Originally written Monday, March 07, 2005

So, What Should Canada’s Priorities Be?

I received some interesting feedback to my post entitled “Consequences” last week, which pointed out that Canada ought to be fulfilling an active and meaningful role in the world instead of just reacting to the United States. niallking asked “when was the last time that Canada did anything of consequence in the international sphere?” and said that Canada, while a member of the G7, is “far from the 7th most active country in taking active roles in solving international crisis”. alevo agreed and said that “taking an active role in the world doesn’t mean giving up independence, but it does mean crafting a coherent strategy”.

The “anybody-but-Bush” strategy failed for John Kerry in his bid to win the presidency. I think an “anything-but-America” strategy will likely fail for Canada too, and it certainly won’t be good for relations with the US. But what exactly should our role be in regards to the United States? In a Toronto Star article, Rick Anderson addresses our relationship with the US by saying we need to decide what is important to us, like:

Open and fair trade, where disputes are more quickly and fairly resolved; a healthy partnership in North American security (the continental approach that outgoing U.S. ambassador Paul Cellucci advocated, only to be cold-shouldered by Jean Chrétien); collaborative forays in selected areas of international affairs, such as spreading freedom and democracy, peacekeeping; modernizing multilateral institutions (the U.N., NATO, G7, G20); countering terror; fighting HIV-AIDS and helping Africa develop.

The problem with this list of issues is that it seems, in good part, to be dictated by the issues that are most important to the US. Sure, “open and fair trade” connects to mad cow and softwood lumber, but it also meshes nicely with US desires, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Or how about “spreading freedom and democracy”, a phrase pulled word-for-word from Bush’s last State of the Union address. Anyone care to join the US in the next Iraq?

Given our unique and dire planetary circumstances and the central role the US plays in them, the stakes are high. That’s why I think Canada needs to adopt a strategy that helps us – all of us, not just Canadians – pull out of the mess we’re in. This is going to mean countering a good many US policies, simply because of their destructive nature. I think the best way of doing that is to lead by example. If we politely decline to participate in any US idea that is bad for the planet, even if it might be good for us in the short term (e.g. BMD), and pursue policies that are beneficial to the planet and to Canadian citizens, we can provide an example to our neighbour down south that it is possible to be internationally helpful, environmentally sound, and socially just, and make it work.

This means putting money into domestic policies that make us better – education, environmental protection, health care, research and development – and cooperating with other countries to pursue international policy achievements. We’ve already started by ratifying the Kyoto Treaty, and now we need to show the US that it can work and it can make life better for Canadians. Similarly, if there are international efforts led by other countries underway to resolve disputes diplomatically instead of by force – the efforts of France, Germany and Britain to negotiate with Iran over nuclear development, for example – we ought to lend a hand.

By acting internationally but with a global conscience and by acting domestically with a Canadian conscience, we can turn Canada into an example of what is possible when the politics of fear and profit are discarded. That’s what real international leadership is all about.

Comment from Alevo:

Agreed. It is much more consequential to disagree with someone in principle when you also have an alternative. To simply disagree is, well, simple.

Niallking:

I support free trade in almost all forms (even FTAA), and I don’t think that anyone has the right to block 3rd world laborers from competing in the labour market.

Of course, I do not support exploitation either, but suggesting that corporations should be blocked from starting operations in South America because they [i]might[/i] exploit the workers serves no ones interest except the North American unions (who conveniently cloak their true motives as civil rights values).

It is also incredibly naive to assume that there is anyway to develop the economies of 3rd world countries without the participation of the worlds largest employers. Of course, many will argue that the wages paid in those markets are inherently exploitational (by western standards), but that is the reality of supply and demand. Self sustaining economies can not be built with handouts (look at Russia); the only way to develop the wealth of 3rd world countries is to allow them to compete in the world market whereever they can (i.e. cheap labour).

It is my opinion that the majority of the left should focus their influence on finding ways to encourage corporations to take a more constructive role in the development of the countries they enter, rather than stonewalling, and blacklisting, any that attempt to do business there. Ultimately, the left are doing as much damage (if not more) to the economies of South America as the capitalists are.

Alevo:

Let me get this straight. In your opinion niallking it is the duty of the political left to encourage constructive corporatism; blocking exploitive labour practices in South America benefits no one but North American unions. Where would you ascribe some degree of corporate resposibilty? Is development at any consequence acceptable for you? Let me pose that another way: if the Canadian government developed a pilot program to have the sewing of Canadian flags done by the Innu at Natuashish for 1/100th of minimum wage – you would say: “I have no problem with that, it is naive to assume they could be helped otherwise. I blame Jack Layton and Buzz Hargrove.”

Niallking:

Firstly, in order to put your question in the correct context, one would have to assume that no one else was willing to employ the Innu – or they would not accept the jobs period.

In that situation there are two possible outcomes/analogies:

1) The Canadian government recieves such bad publicity (spread by Jack and Buzz) from the ‘flag affair’ that it pulls out of Natuashish leaving them with no jobs at all. Futhermore, the government cancels an initiative to open up the Natuashish market to private sector development destroying any hope of other employers entering the market in the near future. This assumes that most Canadian don’t consider the Innu as their responsibility – similar to the attitude of the rest of the world towards South America.

2) The Canadian government is pressured by the people to increase wages; which it does only to the point that the cost benefits of flag sewing in Natuashish remain profitable. Other employers note that it is possible to run a successful manufacturing business in the region, and industries develop. Competition for the Innu labour market rises (as well as wages) and the region is eventually on the path to 2nd world status.

Unfortunately, the attitudes of many leaf leaners towards trade with South America falls in-line with the blindingly myopic ‘corporations are evil – block them in everything they do’ chorus that seems more inclined to produce outcome one than outcome two.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Religion is something that has affected me a great deal in my life. I was raised in a very religious family – more accurately, I was raised by very religious parents. They follow a conservative, traditionalist version of Protestantism generally called “Calvinism”, and believe that all Biblical accounts are literally true – for example, they believe that the universe was formed in seven days, that Adam was created first and Eve was created from his rib bone, that “the flood” actually occurred and submerged the entire earth in water, etc.

From a religious perspective, my parents, although they carefully instructed me in religious matters, taught me the “truth” as they saw it, took me to church and even sent me to a private Christian school, made one major mistake: from the beginning, they encouraged me to read, to seek out knowledge and information, and to think for myself.

I don’t think they ever intended that I would read what I ended up reading (science, mostly) or that I would analyze the religion they taught the same way I analyzed everything else. This might seem surprising (why wouldn’t they expect that?) but it’s really not. They believe what they believe so strongly, in the same way the American Declaration of Independence is phrased – “We hold these truths to be self-evident” – that I think they were caught unawares when as a young adolescent I vigorously questioned everything that until then I had accepted. After all, they believed so strongly that they would not even acknowledge logical fallacies like circular reasoning in my arguments with them, a reasoning they fell back on again and again, saying that “the Bible is true because it says it is true”.

Religions are specifically designed to grip people’s minds this way. In an essay called “Viruses of the Mind”, the author, scientist and famed atheist Richard Dawkins points out that religions share characteristics that help perpetuate the religion and minimize criticism: “[a] deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason…[what we call] faith”, “a positive virtue of faith’s being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based upon evidence” and “the conviction that ‘mystery’, per se, is a good thing”.

Looking at Christianity in particular (simply because I am most familiar with it, I am sure all religions have their own examples), this is quite evident. Faith is defined in the Bible as the “assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen”. Doubt and skepticism, which I view as valuable traits, are not acceptable, as the story of Doubting Thomas makes clear. It is important to religion that its adherents believe unquestioningly, for the most basic reason of all: self-perpetuation. In this respect, religions are similar to self-perpetuating corporations and other “entities”, a concept I unfruitfully tried to flesh out in a previous blog post.

Because religions are based on belief, they perpetuate and grow by causing others to believe. This is accomplished in various ways. Evangelism is one important method, especially for religions that are trying to grow in regions previously closed to them, the way that Islam and Christianity are growing in China, for example. The other major way they grow is the way that failed on me, which is that parents teach their children to believe. This works more often than not, I think. What’s interesting about this is that it illustrates why people hold the beliefs they do. My parents have stated that they believe what they do because it is (I will paraphrase) the “best” religion, the “only truthful” religion, God’s “true word”, the “only religion based on God’s works and not man’s works”, etc. In fact, the truth is they believe what they believe because that is what their parents believed and taught them, just like that is true for most religious people in the world.

If a single religion were the truth, then the followers of that religion ought to feel comfortable with presenting their children with various belief options: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. and then letting their child choose which seems best. Religions don’t spread like that, however. Children (and adults for that matter) will only believe something if we tell them it’s true, or if they see it for themselves (impossible in this case).

A religious person might counter what I’ve written by asking if I’m an atheist (which I am) and then saying that a belief that there is no God is no less a faith, devoid of evidence, than their religious belief. They would be correct if that’s what being an atheist meant. In fact, although denying the existence of God makes one an atheist, lacking belief in God (or a god, or gods) also makes one an atheist. If the hypothetical child in the previous paragraph were to decline to make a choice at all, they would be an atheist. I fit into this latter category.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that atheists are doing a very good job at encouraging people to critically examine their beliefs. I say “unfortunately” because I think the problems that are either rooted in or related to religion – with its emphasis on unquestioning belief – are worldwide and undeniable. And though I think that the positive role that religion plays in many people’s lives is also undeniable, I think that positive contribution is seriously compromised by the fact it comes from “a conviction of things not seen”, i.e. it lacks evidence or to be even harsher, is based on untruths. I think an alternative life system (I say “life system” because it would not need to be based on belief), based on evidence and not on faith, that underlines the truly amazing fact of our existence and the awe-inspiring truth of our universe, could be an equally positive force in people’s lives, with the major benefit of being based on the truth.

Comment from Alevo:

You tread on dangerous metaphysical ground here. I am actually surprised how loosely you throw around the concept of truth – you put alot of “faith” in “evidence.” Care to comment.

Ade:

Dangerous ground, sure, but I don’t believe I’m loosely throwing around the truth. To me, there can only be one truth, and that which is opposed to that truth must be false. Because religions have opposing and contradictory viewpoints (e.g. Jesus Christ vs. Mohammed, to be flippant), yet each claims to be exclusively true, either only one is true and all the others are false (undemonstrated, at the least), or they are all false. I think trendy concepts like “different truths for different people”, i.e. believe what you want, lack intellectual rigor. The belief in some tribes that the moon is a god is not equally as true as the “belief” that the moon is a satellite orbiting the earth – one is true and one is not, one is based on evidence and the other is based on belief. The one that is based on evidence enabled humanity to put a person there.

I have no faith in that which has no evidence. I accept that metaphysical meanderings like the possibility we are figments of some creature’s imagination may also be true, but since we have no way of determining that, and since there are better and simpler explanations – e.g. what we see and experience is real – I’m not sure they’re worth living by.

Iliafer:

I too require evidence. To my knowledge, there has not been any solid proof, to date, which demonstrates that the Bible and its stories are in fact true. Now, some “biblical artifacts” have been unearthed, and provide some shaky evidence to support the validity of the Bible, but to there has never been any evidence unearthed which would unequivocally prove that the Bible is not some fake story.

I agree with Adrian, in that most religions seem to have arisen out of necessity, in times when we knew very little about the world we lived in. Religion provides a set of life-rules that help to create a more peaceful living situation. Religion is also a means of control.

Bottom line: I can only have “faith” in what I can see, hear, smell, taste or feel. These are the senses which I use to understand the world around me, to make sense of it. If physical proof of a God can be demonstrated, then I would be open to its faith. Simple belief in something that cannot be proved to me…I just can’t see myself devoting so much of my time and energy to an idea, much less go to war with someone else over it.

Ade:

Iliafer, re. “I can only have “faith” in what I can see, hear, smell, taste or feel”, I know what you mean, but you’ve opened yourself up to criticism in terms of other phenomena you probably believe in but can’t detect with your own senses, but that nonetheless have a large body of evidence to support them (magnetism, for example, although the effects of that are obvious. There are other phenomena that make this “point” better but I can’t think of them off-hand). I do know what you mean and agree with you, however.

Iliafer:

Well, I knew someone would say that. In response, the instruments that we use to detect these things are like extensions of our own senses. Many are built upon the physical/biochemical basis of our own senses. For that reason, and because there is a body of evidence supporting their authenticity, I do trust that what they are detecting is an extension (albeit huge) of my own senses.

Alevo:

Ade – you answered me by saying that you weren’t throwing around “the” truth. I questioned your use of the concept. Perhaps this is where we would differ on the subject – I would say truth is relative, subjective even. (read: your different truths for different folks) Evidently, your thinking is more influenced by absolutist religiosity than you admit; since you are perfectly comfrotable suggesting absolute truth exists – further that you can prove it. I can almost smell the Christian hegemony. I mean, if it reasons like a pope . . . it must be a . . .

Ade:

Excellent response, and it made me laugh – I almost spilled my holy water.

I don’t think I am as absolutist or rigid about the “truth” as you might think, or perhaps as what I wrote suggests. I agree that to a certain extent “truth” is indeed relative or subjective, but I would place that more in the realm of the individual, in terms of how we view the world, how we experience things, and so on. I do believe, however, that there is “truth” that is universal, that must be if we are to even be able to communicate with each other. For example, I accept and will defend the “truth” that you exist, for which I have a great deal of evidence, including my wounded pride.

It could be said, then, that since God is an individual experience, that the truth of God may lie in the individual and is therefore relative or subjective to that person. Except that religions do not claim God as a purely individual experience, but rather as a universal, absolute truth that must be accepted in the same way that I accept your existence, or the fact that I see snow on the ground outside my window. Religions are quite clear on that matter, and are also quite clear in saying that other religions are incorrect, even to the point of following them being a guarantee of eternal damnation. Viewed as a whole, then, “religion” is not even logically consistent. I realize that some religions have been modernizing and are more flexible on these matters, with even the Pope making helpful comments about other religions being different paths to the same goal, etc., but I think that’s just the Catholic church grasping at relevance as it is pummeled by science, the growth of Islam and lawsuits for sex abuse.

On the other hand, there are those who are not religious but are “spiritual”, but those beliefs are such a mixed bag I don’t think they can be examined this way, and the concept is flexible enough that I could put myself in this category even as an atheist.

Pontiff out.

Originally written Monday, February 14, 2005

On the weekend, I watched a small part of a speech by Ronald Wright, the author of A Short History of Progress, a book that’s been recommended to me here and that I would really like to read. What I saw of his speech was interesting. He was talking about predictions – some intentionally satirical predictions he had made in a book written years ago that actually came true – and some predictions made by various people (futurists, scientists) and groups (like the Pentagon) for the future.

As we are accustomed to hearing, the predictions were frightening. The Pentagon (“hardly a group of hippie tree-huggers” as he said) predicting worldwide chaos, war, and environmental destruction if the more severe predictions for climate change come true. Other predictions dealt with the consequences of war, pollution, overpopulation and the “onslaught of progress”. He also talked about how this is the century where we have to get it right, that this could be the last century where we have the chance to turn things around. I think he’s right about that.

Unfortunately, the task is monumental and it’s getting harder every day. In fact, instead of things getting better, things are actually getting worse, quicker and quicker by the day. Instead of having a global leader intent on improving our world, we have America intent on driving us to the very bottom as quickly as possible. Instead of the world getting cleaner and more sustainable, we are polluting more and more each day. Instead of more social justice, things are becoming more unequal and more unjust each day.

For centuries, humanity has been hearing warnings of the end of the world (or more accurately, the end of us, which to humans is the same thing). We’re used to proving the doomsayers wrong, even when our escape from doom is “more luck than judgement”, as Wright called our avoidance of nuclear disaster during the Cold War. In spite of previous escapes, there is a certain line in our future that, once crossed, will stop us from ever turning back. Our fate will be sealed. The frightening part is that we will not know when we have crossed that line, and we may have crossed it already.

We have already experienced tremendous loss, and we lose more each day, but we feel immune to it, so powerful is our self-deception. If we were a sane society, we would be in mourning right now. We lose millions of each other each year for no good reason, through war, hunger and disease. We lose priceless links with our past as we carelessly destroy artefacts, languages and cultures – a painful loss, because what we are really losing are other ways of being, living and understanding, ways that might be superior to what we have now. We lose species each day, slamming the door shut on millions of years of slow and painful evolutionary development. We lose the contribution of human intelligence and ingenuity, contributions perhaps essential to our survival, as millions of children are born each year mentally underdeveloped because of malnutrition, with millions more unable to apply themselves because of their poverty.

If we keep losing like this, at some point we will have lost.

Comment from Alevo:

I went to his first of Wright’s several Massey lectures this fall. I believe the subtitle for his series was: every time we ignore the lessons of history the price goes up. His talk definitely gave cause to wonder, suggesting that for centuries technology has been viewed as humanity’s salvation from behavior counterintuitive to survival. If things go wrong – we can invent technology to fix it. If extinction is on the horizon – we’ll drum up some solution. However, we may have very well crossed a threshold. Our Western cultural narrative is too replete with stories resolved in the nick of time. It will be our own undoing. How thoroughly ironic.

Friday, January 28, 2005

I read an article today about Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where some 1.1 to 1.3 million Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and others were murdered. The article had had a part that I thought very insightful:

At the height of the Nazi implementation of assembly line killing, 381,661 Hungarian Jews arrived over the two months to the end of June 1944, with another 18,000 from other countries. The number murdered is beyond comprehension, for in appraisal of human life the greatest number with meaning is one, then one, then one again.

It’s the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the numbers of dead keep rolling across the headlines. Some hundred thousands killed by the tsunami, another hundred thousand by the American military, still more by preventable starvation and disease. But the number with greatest meaning, as the author quoted above reminds us, is one…then one…then one again.

Originally written Thursday, January 27, 2005

It makes me sick, it really does. I watched the coronation of Bush a few days ago. I saw parts of his appalling speech, the speech so focused on “freedom” and “liberty” it never mentioned “war” or “Iraq”. I got to see the nauseating Laura Bush, all dressed up right down to the white gloves, making the University of Texas hand sign (the same sign you would make if you were in the habit of yelling “Rock on, dude!” – you know the one I mean) as though the ceremony was just another giant frat party and Laura was looking forward to pleasuring the rest of the football team. I heard about the millions of dollars spent on inaugural balls and celebrations, while Iraqis and Americans kept dying in Iraq and hundreds of thousands died in South-East Asia.

I could have puked.

I got to see the media fall over themselves in a self-congratulatory slop of grinning, joyous cheerleading as they “covered” the coronation. I had the displeasure of noticing the utter lack of coverage of the numerous protests taking place in DC that day. Democracy Now reported the next day on the usual disgusting habits of those whose profession we dishonour by calling them “journalists” – Fox News who reported that only a few dozen people showed up at a protest organized by ANSWER, with the New York Times reporting the next day that thousands had shown up; CNN’s relentlessly superficial Wolf Blitzer who described the protestors as “angry, angry people” and deliberately tried to downplay their significance, saying “We don’t want to make too much of the protesters, because we don’t know how many there were. Certainly, the nature of this business, the nature of television, we could over-exaggerate based on the images, and they might just be a tiny, tiny overall number.”

Hand me my friggin Gravol.

The Plague is back everybody, but this time it isn’t Black, it’s White, Corporate and Military. It’s a spreading sickness of violence, greed, a total disregard for truth and justice and an endless stream of propaganda. It’s a sickness spread as effectively as if America were stuffing the germ-ridden corpses of the Bush family into catapults and launching them across the globe like filthy squishy ICBMs. Put your SARS masks back on people, because America the Model Society of Freedom and Liberty is spreading like an avian flu that jumped from chickenhawk to Condoleeza Rice. Get the shovels out too, because we’re going to need to bury all the voters who will soon enjoy Bush’s promised era of freedom and liberty.

It makes me sick, it really does.