It was nice in Toronto yesterday

© 2009, John FitzGerald

Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair

In 2000 the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 best American film comedies of the twentieth century, and Roger Ebert immediately and rightly questioned the Institute's failure to include any of the work of the Three Stooges. The reason the Stooges were left off the list, of course, is that their work is a telling critique of the values of the far less talented stooges who make up the film industry.

The film industry is a stronghold of the religion of success, which at the moment is the central myth of North American society. The religion of success replaced the Puritan ethic, which required people to believe in a God who would reward them for their hard work. As belief in God withered away, belief in the divine power of the successful took its place.

Just inside the door of every one of the schools we go to as children is a shrine to success – the trophy case. We are taught that if we just want something intensely enough we will achieve it – we are, supposedly, gods in ourselves, who can make the world do our bidding! As adults many of us pay good money to attend seminars where motivational speakers tell us exactly the same thing. The rest of us end up surrounded by success junkies.

The Stooges, of course, are classic success junkies. They really believe that they can succeed at whatever occupation they take up – physician, scientist, policeman, soldier, boxer, golfer, salesman, and on and on. They try really hard to succeed, even running considerable risk of injury.

And they fail. They fail spectacularly. By the end of the movie usually they're either in flight or engaged in combat with their social betters using baked goods as weapons. They relentlessly expose the sham that is the myth of success.

If you know nothing about plumbing, for example, it doesn't matter how hard you try to fix the plumbing at the mansion you've been summoned to – you're not going to end up fixing the plumbing. Ending up in a food fight with a lot of toffs in evening dress is logically a much more likely outcome in those circumstances.

Among the sane, the Stooges are admired for their exposure of the myth of success. The belief that desire can compensate for lack of skill is hilarious, and the Stooges make that blissfully obvious. The film industry types who make up the American Film Institute, though, worship success. After all, who could be proud of having a success with a giant steaming load of crap like the average Hollywood movie if they did not believe that success was meritorious in itself?

So the Stooges didn't make the list. If the people had chosen the list, though, the Stooges would have been at the top. And, in their way, the successful have contrived their own tribute to the Stooges. Having fought their way to the corridors of power, they have contrived a society which is indistinguishable from the lads' own creation. Larry, Moe, Shemp, Curly, Joe, and Curly Joe – we all salute you.

Look on Their Works Ye Mighty, and Despair © John FitzGerald, 2000, 2003
For Earth Day reading we recommend the piece we published for Earth Hour.

Four short pieces

1. WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN

Christianity imposes on believers two impossible duties. First, one is required to accept doctrine which cannot be justified logically or empirically, such as the various doctrines about Christ's nature. Even if one attempts to devise one's own Christianity from reading the Bible one is still forced to accept doctrine for insufficient reasons. Why should one not covet? Well, God says so. So why should we do what God says? Well, read the Bible. Why should we believe the Bible? Because it's God's word. Oh.

The second impossible duty is you've got to be good. You've got to give your goods to the poor, man. Well, really. Now we all know that that would be better but, hey,...I'm not gonna. What have the poor ever done for me, anyway, besides let me be rich?

2. THE RELIGION OF SUCCESS

A popular contemporary belief is that the world may be mastered by hard work and planning. To be successful, the story goes, all you have to do is plan to be successful and then persevere till you are. The enormous body of popular writing about success identifies it with money and possessions. Many success gurus describe money as a scorecard that lets you know you're successful.

Hard work and sound planning may help substantially in becoming successful, but they are neither sufficient for the achievement of success nor necessary. Luck is sufficient, and opportunity is necessary, but the success gurus never mention opportunity except as something which may be unerringly tracked down by the astute believer, and mention luck as infrequently as possible, and then only as something which can be easily overcome. The existence of luck is to the religion of success what the existence of evil is to Christianity – a phenomenon which preachers find most convenient when kept as far as possible from the layperson's consciousness.

One of the political implications of these ideas is that the poor and the failed are the authors of their own misfortunes. In fact, the more one is successful, the less opportunity others have to become successful themselves, but that fact is clearly heretical, just as the idea that the earth revolves around the sun used to be.

What is surprising, though, is that in a society so extensively educated, beliefs so patently irrational and futile as those of the success zealots should be so widely held.

But then our system of education is principally the creature of the religion of success. One goes to school not to improve one's understanding of the world, but to make "something" of oneself. Something. Anything.

3. EDUCATION

Most people seem to think that the schools should be preparing students for jobs. Supposedly the high schools should be able to assign students to appropriate courses of training, even though the jobs at which the students will eventually work may not exist yet. I entered high school in 1961. No one could have advised me in grade 9 to train to be a systems analyst. Thank God.

4. MONEY AND POWER

Orwell observed that the political ideas of the bourgeois of his day (they called them bourgeois back then) were the ideas of a class which had never held power. Today's popular ideas about success are similarly the ideas of people who have been trained to ignore or deny the existence of power. The devotee of the religion of success will vehemently argue that we all have equal opportunity – equal opportunity, that is, to think success is the ability to buy even more of the products that our masters want to sell us. An ability which one person's success must deny to others, regardless of how much the successful person thinks they should be able to make something of themselves, too.

In theory any American woman can become president, but in practice none of them do.

Mr. FitzGerald is available to address your church or school group. His Topics include:

• Dodgeball as a Model of Society
  
• Become Successful While You Sleep!
  
• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Sex with Lots of Models in the Back of my Escalade!

Four Short Pieces © John FitzGerald, 2006

Theo-corporatism

One of the advantages of Western civilization has been that it has had competing centres of power. Church and state have been competing for power for centuries, so that neither has been able to impose its will on society. That gave Westerners the opportunity to develop a quality which is highly prized today – diversity. In particular, Western society developed diversity of thought and diversity of action, two types of diversity which encourage innovation, invention, and improvement.

These days, though, government and religion seem to be heading toward a reconciliation. Religious groups are being treated as if they have legitimate claims on society as a whole. The most striking example recently [Editor’s note: This article was first published in 2006.] has of course been the worldwide protests against the publication of caricatures of Mohammed by an obscure newspaper in Denmark. One government after another has said that it deplored the violence of the protests, but that it also deplored the offence which had been given to Islam by the cartoons. This approach neatly placed irreligious cartoonists on the same moral plane as religious arsonists, bombers, and murderers – You think the killing of all those Christians in Pakistan was bad? What about those awful cartoons!

The new Canadian government wants to hold a vote on whether to restore the traditional definition of marriage to replace the definition currently in effect which allows people of the same sex to marry. The so-called traditional definition of marriage, however, turns out to bear a strong resemblance to the predominant Christian one. The traditional views of the non-Christian members of our diverse society will not be presented as options. And for sure the Mormons needn't hold their breaths thinking their traditional definition is going to be legitimated.

The problem is that political parties have done so well in gutting the political philosophies they supposedly represent of any distinctive meaning that they can no longer count on voters inspired by the same principles as they to support them. In Canada the supposedly socialist party now devotes itself to proportional representation rather than to economics. The supposedly conservative party is still trying to patch together a compromise position on what conservative principles are that will satisfy both the factions which recently patched themselves together into a single party, and the supposedly liberal party tried to inspire the populace during the recent election campaign by claiming the leader of the conservatives was a secret American agent. Any comprehensive analysis of society that can withstand intelligent questioning for longer than ten seconds is beyond all of them.

So not for them any ringing declarations of the priority of freedom of expression over the violent propensities of the faithful. Not for them a declaration that the civil definition of marriage is something different from the religious one. Not for them a further change in the definition of marriage to assert the primacy of civil marriage over marriages performed by clerics.

Instead, political parties have started trying to co-opt the inspirational power of non-political ideologies – environmentalism, feminism, religion. Of these the most dangerous is religion. Environmentalism and feminism are, whether you agree with them or not, characteristically reasonable. Their tenets are expressed in ways which can be tested. Religion, however, brooks no testing. Its tenets are not descriptions of the world but arbitrary assertions about it which the religious refuse to modify. The religious deal with the resulting inadequacy of these tenets to account for what happens in the world by attributing their failure to the actions of enemies – Satan, liberals, Danish cartoonists.

The extent of the danger can be seen in the current plight of the Republican Party of the United States. From one point of view, the Republicans have done well from their courting of the religious. They have a stranglehold on the federal government.

From the point of view of the United States as a whole, though, the deal looks less desirable. The religious faction in the Republican Party tends to come from the Word Faith branch ofevangelicalism, a branch that holds views that are highly compatible with making unsubstantiated claims about the threat posed by Iraq – and with believing them. According to Word Faith theology, any assertion of yours that arises from your faith must be true. The next step is believing that whatever you believe was told you by God, and therefore inerrant. The step after that is acting on those beliefs.

The previous post, about neo-corporatism, points out that the traditional democratic view of society as composed of equal individuals is being replaced by a conception of society as composed of "communities" with unequal rights which need to be made equal. Labour is considered to be such a community, women are one, minorities are all communities, and religions are being seen more and more as communities.

The idea that any of these groups is a community or any other type of cohesive group doesn't stand up to scrutiny, of course. The idea that Christians are a community (and they are frequently discussed as if they are one) is belied by phenomena such as the detestation of many Roman Catholics and Protestants for each other. Evangelical Christians often find it necessary to send missionaries to Catholic countries to convert the benighted papists.

The idea that Muslims are a cohesive group is just as questionable. A civil war is going on in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, but we are expected to believe that there is a single entity called Islam. Once we believe that there is a single entity called Islam, then logically we believe that it can be offended. And if we're one of those religious people driven into paranoia by the futility and irrationality of the principles we accept as guides to life, we think something needs to be done to punish the offence, whether it's real or imagined. Whence abortionist-killers, embassy-burners, and Peter McKay's cowering before the might of Islam.

So we may be on the verge of a society in which we have freedom of religion but not freedom from religion. Nor will we have the freedom not to have a religion. If the religious get their way, every law of a once democratic society will be made to conform to the paranoid preferences of the religious. That idea might sound paranoid itself, but we need only consider the conformity of the Bush administration to the agenda of evangelical Christianity to see that it's not.

Unfortunately, Canadians seem to be falling for this idea. Most think it was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, and from there it is but a short step to believing that their publication should have been prevented.

There's only one thing for it, I'm afraid. Sane people must start their own religion, the key principle of which is that it is unafraid of criticism.

What kind of God is it, after all, who can't tolerate the publication of a few cartoons in Denmark? Not a very self-confident one, it would seem. And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity like that?

What kind of God is it that can give His people a Bible which no two of them understand to mean the same thing? Doesn't the multiplicity of Christian denominations and sects suggest that the Christian God is a pretty ineffective communicator? And what kind of guidance are you going to get from a deity who can't make his advice clear?

A real god would be unafraid to state his or her principles clearly. A real god would pity unbelievers instead of craving their painful and eternal punishment. A real god would not be offended by the actions of people he or she created.

Theo-Corporatism © John FitzGerald, 2006, 2009

Neo-corporatism

Corporatism has come a long way since Benito Mussolini first devised it. Mussolini organized business and trade unions into 22 corporations and associations which administered different sectors of the economy. By giving business more power in this arrangement, Mussolini maintained control of the economy while weakening socialism and trade unionism. Since Mussolini's downfall, arrangements in other countries in which associations of employers and employees play a formal role in government have also been referred to as varieties of corporatism.

Today, however, a new version of corporatism has sneaked its way into the counsels of government, and particularly Canadian government, where it tries to combat or at least modify the traditional principles of representative democracy. This is a liberal/left version of corporatism, which is founded on the idea that a citizen in a democracy derives rights not just from his status as an equal in a society of equals, but also from his status as a member of particular groups or communities. Society is conceived of as an organization of communities rather than of individuals, and furthermore as an organization which dispenses unequal benefits to these communities. It is therefore concluded that the goal of social reform is to eliminate any differences between groups in the benefits they receive from society.

For example, we have for many years been debating the best ways to provide equity for women, members of visible minorities, francophones, and so on. The idea is always that equity will have been achieved when women receive the same benefits as men, members of visible minorities receive the same benefits as members of majorities and of non-visible minorities, francophones receive the same benefits as anglophones, and so on. The commonest examples of this type of thinking are pay equity laws, and the purest example of this type of thinking in Canada was the employment equity law of the Rae government in Ontario in the early 1990s.

The Rae government divided society into five groups: women, members of racial minorities, people with disabilities, aboriginal people, and everyone else (that is, white men). The act mandated that every employer's work force was to "reflect the representation of aboriginal people, people with disabilities, members of racial minorities and women in the community" in every job category. If fewer than half the physicians at a hospital were women, for example, the hospital was to develop an employment equity plan to recruit more women physicians.

But is equal representation the same thing as equity? The school system is considered by many to provide fewer benefits to members of certain groups, and this opinion is probably true. Nevertheless, the most successful groups in the educational system have usually been oppressed groups – Jews, Chinese, Irish, Italians, and so on. Are we to conclude that these groups were actually privileged groups masquerading as disadvantaged ones?

Well, some people do. In the United States, standardized tests of academic achievement and aptitude are now often said to be biased in favour of students of Chinese origin. The idea that the Midwest ministers' sons who created the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) were out to further the interests of Chinese students seems more than a bit comical, although the proponents of the new corporatism seem to have no problem in asserting that the SAT is the result of a pro-Chinese conspiracy instead of simply saying that Chinese students tend to receive higher scores on the SAT.

Alternatively, you could say that the effects of oppression are not general, and that a group may still be oppressed even though in some ways it appears privileged, but that is contrary to one of the fundamental principles of corporatist thinking – the idea of community.

The groups into which the new corporatists divide society are commonly described as communities. In fact, the new corporatism must assume that the groups into which new corporatists divide society are communities of interest. The new corporatism assumes that all members of a group have the same interests, so Chinese students must have the same interests as all other students from visible minorities. However, the broadly defined groups of the new corporatism rarely share interests to any great extent.

Furthermore, when they do, they usually do because the members of the group share interests which are common to all groups. Within any group the interests of individual members will differ and will even often be in opposition to each other. Within groups as broadly defined as those of the new corporatism, heterogeneity of interest is inevitable.

Let's consider aboriginal people. The relationships of the three main Canadian aboriginal groups – First Nations, Métis, and Inuit – to government are different. Their needs cannot even be dealt with in the same way. First Nations deal with the government either through the Indian Act or, if they are not on the Indian Register, not at all. The western Métis have treaties with the government which they consider the government to have breached. The Métis in the North and East have no treaties. Some Inuit have treaties, while others don't. Among First Nations, the interests of band councils are different from the interests of other band members, a fact which the Canadian government has exploited effectively for many years.

In other words, aboriginal people consist of several groups whose interests are quite different. If you want to improve, for example, the schooling received by aboriginal people, you will have to address different problems in each group. While this observation does not invalidate the idea of aboriginal people as a community, it does suggest that considering them to be a community is of no help in addressing their problems.

The new corporatism is an attempt to get us to abandon the idea that democratic rights are individual rights. It wants us to think of discrimination as a denial of rights to a group, when we have usually thought of it as a denial of rights to an individual. A further danger of this idea is that the groups in which rights are thought to inhere exist only as abstractions.

Under the traditional conception of democracy, individual citizens could form communities of interest called political parties. Under the new corporatism, individuals are arbitrarily assigned to "communities" based on arbitrary characteristics such as skin colour, type of genital organs, inheritance, or physical capacity. Instead of being represented by elected public officials they are represented by members of community groups, representatives they have most likely not chosen and with whom they may have few interests in common. These representatives will usually be activists, and the new corporatism is the result of the corruption of the ideal of activism.

Political activism started out as an attempt to get individuals to obtain and exercise democratic rights, but it has degenerated into an elitist exercise in which government negotiates with pressure groups. I am not arguing against pressure groups – without them we would not have seen the enormous progress in civil rights which has been taking place for over a hundred years. What I am arguing against is the idea that society is nothing more than competition and negotiation between pressure groups, and the replacement of the ideals of equality, dignity, and freedom with the ideal of getting one's piece of the pie.

Neo-Corporatism © John FitzGerald, 2005

Jackie McLean was not fooling around

WARNING: This article contains excerpts from jazz criticism. Continued exposure to jazz criticism may lead to bewilderment, frustration, and outbursts of rage.

Or it may lead to outbursts of laughter. Here are some examples of what critics have said about the subject of this article, the alto saxophone player Jackie McLean:

• "There's a plaintive wideness to his playing."
  
• "[McLean's music] contains the milk of musical rightness."
  
• "The music is driven by a pulse that not only is a model of forward motion but which has depth, breadth, and width, too."
  

But perhaps I'm being unfair. Jazz criticism isn't the easiest field in which to work. In particular, it's not likely to make you a millionaire, and people seem to put into it the effort appropriate to the reward. A lot of jazz criticism seems of necessity to have been dashed off, especially when it appears in liner notes. The writers of liner notes often seem not to have been given a chance to listen to the album they're writing about more than once, which is probably why they provide lots of biographical information, remarks about plaintive wideness or the milk of musical rightness, and bland observations such as "a flowing solo" and "passionate playing."

To get around at last to Mr. McLean, my reading of articles about him at first aroused the uncomfortable suspicion that he may have many admirers among the sadomasochist community. Frequent reference is made to his piercing or cutting or withering tone, and to things like "acid lyricism."

Well, having some damn fine chops and consequently a strong, well controlled tone certainly did not hinder Mr. McLean's career. His tone doesn't conjure up images of pain for me, though. But if you like that sort of thing, all the better for you.

Another word often used to describe Mr. McLean's playing is direct. That seems an apter description to me. Jackie McLean was not fooling around. When you listen to him you get the impression that he has something he really wants to play for you, and that he wants to play it right now.

That, of course, is no better a description than the ones I was ridiculing earlier. Whither this impression of directness?, I hear you asking, as well you might.

In part this impression comes from Mr. McLean's ability to improvise in long phrases without repeating himself and without simply running up and down the scales. When he took a long solo, he did not run out of ideas.

The sense of immediacy and directness also comes from Mr. McLean's ability to create what in the psychology trade is known as an arousal boost. Whether or not his tone is piercing, cutting, or withering, it definitely is not sweet (he once referred to his playing as sugar-free jazz). Consequently it gets your attention when you hear it and makes you more alert, which, as I recall from my studies of, ahem, aesthetics and psychobiology under, ahem, D. E. Berlyne, is reinforcing – that is, you tend to listen to him more.

Mr. McLean was also not afraid to play slightly off the tone occasionally, when it suited the music. He didn't sound as if he was playing out of tune, but the slight difference between what he plays and what you would expect him to play also serves to increase your arousal.

Critics have tended to describe Mr. McLean's playing as lacking melodic variety, but to me it seems much more melodic than most jazz musicians'. As I have noted already, runs up and down the scale are less common in his playing than in other musicians', which means that melodies are more common.

Critics also tend to mention his strong rhythmic sense. What this seems to mean is that he wasn't ashamed to play something you could dance to. He can play solos that are as infectiously rhythmic as Hank Ballard's "Finger Poppin' Time."

In other words, he swings. He swings really hard. As they are in many other aspects of life, enthusiasm and exuberance are démodés in jazz these days. Mr. McLean's ability to swing may in fact be the reason it took jazz critics a long time to give him his due.

Oh, they have always liked him, but they have liked more boring players more. As Wentworth Sutton has observed (in an article that will eventually be republished here), practitioners of serious music got very narcissistic after the second world war. They decided it wasn't their job to interest the audience, but the audience's job to pay attention to them. This attitude resulted in such accomplishments as Anthony Braxton's decision to take the mouthpiece off his clarinet and perform on that. And to record himself while he did it so everyone could listen.

Reasonable thresholds of boredom still being prevalent among the population, postwar jazz pretty well eliminated the audience for jazz. The only fans left were ones who wanted to idolize the musicians or to appear ultrahip as a result of liking what those in the musical profession refer to technically as all that weird-ass shit, or who actually like boring music. Someone like Mr. McLean, who played music which was not boring, appears eccentric to them, and he has been discussed by some critics as if he were an eccentric.

But Mr. McLean didn't play for the critics. He said once that one of the most important things he learned from Art Blakey when he played in his band in the 1950s was how to play solos which interested the audience as well as the other musicians. The secret, Mr. McLean revealed, was not to fool around. The solo must be carefully constructed to build to a single climax, which is also the end of the solo. That keeps the audience interested where formless displays of pyrotechnics or endless noodling do not.

In other words, Jackie McLean was thinking all the time. In particular, he was thinking about where his solos are going. As Bob Blumenthal has observed, his solos are coherent assemblages of a wide variety of musical ideas. They are not off the rack. They are custom items tailored with you, the listener, in mind.

His Let Freedom Ring album of 1962 is much admired these days, but, although it is a good album, it pales in comparison with some albums he recorded shortly afterwards. Let Freedom Ring was his first excursion into modal playing, and some people have decided that makes it a great album. The fact is that his playing is less assured than on recordings he made after further experience with modal playing. His phrases are shorter than usual, and he makes uncharacteristically frequent use of trills and honks, just as if he weren't too sure about what he should be playing next. I prefer Vertigo and Hipnosis, while One Step Beyond and Destination Out are also highly regarded.

An interesting early recording is Swing Swang Swingin'. Those guys who say he's not melodic obviously haven't been listening to it. It really swings, too. Jackie's Bag and Bluesnik are other good albums from his pre-modal days.

Jacknife (sic) is another interesting album which demonstrates that even post-swing jazz can be both good and crowd-pleasing. Finally, I especially recommend Dynasty, a recording he made with a band which included his son René, himself an excellent tenor player, and Idris Hotep Galeta. Dynasty was made nearly thirty years after Swing Swang Swingin', but it swings just as hard.

If you like those albums, he made plenty of others. In fact, Blue Note is still issuing sessions he recorded back in the Sixties but which were never released then. That's because, despite the critics, Jackie McLean's skill, exuberance, and concern for his audience made him a key figure in jazz, both as a player and as a teacher, and people want to hear as much of him as they can. Just another sign that Jackie McLean was not fooling around.

Jackie McLean Is Not Fooling Around © John FitzGerald, 2002, 2009

Succeeding in the new investment environment

This article was first published in 2002. The investment environment of 2009 has made it timely again, though.

Scarcely a day passes lately without some revelation which shakes investor confidence. In fact, investor confidence has been shaken more often lately than a broken gumball machine. So it's scarcely surprising that more and more people are asking me what types of investment they should be making in the new investment environment.

The keys to investing these days are to make investments in a field where costs, risk, and payoffs are clearly defined and in which regulatory authorities promptly apprehend and severely punish miscreants whose actions threaten the integrity of the market. In other words, you want to be playing the ponies.

At the race track payoffs are clearly defined – if the horse you like is posted at odds of 5-2 you know that should it win you will receive between $7.00 and $7.90 for each $2 you bet. That's a possible 295% return over a period which may be as short as fifty-odd seconds. When was the last time you got a hot stock tip promising that sort of payoff?

The superiority of playing the ponies to other forms of investment may be easily demonstrated. For example, the return on lottery tickets is typically a loss of between 45% to 55%. That is, the investors lose 45% to 55% of their investments – that's scarcely better than the stock market.

Of course, investors in the parimutuel fund market lose on the average. The difference between playing the ponies and the lottery, though, is that you can take some simple actions to increase your return on investment. Although most bettors lose, you don't have to.

The advantage of the race track to the investor is that you don't have to play every race. You can bet only those races where your chances of making a profit are highest. I, for example, am a form handicapper so I have learned to bet only claiming races. When owners know that they may be losing their horse at the end of the race, they race it to win. Consequently a horse's recent form (quality of performance) is a better predictor of its performance in the race you're betting than it is in other races where owners know the horse will be going back to their barn afterwards.

Of course, knowing which races to pass and which to bet means that you'll have to learn something about how to handicap races and that you'll have to keep records of your success with different types of bet and race. Of course, if people had learned how to handicap stocks they might have more confidence in the stock market today.

You should also follow the disciplinary activities of the racing authorities in your jurisdiction. If people are caught cheating, that is a good thing. People look down on the harness races because people are caught cheating at them, but I'd rather play a type of racing which catches cheaters than one which doesn't. Again, if people had applied that principle to the stock market they'd have more confidence in it today.

Stick to the types of bet which offer the highest return rather than the highest payoff. Triactors (aka trifectas) offer glamorous payoffs but a far lower return on investment than the humble win bet. Gee, I guess if people had followed that principle in the stock market they'd be more confident today, too. Although they wouldn't have all those dot.com stock certificates to paper the bathroom with.

Finally, follow the two great rules of gambling – don't bet money you can't afford to lose, and when you're losing money don't increase the size of your bets in an effort to catch up. If investors in stocks had followed those rules – well, you know.

Succeeding in the New Investment Environment © John FitzGerald, 2002

The Student as Shopper

"Rochdale,...in Toronto, may be a sign of what is to come."

–Jerry Farber, 1967

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of "The Student as Nigger" by Jerry Farber, the essay which shocked entire continents and inspired a generation of young people.

Okay, it's not the two hundredth anniversary. I'm just trying to get your attention. It's actually the forty-second anniversary. But Mr. Farber did shock entire continents etc., and a look back at his essay tells us something about how life has changed over the last third of a century.

It might as well be the essay's two hundredth anniversary, too, for all the difference it makes to us. The schools continue, as Mr. Farber put it in one of those characteristic turns of phrase which endear the Sixties to so many, to "put a dying society's trip" on students. All that shock and inspiration went for nought.

Mr Farber was right about the society being moribund. The society in which he wrote "The Student as Nigger" has died. A society of conformity has been replaced by one of diversity. While many of us quite naturally are sickened by the constant invocation of diversity in the same spirit as that in which one used to invoke God, motherhood, and apple pie, I think most of us find that a society of diversity is more to our taste.

But the schools are still agencies of indoctrination, and more openly than they ever were. Inculcating wholesome attitudes is now commonly thought of as an essential role of the school. Mr. Farber foresaw a future in which students owned and ran the schools, but that future is as far away now as it was in 1967, and seems even farther.

To be fair to Mr. Farber, he clearly intended that his essay should provoke discussion of serious but neglected issues in education rather than prophesy. He also clearly thought that any real change in the schools would require radical changes in students' goals and attitudes which were by no means certain. Nevertheless, the schools didn't change and now, with the benefit of 36 years' hindsight, I'm going to give you the same reasons Mr. Farber probably would to explain why they haven't changed.

One of the reasons Mr. Farber failed to foretell the future is that he made the common mistake of assuming the future would be just like the past. As McLuhan said, we look at the present through a rear-view mirror, and so we march backwards into the past.

Mr. Farber's conception of schooling is one appropriate, as McLuhan would also say, to a society of mechanical technology. While the societies of the Sixties had extensive electronic technology, they were still run as if they were based on mechanical technology. Mechanical technology requires standard inputs, and those inputs include the people who work it. Society was conformist because standard training and characteristics were thought to be necessary if society was going to work.

So Mr. Farber conceived of school as a factory – a monolithic enterprise which moulded students into a standard form – and that conception is not without validity as a conception of the school system of the 1960s. However, not only was the society of the 1960s a dying society, the school system of the 1960s was a dying school system.

Even as Mr. Farber was writing "The Student as Nigger" the monolithic school system of the 1950s was crumbling under pressure from the diversifying forces of electronic technology. Really. I wouldn't kid you about this. Electronic technology permits diversity, and the common 60s demands for a wider-ranging curriculum and for interdisciplinary studies came in part from a realization that technology now made such things possible. At least, they could have come from that realization, and whatever the reason may be, the school system diversified with astonishing speed.

By the early 1970s the variety of courses offered in secondary and postsecondary schools was being greatly increased. Where high schools used to offer one English course per grade, they started offering a half dozen or a dozen. High school students were allowed much greater freedom in choosing courses. Universities added whole new departments and faculties.

Apart from embracing electronic technology – we old folks can remember how in the late 60s you could say that literacy was going to die out in the next generation because film and television would replace books and people wouldn't respond by saying you were a great raving halfwit but instead think of you as a clear-eyed thinker with a firm grasp of social change – people also became extremely alienated from the old mechanical values. Like Mr. Farber, they rejected a society in which people were moulded into a standard form. They sought to do their own thing, as they so eloquently put it.

As Tom Wolfe observed in "The Me Decade," people adopted a gnostic philosophy which held that their salvation would come from within themselves (he did not say people became self-centred or selfish; that misinterpretation was foisted on the public by the usual culprits – journalists). So people sought to be unique, and electronic technology helped them to think that they were.

All of which put paid to Mr. Farber's vision of student strikes overthrowing the owners of the educational means of production (I wasn't fooling when I said he conceived of the school as a factory). People doing their own thing don't engage in common action – as we all know, that was the Achilles heel of 60s activism, and one of the reasons all those young fighters for social justice in the 60s became yuppies in the 80s.

Today's school is more like a shopping mall. If you don't like what's on sale in one department or course you go look in another. Yet you respect the choices of other people who might want to shop in the department which you didn't like, because we respect each other's choices and differences. That's what happens when the owners of the means of production adapt to electronic technology. They can make use of diversity, too.

So Mr. Farber missed the boat. He was right about the dying society, but the injustice he wanted to rectify was a dying injustice. And in the end he was attacking it in the wrong place. The schools aren't that important.

As McLuhan also pointed out, the educational efforts of the public schools are dwarfed by those of the large corporations. Their advertising and television shows bombard children relentlessly. Those television shows include not only all the witless situation comedies and dramas which teach children that the important things in life are being pretty, wearing fashionable clothes, driving a sharp car, and having lots of sex with other pretty and fashionable drivers of sharp cars, but also the television news shows which treat as important events the doings of manufactured celebrities and the openings of branches of chain retailers.

In the 1960s marketing to children was an important industry, but since the 1960s marketers have succeeded at enormously increasing the number of markets in which children consume. In particular, children start to consume fashionable clothing and music at much younger ages than in the 60s. The consumerist approach to life that they come to acquire is more likely to have been acquired from the people who promote consumption than from the people who run schools.

Society today is one big mall. You don't have to think about politics any more. Instead you just shop around and buy the platform that makes you feel the best (what else could explain Quebec separatism?). You don't have to wrestle with the principles and dilemmas of religion any more. You just shop around for some beliefs which make you feel accepted and "spiritual." You don't even have to think about life any more. You just shop around till you find some motivational speaker who makes you feel good about yourself.

School is the creature of this society, not its creator. It's just another store in the mall, and it's not one of the anchor stores. By the time students reach university, which was the chief subject of Mr. Farber's essay, the die has been cast. They are there to shop – chiefly for jobs, but also for social status, sexual experience, and "self-fulfilment."

What the universities have to fear these days is not the awakening of the student body to the the consumerism which they believe helps them express their diversity and uniqueness, but which actually controls them and makes sure they behave in ways approved by important commercial interests. What the universities have to fear is that students will become even more consumerist. When students start demanding money-back guarantees, the university's day is over.

The Student as Shopper © John FitzGerald, 2003

The seven warning signs

Danger lurks everywhere. Even when you protect yourself against the myriad dangers of the world, you still are vulnerable to the myriad dangers of your own self – your habits, your emotions, and above all your intellect. These days everyone is commendably obsessed with keeping their bodies sound, but do YOU have the sound mind which is required in that sound body? Are you thinking straight and true, or has your thinking become deviant and depraved?

Read this list of warning signs:

1. Do you ever think alone?


2. Do you ever think more than you had planned to?


3. Do you ever think for more than two days in a row, or over a weekend?


4. Has thinking ever caused trouble for you on the job?


5. Do you think in front of the children?


6. Have you ever argued with your spouse while thinking?


7. Are you thinking as you read this?

Now here's what your answers mean:

If you answered Yes to one or more of these questions: Your problems will only get worse. No one likes a problem thinker. If you can't control your thinking you're certain to get in trouble some day. New miracle drugs control problem thinking easily and with a minimum of side effects – you have no excuse for not getting help. Seek out a member of a helping profession now.

If you answered No to all of the questions: You are a credit to your community, a responsible citizen on whom your fellow citizens can and do depend. People are attracted to you, and your career path leads to some exciting destinations! Your self-esteem is high, and where others see difficulty, you see challenge! It sure beats being one of those losers with warning signs, doesn't it?

The Seven Warnign Signs © John FitzGerald, 2000

Stay in the shallow end

We pay too little respect to the superficial. We aspire to be Deep. We are so busy looking for the deep, dark, hidden secrets of life and existence that we miss their superficial, bright, obvious truths.

People want to know the meaning of life. They can’t master the difference in meaning between adverse and averse, but the meaning of life – that they think they can understand.

What good would it do people to know the meaning of life, anyway? People all seem to think they know the meaning of global warming, but most of them still haven’t got round to buying those four crummy light bulbs they promised to buy a couple of years ago at Live Earth.

Why are we here?, they ask. Well, I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to be in two places at once. So it’s not possible for me to be anywhere but here.

And what’s so great about knowing why you’re here? When I go to the physician to check out that blood in the urine, I know why I’m there, but I’m not thrilled about it.

These days there’s a huge industry founded on persuading people they can discover their true selves and that, with that knowledge under their belts, they can then achieve whatever they want.

Now, almost none of the people looking for their selves (and precious few of the people offering to tell them where their selves are) could define the self, so they couldn’t recognize it if they saw it. But they’re looking for it.

But, you say, I am being cynical. People do not aspire to a purpose in life for base, self-interested reasons but for noble ones. They want to make the world a better place.

Well, you don’t need to dig too deep to find out how to do that. One of the great moral teachers had a pretty simple formula for achieving that goal – keep the ten commandments and give your goods to the poor. So get to it. I have to warn you, though – that commandment about adultery’s a bugger.

Stay in the Shallow End © John FitzGerald, 2007

Techno-morality

This article was first published in 2007. Given the current epidemic of inveighing against greed, it seems relevant again.

To most people, the moral is what they think they can get away with. Consequently, technology plays an important role in morality by enabling people to get away with more, or by forcing them to get away with less.

This view of morality may seem cynical, but it has clear advantages over other definitions. These definitions may be grouped into two types: causal and functional. A causal definition defines something by its antecedents, while a functional definition defines something by its consequences.

Causal definitions of morality hold that behaviour is moral if it is consistent with some standard already established. So Christian morality considers behaviour moral if it is consistent with Christian standards. In general, the idea of any causal definition of morality is that the Good can be defined, and then used as a yardstick against which to measure the ethicality of specific behaviour.

The problem with this approach is that no one agrees about the definition of the Good. Even the Christians cannot agree among themselves about what Christ’s teachings justify. Some Christians, for example, approve of first cousins marrying, while others disapprove.

Most functional definitions of morality define moral behaviour as what promotes the Good. For example, the moral has been defined as what promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Since nobody knows what happiness is, though, that definition has never really flown. Again the problem is that people cannot agree about what the Good is.

The definition I have proposed avoids this problem by being non-prescriptive. The chief effect of other definitions seems to be to promote wrangling about what the Good is, while this definition actually makes falsifiable predictions about behaviour.

For example, in the early 1960s, sexual intercourse between unmarried teenagers was considered tremendously wrong. It often resulted in pregnancy, and pregnant girls were forced to leave school, have their babies somewhere out of town, and then put them up for adoption. Their boyfriends would also be moved out of town so that the couple could not re-unite.

Then came a piece of technology called the birth control pill. Once it became available to teenagers more of them started having sex. Soon enough legislators were worrying (as have members of provincial parliament in Ontario on at least two occasions) about whether measures to control sexually transmitted disease would discourage sexual experimentation by teenagers. Sexual experimentation by teenagers has been transformed by technology, then, into a wholesome developmental experience.

What’s more, eventually teenagers started to get pregnant in large numbers, anyway, and they were not forced to leave town or give up their babies. Having once approved of sex, we decided to treat its consequences as something to be coped with rather than to be punished.

These days people argue the rights and wrongs of violation of copyright. These days many people, if not most, are for it. In the old days, though, people did not advocate the illegal copying and dissemination of recorded music, since disseminating it in a playable form was damnably difficult. This option was chiefly available to people who owned expensive equipment. Denied the opportunity to disseminate music illegally, people were not interested in advocating its desirability.

These days, though, people seem dumfounded when it is suggested that being able to disseminate music illegally does not justify disseminating music illegally. However, the ability to shoot someone with a handgun does not imply the ethicality of actually shooting someone with it. The difference is that most people have no reason to fear that their music will be copied, since they are incompetent to produce any, while there is some probability that someone with a handgun could avail him or herself of the opportunity to pop a few caps in their direction.

Technology may function in another way in changing ideas about morality. The internet, for example, demonstrated that pornography does not have the terrible consequences that many people believed it had. Consequently, people are now able to make legitimate careers in the exciting field of facilitation of masturbation.

Furthermore, the internet has made it easier to apprehend people who disseminate pornography that is the product of sexual abuse or exploitation. Of course, technology can make some breaches of morality more difficult. However, technology is rarely used to turn what is now considered moral behaviour into immoral behaviour. It plays only a defensive role in preventing people from expanding the definition of morality. As I have noted, once sexual intercourse between teenagers was approved, we were not going to return to the days when pregnant teenagers and the boys who got them pregnant were punished.

When we examine the effects of technology on morality we see that it expands moral behaviour when there are few victims of the expansion. Recording companies are few, people who listen to music are many, so it is moral, in the popular mind, to act against the interests of the minority.

However, technology has also allowed people to steal other peoples’ identities more easily. Since the number of potential victims of this development comprises the entire population, this behaviour remains strictly immoral.

So our falsifiable prediction is that the likelihood that a behaviour will be considered moral is proportional to the number of people it benefits and inversely proportional to the number of people it harms. The behaviours which benefit and disadvantage about equal numbers of people (men and women, say) are the ones that are going to be the most hotly debated.

Techno-morality © John FitzGerald, 2007