"The Culture of Fear" and Related Thoughts: Excerpts, Questions and Answers

QUESTION: How bad is crime in Canada?

“Half of Toronto’s population now consists of those born outside of Canada; notably, the city’s crime rate has dropped by 50 percent since 1991, and is significantly lower than that of the country as a whole.”[1]

QUESTION: Given that newspapers offer "scarelines" instead of "headlines", are newscasts also to blame for our “culture of fear”?

“... between 1990 and 1998, when the nation’s  murder rate [U.S.A.] declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent (not counting stories about O.J. Simpson).”[2]

“... people who watch a lot of TV are more likely than others to believe their neighbourhood are unsafe, to assume that crime rates are rising, and to overestimate their own odds of becoming a victim.  They also buy more locks, alarms, and – you guessed it – guns, in hopes of protecting themselves.”[3]

According to George Gerbner, Dean-emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, “They [people who watch a lot of TV]  may accept and even welcome repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences – measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes – if that promises to relieve their anxieties.  That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television.”[4]

“In the nation’s largest cities, murder accounted for only.2 percent of all crimes, and in the suburbs of those cities, murder accounted for just .01 percent.  Yet not only are murder stories a staple of the coverage in those cities, accounting for 36 percent of the crimes reported on the TV news, the newscasts warned suburban viewers that crime was moving to their areas.[5]

QUESTION: What is the relationship between broadcasting competition and the “culture of fear”?

“Crime stories are a cost-effective way to capture an audience.  The more vulnerable the viewing public is made to feel, the more essential the role of the local newscaster as a neighbour who ‘sounds the alarm for collective defense.’”[6]

QUESTION: If the Harper Government hacks away at public funding for the CBC, will that mean we have even more crime stories in the news, more public anxieties and less public reasoning (even though actual crime continues to decrease) ... and more jails again?

QUESTIONS : Does not the increase  in the number of jails, punishments and “crime bills“ represent  an increase in the violence of the State?  Is this not comparable to the violence of the State during the G20 Summit in Toronto?

“In its most elementary and at the same time indomitable form, the violence of the State is the violence of a penal character.”[7]

QUESTION:  Have we as a society returned to nineteenth-century, Darwinian notions of “survival of the fittest”?

“War is and must remain for us a cataclysm, the outbreak of chaos, the return, in the external relations between States, to the struggle for life.”[8]

QUESTION:  Since 9/11 do we have repeated  ‘failures of the sovereign’ as Michael Ignatieff recently suggested in a Globe and Mail article?[9]

We have seen the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan and now War in Libya.  In all of these instances men (and women) surrendered themselves to a leader, a sovereign.  We have also seen gross incompetence, but they were not failures of the sovereign; rather, we see how violent the sovereign can get, especially when aided by public intellectuals.

QUESTION (and another corrective to Michael Ignatieff):  Is Texas Governor and Tea Party presidential hopeful Rick Perry, who wants to see “Washington irrelevant,” not a Marxist dictator of the proletariat who actually wants the “withering away of the State”?

QUESTION: As an Economist, Mr. Harper’s training is supra-national in perspective (economics is considered a human science): Does Mr. Harper really have Canada’s interests at heart? Is Mr. Harper a prime minister without a country?

ANSWER:  Look to Mr. Harper’s Australian ghost writers (sending our lads to war), and a rotten case of indigestion.

ANSWER:  Look to the newly-minted “Royal” Canadian Forces.  Is the Queen not head of many Commonwealth Countries?

 ANSWER:  Look to the “Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement” (CETA), where negotiations are held outside of the purview of the public.  Does not democracy involve open discussion, Mr Harper?

ANSWER: Look to British prime minister David Cameron addressing Canada’s Parliament, fresh from the war in Libya – the only coalition leader ever to be honoured by Stephen Harper.

QUESTION: What is Canada’s problem?

ANSWER: “...the central problem of politics is freedom: whether the State founds freedom by means of its rationality, or whether freedom limits the passions of power through its resistance.”[10]

QUESTION: How are Canadians best able to express freedom and resistance to excessive “State” power?

ANSWER:  “I am free in so far as I am political.”[11]

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[1] Rachel Giese, “Arrival of the Fittest: Canada’s crime rate is dropping as immigration increases.  Is there a connection?” The Walrus, Vol. 8, No. 5 (June 2011), p. 30.

[2] Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 2009),  p. xxix..

[3] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 44,45

[4] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 45

[5] Glassner, Culture of Fear, p. 230

[6] Glassner, Culture of Fear, pp. 230,231.

[7] Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 234.

[8] Ricoeur, History and Truth, 243. Emphasis added.

[9] Michael Ignatieff, “The Wrong Lessons,” The Globe and Mail, Focus Section, Saturday September 10, 2011, pp.1,2.

[10] Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 270. Emphasis added.

[11] Ricoeur, History and Truth, p. 258.

Letter to Michael Ignatieff, Liberal Leader

The Honourable Michael Ignatieff
Leader of the Opposition
Liberal Party of Canada - National Office
Suite 400-81 Metcalfe Street
Ottawa
K1P 6M8

12 January 2010

Dear Mr. Ignatieff,

I noted in The Globe and Mail some while ago your review of Machiavelli’s The Prince, but you forgot a lesson: “When trouble is sensed well in advance it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable.” Why did Canadians have to wait a week after Harper’s second prorogued Parliament for your meagre depiction of it as “crazy” when the words illiberal and undemocratic would have been an understatement? Apparently you chose to take a vacation – outside of the country? Why did you not return home sooner? Were you not aware that Canadians suffered a leadership vacuum in the days since Harper’s announcement? Were you not aware that “governments” such as ours regularly like to make full use of strategic timing to announce policies in an effort to minimize scrutiny? Ottawa was rife with rumour of prorogation: why did you not say anything earlier, like pass a warning shot across Harper’s bow?

Your sense of timing is impeccable. In the autumn you announced your candidacy for the prime minister’s job when Liberals were riding high in the polls - and for no other apparent reason. After the polls plunged to near Dion levels, as we know, and when constitutional stakes are critical, you announce to all interested parties that you are not going to make prorogation an election issue. This amounts to a terrible squandering of political capital. Perhaps if you had not gambled so soon, we would not be facing prorogation today. Now you must pose a serious threat to the Harper government while they remain ever dismissive. What will construe an election issue, in your mind? Will it be dictated by high polls? Or by what actually matters? It is high time that parliamentary principle prevail over pathetic party-line politics.

I gather you have been canvassing the country while the Afghan detainee issue made its way into Parliament, so your team has been speaking on behalf of Richard Colvin, et al. This must be terribly convenient. In other words you can avoid the detritus of your own regime change politics – and a nebulous climate of opinion around the issue of torture - made on behalf of the Americans and President Bush not too long ago. (See Ignatieff’s World Updated: Iggy goes to Ottawa by Denis Smith, pp. 140-143). The more you remain out of sight today, the less you appear to contradict yourself. Now you have the daunting task (without a sitting Parliament, as you note) of making alleged torture an issue when you were seemingly making the atmosphere around such matters less clear in the years before returning to Canada.

And I would like to point out that one of the causes behind the Afghan detainee issue is that Canada is at ‘War on Terror’. This is also one of the reasons why the Harper government might just get away with prorogation, because it reflects the general diminishment of liberties already taking place in the West since 9/11. While Harper is the only one to have thought of prorogation, both Britain and the USA have experienced profound legislative setbacks to civil liberties (for example the American Patriot Act, aspects of which, it turned out, infringed on the U.S. Constitution). In Britain the House of Commons recently passed legislation allowing subjects to be held without charge for 42 days (extended from a mere 28 days). At the time of the Magna Carta (1215) one could only be held for 48 hours. (See A.C. Grayling, Liberty in the Age of Terror). The widespread decline of civil liberties (for example, now also at our airports) and the opportunity for prorogation itself could have been minimized, perhaps, if Canada’s Leader of the Opposition (as a previous ‘public intellectual’) had not advocated for war on Iraq but instead helped focus the resources of the West initially on Afghanistan, which has very much remained an unfortunate sideshow. Do I see an irony?

Canadians need fresh air. Parliament has been prorogued twice now since your turn in federal politics. You did nothing previously, being the last Liberal signatory to the “coalition”, and so far you have done nothing this time around except time your criticisms of Harper with The Economist, apparently. You must push for an alternative Parliament, and you need to appeal to all Canadians (there is at least 60% of them) to support it until March 3, when “Harper’s Parliament” reconvenes. It is also time you considered working with the other parties, certainly the NDP, to help bring representation back to Canada and to Canadians. This way you can revisit the detainee issue with some element of atonement and clarity. It is up to you as Leader of the Opposition to carry the torch for Canadian democracy: you will not find it in Harper’s government, because it has sacrificed everything for party discipline, the war (in Afghanistan and against the Opposition) - and for Machiavellian machinations. Let’s put some of that “true patriot love” you speak of in action before we conclude it is nothing else but empty and supercilious rhetoric.

Sincerely,

Joerge Dyrkton, D.Phil.
cc www.joergedyrkton.blogspot.com
cc joehueglin@bellnet.ca

'The Rights Revolution' by Michael Ignatieff - A Critique in the Light of Events

The second time I read Michael Ignatieff’s 'The Rights Revolution' it had occurred to me I had read it a first time – it had made such a lasting impression on me. Pity: thanks to a recent reissue of his book, I now have two copies taking up space in my library.

Ignatieff, if you do not already know, is a political liberal. He argues in his new introduction (already out-of-date, and rather backwards in my opinion, as if politics exists in a vacuum): “The fundamental problem facing humanity is political.” Not climate change (which knows no political borders), not the apparent clash of civilizations (to which he contributed), not the conflict between poor and rich nations (Che Guevara he is not) – and not the economy, the latter which he even fails to mention, demonstrating the paucity of his thought. (Shall we anticipate another revised introduction?) The world, according to Ignatieff, needs “order and freedom,” spoken like a true nineteenth-century conservative liberal, the two most active ingredients for political life, from which all true global solutions will follow.

The apparent need for “order” might explain Ignatieff’s lack of support for Dion’s pre-prorogued coalition of Liberals and New Democratic Party, backed by the Bloc Québécois. The so-called “disorder” represented by possible but temporary unity with the NDP, otherwise known as the Jacobins, runs counter to Ignatieff’s gene pool, which is why Ignatieff was last to sign the agreement. Consider his previous support for Margaret Thatcher against the striking Miner’s union of Britain in the mid-1980s. And as he makes quite plain in 'The Rights Revolution': “I prefer the evils of capitalist individualism to the evils of collectivism.” Absent is any sense of a ‘middle ground’ which so identified Canadian thinking throughout much of the twentieth century: individualism is “just a fact about us as a species,” this coming from an historian. (The French Revolutionaries, too, omitted freedom of assembly from their first Declaration of the Rights in 1789). In other words, Ignatieff sacrificed the integrity of Parliament because his sense of individual “difference” (not necessarily a bad thing) had no affinity with the union guys, which was unfortunate for the rest of Canada. He is indifferent not to personal but to public freedom when it interferes with Liberal party interests as he sees them.

Consider another revealing quotation: “Doing something serious about inequality means infringing on property rights,” and here Ignatieff conflates - and almost voids - two diverse traditions of rights, the latter classical and the former presumably more radical. John Locke could not have said it better in the seventeenth century, but then the propertied few were considered a bulwark against the abuses of liberty. (And who really cared about the socialistic “Diggers” forerunners of the NDP today, a group Ignatieff neglects, because he likes to think the rights revolution began with his generation, the boomers of the 1960s.) Today, relatively many more in society are “propertied” (if we ignore the homeless) but there was still an abuse by the state when Parliament was prorogued. Property rights encouraged liberalism, historically speaking, but today’s Liberal party is not protecting the propertied (and unpropertied) from the state. Ignatieff can go on about how democracy (which he does not clearly define or analyze) perpetuates inequality, and curiously he does not seem to think of this as a problem. But even worse, he is not sensitive to the bigger difficulty: how Canadian democracy seems unable to protect itself from arbitrary rule, the likes of Harper’s abuses as we see now.

'The Rights Revolution' is fixed on rights but what about responsibilities? According to Ignatieff’s deft dismissal, “a liberal culture does not obliterate responsibility: it presumes them.” However, I am not convinced by his self assurance. The number of times his lectures discuss “rights” dwarfs the dozen or so times he mentions “responsibility.” It was the French thinker Simone Weil (she died at age 34), in 'The Need for Roots' (a profound WWII era work that appealed to socialists - and to conservatives), who offered a deeper understanding of “order” and “liberty,” ideas which begin her book on our “Duties” (a word one rarely finds in Ignatieff’s text ). In Ignatieff’s chapter on “Rights, Intimacy and Family Life” almost everything is considered a “sacrifice” (of rights) yet nothing is a “duty” (unless it is to yourself), and I find here a sense of imbalance which is disconcerting. Note that Ignatieff also does not mention the word “obligation”. Weil argued (with mankind very much in mind) that the idea of a right “implies the possibility of making either a good or bad use of it,” a notion Ignatieff admits. Rights can be abused, to put it simply. However, as says Weil, an obligation is “always, unconditionally, a good from every point of view.”

The notion of rights is originally Roman, not Greek, and serves the American neighbours to our south very well, and from his prestigious position at Harvard Ignatieff comes across as a kind of modern-day (but blue-blooded) Thomas Paine. Ignatieff has made his living on the marketplace and offers mainstream ideas, and he appears rather taken in by various national dogmas (or shall we say paradigms?). For the British, he wrote about his mentor Sir Isaiah Berlin, the exemplary historian of ideas, himself a subtle blend of various traditions and quintessential English liberty, a conservative liberal and admired Oxford icon. For the Americans, Ignatieff curried to their exceptionalism, the mix of nations and their beacon of democracy to the world – regardless of cost. And I can see why certain members of the Liberal party have fawned over him: he mimics the Trudeau legacy in their eyes, and he gives further articulation to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Today Ignatieff presents Canada as a model to the world, but at the same time also admits to a “semipermanent political crisis” since the 1960’s – a self serving notion. I am also tempted to ask: how does he know? And what damage has he already incurred, passively, in his brief tenure? “Probation” indeed.

In reissuing 'The Rights Revolution' in 2007, originally delivered on CBC Radio in 2000, one wonders whether Ignatieff has reread his words. The words expedience and hypocrisy come to mind in light of his “intellectual” activities on Iraq: “The first presumption I have argued against in these lectures is that the language of rights is an apologia for force. I am committed to the language of rights for precisely the opposite reason: because it mandates limits to the use of force.” But in extending his “rights revolution” to Iraq and in his clear and ample support of President Bush’s Holy War (Oily War?) against Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and all that, from which he was only extricating himself officially in 2007, while still a newly minted Liberal, suggests Ignatieff looks for more than just truth. This ivory tower figure is surrounded by barbed wire, and his missions tend on the opportunistic. Today Ignatieff boasts he has friends in the Obama White House. Let’s not forget he had a friend – the President - in the Bush White House, too, whom he visited. Ignatieff gravitates to power, rather than critiques it.

Carelessness is another feature of 'The Rights Revolution'. On the one hand he is platitudinous when he says “law is supposed to be the expression of popular sovereignty,” and I find it striking that there is no mention of “parliamentary sovereignty” – something that seems to have been sacrificed over the recent months, partly because Ignatieff likes to read the polls, rather than lead them. On the other hand he comes across as primitive (and lacks foresight) when he talks about “the babbling, incontinent inhabitant of a psychiatric ward or nursing home.” Here Ignatieff demeans both the mentally ill and the aged in one stroke, putting his opinion in the same league as Mark Twain’s dated “Injun Joe.” But there is no doubt even former Harvard academics will fall victim to old age (often considered a second career) assuming they are well enough to live that long.

As Budget Bill C-10 (and all its baggage) cruises through Parliament, without meaningful criticism by the Ignatieff Liberals, Opposition falls to others. Harper succeeds because he is like the character Zelig in the Woody Allen film of the same name, who assimilates the physical characteristics of the people around him: first John Howard (the war on Iraq), then Duceppe (“Distinct Society”), then Bush (the environment) and now Obama (the environment). He could not assimilate Dion, who was too unlike a typical politician, so he attacked him. Ignatieff, who is so liberal he can be considered a conservative, and perhaps also because he is coy when it comes to power, is now emulating Harper, who as we now know has not an original mind. The end result: two Parliamentary party leaders assimilating one other. Among the rights that Ignatieff does not articulate in 'The Rights Revolution' is the Canadian right to a Parliamentary Opposition, and in neglecting to do so this esteemed man continues to condemn the public.