The Liquid Life

Well into the 1970s the government of Ontario strove to make getting a drink as difficult as possible. Licensed establishments were, to use an entirely appropriate cliche, few and far between. They were so far between that you could sober up walking from one to the next, which is perhaps why so many people drove drunk in those days.

I have lived along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto for over 30 years. It is a heavily travelled street in a densely populated part of the city, a city which has a high residential density. Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s there were all of four taverns on St. Clair West in the mile and a quarter between Bathurst Street and Dufferin Street, with a beer hall round the corner on Dufferin. There were two lounges in the mile and a quarter between Yonge Street and Bathurst (both within two blocks of Yonge – people in Forest Hill didn’t drink, it seems). Furthermore, in the two and a half miles between Yonge and Dufferin there was one beer store and one liquor store.

There were in those days three types of drinking establishment in Ontario. Lounges were the poshest type of establishment. Since they were Ontarian that means they were posh mainly in comparison with the other types of drinking establishment. Anyway, they served all types of alcohol to people who could afford higher prices. Taverns also served all types of alcohol but the bulk of their receipts had to consist of food orders. The beer parlours were usually called hotels. For a long time the licensing regulations had restricted new drinking establishments to hotels, so all sorts of fleabag hotels sprang up with a dozen rooms or so and a gigantic beer parlour.

The beer parlours were intended for the lower orders, and in keeping with the traditional Ontario fear of those orders drinking in beer parlours was made as unpleasant as possible. For one thing, men on their own were not allowed to drink with women. God only knows what those lower-class hooligans would have got up to if that had been allowed, eh? Beer parlours were divided into two rooms, the ladies and escorts’ side and the men’s side. The ladies and escorts’ was usually pleasant enough, but the men’s side was usually appalling.

For a while in 1971 my local was the Chateau Dufferin (the aforementioned beer hall round the corner). The escorts’ there was a pleasant room with flocked wallpaper and subdued lights. The men’s side consisted of two rooms. The back room contained a long table around which a dozen or so men would sit glumly while they watched a black and white television on a shelf in the corner. The front room was bigger, full of the standard pedestal tables, each with a terrycloth slipcover on which sat a salt shaker and an ashtray. You sat down at one of the tables and a waiter with a tray of draught would appear. At the Chateau (no circumflex accent, of course) they used to wait for you to order a pair of draught. At many places they just put two in front of you without asking. The chief drawback of the Chateau’s front men’s room was its men’s room – when you went to the can it was a good idea to take your waders.

No one could drink outdoors. No one could drink indoors if someone outdoors could see them (most beer halls featured windows of glass block). No one could transport an open bottle of liquor or an open case of beer. Most restaurants were dry, and on Sundays you could only drink with a meal, so if you ran out of booze on Sunday you had to hunt around for one of the few licensed restaurants,

Such were the good old days. Government – and respectable opinion – considered a large segment of the population to be in need of paternalistic protection; its members could not be trusted to act responsibly. To control them, government established different standards of service for different social groups. Men got worse service than women, working people got worse service than the well-heeled.

These days there are more bars and licensed restaurants, and men on their own are actually considered to be others’ equals. The old hotels are almost extinct, and the survivors no longer enforce segregation. Blanket rules are being replaced with measures that address specific problems, such as spot checks of drivers.

Some of the blanket rules remain (where you can drink remains fairly restricted, although you can now drink outdoors where the public can see you), but life is altogether more open and egalitarian in Ontario these days. On the whole, people drink less abusively, too. A common way to pass a long weekend on the old days was to lay in a store of booze at home and spend the weekend drinking it. One of the reasons people don’t do that any more is probably that there are more things for people to do, but surely another is that drinking outside the house has been made much easier.

People still feel the need to drink, though. Drinkers are more responsible these days, but to me that is a worrisome development. Binge drinkers drink to enjoy themselves. Responsible drinkers drink for reasons that seem more sinister to me – relaxation, for example. Maybe we could start some research now on why people now need chemical help to relax. Me, I can relax at the drop of a hat.

The Liquid Life © John FitzGerald, 2008

Requiem for the Information Age

Thirty years have passed since the Information Age ended, and we are at last in a position to understand why our naive faith in the utility of communications technology proved to be unfounded.

At the beginning of the Information Age, Thoreau famously observed that "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." The problem, as it turned out, was exactly the opposite: Maine and Texas had far too much of importance to communicate.

The apex of the Information Age was reached in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Informative news reports from Vietnam shook public confidence in the advisability and even the morality of American intervention there, and eventually the United States abandoned its South Vietnamese allies. Then in 1974 a flood of information about the involvement of Richard Nixon in organized crime led to his resignation.

The Information Age was turning out to be dangerous. Regardless of whether any individual American supported or did not support Richard Nixon or the armed intervention in Vietnam, he or she experienced a great deal of anguish as a result of the appearance of actual information in the realm of public discourse. The height of the Information Age was a period which scarred the psyche of the United States, and Americans could not have been expected to endure much more of the turmoil which information entailed without enormous harm being done to the Great Republic.

The credit for slaying the dragon of Information goes to Ronald Reagan. By arranging for the passage of legislation favourable to giant media conglomerates, he earned the gratitude of the press, which spent the rest of his two terms treating him as if he were a serious person. Thus the Information Age turned into the Marketing Age in which we now live.

The press quickly deteriorated into a vehicle for the promulgation of press releases. President Reagan's inflation of the national debt was ignored, his complicity in illegal arms deals glossed over, the questionable utility of his armed interventions abroad not even hinted at.

The media mastered their new craft in the Reagan era. Compare, for example, the Watergate scandal to the scandals which led to the impeachment of President Clinton, or the scandal involved in the approval of the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court.

Watergate unfolded despite the best efforts of President Nixon to stifle it. The news media were not to be diverted from their job, as they then saw it, of being media for news. By the time Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, though, the news media were no longer interested in news. They showed little interest in aspects of the Thomas affair which would have had Vietnam-era journalists drooling: the failure to hear testimony from the other women who had complained about Thomas's conduct, for example. They were content to take the Thomas hearings as the Republicans meant them to be taken: as a morality play. Justice Thomas was presented simply as the victim of unsubstantiated allegations, the crucial point being that little interest was shown in finding out whether the allegations could be substantiated. A few years later the media followed up on the scandal by printing allegations about Anita Hill which turned out to have been based on mistaken identity.

As George Edge, a contributor to the late website NEW IMPROVED HEAD, has pointed out, the press was effectively diverted by simple stratagems from pursuing serious questions about the actions of President Clinton. By appearing weak on the issue of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton distracted the attention of the press from more serious issues such as the possibility that his staff was used to pay blackmail. Again a simple morality play was staged, and the attention of the public was directed to simple moral issues which the members of the public could resolve to their own personal taste.

In general the Clinton presidency was a masterpiece of marketing. President Clinton failed, for example, to keep the most important promise he made in his first campaign, to reform public health care. He did, however, come up with a plan to reform public health care, one which was unnecessarily complex and completely impractical, and this plan was presented as if it were a major public policy initiative. President Clinton was very successful in presenting his failures as the result of sabotage by the Republicans. In fact the Republicans did often try to sabotage his plans, but that supposedly is what democracy is about. If you make it easy for your opponents to sabotage your initiatives, questions might be raised about your motives in doing so, but none were raised by the media, which by the 1990s were firmly established in a marketing orientation.

After Mr. Clinton, of course, we had the spectacle of George W. Bush being presented as a great President. Even in relative terms this assertion is difficult to support. In my lifetime alone the Presidents of the United States have included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, three men whose accomplishments dwarf any that George W. Bush could even think up to fantasize about as he drifts off to sleep.

President Bush Jr. understood marketing, though, or he knew someone who understood it. He quickly responded to the terrorist attacks by attributing them to a single demonic person whom he pledged to bring to justice, much as the stars of the World Wrestling Federation pledge to bring their enemies to justice. America seems to be no safer against terrorism now than it was on September 11, 2001 (President Bush even managed to lose a city in his second term), but the American people were united around their leader for a good part of his term.

Of course, these developments are not confined to the United States. The rest of the world, which never had as open a press as the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, could adopt the new approach even more easily than the American media. In the United Kingdom, for example, where the press was more interested in presenting Margaret Thatcher as a moral figure than as a political one (luckily for her, she thought she was a moral figure rather than a political one), the new role of the press as a vehicle for the simplified morality and sensation-mongering of the press release seemed a more natural development than it had in America.

And for all this we can be thankful. If the Information Age had not been done away with, it is doubtful if any American president would finish his term. Wars would be impossible to wage. The conduct of public affairs by our leaders would in effect cease.

For example, if President Johnson had decided to use military tribunals to try protesters against American actions in Vietnam, the press of the day would have gone for his throat. People would have been in the streets, even more riots would have taken place. President Bush's plans to use military tribunals could not elicit even a raised eyebrow from the media. Power is back where it belongs, in the hands of the powerful. Information no longer retains the power to destabilize the most powerful societies on earth, because information no longer exists.

Requiem for the Information Age © 2001, 2010, John FitzGerald

On gentility

[First published in 2008]

Perhaps there is a gene for gentility. No matter how hard we try, we always end up being admonished by prigs about how offensive we are. These days some of the prigs go to the trouble of murdering the offensive people.

We are thinking, of course, of the murderous rampages some Muslims went on following the publication of cartoons of their prophet. These rampages were justified as responses to the offence that the cartoons constituted. This position amounts to a claim that Muslims have the right to determine what cartoons should be published while non-Muslims do not.

Any standard of conduct is an attempt to expand the power of one group at the expense of another. Often the expansion of power is intended to benefit society as a whole. Polite prohibitions of coughing or sneezing without covering your mouth, or against spitting on the public footpaths, are ultimately intended to reduce the spread of disease by increasing the power of the healthy at the expense of the unhealthy. Laws against theft increase the power of the propertied and law-abiding at the expense of the thieving.

However, religious believers’ assertions that codes of conduct or of law should require that non-believers respect them do not produce benefits for society, but only for the believers who want respect. In the Western world the status of religious organizations as arbiters of mores is declining as the number of believers in their mythologies declines. Finding that their threats of eternal damnation have lost the power to persuade people, the religious try instead to appeal to worldly standards of gentility. Why, disagreeing with the Archbishop of Canterbury is too, too vulgar.

The religious, however, feel no obligation to refrain from offending the non-religious, or indeed from offending each other. That is why we can conclude that the real goal of their demands for respect is not conformity to standards of gentility but rather an attempt to shore up their collapsing social status.

Different from the demands of the religious are the demands of various underprivileged groups for respect. These differ in that they are rather reminders to us that they should have as much power as other groups do. While these demands are laudable in intent, they seem to us to have got the relationship the wrong way round.

People do not have power because they are respected, they are respected because they are powerful. To paraphrase Barbara Ehrenreich, legislators are quick to announce their respect for family values, but slower to announce legislation which will promote the formation and expansion of families. Professions of respect do not equal respect.

Of course, the powerful are happy to dish out the respect. These days people in positions of influence are punctilious about the names they give to other groups. In fact, they have managed to transform the struggle for equality into a struggle for polite terminology. They still call the less privileged late for dinner, but they care about what they call them.

In a democratic society, you will not promote important social change by appealing to standards of gentility. The fundamental idea of gentility is always that some people are better than others. Calling for others to respect you encourages them only to be polite. It does not encourage them to share their surplus power with you. For that you need to appeal to universal values, such as justice.

On Gentility ©John FitzGerald, 2008

Aboriginal-bashing

Some Quebec nationalists believe the English-Canadian press is Quebec-bashing, as they call it. They comb the English-Canadian press for anything that can be considered to be anti-Quebec, find a dozen or so articles written over the past fifteen years, then claim that these articles represent a pattern on the part of the entire English press of smearing Quebec whenever possible.

As you will recall, Mordecai Richler was considered to be Quebec-bashing when he suggested that la revanche du berceau had not been a wholesome development in Quebec history. You can also be considered to be Quebec-bashing if you disagree with the government of Quebec, as the city of Westmount was considered to be when it opposed, along with many francophone municipalities, a project of amalgamation of municipalities.

The idea is that Quebec-bashing is part of a campaign to make Quebeckers look incapable of managing their own affairs, and therefore unready for sovereignty (whatever that might eventually turn out to be). Granted, the ignorance of Quebec displayed in the English-Canadian press is sometimes staggering, and if some people see it as a campaign against Quebec I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Also granted, some members of the English-Canadian press corps have formidable hates on for Quebec.

However, English-Canadians are well aware that Quebec has been managing its own affairs for 140 years. There is another group, though, which the English-Canadian press is bashing constantly, with the effect, if not the goal, of implying that it is incapable of self-government.

That group is aboriginals, and in particular members of First Nations. English-Canadian news coverage of aboriginals almost exclusively depicts them as ravaged by social problems and incapable of managing their own lives. On February 5, 2008, I did a search on the Google News Canada English-language site for the word “aboriginal” and the phrase “first nations.” The stories I found were overwhelmingly negative. They dealt with:

• a policing crisis on reserves,
  
• aboriginal drug addiction,
  
• the inability of some aboriginals to manage their compensation payments for abuse at residential school,
  
• the “growing and urgent needs of the aboriginal population”¹,
  
• discomfort felt by aboriginal students at university,
  
• rundown reserves,
  
• aboriginal unemployment,
  
• aboriginal alcoholism (you’ve been waiting for that one, I bet),
  
• the impeachment of the grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations of the Northwest Territories,
  
• the possibility of a shutdown of the First Nations Technical Institute on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario,
  
• the inflated remuneration paid the chief of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba,
  
• the refusal of a group of Roman Catholic bishops to apologize for abuse at residential schools, or to promise to bring abusers to justice.

Aboriginals are depicted in the English-Canadian press as people who are overwhelmed by the pressures of modern society, and unable to cope with these pressures themselves. Lurking behind this depiction are two inferences:

1. that maybe it’s best for Indians to continue to be segregated on reserves, and
   
2. that these problems are so huge that they can only be solved by Big Daddy, the government.

Well, the government’s been doing a fine job so far, eh? As far as I can make out, government policy towards the First Nations is to keep the chiefs happy. They do audit band councils, but the well-being of the ordinary citizens of the reserves, and of those members of First Nations who live off the reserves, is not a prime concern. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why conditions on most reserves are so abominable, and why the average income of Indians living off reserves is so low.

As for the Métis, the government looked the other way in the late nineteenth century when land reserved for them under the Manitoba Act was being given to white farmers instead. The Inuit were for decades the victims of daft federal schemes which imperilled their survival – for example, moving them to places where they could no longer hunt.

In short, the aboriginal peoples have been wards of government for over two hundred years, and its tender care has rewarded them with shorter lifespans, lower incomes, and higher suicide rates than the rest of us. And now we want the government to do more.

So, you may ask, what else can we do? Well, we could start trying to like aboriginals. We could ask ourselves why we have an apartheid system for Indians. Could it possibly be that we don’t want to have them among us? And why would we not want to have them among us? Could it possibly be that we consider them racially inferior? In this day and age?

Yep. It sure could. It could be that our long history of acting as if aboriginals were children, and the lack of success we’ve had when acting on this assumption, has left us with the idea that our approach failed because aboriginals are bad children, evil children, who are best encouraged to stay in the north or on their reserves where they can do the least harm.

If we are to overcome the current poisonous state of race relations in Canada, we could start by treating aboriginals as our equals. That would mean, for example, dismantling the apartheid system erected by the Indian Act. What do we do after that? I don’t know. It’s not as if we’ve ever had the experience of treating aboriginals as equals before. However, I’m pretty sure that whatever we try will have no chance of failing as catastrophically as the approach we’ve been taking so far.

Aboriginal-bashing © 2008, John FitzGerald

Pathology is destiny

Thirty years ago the progressive opinion about the differences in the characteristic behaviour of men and women was that they were the result of sexist childrearing, but these days progressive opinion is divided. Behavioural differences are thought by some to be the product of hormonal differences, for example, by others to be the result of a conspiracy among men to oppress women, and so on and so on.

One possibility appears to have been neglected, though. When we look at the conventional catalogue of differences between men and women, we find that men are assumed to have characteristics remarkably similar to the characteristics of people with brain injury.

On the whole, men are more violent than women and more likely to express anger. They are more likely to be restless and impatient. They have been shown to have poorer verbal abilities than women. They are often assumed to have difficulties with attention (being unable to find things which are in plain view, for example) and with memory (as when they forget important anniversaries). They are often assumed to be more egocentric and impulsive.

All these characteristics are associated with brain injury. Men are twice as likely as women to be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, and most victims are young men aged 15 to 30. Young men are more likely than young women to take dangerous risks and to suffer head injury as a result. These figures, of course, apply only to diagnosed brain injuries, injuries which at the very least have resulted in loss of consciousness, loss of memory, alteration of mental state, or neurological deficit – that is, injuries other people notice and arrange to have treated in hospital.

However, men are also more likely to suffer concussion which, although it usually does not have the catastrophic consequences of more serious brain injury, still has some pretty serious ones. "Repeated concussions," note Kelly, Nichols, Filey, Lillehei, Rubinstein and Kleinschmidt-Demasters in an article published in JAMA in 1991 (vol. 266, no. 20, pp. 2867-2869), "can lead to brain atrophy and cumulative neuropsychological deficits."

As children we often hit our heads without the idea crossing anyone's mind that we should undergo a neurological examination. Boys are more likely to hit their heads. As boys grow older they take part in contact sports. Kelly et al. reported that in 1991 football was producing an estimated 250,000 concussions every football season in the United States, and that 20% of high school football players in the United States suffered at least one concussion every season. The probability that at least some of the behavioural difference between men and women can be explained as a result of brain trauma seems fairly high.

History confirms the thesis. The behavioural differences between men and women are less marked than in the past, and society is less violent and less dangerous. Until fairly recently, for example, a large part of the male population spent much of its time working in dangerous occupations without head protection; one of these occupations was war, in which men often found themselves fighting hand to hand in conditions likely to lead to brain injury. Today, of course, jobs are less dangerous, workers wear head protection, and war is fought with weapons which act from a distance. As the likelihood of brain injury has decreased, so have the behavioural differences between men and women.

In North America, contemporary worship of sport threatens to widen the gap again. The most popular sport in the United States is football, while in Canada it is hockey. Both sports inflict head injury at a high rate, and both are played primarily by men. Women's hockey is popular, but the women's game is less violent (bodychecking is prohibited) and far fewer women than men play hockey. The fanatical devotion of young boys to these sports seems likely to create a more "masculine" generation.

In the end, then, the behavioural differences between men and women may not be due to hormones, the worldwide male conspiracy, or, as women seem commonly to suppose, men's inherent moral and intellectual inadequacy. They may after all be due to sexist childrearing, but not in the way people thought in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, the problem may not be that girls are trained to act in submissive ways, but rather that boys are encouraged to act in ways which endanger their physical, emotional, and intellectual function.

The question remains of how we are to eliminate this sexism. Well, one thing that would help would be for young women to stop encouraging young men in this behaviour. Young women reward football players, hockey players, motorcyclists, and so on. They reward the recklessness which produces brain injury. Another big help would be for schools, including our institutions of higher learning, to stop promoting sports which produce brain injury. Movies and television will have to stop promoting the invulnerable action hero as the model of masculine behaviour.

Okay, I knew it was too much to ask. We won't act on this problem, even though action, even if it didn't eliminate differences between the sexes, would reduce the horrible toll exacted by brain injury among both men and women. The opportunity for each of the sexes to feel superior to the other would be reduced, opportunities for profit would be reduced, and we couldn't have that. What was I thinking?

Pathology is Destiny © John FitzGerald, 2001

Better living through cynicism!

According to a passage in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Since being published in 1890, that little statement has enjoyed an attractiveness longer-lived than even Dorian's. It is approvingly quoted any time someone wants to castigate someone else for being a cynic.

Somehow the people who use this quotation seem not to have noticed that it's one of Wilde's characteristic paradoxes. It's a cynical remark about cynicism. So by quoting it to castigate cynics you become a cynic yourself. As Lord Alfred Douglas would have said, way cool.

So if it's contradictory to be cynical about cynicism, let's be consistent and be upbeat and positive about it! Wow! What a great idea! I can think of all sorts of wonderful things that the cynical community has given to the world!

• First of all, there's contemporary television! Cynical television executives realized that if they took the value, or quality, out of television programs they could reduce the price! When they reduced the value and price of television programs, they ended up with shows like Survivor and The Bachelor! And that's a good thing! How do I know? Because everybody likes them as much as those expensive "quality" shows they replaced! Wow! High ratings, low cost! I guess sometimes it helps not to know anything about value!

• Then there's contemporary fashion! Cynical marketers suspected that what people wanted in fashion was nothing more than a trademark that certified they'd spent a lot of money on a garment or accessory. How could they find out? Why, they marketed expensive clothes that were identical in every way to cheaper garments except that they prominently displayed the designer's trademark! That's how we got the $100 T-shirt! And you know what! Everybody bought them! Lower costs for designers, but higher revenues – who needs to know about value!

• And of course there's contemporary politics! Neo-conservative and neo-liberal politicians just couldn't see the value in democracy. For them, democratic values could be reduced to one question – how much did they have to pay? So they embarked on campaigns to cut social programs and to cut taxes. And you know what? Everybody loved the idea! They voted the slash and burn cynics into office, where they slashed and burnt! Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris, they all slashed and burnt! And after they slashed and burnt they all got voted in again!

And you know what else – the possibilities are endless! What if...we combined all three of these things! What if we selected ordinary citizens at random to run for the Calvin Klein party on a platform of eliminating government service and reducing taxes to nothing! Now there you have absolutely no value at all! And everyone'd love it!

Instead of having to fork out to pay for the pet projects of a bunch of fat old ugly politicians, you'd have the discretion to purchase any service you wanted from any giant transnational corporation that was supplying it! You wouldn't have to put up with clunky old government health care, government police services, or government electricity, you could buy designer health care, designer police, and designer electricity!

And once Parliament was eliminated the parliamentary channel would be freed up for reruns of Survivor!

So what are you waiting for! Those old outmoded bleeding-heart do-gooder attitudes are yesterday's news! For a better society, for a better country, for a new improved, more confident YOU, let's all get cynical!

Better Living Through Cynicism © John FitzGerald, 2003

Why we hate lawyers

Jokes about lawyers are very popular these days, and the most popular ones display, especially in these politically correct times, a surprising bloodlust:

What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A good start!

What do you do if you run over a lawyer?
Back over him to make sure. Then, make another notch on the steering wheel.

What do have when a lawyer is buried up to his neck in sand?
Not enough sand.

Now what do lawyers do to arouse such animosity? Chiefly, the problem is that they're smart. Being smart is definitely démodé these days. It is outré. It is, above all, pas comme il faut.

For one thing, having to acknowledge that someone other than us is smart restricts our ability to perform our duty of esteeming ourselves. Moreover, the existence of a group of people who make good money from living by their wits rather than by doing what they're told to do makes most of us feel inadequate, so we hate them.

Intelligence is also the enemy of the good life, as defined for us by giant corporations. It hinders our ability to follow the directions for living that our employers so thoughtfully send us over our cellphones and pagers, and that Oprah and other corporate giants send us over the airwaves. If we actually exercised intelligence, how could we enjoy Survivor, taking work home on the weekend, or reading all those self-help books? Lawyers are intelligent – they must want to ruin our lives.

Furthermore, lawyers are just not genteel enough. If the people had their way, life would not be marred by such embarrassments as the release from prison of Donald Marshall, David Milgaard, Guy-Paul Morin, Rubin Carter, Rolando Cruz, and on and on. When society says that someone is a murderer, the well-behaved accept its judgment.

Often our hatred of lawyers is justified as a dislike of lawyers' greed. Given the incidence of selfless behaviour on our parts these days, though, we can safely assume that this explanation is but another example of the defence mechanism of projection. Feeling guilty about our own greed, we project it onto some outgroup. Certainly lawyers place a high value on their work, and like to get paid for every second of it. On the other hand, people are willing to pay their stratospheric fees, so maybe they're worth it.

Anyway, if lawyers were that greedy, they wouldn't be lawyers. They'd be where the real money is – playing professional sports. Representing the legal interests of citizens caught up in the toils of the "justice" system, or even the interests of giant corporations, pays peanuts compared to what you can get for batting balls about. And when you bat balls about, people worship you. And you get a lot more time off.

We also justify our hatred of lawyers as hatred of their questionable ethics. Insert your own sarcastic comment about that idea here.

Perhaps I have not persuaded you. Luckily for you, society seems to be evolving in a way which will make most lawyers obsolete. People seem to be losing interest in the mainstay of lawyers' business.

Specifically, they are losing interest in democracy. They don't vote; they don't pay attention to the issues when they do vote; they vote, as Ontario voters have done, to reduce their control over the expenditure of public funds. Democracy just takes too much of our valuable time in a world full of rewarding things to do, like watching So You Think You Can Dance or searching YouTube for videos of dogs dancing the hula. Why not just leave the running of society to the experts?

Once the experts take over lawyers will become unnecessary except, of course, to the experts. At any rate you won't have to deal with them, since your rights will be thoughtfully reduced to a convenient number you can protect all by yourself - the right to pay taxes; the right to have your urine tested; the right to be denied unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, and health care. And, of course, the right to tell jokes about lawyers.

Why We Hate Lawyers © John FitzGerald, 2001

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

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