Why Rationality is Important

This morning I had the unpleasant experience of spending a half hour listening to a Guelph candidate in the federal election. I won't go into details, but I haven't heard such a dense avalanche of total nonsense for a very, very long time. It got me thinking about how tremendously fragile a democracy can be.

People naively assume that all you need for a functioning democracy are relatively fair elections. But if you've really thought about it, that's the end result of developing several foundational cultural norms such as freedom of speech, the rule of law, a vigorous free press, and such. When I was listening to this Niagara of idiocy I got increasingly agitated because it was obvious that this fellow's campaign seems to be based on the principle of undermining and destroying at least one of them: the commitment to anchor policy on facts by using logic. 

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Most people don't think about the relationship between philosophy and science, and, democracy. But I believe that it wasn't just a coincidence that ancient Athenian participatory democracy flourished during the time of the great Greek philosophers, or, that modern liberal democracy came into being during the time of the European scientific enlightenment.

If you read Plato I think you get evidence of this relationship by considering the reoccurring theme of the disagreement between Socrates and the Sophists, or, between philosophy and rhetoric.

Philosophy is based on the premise that there are rules that one should follow in conversations that allow you to gain new information about the world. I think modern people often forget what a tremendously radical idea this really was. Just about every other society in the world at that time was based upon tradition, religious authority, and, brute force. People believed what they believed primarily because they had always believed it, because the priest told them, or, because if they said anything different---bad things would happen to them.

But something unprecedented happened in Greece---and Athens in particular. A space opened up in society that allowed people to ask the "unpleasant questions" that would usually result in getting the crap beaten out of you (or worse) anywhere else. As a result, the city state became a place where brilliant thinkers from all over the Mediterranean came to live. And they met and talked with each other, which allowed them to sharpen their insights.

I don't know much about ancient Athenian democracy, but it seems clear to me that there had to be a relationship between the philosophers and the assembly, because both are based on the idea that truth emerges from a conversation between people.

Plato. A Roman copy from a portrait made at the time of the philosopher's death.
Made by the sculptor Silanion. From the Boehringer Collection.
Image c/o the Wiki Commons

Unfortunately, at the same time that people like Heraclitus, Thales, Plato, Socrates, and, Aristotle were trying to work out the way to tell a good argument from a bad one, there was also a counter-current of people who were figuring out the best way to confuse the public in order to get what they wanted.

Probably the most infamous example was one of Socrates' students: Alcibiades. He sought to build his political career by promoting an unnecessary adventure that involved invading Sicily. The result was a catastrophic defeat that involved the annihilation of the cream of the Athenian military. It never recovered, and eventually Athens was conquered by Sparta. And the Athenian citizens lost their democracy.

Philosophy survived, primarily because it was excellent training for members of the elite who would then go on to study rhetoric. With democracy totally discredited---because it seemed to invariably result in demagogues like Alcibiades being put into power---the paragon of societies became Republics, like Rome. These were oligarchies:  societies where power resided in a wealthy elite. Politics and voting still occurred---which meant that rhetoric was considered an essential part of an ambitious man's education. But never again would butchers, bakers, stone masons, and, the guys who pulled an oar in a war galley have a say in how their society was run---at least until modern times.

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Liberal democracy (the modern form) arose during a similar period of philosophical exuberance. Only the driver for this wasn't logic, but rather science. The European enlightenment was driven by the "new learning" that came from people like Galileo, Newton, and so on. The tremendous growth in human knowledge that grew out of the scientific method emboldened philosophers to look at their societies in much the same way that the experimental method had dramatically changed people's understanding of astronomy, physics, medicine, chemistry, and so on.

These people ceased to look towards some divine basis for government and were instead "empiricists". This was the idea that human society could be studied just like any other part of the world around us. And that we could use the insights that arise from that investigation could be used to improve how we make collective decisions.

John Locke. Line drawing by Crovonrosso.
Image c/o the Wiki Commons.

One of the great fathers of Enlightenment political theory was John Locke who said

"whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire." 

This is totally at odds with rhetoric, which is used not to find the truth, but rather to "score points", convince people, and, amass power.

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This gets me back to the noxious individual I had to listen to this morning. I suspect that he genuinely believes what he said. But if he does, it's because he's expended very little effort in trying to find out if what he says is actually true. That is especially pathetic because we live currently live in an age when it is so incredibly easy for a person to find the facts about most contentious issues.

Just to give one tiny example. When asked about whether or not his party is in favour of the pipeline to the West coast, our stalwart candidate said "Alberta is the engine driving the Canadian economy". I'm not suggesting that he invented this idea, but he was certainly helping to spread it. And this is something that it is very easy to "truth-test". It took me about a minute to use Google to look up the Gross Domestic Product of Ontario ($728 billion), Quebec ($338 billion) and Alberta ($335 billion) in 2018. Indeed adding together all the numbers for all the provinces and territories, it turns out that the Alberta GDP only comes to about 17% of the total Canadian economy.  So in actual fact Alberta isn't "the engine driving the Canadian economy" by any stretch of the imagination---. (Repeating this statement over and over and over and over again simply doesn't make it so.) 

The problem with this guy isn't that he's wrong. It's that if you point out that he is wrong, he won't change what he says. He certainly won't be like John Locke and "be the forwardest to throw it into the fire". That's because he isn't interested in finding the truth, but rather in pushing his agenda.

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And that's tremendously dangerous in a democracy. If enough politicians, journalists, and, voters stop caring about whether something a politician says is actually true, then we start edging towards the bad old world where everything gets decided on the basis of money and brute force.

That's the thing about democracy. All societies have to figure out how how to make decisions and divide up scarce resources. Throughout most of human history this has been done through tradition or brute force. What is unique about both ancient Athens and modern liberal democracies like Canada is that---at least in principle---they do it by having an honest and open debate between different points of view. The idea is that this conversation is the best way for truth to assert itself and that the general opinion of the mass of citizens usually comes to---if not the best, at least a "good enough" decision.

Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Sometimes people temporarily lose their way and become overwhelmed by their emotions---both individually and collectively. When they do, fast-talking, "slick Willies" can use rhetoric to bamboozle them into voting against their best interests. That's how ancient Athens ended up sending their fleet off to it's destruction. It's also how the people of Germany pissed-away the Weimar Republic. It's also how Canada could sleep walk its way into a climate catastrophe.

It looks to me---from what I've seen in the last decade or so---that many politicians are trying transition from making the best logical, evidence-based argument to instead creating rhetorical appeals to people's emotions. That's why truth seems to be so much less important than "truthiness" today. It's also why the lies seem so much more brazen. People often aren't ashamed when you catch them fibbing---and many just ignore you if you point out an error. They just keep repeating the same bullshit over and over again, because telling bullshit is what they are all about.

The problem with emotions is that they are dangerous beasts. They need to be tamed and kept under control. We've seen where the politics of emotions can lead people---and it's a dark, dark place. That's what made the 20th century the time of enormous wars. Let's hope that we can collectively step back from this time of delusional politics and find some "new enlightenment" that can inform our political institutions.

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

Making Up Our Minds: Mind Your Language!

One of the things that every citizen needs to remember is that there are a lot of very smart people in this world who want to trick you into supporting some action that isn't in your own best interest. One way that they often do this is by manipulating language to confuse you. I thought I'd devote this weekend's editorial to some of the more common tactics that political weasels employ.

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Loaded Language

This is when a politician uses words that have a specific assumption that supports them is "baked into" their meaning. For example, conservative politicians have gone to great lengths to get Canadians to call refugees who cross the border outside of the customs entry points "illegal immigrants". In actual fact, what these people are doing is perfectly legal and in keeping with the United Nations refugee rules. The problem is that Canada has an agreement with the USA that suggests that since America is such a mellow, immigrant-friendly place, that there's no need for anyone to come from there to claim refugee status in Canada. (And then came Trump---. Maybe this "Safe Third Party Agreement" wasn't such a good idea after all.) This rule doesn't invalidate international law, however, so these people are not "illegal" in any way, shape, or, form.

Unfortunately, the lazy-ass, mainstream media haven't "pushed back" against this blatant attempt to confuse voters, and most of it has adopted the phrase themselves. This has allowed the Conservatives to pretty much take over the debate and force the other parties onto their back legs. This has damaged political discourse in Canada and allowed the alt-right a way of making immigration---which has historically been seen very positively by most Canadians---into a political football. 

False Dichotomies

People will sometimes manipulate a conversation to strongly imply that there are only two possible options and then force you to answer "yes" or "no". Sometimes this is done to create phony statistics in favour of a given point of view. This is called a "push poll". I remember a pollster explaining the concept to Peter Gzowski (an ancient CBC radio host) by polling the general public about whether or not Knowlton Nash (an equally ancient CBC tv news reader) wore skirts that were too short for decency. (Of course, Nash never wore a skirt in his life.) 

My personal favourite example is the basis of a Gary Larson cartoon.  

Gary Larson cartoon from the Far Side,
used under the fair use provision of the Copy Right law.

 

One recent example of a false dichotomy is the idea that the only two choices that Canadians face is to either destroy the Albertan economy by limiting oil production, or, avoid doing our bit to prevent out-of-control climate change. The assumption seems to be that there is something wrong with Albertans in that they are genetically incapable of doing anything else than work in the tar sands. (Poor souls---is it the result of some sort of in-breeding?) The idea that they might want to fund their government by putting in place a sales tax (like all the other ox-like,  dull, subhuman provinces) or diversify their economy (again, like the other ox-like, dull, subhuman provinces) seems to be impossible to contemplate. (There's no sense wondering what the poor, feckless souls did with the royalties they charged on all their conventional oil. Conservatives are notoriously bad with money. They just don't seem to be able to help themselves, poor dears. Just witness what Doug Ford is now doing with the Ontario budget.)   

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Last Thursday I heard a talk by Patti Broughton about the Guelph Arts Council. Afterwards I had a brief talk with her, we exchanged business cards, and, I decided to join the organization. I told her about the Back-Grounder and she said that I should join, even though this is a journalism project rather than fiction. The membership is $30/year, so there's one more expense that I've taken on with this publication. Unfortunately, she'd never heard of it before. What that tells me is that I should be putting more effort into letting people know about it. So, I'm asking readers to consider sharing the link to my blog with the other people on social media. I need to take advantage of "word-of-mouth" advertising just as much as I need subscribers. So while I like it when people click on the "like" button, I also would like you to click on the "share" one too.  

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Plastic Words

One last thing I'd like readers to consider happens when politicians use "plastic words". These are phrases or descriptors that seem to mean something, but when you ask people to define what exactly they think that they mean, you get very different explanations. One of the best use of these comes from an environmental debate that goes back decades. 

In 1972 an international think tank called "The Club of Rome" published a report titled Limits to Growth that put forward the totally obvious (if your head isn't stuffed firmly up your butt) observation that economic growth cannot continue forever on a planet that is not also growing. The idea was that there is always a "limiting factor" in any population that stops it from growing beyond a certain size. These could be a specific essential nutrient, or, it could be that beyond a certain point the ability of the ecosystem to recycle waste becomes overwhelmed and the organism poisons itself.

Unfortunately, the world dominant religion---capitalism---is based on the idea that economic growth can continue forever. And as we all know, for many people whenever facts conflict with ideology, facts always have to go out the window. That means that the "punk and plain" words of the Club of Rome report had to be sabotaged and safely removed from public discussion.

An innocuous title, but yet one of
the most effective pieces of anti-environmental
propaganda ever produced! 
Image from the Wiki Commons. 

Enter the Bruntland Commission, which came up with an alternative to Limits to Growth, known as Our Common Future. The genius of the slime-bags behind this was that they came up with a plastic phrase---sustainable development---which then drove the phrase "limits to growth" completely out of public discourse.  

The "great thing" about this term, is that it allows people who want to save the world (ie:  who want to have sustainability) to use the same words as those who want to sustain the existing status quo (ie: who want to have sustained economic growth.) At that point, the discussion about whether or not the human race should still be growing like crazy, cutting down forests, polluting the oceans, etc, stopped being honestly discussed because everyone agreed on the same thing. Wow! Plastic words are like magic. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Making Up Our Minds: The Importance of "Fiddles"

I was involved in various forms of activism for many years. Amongst other things, I've sat on the board of directors of OPIRG, was Communications Chair for the Green Party of Canada, had a lot of influence in the development of the constitutions of the Green Party of Ontario and Canada, had a hand in organizing the Grand River Watershed Congress and the Municipal Democracy Movement, ran an activist school titled the Public Interest College, helped organize and negotiate with MacDonald's Canada to get rid of extruded polystyrene clam shells, started and built the Guelph Green Party Constituency Association into one of the strongest ones in Canada, started and ran a local currency system that had 23 downtown stores accepting my "LETS Bucks", sued Walmart on behalf of a coalition of religious faiths to help preserve the Saint Ignatius property, and, probably other things I've forgotten about.

As a result of this ludicrous life I've been exposed to several different ways that organizations make collective decisions. I absolutely loathe most of them. Several groups used something called "formal consensus decision-making". Basically, this is a system where each member of the group is allowed to "block" a decision that they don't agree with. In effect, each person present gets a veto over the majority. The theory of consensus suggests that the way to stop this from becoming a complete exercise in frustration is to "build consensus" through meaningful, gentle, conversation.

The problem with this is that even if there were no totally intransigent individuals totally uninterested in listening to other people's opinion---these groups seemed to be filled with them---this "consensus building" ate up enormous amounts of time at meetings. And because every decision was such a labour of Heracles, there were two results that I---and it seemed almost no one else---noticed.

First, because so many issues ended-up "falling off the clock", the paid staff and directors of these groups ended up making most of the decisions---simply because the democratic processes never did it for them. Funny thing, but most of these folks weren't too upset about this.

And second, many people were functionally excluded from taking part in decision-making. If you are a busy person---with young children, your own business, or, a demanding job---you just don't have the time to waste hours and hours of it in discussions that end up coming to nothing anyway. This meant that organizations I was involved with often ended up being controlled by people who---for one reason or another---had lots of time on their hands and no responsibilities. (I'll let the reader "fill in the blanks" on that.) As a general rule, these are not people with a great deal of experience in the practical realities of the world or much of an ability to "put themselves in other people's shoes".

Jo Freeman, photo by Carolmooredc.
Public Domain, c/o Wiki Commons

I'm not the only person who has recognized these problems. There was a paper written in 1970 by a woman named Jo Freeman who called this thing The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Her basic thesis was that if a group doesn't create practical decision-making structures that deal with the limitations that people's lives put on democracy, it invariably creates a vacuum that will be filled by an unaccountable elite.

Freeman's point of view is really unpopular with the people who already benefit from the existing system. I saw this starkly in a group (which will remain nameless) that I cajoled into bringing in some facilitators to talk about class issues. The person who led the workshop raised the idea that a group that holds meetings over the late afternoon, and which has very long meetings, will practically exclude participation by anyone who has a nine-to-five job or a young family. That was it. At that point (only 15 minutes into the presentation) the young, "hip", activist-types who ran the organization (and had the time to attend the marathon meetings) started screaming, hooting and hollering, and, shut down the workshop. The consultant we'd brought in was blase about the reaction and seemed resigned to this sort of response to the concerns he raised.

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I'm not raising this issue because I want to slag activist organizations. Please remember that for all my carping, I spend decades of my life working with these groups. But they were useful to me because they allowed me to understand the absolutely huge importance that process has for democracy. The point I learned was that a flawed process can result in an organization being fundamentally incapable of representing the best intentions of the membership.

This is a lesson that I've taken and used to look at the world around me. For example, people routinely forget that the way we count the votes in elections has a huge impact on the results. But consider this. Doug Ford's Conservatives won 76 seats with 40.5% of the popular vote in 2018, whereas under Tim Hudak they only won 28 seats with 31.3% in 2014. That means that a 29% increase in the popular vote translated into a 270% increase in seats and a majority government. The same sort of math holds for all the parties----Kathleen Wynn's Liberals won 58 seats with only 38.7% of the vote in 2014.

This fact is well known, if difficult to find out. One of the things that's always intrigued me about the percentage of votes cast is how difficult it used to be to find this anywhere. It is difficult---perhaps impossible---to find on the Elections Ontario website (I tried to find it when writing this editorial, but gave up.) Journalists used to almost never report it, although I did find a reference in the CBC. Where you usually can find it is Wikipedia, which is "the exception that proves the rule". My unsupported hypothesis is that Elections Ontario doesn't want to high-light how undemocratic "first-past-the-post" is, and, the mainstream media doesn't want to detract from the "horse-race" coverage that dominates most coverage. "Small change in voter support leads to overwhelming majority" headlines just don't work in that frame. The Wikipedia is written by independent volunteers without any sort of hidden agenda---which is why it is usually the source to find percentages.

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Years ago I had my portrait taken by a local artist as part of a commission he'd got to paint downtown Guelph's "characters". It was fascinating to watch him create a full oil painting in one short hour. As he said "Yes, one hour of work---and a lifetime of practice". That's what writing these stories is like for me. I've put in more than 40 years at various projects. The result is what you get. If you think that they are worth reading, why not subscribe through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar? (Thanks Oxanna and Warren for being so awesome!) If you can't afford that, why not share through social media? 

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I have a term for these subtle little games that people use to manipulate the process. I call them "fiddles". It's hard to blame any particular individual when it comes to the creation of our absurd "first-past-the-post" system, but I certainly can lay blame on anyone who continues to support it. They know damn well that it is undemocratic, but they simply like things the way they are and to Hell with the idea that everyone should be represented in Parliament. I came across a more obviously constructed fiddle when I was involved with the Green Party of Canada.

There was a law that said that there had to be a publicly-accessible record of everyone who'd made a donation to a political party. The idea was that you could look this up and see who gave what to your local MP. The problem was that these were paper records and the listings were random. They weren't alphabetical, they weren't by size of donation, they were just tossed together like a salad. As you might imagine, this meant that it was a LOT harder to figure out cui bono (Latin for "who benefits") from a piece of legislation. This was so outrageous that a Green Party member took Elections Canada to court and a judge forced it to issue a electronic version of this list, so people could use a search engine to find the specific information that the paper version hid. (Unfortunately, I am working from memory here as I couldn't find any reference to this obscure piece of history that happened before the emergence of the World Wide Web.)

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These sorts of fiddles exist everywhere. A friend of mine once told me how the representatives of the unions representing autoworkers raised a lot of procedural quibbles in order to "wait out the clock" at an NDP convention when it looked like a resolution committing the party to moving towards an "car-free Ontario" might pass. (She was so disgusted by the experience that she tore up her membership and joined the Liberals.) I certainly saw lots in the Green Party. With a little research I'm sure I could find some for both the Liberals and Conservatives.

This sort of thing absolutely dominates our democracy, but most folks are totally oblivious to it. Indeed, if you rub many people's noses in this stuff, they will often say that they just don't understand what the fuss is all about. And yet I'm convinced that it is tremendously important in a wide variety of ways. In Ontario we currently have a party bent and determined to rip to pieces a wide variety of infrastructure to deal with a myriad of problems---most notably anything to deal with climate change. And yet, if you look at the polling numbers, a majority of the citizenry are really concerned about it.

Image from Abacus Data, used under "Fair Use" Copyright Provision

If it weren't for the first-past-the-post fiddle, we would probably have a NDP/Liberal coalition government that would never have ripped up the cap-and-trade agreement and wouldn't have cut funding for forest fires, flood prevention, and, Dao-only-knows-what other important infrastructure.

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It's not really all that surprising that people don't know about all this stuff. Almost no one who knows a lot about how political parties actually function bothers to try to explain it to them. It's a downer to learn this sort of thing, and you don't get people involved in your group by pointing out to them how they are getting manipulated by the folks "hidden behind the curtain". The people who do know have to decide whether or not they want to use these fiddles themselves, and thereby get ahead in the organization; or make a fuss about them and end up being vilified by the rank-and-file for "being negative" and the elites for exposing how they manage the democratic system to their ends. Most of this sort of thing just goes over the heads of the membership. That's a pity, as it is something that anyone who really wants to build a true democracy should spend some time thinking about. So as Jesus says in the Gospels: "He who has ears, let him hear".

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

One Possible Reason Why the Populists are Angry

Kate Manne, from her
Twitter Feed

I recently listened to a fascinating podcast interview between Ezra Klein and the philosopher Kate Manne titled This Conversation Will Change How You Understand Misogyny. I can't say that it actually changed the way I look at the current populist backlash that we are facing in politics, but it did reinforce something that I've been thinking about for years and it also helped me better articulate those ideas to the point where I think I can now share them with the people who follow my blog.

The two key points that underlie Manne's analysis is to accept two starting points. First, you have to get rid of the idea that human beings are discrete, atomic entities who freely choose everything that they do. The idea is that modern research has clearly shown

Ezra Klein, c/o Wiki Commons

that in a wide variety of different ways everyone is a product of their childhood, culture, biology, etc. All of these things have a profound effect on how we understand the world and act. This isn't to say that none of us have what we call "free will"---according to Manne---just that the exercise of that freedom has to take into account the subtle ways in which these various factors colour the way we see things. For Manne, the only "freedom" that we really have includes how we try to understand, compensate for, and, overcome these elements that have created who we are.

This is an important issue with a lot of different social issues because it reframes them from being directed onto the individual and instead talks about the society they inhabit. In the specific case that she was talking about with Klein, for example, seeing the world this way changes the conversation from being "do I hate women?" to "is what I'm doing right now something that doesn't help women become equal members of society?" The same thing could be said about other "identity politics" issues. The emphasis changes from "am I a racist?" to "does the immigration policy I support discriminate against non-whites?" It also has impact on the environment: "am I a climate change denier?" to "does this policy I'm supporting make the future sustainable?" Once we assume that people are to a very large part formed by the culture they live in, then if we want to make the world a better place, we need to change the culture instead of blame the individual.

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This leads to the second point that Manne identifies, namely that one of the key ways that culture controls human behaviour is through shaming. Gender is obviously rigidly controlled in our culture through shaming---"man-up", "don't be a sissy", "real men don't eat quiche", "that's so gay", "that haircut is so butch!", "that skirt makes you look like a slut!", etc, etc. It might be harder to recognize this in other aspects of culture, but once you understand what to look for, it becomes easier to see.

Shaming is a complex behaviour in that it involves pointing out that someone is expected to live up to a specific norm---and that they are failing to do so. As such, it is inherently hierarchical because it always involves someone taking on the role of being a judge who can decide who is or is not living up to their understanding of acceptable behaviour. It isn't just a case of someone being told that they don't "make the grade", though, it is also a case of someone internalizing this code to the point where the comment from the "outsider" has a deep emotional "sting". 

Let me illustrate this point with an example from my own life.

I have worked as a porter in an academic Library for over 30 years. Sometimes it's slow in the building and there is nothing to do except the odd walk-through and wait for someone to call on the radio or telephone for help. One night I happened to be suffering from a truly hideous migraine headache and was sitting behind a cup of tea trying to keep my eyeballs from falling out of my head. My supervisor showed-up to pick up something from his office. The next day he called me into his office and told me he was very upset about me being where I was the night before and called me "lazy" because I wasn't actively doing something. (I asked him what exactly I was supposed to be doing and he had no answer---he was actually an incompetent boob who didn't really understand my job.) This event put me into a tremendous depression that went on for weeks, led to some serious weight loss (my significant other called me "the incredible shrinking man"), and, only ended after I went to a professional for some therapy.

The point was that I had never been accused of being "lazy" in my entire life and my self-image was tied directly to being a "hard worker". When my boss called me "lazy", he totally shattered this belief about myself and deeply shamed me. It was only after the therapist pointed out that many workplaces are deeply hypocritical about how much people actually do, that many bosses have absolutely zero understanding about who does what, and, that in most cases our interactions at work are exercises in "gamesmanship" and "deception" that I realized that it was ridiculous for me to care what my incompetent boss thought of me. It also helped me immensely to hear this from a professional---who was actually provided by my workplace---which helped get out from under the deep shame that I'd felt because of this whole incident. 

I will admit that my example might seem a bit extreme, but not when you consider that a lot of working-class people have built their entire definition of self-worth on the concept of being "hard workers". I had this reinforced the other night with a cab driver. I mentioned something about having grown up on a farm and she started going on about how "farm people are all WORKERS". You could tell that in her universe this is obviously the most positive thing anyone can say about someone else. And this makes sense. When you have very little value placed on your being by society-at-large, one of the very few ways you can feel good about yourself is to at least think that you are doing the best you can with the very limited opportunities available.

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Another thing about working class culture is that it teaches people to be ashamed about asking for support. I have to admit that it's taken a bit out of me every time I switch to the blue font and start asking for people to support this blog in order to break the "habit" of assuming that all news on the Internet should be "free". Well, here's "the ask". If you like this blog enough to read it, you should consider supporting it. I don't want money from poor people, but if you aren't, perhaps you could kick something in both to "pay your way" and also to pay for the folks who can't afford to support it. It's easy---you can subscribe using Patreon, or toss something in the Tip Jar. If you don't want to do that, send me a cheque by mail:  124-A Surrey Street East Guelph, N1H 3P9  (made out to Bill Hulet.) (Thanks to Evelyn for being so awesome!) 

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Right now we are going through a period of rapid social change. When I was young there were schools and jobs that just refused to admit women. It was against the law to be gay and police raided their bars. Discrimination was casual and accepted just about everywhere. That's all gone. Just to give you an idea of how much things have changed, a co-worker mentioned to me the other day that it had been years and years since he'd heard a joke that made fun of an ethnic group. I had to admit that I could say the same thing---and that amazed me. They used to a common part of social discourse.

How did this change happen? I'd suggest that it simply became no longer acceptable for people to make "Newfie", or "Polack", or whatever type of dumb jokes anymore. People were shamed into no longer repeating them. I can certainly still remember the first time I was shamed by someone because I repeated a dumb anti-gay joke. It stung, and at first I had a hard time understanding what the problem was, but after some other similar incidents, some reflection, and, time, I simply "moved on" and this sort of thing ceased to be part of my casual conversation.

Unfortunately, some people don't see this sort of negative feedback as being an opportunity to rethink what they believe in. Instead, they get very upset and see the other people's attempt to modify their behaviour through shaming as being an assault on their sense of worth---just like when my boss called me "lazy".

The cartoon show South Park devoted an episode titled Smug Alert! to this issue. It involved the citizens of South Park all buying hybrid cars and becoming so self-righteous that they develop a deep cloud of "smug" over the city that threatened to destroy everything. Just to give you a sense of what the show is like, among other things, people owning hybrids were shown being so in love with themselves that they love the smell of their own farts. (I thought about putting a link to the entire show in the post, but there was so much casual homophobia in the episode---people routinely say something is "gay" because is it "fake", "silly", or, just plain bad---that I gagged on including it.)

Another example from popular literature comes from Barbara Kingsolver's  novel Flight Behaviour. In that book monarch butterflies stop over-wintering in Mexico and instead settle on a wooded valley in Appalachia that is going to be clear cut so a poor land owner can pay off some of his bills. Kingsolver specifically said in an interview that she wrote the book so readers could understand the sort of rural society that breeds climate change denial. In what I suspect she felt was a truly "telling" vignette, an outsider tells a poverty-stricken rural dweller that he should buy a hybrid car in order to "save the planet". I've been involved in the environmental movement for a very long time and I have yet to see this sort of stupid insensitivity to poverty by anyone. I mention this point specifically not because I think that this is an accurate portrayal of how environmentalists act, but because I think it is "spot on" about how some folks think environmentalists act. (I couldn't quite figure out what Kingsolver actually thinks about this, but I suspected that she believes the lie about the environmental movement.)

Barbara Kingsolver,
Photo by Annie Griffiths

I think that both South Park and Kingsolver are serving a useful purpose in articulating exactly what it is that populists are really angry about. A lot of people have lived their lives by defining themselves against a set of very clear notions. But along comes the rapid change of society and all of a sudden hard work isn't as important as having good "people skills". You think that being "gay" is a ridiculous perversion---and yet we have a Premier who is an "out" lesbian. You lost your good-paying job in the oil patch that proved that you were both a "WORKER" and a "good provider" and those damned environmentalists and First Nations types are refusing to let companies build a pipeline.  And the government keeps letting in more and more of those funny brown-skinned folks to compete with your jobs. And on top of all of this, whenever you complain smart-ass people with an education try to shame you into shutting up by saying that you are a ignorant boob who needs "sensitivity training". In fact, if you are too vocal about what you actually feel, you can end up losing your job. What ever happened to free speech?

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I've understood the importance of shaming for social control since well before I heard the conversation between Klein and Manne. I mentioned this to a friend once and suggested that environmentalists need to develop methods of shaming people in order to stop them from doing environmentally damaging things like driving big cars and flying all over the planet on their vacations. Her response was totally unexpected. She totally lost it and said that "shame" is a totally horrible thing to inflict on anyone. I was surprised by the depth of emotion behind her response. In retrospect, I think I now understand what was going on. This friend thinks Brexit is a good idea and believed that Donald Trump would do some good in the USA. She is also someone with a very strong work ethic (she's a "WORKER") who has had to suffer from a great deal of profound indignity in her life. I think that she has developed a very sensitive "antenna" to any attempt to put pressure on people to "get with the program". In other words---she's allergic to "smug". For someone like her, I'm not sure that trying to use informal social pressure is going to do anything except create anger and resentment.

Having said that, I'm not sure what else people can do about "die harders" who keep manifesting behaviour that hurts other or damages the planet. Would it be better to make everything illegal and put them in jail? Should we just try to convince them to change through gentle persuasion and tell the people that they hurt "well, we tried"? I don't really know how else we can get people to stop doing bad things than to let them know that we simply do not approve. It really is the case---as in my example of the racist and sexist jokes---that if enough folks tell you that something is in bad taste many folks will eventually stop doing it.

But in the interim there are going to be a few people that are really, really angry about being told that they need to "pull up their socks" and "get with the program". I suspect that all the people of good will can do is be patient and reflect on the idea that this backlash is only a temporary thing. Most young folks have no problem with this new world. It's just some of the older citizenry who hang tenaciously to the old ways of being. And to paraphrase Max Planck "Civilization progresses one funeral at a time".   

The Village Funeral, by Frank Holl,
Public Domain image c/o Wiki Commons

    

Propaganda in a Free Society

In my last post I took the time to work out an argument that supports the idea of "deplatforming" neo-Fascists. In this week's op-ed I'd like to build on that foundation to talk about some disturbing trends that I've recently noticed outside the loony bin and on the main stage of our political theatre. 

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On April 18th Canadaland published a leaked internal memo from the Toronto Sun that outlined how management wanted their reporters and journalists to cover the upcoming Ontario election. It makes for interesting reading. Here's part of the introduction:

Editorial Perspective:

• The past 14 years of progressive Liberal policies have undermined Ontario’s economy, electricity system and core public services and introduced unprecedented social division.
• Successive Liberal governments have been fiscally reckless, plagued by scandal, self-serving and demonstratively harmed the quality of life for millions of Ontarions.
• Our focus will focus on exposing the Liberal record during the campaign and advocating for change that addresses the critical need to responsibly address chronic and growing problems in health, education and economy.
• We are not better off than we were 15 years ago.

It goes on to outline a list of stories that management wanted their staff to write about. Consider the following, which are only a few chosen from a long list:

Issue: Hydro 

Story: The $9.2 billion fire sale of Hydro One was just one of many blunders that undermined the province’s electricity sector and drove up energy rates. We revisit the government’s failed green energy plan, articular ongoing and future costs, look back at the gas plant scandal and costs and detail how soon after the election rates will rise, and what the 25% rate cut will cost. We look at the high salaries and bonuses paid to hydro execs and dig into the Hydro One purchase of a U.S. coal plant and toxic sludge farm. Does anyone have a realistic plan for hydro?

Issue: Carbon tax 

Story: We compare Liberal cap-and-trade with Conservative and NDP plans for carbon pricing. We look at the impact carbon taxes will have on Ontario’s economy, from jobs to grocery and gasoline prices. We review failure of carbon taxes elsewhere, and problematic nature of implementing if the U.S. does not.

Issue: Minimum Wage 

Story: Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimated as many as 50,000 people could lose their jobs this year because of the wage hike. In January, 59,300 part-time workers lost their jobs. Declines have flattened out since then. We look at stats as they’re published during the campaign. Meanwhile, a 22.5 per cent cut in Ontario’s business tax from 4.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent won’t offset increased staffing costs and other incentives such as paid sick days and three weeks paid vacation for workers with five years on the job.We’re also increasingly seeing unintentional consequences, including part-time work for people with disabilities.

Issue: Green Energy

Story: Ontario’s Liberals have wasted billions on unnecessary wind and solar energy. We look at links between those who benefited and party. We also look at carbon taxes and impact on consumers. Cost of green energy? Corporate welfare? Promised Green jobs?

Please note, this is a strange form of journalism in that the managers are telling their writers and researchers what their conclusions should be before they go out to look at the facts. This isn't how news is written, instead this is propaganda. (This certainly isn't how I go about writing stories for the Back-Grounder. While it is true that I often have some vague idea about how I want to write a story, this usually goes out the window when I start doing research and learn how little I knew going in. For example, last week I thought I'd focus on climate change denial before I started researching and I ended up going with the problem of media concentration. That's how journalism is supposed to work---.)

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Paul Godfrey,
Conservative Politician and Media Tycoon
Image by Vibhu c/o Wikicommons

The Toronto Sun is owned by "the Postmedia Network". This is a very large newspaper chain that was accumulated by and is currently managed by Paul Godfrey (even though it is now owned by an American asset management firm called "Golden Tree Asset Management".) Godfrey doesn't come from a background in journalism---or even ordinary business. Instead he has been involved with various things such as: Conservative municipal politics (Alderman in North York 1964-73, then appointed to various higher offices such as North York Board of Control, Metropolitan Toronto Council, ending up his career as Chairman of Metropolitan Toronto in 1984), public administration (chair of Ontario Lottery and Gaming corporation 2009-2013), and, professional sports (president and CEO of Toronto Bluejays 2000-2008.) (The Wikipedia article linked to his name is really worth reading. The man has had his thumb in a lot of pies over the years.)

Just to give you an idea of how important he is to Canadian journalism, here's a list of Postmedia Network properties:

Newspapers

• National Post
• Calgary Herald
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder
• Edmonton Journal
• London Free Press
• Montreal Gazette
• Ottawa Citizen
• Regina Leader-Post
• The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon)
• The Vancouver Sun 
• Windsor Star
• Calgary Sun
• Edmonton Sun
• Ottawa Sun
• The Province (Vancouver)
• Toronto Sun
• Winnipeg Sun
• 24 Hours (Toronto, Vancouver)
• Airdrie Echo (tabloid)
• Barrie Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Belleville Intelligencer (broadsheet)
• Bow Valley Crag & Canyon (tabloid)
• Brantford Expositor (broadsheet)
• Bradford Times (tabloid) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Brockville Recorder and Times (broadsheet)
• Camrose Canadian (tabloid), closing 2018
• Chatham This Week (tabloid)
• Clinton News-Record (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times (Alberta) (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times-Post (tabloid)
• Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder (broadsheet)
• Drayton Valley Western Review (tabloid)
• Edson Leader (tabloid)
• Elliot Lake Standard (tabloid)
• Fort McMurray Today (tabloid)
• Fort Saskatchewan Record (tabloid)
• Goderich Signal-Star (tabloid)
• Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune (tabloid)
• Hanna Herald (tabloid)
• High River Times (tabloid)
• Hinton Parklander (tabloid)
• Kenora Daily Miner and News (broadsheet)
• Kincardine News (tabloid)
• Kingston Whig-Standard (broadsheet)
• Kingston This Week (tabloid)
• Lakeshore Advance (Grand Bend; tabloid)
• Lloydminster Meridian Booster (tabloid)
• Mid-North Monitor (Espanola; tabloid)
• Mayerthorpe Freelancer (tabloid)
• Nanton News (tabloid)
• Niagara Falls Review (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• North Bay Nugget (broadsheet)
• Norwich Gazette, closing 2018
• Orillia Packet & Times (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Owen Sound Sun Times (broadsheet)
• Peace River Record-Gazette (broadsheet)
• Pembroke Daily Observer (broadsheet), ceasing print edition 2018
• Peterborough Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• Pincher Creek Echo (tabloid)
• Sault Star (broadsheet)
• Simcoe Reformer (tabloid)
• St. Catharines Standard (broadsheet) sold to Torstar in 2017
• St. Thomas Times-Journal (tabloid)
• Strathmore Standard (tabloid), closing 2018
• Stratford Beacon Herald (broadsheet)
• Sudbury Star (broadsheet)
• Timmins Daily Press (broadsheet)
• Vulcan Advocate (tabloid)
• Whitecourt Star (tabloid)
• Woodstock Sentinel-Review (broadsheet)

Magazines:

• Financial Post Business
• Living Windsor
• Swerve
• TVtimes

Websites:

• Canada.com
• celebrating.com
• connecting.com
• driving.ca
• househunting.ca
• remembering.ca
• shoplocal.ca
• SwarmJam.com
• Infomart.com
• in addition, Postmedia Network owns all websites associated with all properties listed on this page either wholly or in partnership.

(All of the info above comes from a Wikipedia article. I thought it would be 

valuable for readers to get an idea of the scale of Postmedia Network holdings.)

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What's happening here is a wealthy business man with ties to the Conservative Party is creating a Canadian equivalent of Fox News---a private propaganda outlet that relentlessly pushes a partisan viewpoint under the guise of "journalism".

It's important to understand how propaganda was created in older authoritarian nations like the Soviet Union. It wasn't particularly the case that each editor and reporter had an assigned KGB officer that they answered to. Instead, what happened was people who were interested as working as journalists realized "what side of the bread was buttered" and wrote stories accordingly. People who did this well and didn't let things like facts get in the way of the "party line" tended to get promoted. The foolishly idealistic, on the other hand, were quickly identified and they lost their jobs and never got hired again. No need for thumbscrews and beatings---the vast majority of people will simply do what they need to do in order to pay the mortgage and feed the family. Reporters are especially vulnerable to this sort of thing now because newspapers are in "free fall" and jobs are scarce as hen's teeth with gold fillings.

The other thing that we need to remember is that recent events have shown that even in a modern liberal society propaganda is tremendously successful. All through the scandals rocking the USA right, for example, popular support for Donald Trump has sat at a rock-solid 42% of the body politic. That's what happens when you have a significant fraction of the public who get all their news and information from corporate propaganda outlets like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting.

The important takeaway from the above is that there is a problem with letting a small number of extremely wealthy and well-connected individuals control the media. Freedom of speech laws don't mean much if one side has a huge, enormously-amplified megaphone and the other side has nothing but the quiet voice of reason. That's why we need to build our own megaphones, and, lessen the ability of "big money" to say whatever they want---no matter how divorced from truth or objectivity.

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The pitch for support shouldn't actually be necessary in this week's op-ed. Do you want to let propaganda machines like Postmedia control what you learn about our society? Or do you want some sort of in-depth coverage that gives an objective, much more complete picture? The choice is up to you---you can support independent, responsible journalism, or, you can passively watch a small number of wealthy individuals amass a "free market" propaganda machine designed to control a large slug of voters. But that choice is easier than it has ever been. Just subscribe to the Guelph Back-Grounder through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar. Other people have already done it---(thanks Charles for being so awesome!) What's stopping you?

You can also share the Guelph Back-Grounder through social media. Word of mouth is the only advertising I can afford.

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Another issue that is compounding the importance of this debate is the fact that the federal government is aware of the problems that newspapers are currently facing, which is why the Trudeau government has pledged money to help the news media. But the question is, who gets what and how is the money going to be allocated? Certainly, it sounds like Paul Godfrey thinks that he is going to be getting some of it. 

Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Postmedia, which publishes the National Post and daily broadsheets in many of Canada’s largest cities, said that tax credit “could be looked upon as a turning point in the plight of newspapers in Canada.”
“I tip my hat to the prime minister and the finance minister. They deserve a lot of credit,” said Godfrey. “Everyone in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now.”

"$600M in federal funding for media 'a turning point in
the plight of newspapers in Canada’ "
Stuart Thomson, Nov 21st, 2018, The National Post

Of course, it wouldn't be a good idea if journalism actually disappeared. But equally, we don't want the government-of-the-day deciding on a case-by-case basis how this money is going to be divided up. If we don't do that, we will probably end up with an independent board deciding how to divide up the largess. But there will be a temptation to get a group of "establishment media types" together who will give most of the money to the existing media companies---like Postmedia. And if we do that, we run the risk of propping up some really horrible media practices, like managers deciding the editorial policy is to support the party of the guy who manages the paper.

Is this the only way we can deal with news in Canada? Maybe it would make more sense to decide the money needs to be divided up on the basis of how actually independent, objective, and, perhaps even local, the news media really is. I think that voters should make sure that Paul Godfreys and Postmedia don't end up using our tax money to tell us how to vote. What do you think?  

We Can No Longer Afford Ideology

Yesterday I was interviewing a respected local politician and I asked her a totally idiotic---and yet, I think profound---question:  "Are the Conservatives  evil? Or are they stupid? It seems that they are either one or the other."

It's an idiotic question because it's hopelessly simplistic and forced her to quickly come up with a reasonable-sounding response. She managed to come back with something that not only kept her from offering me a too-honest "gotcha" quote, but also kept her from sounding disingenuous. The fact that she did so without also making me look like an idiot just showed her profound mastery as a politician.

Why I asked the question in the first place was not because I wanted to score points, but because it was a way of getting to something that journalists usually are afraid of asking about when dealing with important people. That is, "Why exactly do people do the things that they do?" And that is the import of my question, because it is a way of introducing more subtle and serious issues. I was thinking in particular about the decision of both the provincial and federal Tories to build their brand around sabotaging any attempt to prevent runaway climate change. And in that context, the question "are they evil?" really boils down to "are they aware of the existential threat to human civilization and yet consciously choose to oppose legislation to prevent runaway climate change simply because they think it will help them win the next election?" Similarly, the question "are they stupid?" is a shorthand for "are they so blinded by their ideology that they simply cannot comprehend how dangerous climate change is to humanity?"

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It's usually considered "rude" or "unfair" to question the motives of anyone when they say or do something. Indeed, I've been accused of being a "troll" in on-line discussions because I sometimes do this. The idea is that you have to simply accept that someone is saying something with the best of intentions and only deal with what they say instead of why you think that they may be saying it. The problem is that many people suffer from a profound lack of understanding about what the implications of their actions will be. To an outside observer what might seem like a profoundly cynical power play might simply be a case of someone being oblivious to the effects that the course of action they support will have on other people.

I first considered this idea when I heard a fellow at work talking about being in a developing nation and seeing a man with no legs rolling around on a creeper and begging for money. My co-worker said he was with a couple other tourists and he was amazed to see that they were actually afraid of this guy, even though he offered zero physical threat because of his disability. I opined that perhaps they were terrified by the implications that this man raised about the nature of life. This is the idea that "there but for the grace of God goeth I", and this can be a scary thing to contemplate. My co-worker looked at me with amazement, thought for a while, and said "I think you may have something there. I'd never thought of that." The point is that what had seemed obvious to me was something that had never occurred to this other guy.

Too stupid to know he's stupid?
Public Domain, US gov photo
c/o Wikicommons

Since the rise of Donald Trump people have become more aware of something called the "Dunning-Kruger effect". That is a syndrome where people are so ignorant of a subject that they don't know that they know nothing about it, but instead believe that they are experts. It's sort of the corollary of Aristotle's observation that "the more I know, the less I think I know". The implication is that if you know nothing at all, maybe you think that you know everything. There's also a related effect where someone knows a subject so well that they expect that everyone else does too. If it is blindingly obvious to her that a certain thing is going to result from following a specific action, she will believe that anyone advocating for it is really seeking that (to her) inevitable result. And if the other person says "no, not at all", he is actively hiding his true intentions. Well, no. Lots of time people are just oblivious to the consequences of what they are advocating.

This is where the "too stupid to understand" idea arises. I'm not talking about people suffering from some sort of brain damage. Instead, I'm talking about people who have had their heads so stuffed with nonsense that there isn't any room left for evidence or logic to alter their opinions. 

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Time for the begging bowl. If you like these articles---and I suppose you do if you are reading this---consider subscribing to them through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar. Maybe, you could buy a book. All these options exist on the upper right hand of the screen. (Switch to the desktop option if you read these on your cell phone.)  Writing these things take a lot of time and energy and I have bills to pay and family obligations just like anyone else. Part of the problem that I'm identifying in this article is that if people expect to get their news for free, people write wild, sensationalist articles in order to get clicks and shares to increase ad revenue. If you want to "damp this down" and get more logical, fact-based stuff (ie:  less ideological), people are going to have to get back into the habit of paying for it. Lots of folks used to pay for newspapers---why not blogs?

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A few years back I was at a dinner party and one of the guests was a fellow I'd never met before. He was a profoundly odd person. Among other things, he said that "everyone in the USA has healthcare". (My wife, Misha, is an American---one who has never had health insurance except when she was in the Armed Forces.) I was taken aback. I tried to get an idea of what he meant, and said that I knew for a fact that this was simply not true. But he just blustered and got angry if anyone disagreed with him. Eventually, I just left rather than spend any time in the room with this disagreeable person. (I wasn't the only one. An elderly woman who remembered England before the National Health Service similarly couldn't stand this "nonsense" either, so she left too.)

While it was hard to figure out exactly what this guy was thinking (simply because he refused to engage in the "back-and-forth" of conversation that allows one to tease out this sort of information), I did learn that he owned a local company and he was profoundly pissed off about the amount of money he had to pay in taxes. In fact, it seemed like he had worked himself into an almost permanent frenzy over the subject.

Moreover, my hosts told me afterwards that they had made a mistake inviting the three of us to dinner at the same time. They'd forgotten that they had invited this person earlier. The fact of the matter was that my two friends were also self-described "right wing", but they tended to keep quiet around me and the elderly relative, because they knew that we didn't share their opinions.

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I might be odd (in fact I've been told I am by several people), but I tend to think that we should subject our cherished ideas to some sort of "fact checking" once in a while. The idea that someone would tell me to my face that I was wrong, and that my wife does have health insurance when I know that this isn't true---and that in some sense this is a question of "opinion" instead of "facts"---just seems weird. 

Of course, there are nuances to most conflicts. It might be the case that the fellow I met at the dinner had conflated the idea that no one can get turned away from an emergency department in an American hospital with the existence of "medical insurance". But if you do end up at a hospital, you will end up with a bill afterwards and people can and often do lose their entire life's savings over this sort of thing. And as a result, people often think long and hard about whether they want to go in for a "check up" after a minor accident. Indeed, Misha had a friend who got into a "fender bender" on his motor scooter, got a significant bump on the head, but avoided going to Emergency because of this concern. He died of an aneurysm the next day. People who have no health insurance never go for check-ups either. Which means that if I lived in the USA I would never have had my high blood pressure identified and would probably be well on the way to kidney failure right now.

The important point, however, was that we never had this discussion because this guy was so angry and belligerent that he would not allow me to find some sort of "common ground" that we could build a conversation on. He just made angry, universal statements. Indeed, if my friends had been better organized, I would never have even met him because the two of us would have been kept carefully separated into our own, independent "filter bubbles". 

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This isn't a new thing. In fact pretty much since the revolutions (British, American, and, French) that changed European politics from being about intrigue between courtiers to being about the worldviews of an entire nation, people have been creating grotesquely over-simplified ways of looking at the world. Political scientists and revolutionaries alike call these "ideologies".

The thing about ideologies is that they aren't fully-formed, well thought out, and, evidence-based. Instead, they are a type of tribal identity that one declares allegiance to. Before I figured this out, I would often be surprised by people who complained about things like "the liberal bias" of universities and who expressed a desire to see space created there to allow "a conservative point of view". Why---I would ask---can't we just judge each issue on its own merits and see where the facts lead us? The problem I couldn't see was that in the hierarchy of understanding that these people hold, "conservatism" is more important than facts or logic. At the dinner party, the anti-tax business guy simply ignored my statement that my wife didn't have health insurance because it didn't agree with something more important, namely his ideological opinion that all taxes are a form of theft.

Ideological conflict has been around since the 17th century's battles over the divine right of kings. But until now the "stakes of the game" haven't been all that large. It just involved whether or not thousands and hundreds of thousands of people would suffer horribly because of minor irritants like slavery and horrific poverty. Now, the fate of human civilization is on the chopping block. What is more important, whether a company in Guelph has to pay more taxes or the ice caps melt and Bangladesh gets drowned? It seems clear to both the federal and provincial conservatives that taxes are much more important. But that's absurd. Our world is too complex and our technology far too powerful to continue this childish game of ideological thinking.