Cargo politics

A cargo cult mistakes an effect for a cause. The original Melanesian cargo cultists watched cargo arrive after their colonial occupiers had built airports, and concluded that the cargo had arrived because the airports had been built. This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, as we have seen in the earlier articles in this series, we frequently fall into this type of error ourselves.

Anthropologists might object that I have oversimplified cargo cults, by the way. For example, the Melanesian cargo cultists often believed that their gods had already prepared cargo for them, and they just needed to supply places for the gods to deliver it. Whether my definition oversimplifies cargo cults or not, the cargo cultists still had the chain of reasoning backwards. Whether or not you thought cargo already exists, building an airport doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. Even if you build a real airport rather than an imitation of one, building an airport still doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. The Soviet Union had many airports, but it didn’t receive much cargo.

These days we have a lot of politicians, but they're not delivering much politics. Even in the broadest sense of the word, in which politics means simply the exercise of authority, contemporary politicians seem remarkably apolitical. Consider their agonizing and posturing about climate change, and then consider the few, trivial decisions in which that agonizing has resulted. The government of Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocols, and then promptly started ignoring them. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but rather the art of avoiding the possible.

Political philosophy has followed the slide rule, restaurant counter service, and the dodo into oblivion. There was a time when conservative principles were based on the interests of the landed classes, liberal principles on the interests of the business class, and socialist principles on the interests of the workers. In Canada these days the national party with the closest thing to a political philosophy is the Conservatives, and judging by that philosophy they seem to represent the interest of pension funds. Everything is evaluated by the colour of the ink on the bottom line in the account books.

The New Democrats are now above all the party of proportional representation; the issue over-rides all others for them, and they drag it into the discussion of the most inappropriate issues (parliamentary ethics, for example). With a history of getting 20% of the vote and 10% of the seats, they're fierce about getting a system under which their 20% of the vote will get them 12% of the seats. They are losing the support of organized labour, but prefer to concern themselves with tinkering with the way votes are counted.

Both the Conservatives and the NDP have adopted the view that politics is a form of management. The Conservatives follow the managerial philosophy that all operations should turn a profit, while the New Democrats follow the managerial philosophy that all stakeholders should be persuaded to believe that they have a fair say in decision-making. As for the Liberals, they follow an approach known in the managerial literature as hill-climbing. That is, they believe in dealing with issues as they crop up, rather than in ways that are consistent with a political philosophy. They long ago abandoned their representation of business (as a class), and as for liberalism in the sense of promotion of individual liberty, they're the ones who, with the notwithstanding clause, decided the Charter of Rights should be perforated for easy removal.

Then there is the Bloc Québécois. It actually has the appearance of a political party. Its fundamental principle of sovereignty for Quebec is not well defined, if it is defined at all, but its decisions on parliamentary issues unrelated to sovereignty seem to be guided by consistent political principles. The Bloc also has a clear idea of the people whose interests they represent. There is a simple reason that the Bloc is more like an old-fashioned political party than the national parties are.

National sovereignty has been declining as international organizations and international agreements limit it, and as transnational corporations grow to ever more enormous sizes. Canada signed away much of its sovereignty, for example, to get free trade with the United States. In a world of declining national sovereignty, political principles and serious decision-making can get politicians in trouble with the people who really run the world. The Bloc can operate like an old-style party because for the moment the real decision-makers don't care what it does. Let Quebec become sovereign, though, and then someone new is going to be calling the tune.

The tune the rest of us are already dancing to, that is.

Cargo Politics © John FitzGerald, 2008

The truth cult

For much of its history human beings have taken part in rituals in which an authority informs other people of what is supposed to be the Truth. I call this the pulpit model of information. For centuries Europeans went to church and an authority got up in the pulpit and told them what to believe about the world (and other places).

This model was later adopted by the schools, no doubt because the schools were established by churches. Whatever the reason, schooling until recently consisted of listening to an authority tell you what to believe about the world (in universities, it still often consists of this). In school, though, you were even tested to make sure you’d learned the approved view of things.

In school you also acquire the idea that Truth is something that can be found on the printed page. Consequently we come to accept something that has been published as true, without verifying that it is.

It’s not surprising that we come to look on the truth as something that is dispensed by authorities. Consequently, we look around for people who look like authorities, and treat what they say as information. Furthermore, we treat the methods they use to come up with things to say as methods that can be used to define information. We are often wrong.

Given the track record of authorities (remember all those biological weapons that, according to authorities, Iraq was just itching to use against the West?), depending on them to tell us the truth is a questionable approach. Another problem with this approach is that there is considerable doubt as to whether we need to know the truth, anyway.

Here’s something that’s true: Churchill, Manitoba, is named for John Churchill, first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That’s a fact. Despite being a fact, though, it doesn’t help me get served when I drop in to the local branch of his company.

Every day we are bombarded with truths. The newspaper tells us things like what the temperature was yesterday in Beijing and what celebrities have (or had) their birthdays today. I remember once reading in the paper that it was the late Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday and thinking “I can’t really send him a card, can I?”

Better than mere truth is information. Information is confused with many things that are not informative, though.

Facts, as we have just seen, are not necessarily informative. Unless I’ve made a bet about what the high temperature in Beijing was going to be, that fact cannot be said to inform me of anything.

Furthermore, many items of information are not factual. The idea of intelligence, for example, cannot be said to be a fact, since there is widespread disagreement about just what intelligence is. However, the concept of intelligence is informative because in speculating about it we discover useful things. We have even discovered some of the shortcomings of the idea of intelligence.

As we have also seen, authoritative statements are not necessarily informative. Another reason they're not necessarily informative is that they disagree with each other. In fact, many of them work according to decision models which encourage disagreement as a way of establishing crucial issues that need to be tested. Courts of English law, for example, require two or more highly trained professionals to argue for exactly opposite points.

People also often assume that a logically sound argument is informative. However, it need not be. We can reason as soundly as it’s possible to reason and still be wrong.

Deductive reasoning starts with a general premise or principle. It then applies that premise to a specific piece of evidence and draws a conclusion about that piece of evidence. For example, we might reason like this:

• All Canadians are British subjects. (general principle)
  
• John FitzGerald is a Canadian. (evidence)
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is a British subject. (conclusion)

Well, that conclusion is true. However, let’s suppose we reason like this:

• All Canadians have French first names.
  
• John FitzGerald’s first name is not French.
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is not a Canadian.

That conclusion is not true, although the reasoning is entirely sound. Since my first name is not French, the conclusion that I am not Canadian follows logically from the general principle that all Canadians have French first names. The problem, of course, is that the general principle is wrong. Consequently, all statements that follow logically from it are most likely to be wrong. That example is a bit artificial, but people draw sound conclusions from erroneous premises all the time.

For example, many people reasoned out thoroughly logical arguments that on January 1, 2000 the world would be thrown into chaos. I say their beliefs were serious because they acted on them. They stockpiled food, for example, they bought portable electric generators, and some even created fortified shelters to protect themselves from people who hadn’t stockpiled food or bought generators.

As we saw on January 1, 2000, though, the computers didn’t fail. Some of the premises in those thoroughly logical arguments had been unsound. Logic is a tool. Logic does not guarantee that your arguments will stand up any more than a hammer guarantees that the bookcase you build with it will stand up.

Information is often confused with consensus. The supposed existence of a consensus among scientists about global warming is supposed to imply that the consensus opinion is highly likely to be true. Well, a hundred years ago a consensus of scientists would have told you that other races were inferior to whites.

The issue of consensus about global warming seems to have been raised initially as a red herring. That is, people argued against taking action against global warming because there was no scientific consensus about what caused it.

However, consensus has nothing to do with it. At one time there was a scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth. That point seems to have escaped the people who are opposed to taking action against global warming, though. Now they complain that this consensus they considered so desirable is being forced on them.

What is informative about an idea is its ability to predict events. The chief value of consensus seems to be coming up with a plan that everyone, or at least everyone important, is willing to go along with. To me, that seems a lot like what lemmings do.

Information cannot be defined by its source. If an expert meteorologist says tomorrow will be sunny, clouds don’t decide to go somewhere else just because a respected source says they will. Information is defined by its effect. Information increases the probability that we will act in effective ways. If it never rains on days when the weather forecast calls for rain, you’re going to end up lugging around a useless umbrella. If it always rains on days your bunions hurt, though, your bunions are a mine of information.

The Truth Cult © John FitzGerald, 2008

World-class cargo

[First published in 2007.]

A great city is one in which great people have done great things. Toronto is a city in which comfortable people have done comfortable things.

Toronto doesn't even want to be great, though. It wants to be "world-class" instead.

That expression is used in a strange way in Toronto. Logically you would think that world class was a pretty low standard. For example, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, signs by the elevators inform you that the hospital's mission is to provide world-class health care. Since the general standard of health care in the world is pretty low – even lower than Canada's – that seems a disturbingly modest ambition.

What Torontonians seem to mean by this is that they aspire to the class of the world cities. However, Toronto is already officially recognized as a major world city. There is one higher class of world city ("full service" world cities), but the variables keeping Toronto out of that class are chiefly related to population. That is, Toronto doesn't have enough people to get into the top rank. If Torontonians want to get into that class they'd better start making babies.

Instead, Torontonians have taken the approach of cargo cultists. They look at cities which seem world-class to them, and they notice that those cities have institutions that Toronto doesn't. Back in the 1970s Toronto had to have a major league baseball team and a major league stadium to put it in. Toronto eventually got one of each, and the cargo cultists redoubled their efforts in their quest for other institutions they considered world-class.

One of these institutions was an opera house, which Toronto has finally acquired. Now, an opera house was a hep and happening institution back in, oh, 1740 or so, but these days its value to the cultural fabric is questionable. Opera is a fossilized art. Ancient works are trotted out and people attend largely as a public service – they're promoting the arts! Well, by going to the opera they're promoting a dead art.

By the way, I am aware that composers still write operas. I am also aware that they couldn't get them performed without extensive subsidies from government and business. So maybe opera is an art on life support rather than a dead one, but it's no longer a sign of exceptional urban culture. My life isn't any better because there's now an opera house down at Queen and University, and I suspect yours isn't either.

Another activity favoured by Toronto cargo cultists is bidding for Olympics and world's fairs. The world-class cities they admire hold Olympic games and world's fairs, they notice, so they conclude that if Toronto holds the Olympics or a world's fair it will be world-class, too.

They need to look about them, eh? Montreal had the Olympics, Montreal had a world's fair, and Montreal is only a minor world city, as the list I've already linked to shows. Perhaps having the Olympics and world's fairs makes you less of a world city, because back when Montreal had its world's fair it was definitely a few steps ahead of Toronto.

Then there's architecture. World-class cities have buildings by Daniel Liebeskind, so Toronto had to have a building by Daniel Liebeskind. World-class cities have buildings by Frank Gehry, so Toronto had to have a building by Frank Gehry. Any building.

Mr. Liebeskind's proposal apparently consisted of a sketch on a cocktail napkin; as his building nears completion it comes ever more closely to resemble a trailer park after the tornado. Meanwhile, Mr. Gehry's plans for the Art Gallery of Ontario include a section which is strikingly reminiscent of the bus terminal in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Toronto does have an agreeable open space designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – oh, wait; they did have one until they insisted on obstructing Mr. Mies's carefully planned sight lines with a monstrous "sculpture."

Well, I don't want to demean anyone's religion, so I'll make a proposal to the Toronto cargo crowd which fits right in with their ideas. People in world-class cities couldn't care less about what people in other world-class cities spend their money on. Maybe if Torontonians emulated that attitude they'd start getting somewhere.

World-Class Cargo © John Fitzgerald, 2007

The Canadian cargo cult

The following article has been updated somewhat from the original 2006 version.

The most popular article on our sister site (that is, the article with the most hits and the most links to it) is a fifteen-year-old one about contemporary cargo cults. An early passage in that article observes:

Cargo cults supposedly originated in Melanesia about 75 years ago, but the type of thinking which is the foundation of cargo cults has long been characteristic of what we like to consider the most sophisticated society on the face of the earth. In fact, North America is currently ruled by cargo cults.

The cargo cult is founded on a familiar, and popular, bit of fallacious reasoning: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The residents of Papua, Yaliwan, Vanuatu and other places noticed that when the colonial occupiers built wharves and airstrips, the wharves and airstrips were soon visited by ships and airplanes which delivered cargos of goods. They concluded that the ships and airplanes arrived as a consequence of the building of the wharves and airstrips, so they built their own wharves and airstrips in the expectation of receiving their own cargoes.

This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, in dealing with that which is new to
us, just as wharves and airstrips were new to Melanesians, we draw exactly the same conclusions about it.

Among the contemporary cargo cults discussed in the argument are the cults of the shopping mall and of the computer. The first shopping malls attracted lots of customers, so other poeple built shopping malls, expecting that they would also draw lots of customers. This is how the article describes what happened next:

We soon had a shopping mall on nearly every block. Retail space expanded enormously, and eventually the retail industry collapsed under its own weight. Retail chains closed and downsized, their unsustainable outlets either replaced by dollar stores or left permanently empty.

Today, Wellington Square in London, Ontario, the first shopping mall in this country, bloated to three or four times its original size and given a trendier name, lies dying in the centre of a downtown which it has already killed. On Saturdays the
retail staff in the few stores that are open outnumber the customers. In Toronto, the Eaton Centre has transformed the retail neighbourhood around it into a vast bazaar of dollar stores, adult book stores, and fast food franchises.

Since that was written some of the dollar stores and adult book stores around the Eaton Centre have been transformed into a giant empty space, Dundas Square.

The computer cult is somewhat weaker today, but the following observation from the article still isn't that far off the mark:

Even when it is used for undertakings which could not be done more effectively without a computer,
the computer often is more of a hindrance than a help, simply because it is considered more as a talisman than as the appliance which it is. For example, computers have been widely used to amass great quantities of data in databases which then prove to be unanalyzable or unreliable. We reason that since other people have increased the efficiency of their organizations by constructing databases, we will also increase the efficiency of our operations if we construct databases. We might as plausibly argue that since Newton had brilliant ideas when he sat under apple trees, we should all sit under apple trees.

The computer can help carry out intelligent plans more efficiently, but it cannot do much with wishful thinking, apart from dressing it up with pretty graphics. Nevertheless, even when wishful thinking goes disastrously awry, people seem to think
that everything will turn out all right if they just get the next upgrade.

Well, you get the idea. While all but one of the Melanesian cargo cults have disappeared, and the one surviving one has developed a more sophisticated theology, the cargo cult is alive and well in the rest of the world.

I was reminded of the article about cargo cults while trying to answer the question raised in a 2006 article at our old NEW IMPROVED HEAD website – how did a 2006 Commonwealth Fund report about health care, a topic in which Canadians are extremely interested, a report which suggests furthermore that Canadian health care is a shambles and suggests several specific improvements to it whose effectiveness could easily be assessed, how did that report end up being almost completely ignored by the Canadian press and public?

The answer, it seems to me, lies in Canada's being perhaps the biggest cargo cult in the world. We have provided it with what seem to us to be all the characteristics of a nation, but on closer examination these characteristics turn out to be in large part primitive imitations of the real thing. Furthermore, the large part of these characteristics consisting of primitive imitation seems to be getting larger.

The Canadian health care system does provide real health care. However, it is not providing enough. We have built hospitals, but they are performing only a fraction of the operations which are needed. Waiting times for surgery are long, sometimes measured in years, and often the ailments for which surgery is required are life-threatening and progressive – that is, they get more life-threatening while surgery is being waited for. Even when they are not life-threatening they may still have economic effects. The reduced mobility of people waiting for hip replacements – for an average of two years or so if their hip is not actually broken – obviously must affect their productivity and earning power, at least on the average, so that the country loses domestic product and acquires social program costs.

And why does that happen? Well, we have the health care "system," but we don't have the staff. We don't have enough doctors, nurses, or technicians. Governments decided to save money by not training doctors and by laying off nurses and technicians. Those decisions mean that not only are operations postponed, but the tests which must be performed to prepare for the operation must also be delayed, so that the operations end up delayed even more.

In other words, Canadian governments have about as many clues about running the hospitals they've built as the average Melanesian cargo cultist had about running the air traffic control tower he built. Furthermore, when confronted with a study whose results suggest that some technological changes which should anyway have been undertaken years ago would improve the effectivess and reduce the cost of the health care system, the cargo-besotted government and its cargo-besotted citizens show the same comprehension as the Melanesian operator of an imitation air traffic control tower would display of a report about the relative effectiveness of different radar systems.

[Since I wrote this, the Ontario government set out to implement a system of electronic health records, which the Commonwealth Fund report recommended. However, it went about the program in true cargo cult fashion, simply hiring people willy-nilly to create the system, not specifying deliverables, and not getting anything delivered. For a billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) we got some classy looking letterhead.]

Yes, not only are our governments cargo-besotted, so are we non-governmental types. It is scarcely a surprise. The whole country has been from the beginning explicitly a cargo undertaking. Canada was not founded for reasons of history or principle. It was founded to solve a managerial problem.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the legislature of the then Province of Canada (which consisted of the shores of the St. Lawrence and the British shores of the Great Lakes) was incapacitated by deadlock. Canada East (along most of the shores of the St. Lawrence) kept electing Conservatives, while Canada West (along the rest of the St. Lawrence and along the Great Lakes) kept electing Reformers, the predecessors of today's Liberals. Canada West and Canada East had equal numbers of seats in the legislature, so the legislature permanently consisted of equal numbers of Conservatives and Reformers. Governments tended to fall quickly, and little got done.

The idea of a federal union, in which some responsibilities could be hived off to local legislatures in Canada East and West, thus ending much of the deadlock, was first proposed as a solution by Alexander Galt in the 1850s. A federal union, incorporating New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as well as the old Province of Canada, finally was implemented in 1867. Canadians have traditionally been so deeply moved by this accomplishment that in the 1960s they took Galt's name off the town in Ontario named after him (it's now part of Cambridge).

From the beginning Canada was intended to represent a political nationality only. In those days it was considered unlikely that English and French could forge a common intellectual nationality, so they let that aspect of the issue slide. Of course, by neglecting it they guaranteed that it would never develop. To this day we have a country which, as Joey Slinger has observed, is held together only by each province's fear that if it doesn't stick around with the other provinces they might get something it doesn't. He calls it "seagull democracy." In fact, British Columbia entered the federation because it had been promised a railway, and Newfoundland because it was broke and Canada wasn't.

The early years of the Dominion were marked by attempts by the stronger provinces, Ontario and Quebec, to weaken the federal government. Their attempts were facilitated by a decision by the Imperial Privy Council in 1896 that the federal government could exercise its residuary power only in time of war (the British North America Act 1867 reserves any powers not specifically enumerated in it to the federal government). As a result, programs in new areas of government responsibility, such as unemployment insurance and social welfare, were not automatically taken over by the federal government (whose capacity to wage endless war was severely limited). These days the federation has loosened to the point that provinces may, if they choose, regulate immigration, which is inherently a federal responsibility – no matter, Quebec has taken up this option. Quebec also gets miffed when it's not allowed to represent itself at conferences of sovereign nations.

Canada, therefore, is in form a nation but does not act like one. It is a cargo country, erected in the form of a country in the hopes that it would magically start reaping the benefits of being a country. For the first 75 or so years of the federation the trick seemed to be working, since most of Canada had the identity of loyal servant of the British Empire to fall back on. British imperial ideology provided most of Canada with national principles (there was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until 1948). Canada loyally furthered British imperial interests around the world, furthering them with arms in Egypt, South Africa, the Far East, and Europe. The non-imperialist part of Canada didn't play along, but the problems it created could be contained.

In 1931, however, Canada became independent. The Depression and the Second World War delayed the abandonment of imperial principles, but once the war was out of the way the attractions of imperialism started to pall. Over the succeeding decades we have seen the abandonment of the term Dominion, because it is colonial, and an attempt to substitute other ideals, such as the "just society" and multiculturalism, for the old imperial ones. However, none of these ideals has really caught on. The only thing that really defines Canada today is its refusal to be American, and that refusal is probably chiefly due to the unattractiveness of the great American ideology – we didn't throw off one empire's dogma so we could get fitted for another's.

It is not surprising that since the Second World War our institutions have become more like cargo institutions. Our armed forces have been reduced to the point where the country not only cannot defend itself (not a big problem, since the only country likely to invade is the United States, and we'd all have to be armed to fight them), but can maintain internal order only with difficulty (as at Oka, where a small band of lightly armed militants kept the army at bay for weeks). The Canadian armed forces are too small to carry out any large-scale sustained operation, as is becoming apparent in Afghanistan. For a long time we pretended we were too noble to have our armed forces actually use armed force, and that instead we were devoted to peacekeeping, but in the end even peacekeeping got to be too demanding for the tiny forces we were prepared to fund.

We needed an educational system, so we built schools. Just like the leaders of real countries, the leaders of ours frequently announce that education is crucial to Canadian prosperity and influence. Then they cut education budgets and raise university tuition. In Ontario in the early 1990s they reduced the number of places in medical schools, thereby helping to aggravate the problem of waiting times in the health care system, among other things.

And it's not just doctors we can't be bothered to train. We have always had to import tradespeople, for example. Even the ideas implemented by the educational system are imported. Having decided that if you build it, they will learn, we have never seen any need to think about what the schools should do. We'll build schools just like other countries' and think just like the educators of other countries. Usually, of course, that means not only that the ideas are often inappropriate for Canada but also that they are obsolete. Ontario, for example, set up the Educational Quality and Accountability Office in the 1990s to implement performance assessment, a type of evaluation which had been implemented much earlier in other countries, and which, when Ontario adopted it, those other countries were dropping like a hot potato. EQAO eventually dropped it, too, and since then seems to have been changing the type of evaluation it uses as often as Bill Gates changes operating systems. But then EQAO has traditionally been run by people untrained in measurement and evaluation.

Other sectors of Canadian society operate similarly. Pierre Berton observed long ago that early in the automobile age Swedish manufacturers decided to build cars adapted to the Swedish climate and road conditions, while Canadian manufacturers decided to assemble American cars. The Canadian private television industry follows the same strategy – it simply rebroadcasts American television programs.

And guess what? We gobble 'em up. Why, those are the programs people watch in a real country, the United States, so if we watch them that means that we're a real country, too. And don't think this generalization applies only to English Canada. When you watch most of the dramatic shows and movies on private French television, you'll notice that the actors' mouths aren't moving as they would if they were making the words on the soundtrack. And Quebec is the home of the idea that if it calls itself sovereign it will be, even if after becoming "sovereign" it uses another country's currency.

Well, Canada could have been a real country. Not only does it have a real culture, it has two of them. But one unfortunate characteristic of both those cultures is that an infatuation with appearance occupies the place that should be accorded to a devotion to principle and to comprehension.

The Canadian Cargo Cult © John FitzGerald, 2006