Heighton, Steven. Every Lost Country. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010

Every Lost Country contains a parable that illustrates the classic “what would you do if . . .” dilemma as it relates to the pacifist's stance. In the story, a Bodhisatva (Buddhist 'enlightened being') finds himself in a boat with a number of sleeping innocents and a serial killer. Fearing harm to the innocents, he engages in debate with the killer hoping to dissuade him from doing what he has been known to do. The killer, however, insists that his nature demands that he do what he does, and takes out a knife. The question is: What does the Bodhisatva do? Does he say, “If you must kill, take me,” which would leave the innocents both helpless and vulnerable, or does he think of another action, given his moral aversion to harming another life?

            We are high in the Himalayas in Every Lost Country, where a party including a “Doctor Without Borders” veteran is preparing to launch an historic assault on Kyatruk, the second highest peak in the range after Everest. Kyatruk happens to be in Nepal but adjacent to the border with Chinese-occupied Tibet. In part because of the doctor's insistence on helping a group of Tibetan refugees being pursued by Chinese militia as they attempt to escape into Nepal and another of the party's members foolish attempt to film the event, half of the party ends up arrested and in a jail deep in Chinese-occupied Tibet.

            There follow parallel subplots, one of an obsessive adventurer seeking to be the first to conquer Kyatruk, the other involving the doctor, his daughter, the photojournalist and a group of Tibetan nationalists trying to make their way back to Nepal after a break from prison in China. Both are harrowing ordeals: the mountains swirling with storms, the thin atmosphere that debilitates the body and scrambles the mind, the likelihood of imminent death and—probably the most poignant—the desires of the self in opposition to the hunger for the other.

            It's a dense novel and a gripping tale as stories of people struggling on the knife edge of survival often are. What Heighton achieves that many don't, however, is the delicate balance between plot and character that prevents the story line from overwhelming inner dynamics. If anything, there are too many characters with too many conflicting impulses for one story, the doctor's struggle between his Hippocratic obligations and his personal need for both physical and emotional survival being only one. It's hard to do justice to a dozen characters in one 300-page novel. I found as I read that there were just too many Tibetan and Nepalese names for me to keep track of who was who without back-checking. Like foreign faces, foreign names tend to look more similar to each other than we're accustomed to when close to home.

            (I'm having a problem writing this paragraph) I've sometimes said that for a creation to qualify as art it must meet two requirements: it must appeal dramatically to the sensory region of the viewer's consciousness (who needs to experience touch-taste-smell-visual-auditory sensations almost as if it were a first-person experience) and it must change the viewer forever, hopefully for the better.  Every Lost Country passes this test for me; I found myself, for instance, pulling an afghan over my knees when I accompanied the climbers up into the death zone near the summit of Kyatruk. As to the second criterion, I have brushed shoulders with a man who must answer the “what would you do if . . .?” dilemma and made the decision I never hope I have to make.

            The Bodhisatva in the boat disarms the serial killer, stabs him with his own knife and throws him overboard.

            What would I do . . . if ?

           

The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind; Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion: New York, Pantheon Books, 2012

Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party, Conservatives, New Democrats, Liberals, Anglicans, Mennonites, Mormons . . . the list of groups into which we’ve divided ourselves could fill this page, if not an entire book. Coexistence of unlike-minded groupings is—as a general rule—not a problem but a listen to question period in the Canadian House of Commons, news of the bloody uprising in Syria or rancorous politics in the USA, an historical survey of the splitting-up of church denominations over a variety of issues through the centuries all remind us that there are times and occasions when coexisting groups easily become conflicting groups.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. (A great introduction to Haidt’s thinking on the psychology of morality can be found by clicking here: Jonathan Haidt TED address)

In The Righteous Mind, Haidt concerns himself primarily with the liberal/conservative divide in our view of the world and are essential moral stances. His analysis rests on a number of assumptions, and I’d like to summarize the book by focusing on these:

1)      Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Based on a variety of (mostly university-based) studies, Haidt begins with the assumption that we don’t find our way to a particular moral stance through logic, but through a more intuitive route. He uses the imagery of an elephant and its rider, where the elephant is intuition and the rider is reason. In practice, the elephant is the first to lean this way or that, to choose a course left or right. The rider’s role is not so much to steer the elephant as it is to justify the elephant’s choices.

“Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that makes people behave ethically after they step out of the classroom. Classes are for riders, and riders are just going to use their new knowledge to serve their elephants more effectively (p. 90).”

2)      The human mind at birth is not a blank slate as regards moral thinking. Just as an infant seems prepared at birth to learn language, it comes prepared to learn to distinguish between harm and care, to recognize sanctity, to incorporate fairness principles, etc. A year-old bird builds a nest in the exact manner that her parents built the one in which the bird was hatched . . . without ever having been instructed in (let alone without ever having observed) nest-building technique.

3)      With time, the growing-up environment produces a “morality matrix” in us. Haidt’s central thesis revolves around the existence of liberal and conservative matrices, how they develop, how they differ and why both are legitimate, although different.

4)      There are at least five major components of any moral matrix: Harm/Care, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation. Individual morality results from the emphasis or de-emphasis of one or more of these components: liberal morality results from the emphasis of Harm/Care and Fairness/Cheating while conservative morality emphasises the other three above the first two.

This is simplified, but if it turns out to be a viable set of assumptions, the implications become obvious. Unless one insists that one matrix is wrong and the other right, they should help us to see members of other groups in a new light; they are what they are for very good reasons and in the end—because we have developed successful, multi-group societies—it may well be that like Yin and Yang, the differences are conducive to balance and progress. In other words, it’s right that the Conservatives under Stephen Harper exist, because without them, our culture would over-emphasize social welfare and neglect the appropriate emphases on loyalty and patriotism, respect for authority and the sacred aspects of being.

Haidt visualizes human moral behaviour as 90% chimp and 10% bee. Depending on our moral matrix, the independent, whatever-is-good-for-number-one part (the chimp; chimps demonstrate very little empathy or altruistic behaviour) or the all-for-one & one-for-all part will come to the fore in approximately the proportion of 9 to 1. Without putting too much faith in the proportions, it seems about right that we concern ourselves with our personal interests most of the time, but can be moved through circumstances to become hive dwellers. People who dedicate themselves to “green issues,” like Greenpeace, for instance, have “hived” in order to do together what can’t be done individually.

Hives are typically in competition with other hives. The application of this can lead us to a number of observations, including how one gets strangers to come together and form a “hive” in order to fight a war: marching and uniforms play a role for certain.

At the centre of The Righteous Mind is the persuasive argument that a conservative, libertarian or liberal outlook is neither wrong nor right, but that both are natural developments in individuals and in the cultures to which they belong. As a consequence of failing to credit this, we often do the exact wrong thing when conflict threatens a desired unity. Haidt closes his book with an admonition that seems a bit naïve, but may just sum up the “right” way to be with each other:

“We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult—but not impossible—to connect with those who live in other matrices, which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations.

“So the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality or in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest (p. 318).”

For some of us, the calling in life may be to be vocally liberal, to stand ready to ensure that the poor are fed, the ill are given medical care, the rich made to pay their fair share, etc. For conservatives, the calling may be equally strong to ensure that individualism and the emphasis on individual human rights never reaches a degree that makes us unable to cooperate when cooperation is essential. And for libertarians, the calling may be to hold up the possibility that there may be times and situations in which governments should butt out and leave matters to unfold through the ebb and flow of independent initiative.

What is certain in Canada today is that we could use a reality check; our current government finds it really hard to cooperate with the Opposition, so much so that parliament is repeatedly held in contempt. The Opposition, for its part, would do well to take Haidt’s advice and stop loading their questions to the government with pejoratives that simply serve to heighten the animosity and make cooperation impossible.

Killing Enmity - a reflection

Yoder Neufeld, Thomas R. Killing Enmity: Violence and the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011

If the civil war in Syria is violent, and belittling a spouse in public is violent, then the very word must accommodate an enormously broad definition. Yoder Neufeld begins his study of violence in the New Testament with the Oxford English Dictionary definition, which emphasizes deliberate harm or injury to persons or property. Citing other references, he broadens the definition. Robert McAfee Brown, for instance, sees violence as any “violation of personhood (2),” and Jacques Ellul includes any act by which a superior “ . . . inculcates submission and a servile attitude in another (3).”

            Words are slippery entities and I generally object to beginning a discussion with a definition for that reason, particularly in the case of a catch-all nominative like violence. Although I can barely imagine a conversation between Jacques Ellul and Don Cherry, I think the attempt would prove the point that words are clouds, not points.

            Having been raised in a non-violent culture that expressed its belief in Jesus' example by eschewing physical violence while practising all sorts of passive aggression, I've come to appreciate the broadening of thinking—as well as the definition—when we talk about violence. I grew up thinking that passive aggression was acceptable and became an expert in its application: “just don't hit people!” It was primarily through a university education and experiences as a teacher that I began to see that the violence cloud is mighty large compared to my childhood, childish conceptions.

            But enough about me.

            Killing Enmity takes its title from a verse in Ephesians 2:16. It's a delightful piece of irony, the killing of enmity, as if the road to Kingdom relationships among people can only be won through pitched battle, as in Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to war. It leads to a conundrum among all who have taken the non-violent or the pacifist stance: if one refuses to be aggressive on the side of combat, can one learn to be aggressive in the pursuit of peace? For me, this lies at the crux of the discussion of violence and peace-making today, as well as forming the backbone of any contemplation of the Bible as authoritative on the subject.

            I don't know how often I've heard pitched confusion in people's voices about Old Testament violence, the genocides in Joshua for instance. It leads logically to questions concerning the identity of the God of Jesus versus the God of Joshua, and that not unexpectedly. The conquest of Canaan by the Children of Israel was exceedingly violent, no matter how you define the word and for many, the whole witness of the Bible is cast into doubt by that and other events that defy a non-violent interpretation.

            Many have also ascribed such a record to its belonging to an “Old” Testament, and declare that Jesus' witness in the “New” Testament supersedes it with a message of peace, hope and redemption. I think that N.T. Wright would rather say, “The advice you gave the grandfather is foolishly given to the grandson,” or words to that effect. (See my review of Scripture and the Authority of God previous to this.) Yoder Neufeld makes it clear that this “Old” vs. “New” distinction doesn't absolve us of work on the subject; the New Testament is rife with acts and implications of violence, including the entire range from the torture and crucifixion of Christ to the implied violence in its apocalyptic imagery, the lake of fire and all that.

            And so he sets to work.

            Yoder Neufeld begins with a look at passages most often cited as supporting a pacifist position: if a soldier commandeers you to carry his coat one mile, carry it two, and, if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other as well. The interpretation of these and similar passages is most often something like, “even if violence is practised against you, you are not to respond in kind.” An eleventh commandment, if you will. Yoder Neufeld sees it in a little different light, not as a “cow-towing” but as a courageous and determined stand in opposition to the violent option. “. . . Jesus can be seen as once again 'intensifying' Torah in the direction it was already pointing, namely, to break an otherwise endless cycle of retaliatory violence (22).” This conclusion must be mitigated—he cautions—by OT passages that advocate revenge as a cleansing, although limited to the talion, the equivalency restriction.

            Yoder Neufeld emphasizes how context makes a difference in interpretation (24): if a right-handed person strikes you on the right cheek, the blow has to be backhanded, symbolic of contempt for an inferior. To turn the left cheek is a challenge to the offender to see you as an equal, but with an enormously different intent than would be modelled by a retaliatory blow. The “mini-parable” of the turning of the other cheek might be understood either as advocating a suffering in silence—almost a self-flagellation by proxy—or as a courageous act of anti-violence. The difference has enormous implications for the way peace-making is practised. Killing Enmity is aptly titled; if God's will is understood to be the redemption of creation, the “salvation” of the cheek-striker is implicit in the mini-parable, the person struck the active, courageous instrument for the opening of the offender's eyes.

            Among many enigmatic encounters of Jesus with his culture and religion, the cleansing of the temple—as we've come to know it—sticks out like a sore thumb. For the Prince of Peace to wield a whip against people and animals as it's described in the gospels comes as a shock when it's the same Jesus who chastises Peter later for taking out his sword against the officers come to arrest him. I've never been able to visualize the act of cleansing clearly; the temple was a huge place and the tables of the money changers and dealers in sacrificial animals would have to have been numerous. The vision of a Galilean driving them and all their goods out seems ludicrous, something like a farmer from Consort, Alberta driving all the horses, booth operators, barkers, etc., out of Calgary at Stampede time. I'm guessing the indignant farmer would be jumped and hustled out of there before you could say, “git along, little dogie!”

            Yoder Neufeld quotes theologian John Howard Yoder: Ever since the early Christian centuries, the whip in the temple has been considered the one act in the life of Jesus which could be appealed to as precedent for the Christian's violence (60). Yoder Neufeld suggests that since John's description of the cleansing is quite different from that in the synoptic gospels, consideration of its symbolic, as opposed to its historical, intent is justified. And isn't this true of much of what we see recorded in the Bible; the story of Jonah and the Whale, of Noah's Ark, of the creation accounts in Genesis seem to take on much deeper meaning allegorically-read than debated as historical—yes or no?

            What has this to do with killing enmity? Yoder Neufeld writes about the cleansing of the temple as an act of prophesy, a one-time drama to underline the gravity of a concept, in this case that underlying all of a God-fearing ethic is a profound respect for God the creator and God the redeemer, the desecration of the temple by commerce representing symbolically the most fundamental of errors plaguing the culture of the time, namely the displacement of a love for the one true God with systems of economic injustice characterized by the accumulation of wealth in the temple establishment (63). In any case, we've no way of knowing—as Yoder Neufeld points out—how violent the historical event was, whether or not Jesus actually whipped money changers and hurt them (did he apologize after he cooled down? one wonders); what we do know is what is undoubtedly symbolized by the temple cleansing; the thinness of the line between stone idols and the idolatry of economic exploitation is not to be missed.

            I've used the temple cleansing and the “turn the other cheek” chapters as examples. Yoder Neufeld also deals, for instance, with the “household code,” a phrase with which I was unfamiliar although I knew well Paul's description of the preferred relationship between husband and wife in Ephesians 5: 22 – 6: 4. Dominance/submission is considered by many to be an environment for the breeding of violence, if not violence itself, and I can't count the number of times I've been involved in discussions around the relative weight of the code in modern times. Just recently, a man lamented to me how that we were allowing women to usurp the pulpit; he ended his diatribe with reference to Sodom and Gomorrah!

            And, of course, a look at violence in the New Testament can't gloss over the gut-wrenching imagery of John's apocalyptic vision in Revelation. There is far too much in the chapter, “Divine warfare in the New Testament” to allow me to do it any kind of justice here, but to whet the appetite I quote (133) Yoder Neufeld's challenge to today's reader of John's Apocalypse:

[Reading the Apocalypse] to signal that the ultimate war has been waged and won in and through the suffering of the slain Lamb clearly renders it anti-violent. But such a reading requires of readers a nimble facility to read against the grain of inherited interpretation and against the surface meaning of the text.

There are still plenty of examples around us of evangelism that uses clumsy, surface reading of Revelation (as opposed to Yoder Neufeld's “nimble facility”) to “scare the hell out of people.” Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins series, Left Behind, comes to mind although this may have been a case of capitalizing-on-a-human-fetish as opposed to evangelism—commerce in the temple, as it were.

            Tom Yoder Neufeld was my pastor for three years and has been a true friend for going on thirty-five plus years now. That's why this is a reflection and not a review; I am not qualified to judge his scholarship, nor would I want to if I could. I think I would recommend careful study of Killing Enmity in any case; my copy is dog-eared, replete with underlining and marginal comments by now, and I thank Tom for two things: having “donated” the mountain of time and energy required to write down the material for me to ponder, and having written it in a style and with the necessary care that makes a great essay even better.

            Tom Yoder Neufeld is not only a master of his subject, he is also an adept in the English language. This combination is rare enough to make Killing Enmity an experience to be savoured.

           

           

           

Scripture and the Authority of God - N.T. Wright

Wright, N.T., Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. New York: Harper Collins, 2011

“They (current books of Biblical scholarship) indicate that there is today a lively and serious engagement with the whole question of what scripture is, how to read it with cultural and intellectual alertness and integrity, and how to enable it to be what it ought to be in the life and mission of the church.” (19)

I was twelve or so. My brothers, cousins and I were crossing the pasture on a Sunday afternoon, jostling, jabbering and generally trying to fill a boring afternoon with something, anything that wasn't nothing. As we walked, my brother, Bob, stuck out his foot and tripped me, landing me in a cow pie. “You **** fool!” I yelled as I picked myself up and hurled myself at him.

            My uncle was a minister; his children had heard a lot of scripture. “It says in the Bible that if you call your brother a fool, you'll go to hell,” cousin Abe taunted.

            Cow shit washes off in no time; that particular taunt had a smell that lingered through the rest of my green years. So much for cultural and intellectual alertness and integrity.

            “Non-scholarly” Christians might be forgiven for despairing that if God inspired scriptures for the guidance and edification of his people, He might have done it in a less puzzling way, a way that doesn't require centuries of scholarship to unpack its apparent riddles and enigmas. (Not to mention the knitted brows of lay persons trying to grasp the scholarship.)

            The problem of how to read the Bible arises in part because the written word is by its nature, static. “It is written,” after all. Oral traditions seem less static, they enjoy the benefit of greater flexibility, a likelihood of adaptation to suit changing cultures and times, different ways of telling the stories by different story tellers. I'm reminded that the record of the Ten Commandments was written in stone, apparently required to be so by the writers of Exodus in order to emphasize their immutable nature. That made sense in a nomadic people trying to establish and maintain a distinct identity among alien, “pagan” peoples, but there is a price to pay for writing your words in stone.

            Does Wright's book help us along the road to benefiting from scripture in a world where it often seems outdated and stale, almost irrelevant? Apropos to the current climate around Bible as authoritative, Wright bemoans the splits among Christians we characteristically give names to like fundamentalist, liberal, conservative, literalist, etc. I find it helpful to consider the possibility that we might someday stop the endless abuse of the Bible on all sides, the selective use or rejection of portions that support or don’t support our worldview. That could be helpful, if impossible, given our natures.

            And is it useful to list from A – L the misreadings of the “Right,” and from A – L, the misreadings of the “Left?” I find it interesting that the “Left” and the “Right” have exactly the same number of ways of botching the reading of the Bible. For example, “B” in the “Right Misreadings” list is the folly of “The explicitly materialist ‘prosperity gospel’ understanding of Biblical promises.’ (108)” Lefties, on the other hand, make the error of “[claiming] that modern history or science has either ‘disproved the Bible’ or made some of its central claims redundant, undesirable or unbelievable (109).” My church has adopted a document that similarly lists Bible reading dos and don’ts, and calls the two lists “paths” and “ditches,” i.e. the positive practices to keep in mind and the negative practices to avoid. Lists are generally notorious over-simplifiers of situations, partly because they have the appearance of being complete when they can’t possibly be, and because the relative weight of the items in the list appears the same even if it isn’t.

            There are things in Wright’s book that will help some Christians to understand in part how the changing interpretations of scriptures have come about historically. The progression of thinking from medieval times through the Enlightenment to Post Modernity is helpful, as is Wright’s suggestion that we give credence to a “Five-Act Model.” The latter proposes that Biblical history be viewed as one would view a five-act play, with each act being discrete and distinct, yet integral to the whole. The five acts are: creation, “fall”, Israel, Jesus and the church. The New Testament is Act 4, leading into Act 5 in which we find ourselves today. Reading the Bible as a one-act play may lead to “over-reading,” so that we feel compelled, for instance, to replicate the Sabbath of Act 1 in Act V.  

Those who live in this fifth act have an ambiguous relationship with the four previous acts, not because they are being disloyal to them but precisely because they are being loyal to them as part of the story . . . we must act in the appropriate manner for this moment in the story . . . a moment where genuinely new things can and do happen (123).

            Wright ends with two case studies, namely Sabbath and Monogamy. He illustrates in Chapters 9 & 10 the progression through the acts of the play that sees strict seventh-day laws in Act 3 leading to accusations that Jesus was breaking the Sabbath in Act 4 to present day “Sunday shopping.” The last chapter illustrates that the fact of Solomon’s many wives (Act 3) is not indicative for Act 4, nor should it be considered to be in Act 5.

            I also learned a new word in Chapter 9: adiaphoron: "something over which one should not divide the church." I don’t expect it to slip into coffee conversation on Monday, but I do wonder if the issues that are “hot” these days, like gays as church members, should be treated as adiaphoron.

            Wright helped me think about this in a new way.

            Scripture and the Authority of God is not a big book at 195 pages and it is a “Revised and Expanded Edition of The Last Word” of 2005. On the whole, it probably serves best as a primer of current Bible scholarship for lay persons; it seems much too cursory for more and I found myself wishing that Wright had not used the “much too big a topic to be covered in this volume” excuse quite so often, particularly when I had questions for which I craved answers.

            I close with a quote (13) that may make novice seekers in the field of hermeneutics uneasy, but which anyone who reads extensively already knows:

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretive strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one’s presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

Amen to that, brother. Amen to that. 

         My slip in the cow pasture may not have consigned me to hell after all; that language clearly belongs to another act of the story!

The Spirit Level - Can't get level!

Wilkinson, R & Pickett, K., The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. London; Penguin Books, 2009

A man visits his doctor in the hope that a cure for his headaches may be found.  “Every time it rains, I get this ringing in my ears followed by a raging headache, doc. Unless you can make it stop raining, you’ll just have to prescribe me a pill!”
    The doctor—ever the skeptic about self-diagnoses, as doctors tend to be—prescribes a pill and the man goes home . . . in the rain. As he walks through the front door, his wife greets him with “How many years am I gonna have to wait for you to fix the leak in the roof??” and she conks him on the head with a frying pan . . . again.
    Question is: What really caused the man’s headache? Was it the rain, a physically aggressive wife, his procrastination? Or can it all be blamed on parents who didn’t raise their kids properly?
    The thesis in The Spirit Level is that the spread of means among citizens in a country is a factor in all sorts of social ills, regardless of that country's real wealth or lack thereof. But like the man with the headache, it’s incumbent that cause and effect be established beyond a reasonable doubt or someone is bound to say, “How do you know it’s not the high crime rate that’s causing inequality and not the other way ‘round?” Or, “How do you know that a third factor is not causing both the inequality of means AND the high crime rate?”
    Sometimes identifying the real relationship between a cause and its effect is easy: the man’s headache certainly didn’t cause the rain. At other times, it’s not all that clear.
    You might well scoff if someone were to tell you that, “All penguins walk single-file . . . at least the two I saw did!” How many times would you have to observe penguins walking single-file to establish a principle of behaviour? Ten? Hundred? Thousand?  And if they only walked single file 5 times out of 10, would there be a useful observation to be made there?
    Wilkinson and Pickett are fully conscious of the problems of demonstrating cause and effect, particularly on a subject like Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better—the subtitle of the book. Their basic method is this: using the relevant research gathered from around the world, they plot the equality/inequality factor on the X axis of a scatter graph and the incidence of a certain social ill (murder rate per 1 million, incidence of teenage pregnancies, for instance) on the Y axis. Then they get their computer to draw a straight line through the “averages” and by the gradient of the slope, the relationship between the two factors is revealed. Needless to say, everything from drug use to obesity to social mobility/immobility is clearly demonstrated by the research to bear a statistical relationship to inequality/equality that goes well beyond a reasonable doubt.   
    The USA is the most unequal country in the world on Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s X axes; Japan one of the most equal. The USA experiences 63 murders per I million population annually, Japan only 5.
    Clearly, none of the correlations are one to one. “Health and social problems” tend to increase quite strongly with inequality, but that obviously doesn’t mean that egalitarian societies don’t have any such problems. Imagine the difference it would make to health care, though, if the incidence of such problems were reduced by even 10%. What is also evident is that countries don't necessarily show the same social responses to economic equality/inequality, and so the graphs show a lot of what could be called “outliers,” countries that might be predicted to have high drug use rates, for instance, but don't.  The reader might find the presence of so many “outliers” disconcerting even though the trend indicators can hardly be doubted.
      If the relationship between equality and inequality were one to one, it would follow that poor countries or communities could be happier places than richer places . . . if everyone were similarly endowed with worldly goods. It would also follow that wealthy countries with great inequality would find social dysfunction reaching toward plague proportions.
    The question, “what can be done about it?” follows naturally. Here The Spirit Level definitely needs a sequel. Reference is made to the escalating, exorbitant salaries being paid to management, for instance, and a revisit of the tax system, minimum wages, employment insurance, social assistance programs, etc., is a no-brainer; these income-adjusting measures always need to be tailored to changing conditions.
    Seems to me, though, that nothing short of a new philosophy of nationhood will do, a philosophy that begins and ends with the premise that we all benefit when we are relieved of the burden of social stratification.  This notion, of course, swims upstream as it has always done. The long and the short of it is that equality of means will never come to be under an unregulated market economy, and our 2008 experience of the financial meltdown in the USA and the current economic woes in Europe have proven to be ineffective in advancing the social democratic option . . . so far.
    The solution to much of what ails us lies in moving from growth to steady-state economies, but a quote from Herman Daly hints at the difficulty in moving in that direction:

Capitalism can no more be “persuaded” to limit growth than a human being can be “persuaded” to stop breathing (220).

On the same subject, the authors quote Henry Wallich, former governor of the Federal Reserve and professor of economics at Yale:

Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable (221).

Why this is so may not be obvious, but it may well be as simple as the observation that we are made to want the things people with greater means have:

The growth of inequality made it harder for people to maintain standards relative to others. The increased pressure to consume led people to save less and borrow more to such an extent that the expansion of consumer demand became one of the main drivers of the long economic boom and financial speculation which ended in crisis (223).

Inequality drives up consumption and with it, debt. Both are symptoms of the rising inequality in developed countries, both phenomena have increased lock-step with the escalation of inequality. Both have made the climate change and national debt issues almost impossible to address reasonably.
    The final chapter deals with the future. The authors point out that there is a pervasive mythology out there that says public enterprise is inefficient and private enterprise is therefore the way to go. In the USA, public utilities produce product for consumers at an average of 11% less than corporate enterprises (245). Cooperatives and companies in which the workers own the bulk of the shares are doing very well, thank you, and are acting as good examples of ways to reduce inequality.
    So much is left to be talked about. Government policy is, of course, key to the inequality/equality question. In Canada today, this question is not on the agenda, at least not in the nation or in Saskatchewan where I live. Economic growth is being held up as the primary measure of success by both the Harper and the Wall governments. I recently attended a conference with delegates from across the country; the Saskatchewan boom entered the conversation and I pointed out that the optimism about our boom wasn't equally shared, that for the bulk of the population, it just meant that housing was now less affordable while incomes were remaining static. Municipal taxes are rising faster than the inflation rate because increased population is straining infrastructures.
    The corporate world is booming, no doubt about it, but the obvious downsides are the stubbornness about environmental concerns and the tendency to balance budgets by reining in social programs.
    Recipes for increasing inequality.

Wake up, Citizens! Ye have Slept Long Enough

Saul, John Ralston, The Unconscious Civilization. Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1995
 
“The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such a denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good. Corporatism is an ideology which claims rationality as its central quality. The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t (2).”
 
John Ralston Saul’s book is a late-teenager by now, but his take on the roads that governance and corporatism are taking us down is probably more relevant now than it was in 1995. That road—according to Ralston Saul—is a garden path. At stake is no less than the gradual disenfranchisement of the citizens of Western democracies. For power to be acceptable, it must have behind it clear legitimacy; in a truly democratic country power is legitimized by the citizens. In Western democracies today, power is legitimized by groups operating outside the direct influence of the citizens, hence the contention that our society is becoming more and more corporatist, less and less democratic.
 
Corporatism: noun, the control of a state or organization by large interest groups. (Concise Oxford English Dictionary) An example of corporatism at work, in Ralston Saul’s view, is the failure by President Clinton to reform the health care system in the USA, a promise on which he was elected. It was corporatist interests and the technocrats negotiating with each other that put the kybosh on the citizens’ wish to have a better system. That’s how corporatism delegitimizes citizens. More recently, we’ve seen how Obama has struggled against vested interest to bring about reform in the same area, and at this writing, it’s not clear how far corporate interest groups will allow change to happen. 

We could find numerous examples closer to home. I give you one. The last election in Canada was precipitated by a clear decision by the speaker of the House of Commons and the opposition that the Harper government was guilty of contempt of parliament. Most recently, the same government—this time with a 39% majority—has rammed through a myriad of laws and amendments to laws via a massive omnibus bill, deliberately preventing a whole host of measures from being subjected to proper public scrutiny. Such contempt of parliament is tantamount to contempt for the electorate. Many of the laws and amendments clearly pander to multinational corporate interests: the relaxing of environmental standards, for instance. Decision making consists of an ideologically-based government negotiating with entrenched interest groups, particularly those that favour the political stripe of the day.
 
Ralston Saul is blunt: “The result has been a remarkable growth in the lobbying industry, which has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. That is, lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people’s representatives and servants away from the public good (93).” The debacle of the F-38s is a current example: the ministry of defense was so badly bamboozled by the military establishment (interest group) and the aviation industry (interest groups) that poor Peter McKay simply had no coherent defense for his “corruption” by the lobbyists and technocrats! On another issue, we know which interest groups want a pipeline from the oil sands at Fort McMurray to Kitimat; we know what efforts the Harper government is making to smooth the way for that. They are clearly on the corporatist side here, the dramatic symbol of that being the shutting down of citizen opposition, this time as a “budgetary measure” embedded in the omnibus bill.
 
Ralston Saul quotes Scottish Philosopher David Hume writing way back in the mid-18th Century: “'It is easy for the rich, in an arbitrary government, to conspire against [the middle class], and to throw the whole burthen of the taxes on their shoulders (143).’” We have seen how easily the Canadian population accepted the incremental reduction in corporate taxes in the recent past. We have also seen how willingly Western governments have bailed out corporations that are failing, inevitably through their own folly and greed. Who will bear these costs in the end? (No need to answer; that was a rhetorical question.)
 
There’s a great deal more to consider in a book on such a broad subject. Citizens rendered passive by the domination of the elite in a society is not the whole story. Life consists of more than the economy: education, health, stimulation, shelter, food, employment, career, clean air and water, beauty and art, etc., etc. “The world is so full of a number of things/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in A Child’s Garden of Verses.” With so much to experience and enjoy, a citizenry is easily lulled into giving up its rightful role in its governance. Most of the people I talk to on a regular basis see the Occupy Movement, the Montreal student demonstrations and other such street actions as either unjustified, stupid, or both. Few see such actions as citizens trying to claim back their legitimate say in how they are governed. That old saw—people inevitably get the government they deserve—is relevant here; I think Ralston Saul would agree.
 
How do we get back to the place where our government is again legitimized by the citizenry, where corporatist power is checked by the will of the people, where governments again hold us in the respect that we deserve? Ralston Saul suggests what to many of us has been obvious for years: education must again teach children and youth to be citizens before lulling them into becoming life-long functionaries in a corporate world. Beginning with the industrial revolution, corporatist interests have sought to mechanize humans, to make them pliable and compliant modules on production lines, in offices and oil fields, in factories and warehouses. Our great sin was to allow this to happen, to think of ourselves as mechanistic functionaries.
 
John Ralston Saul demonstrates the kind of balance he urges on society in his writing. His illustrations go back to Socrates and Plato, to the literature of Shakespeare, to the careful analysis of the work of Adam Smith (which current economists have bastardized to fit their particular, managerial interests). In this eclectic approach, the reader senses that the running of our national household is not just about the economy, but that ultimately we must be governed with a view to the broad scope of life on the planet, stretching back into our history and forward into the future.
 
Only we as citizens can legitimize the choices that are made for our benefit; we must not abrogate this responsibility.

Richler, Noah, What We Talk About When We Talk About War. Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2012

Let’s get the down sides of Richler’s book out of the way first. They aren’t many.
   First, I can’t help wishing that Richler had had an editor who—and Goose Lane Editions should find such fine tuning routine—could visualize how long sentences (and there are many) with too many parenthetical insertions—like this one—are unnecessary, confusing and impediments to the message—which, in this case, is an important one. 
   Secondly, Richler seems to feel that an argument is strengthened by its length and the number of times it’s repeated. This is a 100-page book bulked up quite unnecessarily to 362 pages.
So much for the down side.  
   Richler effectively argues that there’s a serious dichotomy between dominant Canadian values and the current language, priorities and directions in the Harper government, particularly as they relate to the military establishment. His metaphor for this schism compares the epic in literature with the novel. Epics have heroes, rely on good vs. evil distinctions and picture the world as black and white. Novels develop more liberally; they see good and evil as present in all humanity and don’t insist that the ending be a clear victory of good over evil, with us being good and them evil. 
   More understandable to many readers will be his characterization of Canada as a humanist, peacemaking culture with compassion for all the world’s people and a desire to be helpful and giving. Through the period of the war in Afghanistan, however, our government has worked hard at remolding us as a “war-making country,” able to be a formidable combat force alongside the big boys.
   Richler traces the government, military and media push in the direction of war-fighting at length. Beginning with Harper’s contention that Canada would be unrecognizable when he was done, he endlessly quotes right wing commentary by Jack Granatstein (author of Who Killed the Canadian Military); Gen. Rick Hillier (former Chief of Land Staff), and Christie Blatchford (National Post columnist and author of Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army). By the time you’re done with War, you might well think of these three as Richler’s Antichrists! Their denigration of peacekeeping along with their eulogizing of Canada’s combat work in Afghanistan supports well the contention that the Harper government and its supporters have been working hard to cast the country in a more “epic” vision of itself and the world. 

Policies of “war-fighting” rather than peace operations; of smaller alliances with like-minded states rather than entangling ones under the aegis of the UN oriented toward some vague, quasi-utopian future; of tighter immigration and greater demands made of newcomers seeking Canadian citizenship than those made by the gatekeepers of the previous, more open society in which merely alighting in Canada was enough, became in less than a decade the underpinnings of a more monolithic version of the country (p. 256). [Readers may have to read that run-on sentence a few times to comprehend it.]

    Little of this comes as news to anyone who’s been paying attention. The ceremony around fallen combat soldiers (while muting the deaths of peacekeepers), the grandiose projections of 400 billion + to be spent on the military over the next 20 years (that’s roughly $800 per year for every man, woman and child in Canada), the fighter jet issue, the Royal put back into the forces’ names, these are only a few of the signs along the way.
   Richler spends some ink on the subject of goals in Afghanistan and how they’ve shifted over the last decade from being a good ally to our friend, post 9/11 USA, to saving Afghanistan from the Taliban, to bringing democracy, to building schools for girls, all meant to support the contention that what we were up to in that country was a kind of “peace-making, nation-building” exercise. The goals have been wishy-washy in the extreme; the groping for palatable purposes difficult under the circumstances. The result has been disheartening for the war makers; as a war it cannot be won since the Taliban are Afghans and will be Afghans even after all NATO forces are gone. In the official language, it began as a “mission” when that was convenient, became a “war” in the middle and now again has become a “mission,” precisely because as a war, pulling out makes no sense when the situation on the ground is as unresolved as it is.
    Richler ends with a chapter called, “What is to be Done?” In it, he proposes that the military must again reflect the values of the people, which in Canada are predominantly humanistic, compassionate and only mildly nationalistic compared to the current vision. He suggests that we go back to being the best peacemakers and peacekeepers in the world and that we establish an institution dedicated to training peacekeeping, peacemaking young Canadians fora new branch of the military to this end. It’s an intriguing thought, that we would be the providers of corps of Canadians expert in the field of negotiation, human rights and all those other skills that a helping and open people rely on when at their best.
    I am an admirer of Stephen Lewis and the work in which he engages, and so his endorsement on the cover of What We Talk About When We Talk About War carries weight for me: “A book of enormous erudition. I am stunned by Richler’s courage and insight.”
    The subject is pertinent. Almost accidentally, we’ve given majority government to a party that is out of step with its citizens, that has goals in mind for the military, industry and the natural world that are anathema to a growing number of citizens. We all need to read and discuss Richler’s take on this phenomenon reflected in military language; there are changes going on that will take a great deal of effort and courage to undo when we finally turf the right wing ideologues out of office.

George Epp
07/06/2012