Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Thursday, May 30, 2013

On the CBC and Civil Disobedience

Bill C-60 aims to give the “Harper Government” control of collective bargaining at CBC, Canada’s largest media organization and the nation’s public broadcaster, thereby undermining journalistic independence, or freedom of the press, simply put.  If the Bill goes through, then the CBC will no longer be operating at arm’s length from the government.  Pravda readily comes to mind, among other examples.

Here is what the American writer, thinker and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) would say to the folks at CBC, and to Canadians at large:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the last degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a conscience then?  I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.  It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.  The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.  It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.[1]




[1][1] Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Joseph Wood Krutch (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 86.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

To Duffy on Dues and Duty (with help from Collingwood)



For those not in the know, Senator Mike Duffy’s $90,000 expense claims, considered invalid by audit, were to be secretly paid for by personal cheque from Prime Minister Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright.  Given that the highest-ranking official behind the “Harper Government” has now stepped down, Duffy is left to once again to ponder his accountability, a matter in which Harper and his subordinates allegedly take pride. Here is what R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), the English philosopher and historian would say to Duffy on his “dues” and “duty”.

17. 12.  ‘Due’ and ‘duty’ first appear in English in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to describe various aspects of the state of indebtedness.  They always contain a reference to the past, debitum being a past participle; a past act of incurring the debt; logically past; it need not be also temporally past.

17. 13. They are medieval words, and in the Middle Ages the idea of debt was associated less with the expectation of a money payment than with that of a payment in kind; or, still oftener, that of rendering to a ‘lord’ a ‘service’ not necessarily conceived as having a monetary equivalent.

17. 14.  The idea of a debt incurred by one act and discharged by another had already found a vernacular English expression in a new sense of the Germanic verb ‘owe’.  Originally this meant ‘own’, but from the tenth century onwards it is the current English translation for debere.

17. 15.  When ‘due’ and ’duty’ first appeared in English, therefore, they found Germanic synonyms derived from the verb ‘owe’ already established; in particular the past tense ‘ought’, where the same reference to a logically past act of incurring debt is implied.

17. 16.  Etymologically, then, ‘it is my duty to do this’ and ‘I ought to do this’ mean the same; viz. that I am conscious of an obligation or debt incurred in the past by an act that generated the obligation, and to be discharged in the future by the act referred to as ‘this’.

17. 17.  In modern English, consciousness of obligation is distinguished from other forms of consciousness by the name ‘conscience’.  ‘Conscience’ has a first-order subject, viz. the obligation itself. ...[1]





[1] R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism, ed. David Boucher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 119,120.  Emphasis added.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Montesquieu on political liberty - and Harper

The French man of letters, Montesquieu, is best known for his famous work The Spirit of the Laws (1748), where he develops the idea that political liberty follows from the separation of powers – the legislative, executive and the judicial.  Montesquieu had studied and admired England’s mixed system of constitutional government – the Houses of Parliament, the Crown, the king’s minister (Walpole), and the respective checking of power.  His work had an enormous influence on the American founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, and he was referred to extensively in May 1789 at the Meeting of the Estates General, considered the start of the French Revolution.[1]  (His influence waned as the Revolution became more extreme). It is worth noting that Montesquieu dictated The Spirit of the Laws to any number of secretaries over 20 years as the author was becoming blind.  It was placed on the Pope’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1751

Here is an excerpt from Montesquieu’s text, and it has bearing on Harper’s Canada:

Democracy and aristocracy are not free states by their nature.  Political liberty is only found in moderate governments.  But it is not always in moderate states.  It is present only when power is not abused, but it has eternally been observed that any man who has power is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits.  Who would think of it!  Even virtue has need of limits.
     So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things. …[2]




[1]Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu. Past Masters. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111.
[2] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, eds.and trs. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 155 (Part 2, Book 11, Chapter 4).

Friday, May 10, 2013

CBC Freedom - or else


Once again the CBC is under attack.  This time it is worse than ever – and all Canadians should be concerned, regardless of (democratic) stripe.   Yet another omnibus bill has been introduced to the House of Commons, and in Budget Bill C-60 a sneaky provision has been added to give the Conservative government essential control of collective bargaining at the CBC.  In other words, Harper is converting our national “public” broadcaster into a “state” facility, adding to his ability to influence the news and its journalists. Our political ‘leader’ wants to be virtual ‘master’ of the CBC airwaves, bringing with him a heightened level of personal rule which is not often found in a modern Western democracy. The potential unity of thought will be profoundly debilitating to the nation.

In a nutshell, Canada is undergoing a revolution, one that is taking us back to the USSR.  The Puritan forefathers of Canada’s Conservative Party bear an uncanny historical resemblance to the Bolsheviks – both were radical ideologues and rather oppressive.  If the Canadian state takes control of the CBC it will fulfill Harper’s dream of ‘holy discipline’ familiar to Calvin’s Church.  Also of some inspiration to Harper are the Romans, and if only they had today’s broadcasting technology, for they too held to a ‘religion of order’.  Canadians cannot afford to be indifferent to the fate of the CBC, as Harper already controls the realm.

798 years ago, in the year 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta, and he was forced to do so, because English Barons challenged his centralization of power.  Essentially the document implied that the King was not above the law. Unfortunately, Harper does not see himself as a servant of the law (as represented by Parliament). And he has no sense of the people’s inherent rights, which is why he is tyrannical with the CBC. Borrowing from the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Harper can easily be described as having “perpetual and restless desire for power after power.”  And if we consider Plato, who says that “The measure of a man is what he does with power,” one finds ludicrous ‘leadership’ misguided by a puritanical sense of being ‘the elect’.  Certainly, we can all agree that the Prime Minister requires several degrees of restraint on the CBC, public or otherwise - and immediately so.

Joerge Dyrkton de silentio