system that we inherited from Great Britain.  😡 

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I think that the lessons we can learn from the above two examples illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of sortition. The system works well at assimilating complex information and coming up with good policy. It also allows elected officials the ability to avoid being personally attacked by extremely polarized members of the community. 

What it isn't able to do, however, is mobilize the citizenry to support whatever decisions it makes. This didn't matter much with regard to cosmetic pesticide use because there already was a very strong support for the ban in the community. But with regard to proportional representation most people hadn't thought much about the issue. It's something that requires a significant understanding of the electoral process---and most people simply don't know enough about that to see how it would be a profound improvement. 

Our old buddy the FUD campaign. Fair Use Provision.

We should also remember that electoral reform is something that the existing political parties don't generally like. That's because the parties who do well in the present system almost by definition like the present system because it gives them power. Conversely, the parties that do like proportionality tend to not have any power at all---because of the present system. 

Because of this fact, none of the mainstream parties were willing to devote any of their resources to encourage voters to vote "Yes". Moreover, the Liberal government---who I suspect were surprised how well the Citizens Assembly did---strangled the process by starving its ability to get the word out to the people. This left the door open for people opposed to mount local Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaigns---which are generally successful in situations where great numbers of people know very little about a complex issue. 

Sortition's Achilles Heel in our political environment is the flip side of it's great attraction---it doesn't involve the creation of political parties. Unfortunately, our representative democracy can't function without political parties. But that's an article for another day. 

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It appears that our latest lock down is ending soon because our disease numbers seem to be declining. But we still have to be careful because the new Delta variant of Covid seems to be a lot more transmissible than the others. Moreover, it seems like the limited protection that one dose of the vaccines gives seems to be significantly lower with it too. So keep wearing your mask and get your shot---both the first and second one---when your number comes up.

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