Self-Isolation Reading List for China Watchers: From Mao to Trump. Review of "Two Tears on the Window" and "Claws of the Panda"

As we practice self-isolation and social distancing in Canada and around the world, let us not forget diplomat-on-leave Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, who have been detained in a tit-for-tat move by China for the past 16 months, the last 3 of which without consular access allegedly because of the Covid-19 pandemic: no visitors allowed.  Wrongful imprisonment at the hands of Communist authorities, with the prison lights on in their cells for 24 hours a day, accompanied by daily interrogations, may be hard to fathom, especially when Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei CFO, traipses around her Vancouver mansion encumbered only by an ankle bracelet.

    

However, ‘the two Michaels’ are not the only Canadians ever to run afoul of China’s so-called “rule of law”, where the Communist Party is accountable to no one.  We also have the example of Kevin and Julia Garratt, two missionaries who ran a coffee shop on China’s border with North Korea at the Yalu River in Dandong.  They ‘disappeared’ - she for 6 months, he for 775 days – in a chess game of sorts, after Canada accused the Chinese of hacking the National Research Council, and following the arrest of a Chinese spy by Canada at the behest of the United States.[1] The ordeal and suffering of ‘the two Garratts’ – and their devastating sense of isolation – is recounted in Two Tears on the Window, a book I recommend for anyone who wants a compelling description of psychological struggle at the hands of China’s Ministry of State Security.

The Garratts endured because of their evident faith and because of their love – and because they had each other: in their first six months, for example, when both were in isolation at the same facility, they would sometimes have the opportunity to leave messages in the snow in their all too brief outdoor exercise sessions.  But after she was released Julia remained isolated in her apartment, and Kevin continued to suffer mentally and deteriorate physically, always reinventing hope in his “black prison” – a for-profit venture, where relatives were expected to pay for inmate food expenses, none of it nutritious or palatable.  Despite the grim storyline, there are generous streaks of humour to the narrative, for instance Kevin’s exuberance upon eating the best meal of his life – airplane food – during the flight home to Canada.

If Two Tears on the Window were the only book about Canada-China relations one ever read, it would come as a surprise to learn that Chinese security forces operate in Canada, too.  A necessary corrective is Jonathan Manthorpe’s Claws of the Panda ominously subtitled: Bejing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada.  Manthorpe offers an historical perspective of our ‘missionary’ approach to China – after Canada opened up relations, for example, the first three Ambassadors to Beijing were “Mish Kids”, or the children of missionaries.[2]  Manthorpe also details how the federal Liberal Party especially is now imbedded with China interests, in multiple – and deeply concerning ways - following Pierre Trudeau’s opening of the doors (for which he was well primed) in 1972. Later Jean Chretien, who in 1994 led Team Canada to Beijing, brought China out of international purgatory following the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989.  In return Canada has received no particular favour from China as the Garratt case - and our current imbroglio - indicate.

Claws of the Panda puts an end to any romantic notions one might have had of China, as does Two Tears on the Window, though Kevin and Julian Garratt continue to think wistfully of their time there, outside of prison.  Manthorpe underscores how naïve Canadian thinking is with regards to China, and the Garretts – the endearing missionary couple who provided aid to North Korea - serve as an example of this, at least in their early years.  The Garratts began their careers in China in 1984 teaching English at its National University of Defence Technology, which does not come across as the most innocuous of institutions.  At the time they joked that they were picked because of their youth, and because they were “least likely to be spies”.[3]  After spending upwards of 30 years in the country, most-likely observed, they were in the end falsely accused of spying, a bitter irony. In Two Tears, moreover, the Tiananmen events are summed up in a single short paragraph thereby minimizing the degree of shock it induced – in China, and, of course, beyond.[4]

Despite these minor flaws, Two Tears on the Window, published in 2019, is perfect for our times because it’s a book about enforced isolation – in the most populous land in the world.  In short, it’s an intimate look at differing degrees of torture, and how one couple coped.  It comes as a something of a surprise that local lending libraries do not have copies available for the public.  The copiously detailed Claws of the Panda, also published in 2019, is flawed only because it stops too early.  It mentions the Garratt family twice, but there is no mention of ‘the two Michaels’; this would have resulted in a much longer book, given that current events were unfolding as writing was finishing.  Furthermore, it was published well before the current Covid-19 pandemic about which the best-selling Manthorpe must have volumes to say.

Manthorpe does bring to the reader’s attention, for instance, the criticism of Beijing’s official silence during the early stages of the SARS outbreak in March and April 2003.  A similar silence occurred in early 2020, with the unfortunate ophthalmologist, Dr. Li Wenliang, who was forced to confess to spreading rumours, and who later died from the coronavirus.  This time, however, there was no criticism by the World Health Organization, which also recommended that international borders remain open, thus apparently following China’s lead, something Donald Trump rejected, his only good move – driven by populist preoccupation with contamination, however - when dealing with the pandemic.  A study by the University of Southampton indicates that China could have prevented the spread of Covid-19 by 95 percent - a kind of magic number when it comes to statistics - had it acted three weeks earlier than it did, that is, around the time when Dr. Li sounded the alarm.[5]

“Check your sources” - these are remarks that frequent any number of student papers as they are graded if they present dubious arguments or infelicitous writing.  The WHO failed properly to consider its sources, otherwise known as the Chinese Communist Party, never known for transparency.   Ancient China is famous for its development of silk, tea, and gunpowder, among quite a number of other inventions; the CCP’s gift to the world is Covid-19. By the time this global pandemic becomes a spent force, President Xi could be in the positon to have outdone himself – and Mao, given the international scale of this disaster.

But as irony would have it, Trump, who is more dictatorial than democratic by instinct, also resembles Mao, particularly in his callous disregard for life, given the former’s decision to withhold funding to the WHO during a pandemic thereby valuing money over humanity.[6]   Like Trump, Mao was unmethodical in his speeches, preoccupied with his position in history, taking offence at any slight, and prone to browbeating.  So by quirk of history, as Trump engages in China-bashing with hopes of winning a second term, he is in effect battling an alter ego, that other Chairman - Mao.  Sometimes self-isolation can clear the mind.

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[1] Julia and Kevin Garratt, Two Tears on the Window: A True Story (Victoria, BC: First Choice Books, 2019), p. 189.

[2] Jonathan Manthorpe, Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada (Toronto: Cormorant Book, 2019), p. 58.

[3] Garratt, Two Tears on the Window, p. 17.

[4] Consider instead Jan Wang’s captivating memoir Out of the Blue: My Long March from Mao to Now (1996) which provides a gripping first-hand account of the Tiananmen Massacre.

[5] See, for example: “Hold China to account on COVID-19: Cotler”, The Globe and Mail, Thursday, April 16, 2020, p. A1.

[6] See Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. xv.  First published in 2010.

“21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act.” A Review in light of Wet’suwet’sen voices.

As national bestsellers go, Bob Joseph’s book, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, provides valuable context to the history of our First Nations Peoples, particularly given the current Coastal Gaslink pipeline debate – or crisis, rather - that began in northern British Columbia, and which has since spread to other parts of the country with a number of strategic rail and road blockades.  Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs oppose the project, as they lay claim to considerable swaths of unceded land through which the proposed pipeline will run, while most elected Band Councils – which are products of the Indian Act – support it.

   

21 Things, which should be read by all concerned Canadians, methodically details how the Indian Act (1876), created when Sir John A. McDonald was Prime Minister, made Indigenous Peoples (in variation of an oft-repeated phrase) “wards of the state.”[1] Moreover, the subsequent legacy of the Residential school system robbed generations of youth of their family elders, ancestral values and cultural identity, confronted as they were by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so-called denominational educators - and by high rates of death, especially from TB.

    

Echoing the conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the words of Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief of the Supreme Court of Canada, Joseph – like many today – refers to this sordid episode in Canadian history as “cultural genocide”, a term I prefer not to use.  The important memoir, The Education of Augie Merasty, for example, which gives a child’s eye view of the Residential school system, does not compare to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, or Elie Wiesel’s terror-fraught Night, and here I am in accord with Merasty’s own co-writer and editor, David Carpenter, who concedes “Augie might differ with me on this”.[2]  The sheer industrial scale and deliberate mass destruction of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazi’s who were either gassed, incinerated - and sometimes shot, when considered cost-effective - or turned into soap products, suggests that a “genocidal” approximation of these two different historical experiences – Jewish and Indigenous –  is not quite tenable.

So what do we call the Indigenous experience in Canada since the Indian Act?  An “historical wrong” is a generic term Justin Trudeau sometimes uses.  A system of “apartheid” is perhaps a more valuable and historically generalizable designation employed by Tommy Douglas when he was Premier of Saskatchewan.[3] A form of apartheid persists even today, and we can make comparisons between the Indigenous and the Palestinians, as each are in their own ways “a landless people", or deterritorialized, to use the term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since popularized by legions of admirers of the two postmodern French thinkers who wrote a number of seminal works together – one as a philosopher and the other as psychiatrist.[4]

When looking at the greater nineteenth century context, “historical error” - or, in more modern parlance: “fake history” - is a term which apparently has its rightful place according to another French thinker Ernest Renan in his classic essay of 1882, “What is a nation?”[5]  He explains that “historical enquiry brings back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origins of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally …”[6] Renan insists that “the act of forgetting … is an essential factor in the creation of a nation” and he adds that “progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality.”[7]

 

In other words, Renan might be construed as someone who – at first blush - considers Indigenous studies at our schools and universities a threat to Canadian nationhood, but his notion of such is that it presupposes “all individuals have many things in common.”[8]  He is not a racialized thinker: in fact, he considers Europe to be a thorough mix of apparent “races”, and he argues that “the primordial right of races is narrow and full of danger for true progress”.[9]  Renan also goes on to anticipate a “European confederation” in the future.[10]  But, even more significantly, Renan promotes the right of national self-determination as first proclaimed by the French Revolution with an eye to revisiting Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.  “A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle …. A nation is therefore a vast solidarity.”[11] More famously, as he puts it, a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”[12]

Even though the right to vote in the nineteenth century was restricted (only white men and those who held property or who payed taxes were eligible), the electoral principle - ostensibly a European construct, one could argue - was introduced into the Indian Act, thus disrupting existing traditional matriarchies. Not only were Indigenous lands in a number of provinces reduced to postage stamp-size reserves, the Indian Act specified that “First Nations must have an election every two years.”[13] This electoral principle (and Canadian Confederation) occurred – not by chance, I would argue - along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867 which enfranchised large numbers of the working classes in both England and Wales. Tragically, however, the right to vote beyond the reserve was not extended to all Indigenous Peoples until it was introduced by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1960, though Indigenous veterans of WWI were granted the vote in 1924.[14]

This electoral principle is still at the nub of the Wet’suwet’sen debate.  Band Chiefs, who have “status” according to the Indian Act, are elected to a limited term and support the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project.  Hereditary Chiefs, according to Bob Joseph, “have power passed down from one generation to the next along blood lines or other cultural protocols” (though in the case of the Wet’suwet’sen which of the two is not very clear), and they oppose the project because it runs through their traditional territory.[15] Josephs goes on to say – and this should be subject to further analysis - that the Hereditary Chiefs are “similar to European royalty”.[16]  Similar to European royalty when – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  Queen Victoria, as is well-known, chose the location of Canada’s capital, Ottawa; she also chose the name of New Westminster as the original capital of British Columbia, so she participated in the colonial process on one level at least.  She also enjoyed good relations with Benjamin Disraeli, so her influence was likely by means of protocol and supine deference. Overall, the British Empire represented colonial rule in the name of its monarch, which dates back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, also - and this is no coincidence - the mainspring for the Crusades which followed.

Today’s European royalty, however, are mere titular figures – constitutional symbols that have no real authority outside of ceremony.  The examples of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle suggest that pomp and circumstance are no shield from the invasive scrutiny of royals by the British popular press.  In other words, the Wet’suwet’sen Hereditary Chiefs who lay claim to an occupation of land that numbers in the thousands of years appear to exercise a kind of power that exceeds that of European royalty today, such that they can spark a national crisis – rather unlike Queen Elizabeth II whose role is to stay above the fray of politics (but who is also by no means marginalized).

European democracy advanced hand in hand with science – in particular positivism, with its focus on the observable, as found for example in Renan – in the nineteenth and later in the twentieth centuries. Central to this was the expanded electoral vote, which worked against hereditary influences in society mitigating the role of the Crown.  Today’s Supreme Court of Canada, with support from the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, indicates that there must be “nation to nation” dialogue with the First Nations. This brings us back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which indeed first articulated such a relationship between the Indigenous and “settlers”, a lapse in the longer tradition of British imperialism - later revived by the Industrial Revolution - following a costly Seven Years’ War.[17] In other words, Canadians are being held to account to an agreement when a monarchy, using its “soft power,” was apparently more inclined to recognize other hereditary chiefs, that is, when the English Crown still had a measure of influence.

  

Most of us in the modern world – with the exception of the Saudi royal family and perhaps Donald Trump's White House - have moved on from the idea of hereditary power.  Is the idea of an unlimited tenure with actual authority, or the hereditary chiefdom of the Wet’suwet’sen, consistent with Canadian democracy as we know it today? Or am I imposing my own Western values?  Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, himself, a kind of Liberal Party hereditary chief, eldest son to Pierre Trudeau?  These are questions we must ask ourselves as we – Canadians and First Nations – work towards Reconciliation, and with that in mind 21 Things is a good first step.

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[1] Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam, BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018), p. 60.

[2] David Carpenter in Joseph Auguste Merasty (with David Carpenter), The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir, ed. David Carpenter (Saskatchewan: University of Regina Press, 2015), p. xxxiv.

[3] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 45.

[4] François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives, tr.Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 258.

[5] Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? And Other Political Writings, ed. and tr. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 251.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. The full sentence reads “Now, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”

[9] Ibid., p. 254.

[10] Ibid., p. 262.

[11] Ibid., p. 251.

[12] See Ibid., pp. 261, 262  Giglioli translates these key words mundanely as “an everyday plebiscite.” Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, points out that Hobsbawm in his Nations and Nationalism since 1780 offers a superior translation: “a nation is a daily plebisicite.”  In the original French: « L’existence d’une nation est (pardonnez-moi cette métaphore) une plébiscite de tous les jours. » See Renan, Oeuvre Complètes de Ernest Renan, I, ed. Henrietta Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [nd]), pp. 904,903.  See Stefan Collini , “The Enlightened Vote,” London Review of Books Vol 41, No. 24 (19 December 2019), p. 10. Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 7. 

[13] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 109.

[14] Ibid., pp. 81, 82.

[15] Ibid., p. 109.

[16] Ibid.

[17] For some text and discussion of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 see Joseph, 21 Things, pp. 82, 83.

Native Born Son (or, arctic memoirs with a paradigm). A Book Review.

Hidden in an attic in the village of Canton, just north of Port Hope, Ontario, lay for many years the dusty journals of J. David Ford, born in the eastern arctic in 1910.  Recently discovered and edited by Marnie Bickle, a family relative, Native Born Son (2018) chronicles Ford’s youthful adventures as a member of a long line of fur traders living among the Inuit at the north end of Hudson Bay – namely Coats Island and Southampton Island. The stories include, as well, high school at St. John’s, Newfoundland, but more dramatically the journey on land, snow, ice and sometimes water to obtain foodstuffs, after the annual supply ship failed to arrive, blocked by ice, circa 1930.

Full disclosure: as it turns out, Ford was husband to my own grade 9 Geography teacher, though I did not learn this until after purchasing the book.  We all knew her as “granny Ford” (it was her last year of teaching) at Port Hope High School.  Little did we know that Ruth and David Ford corresponded with each other over the course of WWII, and upon his return from overseas - when they married and built a home together - he dealt with “shell shock” for the remainder of his life, such was the difficult transition from the arctic to the theatres of war.

But anyone wanting to discover the hardship of Canada’s nomadic north well before the era of snowmobiles and – now – climate change and would benefit from reading this book. Consider the following sample passage.

When the igloos were ready, we beat the snow from our frosted parkas and crawled in through the snow house door on hands and knees.  We felt some warmth immediately.  A caribou tallow candle was lit; then we prepared a feast of beans and pemmican made from seal and caribou meat, raisins, salt and pepper.  We had tea and bannock that had been fry-baked in seal oil.  The bannock was very easy to eat and seldom froze in spite of the -60 [degrees] F weather.[1]

Who builds igloos today?  Ford articulates how wooden structures, such as the HBC store or his home, would be completely lined with blocks of snow for insulating purposes.  Given the current melting of the permafrost, much that Ford describes in his journals has disappeared, known to perhaps a few Inuit elders today, if any.  Reading Native Born Son recovers knowledge of the past but unfortunately does not restore some of the most important elements (aside from the human) – the need for snow and ice.

The journals are lively, but at a sublime level they are also suggestive of a new (but still ancient) paradigm – one that admires (or feels closely connected to) Indigenous and Inuit ways.  Ford’s life in the arctic straddles two different cultures, but he is almost totally immersed, communicating in their language and respected by all generations. Today numbers of people want to replace the prevailing model of man’s power over nature and its resources as the accepted modus vivendi. Reading the memoir invites us to consider a more sustainable example of cohabiting with nature, valued by this growing minority to be the way of the future.  Thus, parenthetically-speaking, it should not come as a surprise, for example, that some in the Green Party now want Jody Wilson-Raybould to lead them, given that Elizabeth May has stepped down. 

This paradigm shift reflects the degree to which we have experienced (for lack of a better term) a kind of ‘Indigenous revival’ in recent years, compensation in part for Canada’s original sins at Residential Schools.  Ford himself was raised a Christian, yet he defended the Inuit absence of a religion (leading them in prayer only once when the risks faced by the group were particularly high).  In broader terms, while the Lord’s Prayer is now absent from our classroom rituals, it has been replaced by regular public acknowledgements by “settlers” gathered on unceded Indigenous territory.  Northrup Frye’s The Great Code (1982), which examined the Bible’s lasting influence on imaginative literature in the West, has been supplanted by John Ralston Saul’s work, A Fair Country (2008), which alleges that Canadians are more métis than European in origin, a questionable claim.[2]  It is worth surmising, however, that we seem to be developing a new kind of secular code, and Native Born Son belongs to the literature which unearths and esteems Indigenous ways – and European man’s cooperation with its wisdom.

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[1] J. David Ford, Native Born Son: The Journals of J. David Ford, ed. Marnie Hare Bickle (Cobourg, ON: Blue Denim Press, 2018), p. 200.

[2] See my book review of A Fair Country posted to this blog site.

The Ghost Garden: A Book Review

Schizophrenics are the least represented people on the planet, with the possible exception of lepers.  Susan Doherty’s path-breaking book The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia’s Feared and Forgotten (2019) is an excellent and compelling non-fictional narrative of the life of Caroline Evans (a pseudonym) as she battled chronic relapses of psychosis and delusional thinking throughout her adult years.  The story begins with a horrendous forensic episode, at the age of forty, when the system failed her, and how two of her sisters (of nine siblings) do the emotional heavy lifting essential to recovery, as Caroline eventually comes to terms with the debilitating disease and learns to love herself again.   Interspersed throughout the main narrative are vignettes of other individuals – each trying to cope with schizophrenia in their own way – whom Susan Doherty befriends while volunteering at the wards of Montreal’s Douglas Institute.

While most reviews of The Ghost Garden are glowing, Anne Thériault’s comments in Quill & Quire are unjustifiably dismissive “as passing along second- or third-hand information”.  Centred on herself, Thériault writes: “many people living with mental illness write clearly and compellingly about their experiences,” while ignoring the fact that schizophrenics tend not to publish.  Schizophrenics either lack the motivation or are incapable of expressing themselves clearly in written form, with some exceptions.  Even Caroline, now in her sixties, owing to cognitive impairment following repeat psychoses, is unable to read her gift copy of The Ghost Garden.  The reviewer for Quill & Quire underestimates the totalizing severity of the schizophrenic condition, which makes The Ghost Garden all the more valuable to the general public, as it opens up eyes and is full of empathy.

The Ghost Garden sustains itself throughout by means of personal stories and gritty detail, but the concluding chapter (“Sixty Thoughts”) comes across as anti-climactic, and perhaps is less informative for those already familiar with the problems associated with schizophrenia.  Still, there are gems, for example the line: “Suffering is universal, a natural and essential aspect of the human experience.  Without suffering there is no benchmark for joy.”[1]  Elsewhere Doherty writes: “I have not yet met a person with schizophrenia who has managed to quit smoking” (while this author knows those who are non-smokers), which goes to suggest the degree to which her friends are seriously and chronically ill.[2]  Doherty leaves the reader with three central thoughts: schizophrenics (as do we all) need purpose, communication, and love. She expresses the latter again admirably well: “To love and be loved is an irreducible need.  Without it we ache, we hurt others, we fall ill.  Loving another person means we belong.”[3] The Ghost Garden is a book to be treasured, and every stage in Caroline’s life – as well as in Doherty’s other friends – is something from which we can all learn.

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[1] Susan Doherty, The Ghost Garden: Inside the Lives of Schizophrenia’s Feared and Forgotten (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019), p. 330.

[2] Ibid., p. 189.

[3] Ibid., p. 178.

Welcome to Everytown - A Brexit Comment

Julian Baggini has written an original work, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (2007).  Formally trained with a doctorate in philosophy, he chose to set up shop for six months in Rotherham, Yorkshire, judged by him as the typical community in England by virtue of its postal code, in order to live in immersion among its residents (many of whom he later identifies as friends). On a steady diet of the two main tabloids (Daily Mail and Sun), he finds England’s core culture to be fundamentally working class, whose game is football - not cricket (no surprise here), and where “tolerance” of different minorities is considered the only option available.[1]

Baggini (who was born in England to an Italian father) already thinks of himself as an outsider, and he gets to the heart of English difficulties with multiculturalism in his excellent chapter “Culture Shocks,” important reading if one wants to understand the mind of the typical Brexit voter.  My only concern (as the author readily admits) is that he might be accused of being an “apologist” for the intolerance he encounters.[2]

 

The next chapter, “Illiberal Democrats” looks at Rotherham’s communitarianism (the most polysyllabic word you will find in the book) which, as the author simplifies, is a philosophic anti-abstraction combining attenuated rights with local responsibilities.[3]  If this definition is still unclear to the reader, allow Baggini’s discussion of the remainder of his stay in Rotherham to convey an underappreciated way of political thinking in England - often considered the fountainhead of liberalism instead because of its so-called traditional freedoms.

There is much more wonderful analysis of working life available to the everyday reader in Welcome to Everytown, including chapters on gambling, holidaymaking, and the proverbial English pub.  Overall it seems reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) which, as that novel’s title suggests, depicted the social differences between the gentrified South and commercialized North in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.

 

Given England’s past “greatness” – memories of Empire, and all that - one might see its current Brexit predicament as the culmination of the logic of postcolonialism, as Scotland and Northern Ireland now might have motive to leave the United Kingdom.  How could such blundering come to pass?  One might begin modestly by peering into the minds of Englishmen north of the metropolis of London, as Baginni so eloquently does in the microcosm of Rotherham, well before the fact.

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[1] Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (London: Granta Books, 2008), p.72.

[2] Ibid., p. 57.

[3] Ibid., p. 83.

The People vs. Democracy: A Comment.

Yascha Mounk, lecturer at Harvard University, has written and interesting book: The People vs. Democracy.  He argues that liberal democracy as we know it – the world over – is cleaving into illiberal democracies run by populists and undemocratic liberalism as represented by ‘elites’ in the EU, for example.  On the whole Mounk does a more effective job with the former as opposed to the latter, which he sometimes has difficulty pinning down, partly because the term liberalism can mean a great deal of different things to many people.[1]

Closely analyzed is the rise of social media, the problem of economic stagnation, and questions of identity in the face of increased levels of immigration, all of which contribute to the populist phenomena.  Along the way Mounk acknowledges a number of historical gems: not only were women and slaves discounted as citizens of Athens but immigrants and their children were as well.  This meant that even individuals such as Aristotle were prevented from full participation in city-state affairs.[2]  In other words, democracy – despite its decomposition into the demos (people) and kratia (rule) - for most of its history has been rather limited.

 

He also points out that democracy flourished in Europe only after it was ethnically cleansed by World War II.  Today’s loss of homogeneity means that older citizens – pensioners, for example, who voted for Britain’s Brexit - are indeed confronting (and retreating from) much more equal and diverse politics.  But Mounk also warns that millennials (those born after 1980) tend to increasingly express appreciation for strongman politics, for example in the USA, but this trend can also be found in Germany, France and Britain.[3]

The People vs. Democracy is an important book because it approaches populist demagoguery as a global problem – not merely a Trump phenomenon, and it is bold enough offer insightful solutions.  One annoying feature of the text is that the language is very plain – almost as if one were reading from a college textbook.  Perhaps the rise of social media means that even works from Harvard need to be boiled down to their simpler elements.  The chapter on “Renewing Civic Faith” is particularly rewarding, and I encourage all to read it, while supplementing it with some of your own rhetorical flourishes.

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[1] See, for example, Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 243.

[2] Ibid., p. 162.

[3] Ibid., pp. 109-111.

Flanagan's "Game Theory and Canadian Politics"

The blueprint for today’s Conservative Party can be found in Tom Flanagan’s work Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998).  The discovery that Harper’s erstwhile mentor has written a book on Game Theory - not a very interesting one, mind you (a selective read is recommended) - makes the evidence of the proverbial smoking gun become clear. Game Theory explains the so-called Fair Elections Act.

This blog first broached Game Theory in my review of Lawrence Martin’s Harperland, and I returned to the matter more philosophically with my discussion of “Harper and Hobbes”. Rather than repeat myself excessively I invite the reader to consult the aforementioned entries, but allow me to point out that Game Theory began  in 1944 with the publication of The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, the joint work of John von Neumann (a mathematical genius) and Oskar Morgenstern (an economist).  It was also later developed by Princeton’s John Nash (“A Beautiful Mind”), for which he won a Nobel Prize.

Stephen Harper would have encountered Game Theory in his study of economics, and this fact has been missed by his many observers – and critics.  Game Theory is also rooted in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, particularly his Leviathan (1651), published in the wake of England’s Puritan Revolution – and the execution of King Charles I in 1649.  Central to both Hobbes and Game Theory is what Flanagan describes as its “Methodological Individualism” which is inherent in “Rational Choice”: “… rational choice is sceptical about speaking of vague aggregates such as ‘society’ or ‘the nation’ because such terms are often used to disguise very real differences among the people who make up the collectivity.”[1]  Game theory argues from the premise of “rational actors seeking to maximize their own self interest”[2] (two questionable assumptions, indeed), and Flanagan twists himself into knots (indicating shallow imagination) over the altruism of Mother Teresa.

According to Game Theory there is essentially nothing but rational self-interest, a rather paranoid vision of the world, which helps to explain Harper’s penchant for secrecy (and John Nash’s bout with schizophrenia).  Game theory also argues that is rational not to cooperate, which implies – logically speaking, of course - that a Game Theorist would never trust his or her Doctor, who must have an ulterior motive.  True to form, Game Theory flouts public health concerns and gives legitimacy to those who avoid vaccinations, dubiously described by Flanagan as “a rational exercise in pursuit of self-interest.”[3]  Apparently Flanagan – and Game Theory - forget David Hume’s famous contention in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”[4]

As discussed, Game Theory also has no sense of collective values: Medicare can be privatized and the CBC slashed, raising the question of what is Canada, outside of Harper’s symbolic esteem for the military and (of course) the “cult” surrounding our Prime Minister’s excessive “leadership” (thus tearing a page from Hobbes’s Leviathan).  Because Game Theorists have no sense of the public, how is it that the “Harper Government” deigns to speak in terms of elected “public service” – surely a relic from a bygone age.  Conservative “parliamentarians” are actually living a public lie at the public’s expense by acting only in their self-interest: hence the so-called Fair Elections Act.

It is important to note that Pierre Poilievre, the Democratic Reform Minister who is responsible for the “Fair” Election agenda, attacks our Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand in vitriolic terms derived from Flanagan’s book: “he wants more power, a bigger budget and less accountability” as quoted by the Globe and Mail in their record eighth editorial opposing the Fair Elections Act.[5]  Compare this with Flanagan’s text who writes in his conclusion of Game Theory and Canadian Politics: “Nevertheless, the evidence of self- interest is all around us … [for example] public servants seeking bigger budgets and career advancement.”[6] In other words, Poilievre’s speech writers are dipping into Flanagan to justify their case.

Meanwhile Flanagan laments in his forthcoming book Persona Non Grata that Harper is “Nixonian” and treats people as “disposable”, surely one of the hazards of Game Theory when only the “individual” counts – society be damned.[7]  Allow me to recommend by way of conclusion some folk wisdom, which comes from an observation of nature (Game Theory is also big in biology today): a tree does not grow in solitude; trees need other trees around them to survive and flourish.  In other words, we as people cannot thrive as self-interested individuals alone, a fact which indicates that the asocial and atomized model behind Game Theory as it applies to Canadian politics should be jettisoned lest it poison the public any further.

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[1] Thomas Flanagan, Game Theory and Canadian Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 5.

[2] Ibid., p. 164.

[3] Ibid., p. 73.

[4] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest G. Mossner (Toronto: Penguin, 1985), p. 462 (Book II, Section 3 “Of the influencing motives of the will.”)

[5]  Globe and Mail, “If only evidence could vote,” Saturday April 12, 2014, p. F9.

[6]  Flanagan, Game Theory and Canadian Politics, p. 164.

[7]  Globe and Mail, Thursday April 10, pp.A1,A4.