Measure of Doubt

One Hundred

2011-07-01T07:19:00.005-04:00

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. ~ Lewis Carroll

And so, at long last, we arrive at two-word titles on Measure of Doubt, some three years and four months after we began. One hundred posts. Eighty thousand words. I don’t keep comprehensive tracking statistics, because I’m opposed to writers surveilling their readers, but I do have a counter that indicates that I have had something on the order of 35,000 unique “hits” on this page.

I have more to say, of course. Consider:

- Those digital signs that span the 401: they bug me. The other day, one said, “School is out. Watch for children.” Are children playing on 400-series highways now? And if I intended to drive like a psychopath, gunning for children, would the sign make me reconsider?
- “Natural” is not synonymous with “good”. Polio is natural. Polio vaccine is unnatural. Which would you rather have?
- The organizing principle of homeopathy cannot be true unless the laws of physics and chemistry are false.
- Oprah’s practice of having only herself on the cover of her own magazine is made all the more egotistical by the fact that she very occasionally violates the practice. It wouldn’t be a problem if it were a general policy. It’s not. It’s question of her finding someone worthy to appear with her.
- Television is both worse (reality TV) and better (Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad) than ever.
- My wife makes the best sandwiches in the world. On Saturday, it was avocado and red onion on grilled French bread with a cilantro chipolte mayonnaise.
- The proper way to cook a steak is in a very hot cast-iron fry pan until it’s rare or medium-rare, not on a gas BBQ until it’s a greyish brown colour.
- One advantage of cats over dogs is that you can leave them alone for the weekend. They have this advantage over children, too.
- The phrase, “those who can’t do, teach” doesn’t apply to university professors who are active in scholarship in their field: they teach precisely because they can “do”.
- The guy who first proposed that his company should pour tap water into a plastic bottle, ship it across the country, and sell it at variety and drug stores for three times the price of gasoline deserves a big raise. And to be beaten.
- It’s hard to find good restaurants in London, Ontario.
- The greatest movie ever made is Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
- Nonacademics have more freedom to express their views on academic matters than academics do, even though academics are supposed to have academic freedom. You wouldn’t believe the blogs I didn’t post.
- The scariest book I’ve read in the past two years is The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Anyone who spends more than an hour per day on the Internet should read it.
- Technology is not neutral. It changes us even when we’re not using it.
- Educated people built Auschwitz and the atomic bomb. Rationality can sometimes lead to horrible things. But irrationality always does.
- Steinbeck is overrated. That’s irrational, I know.
- Get over the Beatles, everyone. They only recorded something like 9 hours of music. Seriously. 9 hours. Move on.
- The Golden Compass series is better than Harry Potter by a longshot. And Harry Potter was good, although by the last book in the series I was skimming.
- In the 1960s, this actually happened: university administrations decided it would be a great idea to get teenagers who have never taught and never studied pedagogy to be the ones to decide whether or not university professors with PhDs, lengthy publication records, and decades of teaching experience are any good at teaching. That actually happened.
- A recent study in the United States found that between 1961 and 2003, the number of hours per week that university students spent on all aspects of their studies declined from 40 to 27. Assuming the same rate of decline continued through to 2011, the figure would now stand at about 24 hours per week. Average grades, however, have gone up rather dramatically. Draw your own conclusions.

Well, I could go on and on, but things have value precisely because they don’t. And that is why this 100th column of Measure of Doubt will be its last.

I’ve changed. You’ve probably changed, too. I’ve gotten a load off of my chest and have begun to repeat myself. So now it’s time for other things.

Are you out there, readers? Are there more than three or four of you?I have no idea. I have unlocked my message board: there is no need to register. If you have read Measure of Doubt, and it has meant something to you, leave a message. I’d like to know.

Well, that’s enough, I think. One final thought: Bertrand Russell said that the whole problem with the world comes down to the fact that intelligent people are full of doubt while the stupid ones are sure of themselves. So may you always be full of doubt, my friends.

Violence

2011-06-22T18:26:00.010-04:00

A true story. On the 24th of November, 1326, four horses entered the marketplace at Hereford, England, dragging behind them Hugh Despenser the Younger, recently convicted of treason, while the Queen, Isabella, and the assembled crowd of courtiers and commoners hooted and jeered. Already wearing a crown of nettles and disfigured by crude tattoos of verses concerning matters of retribution from the Old Testament, Despenser was stripped naked and “half-hanged” — that is, hoisted by a noose until semi-conscious — at which point they cut his genitals off. This was considered very fitting by all assembled since Despenser was known to have been the lover of the King, Edward II (himself to die the following year by means of a red-hot “trumpet” thrust into his anus, according to at least some accounts.)

The writer Alison Weir recounts that Despenser then emitted a “ghastly, inhuman howl”, but his punishment was very far from over. Weir then picks up the account of a contemporary chronicler who wrote, “Then his belly was split open” – this while he remained conscious — “and his heart and entrials cut out...when the other parts of his body had been disposed of, Sir Hugh’s head was cut off and sent to London. His body was then hewn into quarters, which were sent to the four next largest cities in England.” You can see the event depicted, above. I bet nobody accused Isabella of being soft on crime.

But this is kid’s stuff, actually, by the standards of the Middle Ages. Consider, if you will, the words of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who recounted that Spanish conquistadors in the New World would, “hang 13 natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the 12 Apostles. Straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive. They took babies from their mothers’ breasts, grabbing them by their feet and smashing them against rocks. They would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and threw others to the dogs and thus were torn to pieces.”

Well, that’s Medieval justice for you, a fact that Shakespeare was very much aware of when he had his hero Henry lay the following threat onto the governor of the French town of Harfleur in his great play Henry V.

    Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
    Take pity of your town and of your people,
    Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
    Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
    O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
    Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
    If not, why, in a moment look to see
    The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
    Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
    Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
    And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
    Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
    Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
    Do break the clouds

It’s Shakespeare, yes, but historically accurate: Henry really did make a threat like this and the actual execution of such threats was commonplace throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, the people of innumerable towns and cities have suffered similar fates from ancient times through to Nagasaki and beyond. But this particular passage was excised in the 1944 Olivier film version: it wouldn’t do in 1944 to have a Shakespearean hero employing Gestapo methods against England's enemies even though at that very moment, the planes of Bomber Command were burning German cities and the people in them to the ground, night after night.

And what do all these people have in common? These crowds who cheered for the drawing and quartering of a homosexual? The medieval kings who ordered their men remorselessly to rape and murder their way through towns and villages? The conquistadors who actually did spit naked infants upon pikes? Well, for one thing, they were all Christians, devout believers of utterly unshakable convictions. And, why not, really? In the Old Testament, Mr. Tough-on-Crime himself orders all manner of massacres and whatnot. Yahweh is not merely vengeful and jealous and all the things that normally are attributed to him, at times he’s rather fiendishly diabolical in the manner of a James Bond villain. In 2 Kings 2, verses 23-24, He sends a couple of “she bears” to rip apart 42 children for making fun of Elijah’s baldness. Do not mess with this cat. Seriously.

Am I saying that religion is the problem, that it “poisons everything” as a recent book put it? Certainly not. The claim that “religion poisons everything” is an empirical one, and until such time as we have studied religion in relation to, well, everything, we can’t possibly reach that conclusion. And there is, moreover, the undeniable fact that, in absolute terms, the secular (and in some cases aggressively irreligious) dictatorships of the 20th century: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, killed perhaps 100 million people between them. Indeed, Stalin, the foremost mass murderer in history, studied for the priesthood for only about four or five years so.

Here’s the catch, though. In absolute terms, the 20th century was undeniably the most violent in history. But there were also a lot more people to kill, and I am very far from convinced that, in relative terms, the 20th century was necessarily more violent than any of a number of centuries that preceded it. For Americans, the death rate from their Civil War, fought amongst themselves in the 1860s, was about six times greater than what they lost in World War Two; a Frenchman was more likely to die in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars than during the World Wars; the average person living in early 16th century “Germany” during the Thirty Years War, was almost certainly more likely to die from violence than the average German living in the first half of the 20th century, and all these wars were fought amongst Christians. We could go on and on. Need I even begin to enumerate the catastrophic death toll of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Anyone who studies military history long enough eventually reaches the conclusion that there is basically nothing that people won’t do to one another. There is no act of betrayal or violence or cruelty so profane that people will not do it to their fellows in order to impose their will, and every human religion, doctrine, or philosophy can be and has been utilized to sanctify acts of unfathomable cruelty. But history also shows that people are often selfless, will sacrifice themselves for one another, and will die to defend the lives of otherwise defenseless people who they have never met and from whom they can earn no reward. As historians, we need to devote greater efforts to understanding what motivates actions such as these, in addition to understanding the everyday kindnesses, of which there are a multitude, that go unrecorded and unnoticed in the annals of history.

Silence

2011-06-11T08:50:00.004-04:00

One of the many, many irritants in my life is the music they play near the elevators in my apartment building. The radio station (yes, they still have those) that I am forced to listen to for a few minutes every morning describes itself as “the home of the best rock of the 70s and 80s”, by which they mean some of the worst music in the history of the world. I can do without “Highway to Hell” at any time. I certainly don’t need to hear it at 7:45 AM. Yesterday it was “Hotel California.” At 7:30 in the morning. I felt like I was the person in the song. If I were an aging hippy, and lived in a van, and were brain damaged from too many drugs, I might want to listen to the Eagles at 7:30 in the morning. But I’m not. So I don’t.

Some mornings, I catch the station between songs. But this only makes things worse, when the disk jockeys (yes, they still have those, too) are bantering. This station has three of them. You know the types: the one who always seems to be suppressing a laugh at his own joke; the one with the barking voice who sounds like he’s going to tell you that this FRIDAY, at the METRODOME, the first hundred FAMILIES to see MONSTER TRUCKS get a FREE 12-GAUGE; and then there’s the hapless female, who makes inane sexual innuendos at her own expense. She serves no other purpose on the show. When I get to Hell that’s what will be awaiting me. An eternity of listening to FM Whatever-Whatever, Home of the Hits.

In the winter, my morning ritual involves a short walk to the corner of the downtown intersection to catch a bus. I used to stop at Starbucks for an espresso, but the long lines, the fact that, after a while, I caught myself translating my own order into Italian (“doppio espresso”), and their diurnal selection of music just became too much. The musical selection usually involved the latest CD by another in a litany of minimalist folk-rock females of modest talent who will one day be featured during a weepy montage sequence at the end of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. In Starbucks, you get the added bonus of listening to the counter-staff (who are supposed to be making your espresso) talking about the music. (“This is Morgana Wheatfield. She is, like, so cool. She’s, like, such a great poet.”) People who work at Tim’s prefer the Eagles, I think.

Out the door, espresso in hand. Standing at the corner, waiting for my bus. My city has located all of its social services in the core. There are arguments for and against this, and for good historical reasons I get quite uneasy at the suggestion from some of my city’s quite clueless public officials that all such services and the people who use them should be “relocated to the east.” Anyway, the very core of the city is a haven for small-time drug dealers. They’re there all day long, and everybody knows it. In an effort to get them to move, the owners of the building set up speakers and started playing classical music at quite a loud volume. The hope was that this would be so unendurable to the dealers that they would leave. This hasn’t worked but I suspect that, in six months or so, London will have the most erudite and cultured criminal element anywhere.

And then the bus arrives. I sit between two people wearing iPods and playing them at such a volume that I can hear every note. And usually the music sounds something like: “WAAGGHAH! AAAARAGHA! WOOOOO! BAY-BEE! WAAAAGHAHAGH!” and the people listening to it nod their heads and play drums on their knees while I’m trying to read a book. Add to that the following fact: my city’s busses talk. Insert blasphemy of your choice here. Can I say it again? My city’s busses talk. The busses. Talk. They announce the next stops. This is one thing on a subway, where the stops are blocks apart. It’s another on a bus, where they are fifty feet apart.

Silence. Please? May I have a moment without an endless cacophony of noise? Well, yes. Because then I get to class. It used to be, only a few years ago, that when I wanted to start lecturing I would have to tap the podium for some time to bring my students’ chattering to a close so that I could begin the process of crushing their youthful enthusiasm for learning. (“I'm teaching you to think critically. Now memorize this lecture: it's on the exam.”)

So, what has changed? Well, now when I enter the lecture hall there is silence. Because my students aren’t talking to one another. They’re “talking” to people who aren’t there. They’re sending text messages on a device that used to be used for speaking. (Some day there will be a class-action lawsuit against Blackberry and others by the all the people who got arthritis by the time they were forty because of the thousands of hours they spent typing with their thumbs. Mark my words. It will happen.) And they almost never stop, just like the people who get on the elevator in my building in the morning, who start texting in the ten-foot walk between their apartment door and the elevator. Like the people on the bus, texting where a decade ago they might have been reading a book. Like the woman out walking her dog the other day, texting while she was walking, who strayed onto my side of the path while my bicycle and I were barreling down onto her. I nearly hit her. Like the grown man, texting behind the wheel of his SUV, who nearly hit me while I was crossing an intersection. Like the boring couples I see in restaurants, texting while sitting directly across the table from one another. Like increasing numbers of colleagues at meetings. Well, they might have a point there.

But why, really? What is so important? Well, nothing, of course. We have no evidence that students are smarter or businesses more efficient or people happier because we can now all "talk" to everyone all the time. On the contrary. What is important is that our brains want it and want it all the time. Our brains evolved to do simple things. Find a nut. Get an endorphin hit. Find a berry. Get an endorphin hit. Trap a small rodent. Get an endorphin hit. Now it’s: get an e-mail. Endorphins. Get a text. Endorphins. Send a text. Endorphins. These behaviours are a literally addictive byproduct of a behavioural process that evolved for other purposes. And it’s just one more thing that’s making people dumber. Every minute they spend sending messages they don’t need to send is another they could have been doing something meaningful with the ever-decreasing number of minutes that they have left.

Students sometimes ask me, “What can I do to get ahead?” By this, I assume they mean, “What can I do to get ahead of my classmates?” It’s a fair question, because it’s a dog-eat-dog world where they’re going to be competing for smaller numbers of good jobs with increasing numbers of highly credentialed classmates. My advice? Leave the laptop at home and get a cell phone for emergencies only. Then encourage your classmates to get the newest Blackberry and bring their laptops to school. I predict a twenty-point spread in grades at the end of a twelve-month period. Try it and see if I’m not right.

Addendum, June 13th. Just finished reading a very good and profoundly startling book, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows in which the author argues that our cognitive equipment simply can't handle the amount of stimulus I talked about in this column and the last. The exigencies of modern life require mastery over a range of skills, but really learning something important requires concerted effort and concentration on one thing (or a small number of things) at a time. Modern communications technology, however, practically demands and usually receives shallow and superficial spurts of attention. It is making us stupider. In fact, I took time out from marking to write this paragraph. And you, presumably, took time out from something else to read it.

Rhinoceroses

2011-06-05T06:29:00.000-04:00

A funny thing: about three years ago I arrived at work to discover that somebody had put a rhinoceros in my classroom. Nobody told me it was going to be there. I didn’t ask for it, either. I just showed up one day and there it was. It’s an enormously disruptive beast, and I spend a lot of time trying to cajole it into a corner. Believe me, I’ve complained. But whenever I do, I get told, “Well, Broad. Get with the times. We all have rhinoceroses in the classroom now. Adjust your teaching style. Deal with it. Work it into your lectures.” Some say the problem is me. “Maybe if you were more interesting, students would pay less attention to the rhinoceros.” Relax. Deal with it. Adapt. Make the flying leap into Rhinoceros Age.

Actually, none of that happened. Instead, somebody decided it would be a great idea to install wireless Internet instead. Now half of the two-thirds of the students who show up for my lectures have something else to do while I’m trying to talk to them. Is that lecture about the Holocaust getting you down? Never fear – here’s a video of a panda bear sneezing. Update your Facebook status. Multiplayer Call of Duty awaits.

Well, we all used to fade out sometimes, didn’t we? I recall doodling and making to-do lists the odd time, and fighting to remain conscious against the sonorous drone of a handful of sonorous droners. But that’s not really the point. Good lecturers can compete with everyday classroom distractions. I personally can blow the student paper or an idle game of hangman out of the water, any day of the week. What I can’t do is compete with Youtube, Facebook, and Call of Duty. If I could do that, I’d create a website called grahambroad.com, upload my lecturers, and be a multi-billionaire by the end of the year. They’d make a movie about me, with George Clooney in the starring role. We’ll call it The Asocial Network. But I can’t compete with those things, and for a simple reason: I’m not in the entertainment industry.

A few weeks ago, I had a “eureka” moment while a student was giving a presentation. I should haul out my laptop and phone and start surfing the web and texting while this student is talking, I thought. And then, when the student appeals his grade on the grounds that I wasn’t paying attention, I’ll tell the Powers That Be, “Well - that student should have just incorporated my web surfing and texting into his presentation.” Nonsense, isn’t it? And yet another example of the double standard (or perhaps lack of standards): we profess to be preparing our students for their professional lives, but we permit them to behave in ways that would be considered highly unprofessional if we were to do it.

Oh, puh-leeze, I can heard the digerati saying. This discussion is so 2007. This generation of students “lives on the Internet” and they communicate by texting. You can’t ask them to stop.

Oh, yes we can. Can we all say it together, like at an Obama rally? Yes. We. Can. We ask students to do things they don’t want to do all the time, like write essays, take tests, and read books. Or does anyone think that, if it weren’t for university, they’d be quizzing each other on Plato’s Republic and writing papers about it?

Okay, I admit it. I’m getting on. I blinked and suddenly I was middle-aged fogey. “That lecture was sick!” one of my students said after class a few weeks back. Only later did I learn that “sick” means “good.” And I was just getting used to “bad” being “good.” Now it turns out its bad again.

So let me put the question another way. What have we wrought? PowerPoint. WebCT. E-mail that effectively renders our office door open 24/7. Wired classrooms. Digital databases. WikiLearning. Educational podcasts. Flat-panel displays mounted on nearly every square inch of empty wall space. Tweeting to students, sometimes from the front of the lecture hall. Clickers. And for all that, for all those billions of dollars and millions of labour hours expended, do we have so much as a tiny, tattered, threadbare shred of evidence that our students are smarter than they used to be? Are their essays better researched or written? Are their exams more accurate? Are they more literate? More articulate? Better able to critically assess what they read and learn? And if they are not — and I have searched the pedagogical literature in vain for evidence that they are — then why is the rhinoceros in my classroom?

Apocalypse

2011-05-22T08:21:00.003-04:00

Okay, everybody good? Whew. Dodged that one.

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t supposed to be the End of the World per se. According to Harold Camping and his followers, about 200 million people were supposed to have been saved, and the rest of us left to await the actual end of the world, which will occur in October. But there was supposed to have been a monumental earthquake. And 200 million people disappearing. And all manner of apocalyptic whatnot.

Okay. Avoid cliches, students. But sometimes they’re inevitable. This is shooting fish in a barrel. But there is a larger point that this minor, media-inflated incident raises. Predictions of apocalypse come and go. Many authorities in the field of Biblical Exegesis agree that Jesus himself was (historically) an apocalyptic preacher who (scripturally) predicted that the End would occur within the lifetime of his own followers. We could go on and on, covering a truly staggering number of failed predictions, from those made by some very noble Roman Christians trying to understand the catastrophes of the world around them in a pre-scientific age, to the seediest of money-grubbing American evangelicals such as the late Jerry Falwell, who in 1999 predicted that the Big Wrap Party would occur “within a decade” based upon his “reading” of recent events in the Middle East.

I’m an historian. Reflecting upon the past and attempting to rescue wisdom from it is the essence of what I do. Just yesterday, I bought new translations of Herodotus and Thucydides in preparation for an academic suicide mission I'm embarking on this fall, and last week I turned the last page on Karen Armstrong’s engaging The Bible: A Biography, part of the excellent “Books That Shook the World” series. But it’s one thing to search for meaning, guidance, and wisdom in old books (or very old bronze-age books). It’s another to thing to organize one’s life around one particular reading of them. Camping, his followers, and people of their ilk live in a small, shriveled, self-centered, mean, miserly, intellectually constipated world. In a world full of causes worthy of pursuing, they decided to devote their lives to preparing for an apocalypse that didn’t even happen.

It is now 12:02 AM in Apia, Samoa, which means it’s May 22nd everywhere, and not everybody is good. Yesterday, about 20,000 people starved to death. Some people console themselves by believing that they are in a “better place” now. Harold Camping and people like him believe they are in Hell, eternally to be punished unless they died in a (proper) state of grace. Am I mocking Camping and his ilk for their religious beliefs? To quote one of the great figures of American politics of the modern era, you betcha. Me, I’m always willing to listen, at least for a while, to what people have to say. But there must be fairness in any such relationship. Proselytize, and I should be permitted to argue without fear. Threaten, and I will defend myself. And if you tell me that I’m going to Hell, I get to tell you to precede me there.

Update: May 24th: Harold Camping has emerged unraptured. To his thousands of followers who quit their jobs and spent their life savings spreading his message, he offered the following: God has decided to do the rapture and the end-of-the-world thing in one fell swoop, October 21st. The remarkable thing is how many of his followers are standing by him. As always, the problem isn't the ability to absorb information. It's the ability to think.

Rapture

2011-05-21T09:00:00.003-04:00

Well, so far, so good.

As Measure of Doubt reported back in January, months before the Johnny-Come-Lately second-stringers at The New York Times and on CNN did, a small group of very vocal fundamentalists centered around an evangelical preacher named Harold Camping and his Family Radio Network are saying that today’s the day. Pack your things, ‘cause Jesus is Coming Back.

It’s currently 2:44 AM, May 22nd, on Christmas Island, which is the world’s farthest forward dry-land Time Zone. No Rapture has been reported there. They skated through the whole of May 21st with nary an Apocalypse in sight.

Well, it’s only 1:51 AM in Apia, Samoa. So if we’re taking Coordinated Universal Time into consideration (and what is this blasphemy of time being different in different places, anyway?) He has another 22 hours to show up. Maybe we haven’t dodged that bullet yet. I’m drinking beer and running up the credit cards for the rest of the day, just in case.

I’ll check in tomorrow, when it is definitively May 22nd, 2011, everywhere, to see if y’all have come back. Or if I’ve been Left Behind.

In the meantime, consider the innovative business opportunities being pursued by the Damned.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/05/18/atheists-offer-to-rescue-christians-pets-after-judgment-day/

Arguments

2011-05-14T09:04:00.008-04:00

Ne nuntium necare.

The Ontological Argument. Famously associated with Anselm of Cantebury. The argument holds that the existence of God follows from the concept of God in language. It works like this: God is the most perfect thing that can be conceived of. But if He didn’t exist, He wouldn’t be perfect. So He exists. Rejected by intellectuals ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Bertrand Russell (who admitted that he had a fifteen-minute flirtation with it in his youth.) Currently returning to fashion in a modified form, the argument basically contends that if you write a good enough job description, the ideal employee must exist.

The Cosmological Argument. Holds that all things must have a first cause, and that the first cause of all things is God. Dates from antiquity, but is hoisted by its own petard, as the ancients well realized. Complicates rather than simplifies the problem, thus answering nothing. Why is there something instead of nothing? Because of the Creator. Why is there a Creator instead of no Creator? Let’s change the subject. Implies nothing about the correctness of any particular religion, let alone denomination. Implies almost nothing about the nature of any alleged creator or creators - neither omnipotence, nor omniscience, nor omnibenevolence, and certainly not gender. At best an argument for a highly conditional Deism.

Argument from Miracles. Holds that the existence of various miracles proves the existence of God. Four problems. First, evidence for the supernatural origins of miracles doesn't pass peer review, except where vested interests are involved. Second, even if the miracles had supernatural origins, this doesn’t imply any particular supernatural origin. Third, if God is the cause of all things, it makes no sense to make a big deal about miracles, which would be just another thing he caused. Four, for alleged “signs from God”, the miracles are often extraordinarily unimpressive: bleeding statues, low-probability recoveries from illness, bell-shaped watermarks that look like Renaissance portraits of Christ or the Virgin. Statues wandering about churches, getting their pictures taken with parishioners; prayer regenerating amputated limbs; full-colour, 3-D talking images of the Virgin giving interviews on CNN. This would be impressive.

Argument from Design. Similar to the Cosmological Argument, but focuses on the remarkable complexity of life as opposed to the curious existence of the cosmos itself. See Darwin, Charles.

Gender. The belief that God must be a man runs contrary to claims of omnipotence.

Deism. The belief that God is essentially indistinguishable from the physical laws of the universe. The default position of most of America's Founding Fathers. They would not be elected two-and-a-half centuries later.

The Mysterious. Can be appealed to in place of making embarrassing concessions such as, "You've got a point there."

Pascal’s Wager. Famous argument that contends it’s the best bet to believe in God. Maybe. But Pascal left the problem of which God to worship and how unresolved. Rather more critically, he failed to distinguish between the beneficence of belief and actually believing. Belief follows from persuasive evidence; Pascal’s Wager offers none.

Argument from Personal Faith. Simultaneously unconvincing but irrefutable. “I know in my heart that I’m right.” But every devout believer in every god in every society in the history of the world has said the same thing, including many today who are convinced that everyone else, including you, is going to Hell.

Agnosticism. A cancellationist position which holds that the evidence for and against the existence of God is about equal. Good for fence-sitters who don’t like to commit. Agnostics are often found attending United Church services "for the music" and like to recite tautological banalities such as, “Everything happens for a reason.” Intolerable people.

Russell's Teacup. Russell once argued that while he couldn't prove that a teacup is not orbiting a distant planet, that was insufficient reason to be agnostic about the issue. This is important.

Suburban Protestants and Cafeteria Catholics. Polls show that something on the order of 90 or 95 percent of people believe in God. Polls also show that the great majority of ostensibly religious people have no idea why they believe and very little idea about what they’re supposed to believe. A recent poll found that the overwhelming majority of alleged Christians could not name the four canonical gospels. Curiously, such people often get a free pass from the devout on the grounds that, “At least they believe in something.” Non-believers whose atheism is a consequence of sincere, daily, and lifelong study don't stand a chance of getting elected to political office.

Oprah. The dominant religion of our era is a belief in an immensely gregarious God who wants us to be comfortably middle-class and soothingly middle-brow; a celestial Oprah who will one day welcome all of us onto her living room set in the sky and let us jump on the sofa for all eternity.

Impossibility Arguments. Highly sophisticated evolution of ancient arguments that explored the paradoxes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence and which conclude that God, like a square circle or an honest lawyer, is a logical impossibility. Fascinating, but they do not preclude the possibility of an extraordinarily powerful but less-than-perfect God. Human beings went from stone tools to the surface of the moon in 5,000 years. Imagine a race 5 million years old. Or 5 billion. We build skyscrapers. Could they build universes?

Theological non-cognitivism. The position that all God-talk is cognitively meaningless. Stems from the impossibility arguments. Some theological non-cognitivists are therefore hard atheists; others contend that no discussion about the matter is possible until theists can arrive at a cognitively meaningful definition of what it is that we're supposed to be talking about.

Einstein, Albert. At a public debate, I sat, jaw dropping, as an atheist and theist argued over whether or not Einstein was religious. Did they think that the existence or non-existence of God was somehow contingent on what Einstein believed? A particularly dangerous argument for Christians to make, because if Einstein was anything, he was a Jew. Similar arguments are deployed for a pantheon of historical giants, good and evil, from Plato to Jefferson to Hitler. Historically interesting but, as a point of logic, utterly irrelevant in terms of the argument over the existence of God.

Atheism, hard. The position that there is no God. Generally held to be logically untenable, but adherents of impossibility arguments say otherwise.

Atheism, soft. The position that there is insufficient evidence to believe in God. An important distinction.

Atheists. Very rare. A rigorous philosophical position: not something soft that one can fall into. Atheists are also not to be confused with secular liberals who are mad about organized religion.

New Atheists. A recent breed of aggressively irreligious nonbelievers who hold that a general critique of the beneficence of faith follows from their disbelief. But whatever else they may be, religions are social institutions of enormous importance and cannot uniformly and universally be deprecated for "poisoning everything."

Prayer. Fortifying for millions, but removed from schools. The worst prayers are the begging kind: the belief that maybe this time God will intercede on your behalf. (“Please let my team win the Superbowl”, etc.) Convincing to some people because of an inability to separate correlation from causation. “I prayed and somebody found Fluffy, who was lost for three days.” Wow. Now, about that Holocaust...

Praying. It is disrespectful for non-believers to lower their heads, as if in prayer, while others are praying. Listen attentively, instead: you might learn something. But do not disrespect the devout by pretending to be something you are not. In the 7th grade, a nasty old crone who was our substitute teacher for the day made the whole class re-do the Lord’s Prayer, saying the words. Even then I wondered, “What is the point?” If the words meant nothing to us, did she think we would be fooling God?

Comparative Religion. Should be mandatory in schools. Until 1988, students in Ontario public schools rose diurnally for the immensely symbolic pairing of “Oh, Canada” and the Lord’s Prayer, understanding neither. Nor did most of their teachers, and discussion of religion was verboten anyway. Further proof that the real agenda of the Ministry of Education is to impose ignorance, and for obvious reasons. Educated people would abolish the Ministry of Education.

Darwin, Charles. A visionary genius who both demonstrated the fact of biological evolution’s existence and offered a theory – natural selection – to explain the mechanism by which it operates. Also, and this is critically important, dead since 1882. He lacked a proper understanding of heredity and did not know about genes. Today, most competent undergraduates in biology know more about evolution than did either of its co-discoverers. School-boards in Texas and Kansas can deny the existence of biological evolution all they want, but what they think doesn’t really matter. Darwin gathered a few pebbles of evidence that subsequently have become mountains. “It’s only a theory,” they say. So is gravitation. They lose. Period.

Evolution, biological. Change in the inherited characteristics of populations over time. As factually established as anything can be science. Has implications for most creation myths and for the Argument from Design, but otherwise has no bearing on the argument over the existence of God.

Catholicism. A favourite target of liberals who are at once relativists but also moralizing crusaders. In other contexts, the same people gleefully will report you to a Human Rights Commission for criticizing a religion or religious group.

Argument from Beauty. Similar to the Argument from Design. Holds that such-and-such a cultural object is “too beautiful” to have been created by a species that emerged solely as a consequence of random mutation followed by non-random natural selection. Bad thinking for obvious reasons. “How do you explain Mozart?” they say. Okay, how do you explain Michael Bolton?

Doubt. Malcolm Muggeridge said that doubt is like a pillar at the center of faith, because no one who is sincere in his or her beliefs need fear argument and disputation about them.

Beer

2011-05-05T22:07:00.000-04:00

The problem with wine is that it breeds wine snobs. We are not wine snobs. We love wine. Rare is the night that a new bottle isn’t corked around Broad-Green Estate and a glass with any lunch worth having is customary, too. We are particular about what we like and what we don’t. A big yes to French syrah, a big no to Australian shiraz, even though they’re the same grape. We know the difference, sometimes on sight and smell alone, between major varietals (though Chardonnay, which can be manipulated into almost anything these days, often fools us.) We reserve our right, in decent restaurants (hard to find in this city), to ask for small pours to sample; we solicit opinions from knowledgable waitstaff (harder still) but don’t always follow them. Amanda and I are also compiling a very substantial collection of futures to open after aging for a decade or two, and I maintain that, yes, there is something to all that nosing and swirling and decanting and tongue-smacking. But we are not wine snobs. My wine-tasting vocabulary extends as far as such words as, “yummy”, although I confess that the scrupulous avoidance of wine-tasting terminology could be viewed as a form of pretension, too. I also believe that it’s undeniably true, as the enormously likable and sensible Billy Munnelley says, that “we live in a golden age for wine” where there are a ton of great wines for under twenty dollars and a lot of good ones for under ten. Our everyday go-to pours are screw-top bottles from Italy, France, and, yes, Niagara, and they all come in under twenty bucks, positively a steal when one considers that the cost of psychotherapy ranges upwards of $150 an hour.

An aside for my American readers, who are probably thinking that twenty bucks is a lot to pay for a decent table wine. Indeed it is, at least in a civilized place such as, well, anywhere in the United States of America. Not so in Soviet Canuckistan, where government-owned provincial monopolies are the order of the day in all provinces except one. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario is the biggest single buyer of wine in the world. They have a good gig. It works like this: Ontarians pay taxes to maintain a crown corporation that sells wine back to them at inflated prices. In other contexts this is known as a “protect racket.”

Now, concerning the matter of beer. The words “wine and beer” are often uttered together but the experience of consumption usually is very different. Unfairly is beer denounced by wine drinkers as nitwit juice, mass produced in watery forms such as “Coors Light”, to be swilled one after another by fellers with big guts, who like football and eating nachos and hitting on the woman from the next trailer over when she’s visiting to watch the game on the big-screen they’re paying down over eleven years, while meanwhile their wives are in the same room, half-passed out on the sofa from too many vodka coolers at four o’clock in the afternoon while their gaggle of kids, all precisely eleven months apart, scream like monsters running from room to room shooting at each other with squirt guns loaded with bleach. This is unfair stereotype, as Coors Light is consumed by many hockey fans, too.

Moreover, good beer also has its partisans and its snobs. I myself have just downed a rather engaging, bitter and spicy little lager from San Francisco. (Put this in the “Did you know?” file, readers: your noble author almost always consumes some sort of alcoholic beverage while blogging. Can you tell? Hint: the passive-aggression meter goes up depending on the time of night and number of beverages consumed.)

A few weeks ago, the commissars at the LCBO decided that it was in the public interest to remove from their shelves forthwith and forevermore a beer called Smashbomb Atomic India Pale Ale, produced by the cheeky Flying Monkeys brewery (formerly the Robert Simpson brewery). Their reason? Because the name of the beer might promote violence. Read that again, dear readers. It might promote violence. Two observations, if I may. First, of course it will promote violence. It’s alcohol. Second, it’s not the name that’s the problem. It’s the alcohol. From the window where I type, I watch every morning as a group of homeless and/or destitute men gather in front of the LCBO, waiting for it to open, so that they can rush in and buy the cheapest bottles of swill they can get their hands on, and the LCBO sells it to them quite obligingly. But I can’t buy an India Pale Ale because the LCBO is afraid I might go and go and build a nuclear weapon in my kitchen. Good Lord. What goes on in their tiny, tiny brains?

A few days later, I discovered that a local bar and grill that serves serviceable food pours Smashbomb Atomic on tap. It was a done deal. In a fit of rage against the machine, I had a pint at lunch and went back for another the day I wrote this. Take that, Liquor “Control” Board of Ontario! I am drinking the beer because you took it off the shelves. It’s good, incidentally. Positively terrific with fish and chips.

And did I give in to fits of violence? Did the name of the beer make we want to go out and smash or bomb somebody? Well, no. But, after lunch, I immediately went home and decided to turn against everything good and decent in Western civilization and violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a hobby project.

Oh, dear. Did I just get myself flagged by a number of security and intelligence services? Probably. Hey, guys: I was just kidding. It’s a joke. Let me make it up to you. Have a Coors Light on me.

Voting

2011-05-01T16:37:00.001-04:00

As an historian, I’m skeptical any time I hear someone say, “History shows us that...” or “one of the lessons of history is...”

History is a series of arguments about the past – it is not the past itself, and rarely does it offer us clear lessons. Hindsight is not 20/20: if it were, we wouldn’t need historians. And when historians themselves do not agree about what the lessons of history are, how are we to know what lessons to derive from the past? The problem seems insoluble.

I think that the lessons of history are of a more general kind. For instance, I believe that there is a remarkable uniformity to human behaviour over time, probably the result of our evolutionary endowment manifesting itself in a plurality of social circumstances. If there’s one general “lesson of history” to be learned in regards to tomorrow’s election, it’s this: when decent people surrender the political sphere, people who crave power will occupy it for them, and there are no shortage of hate-filled, venomous, cruel, crazy, stupid, and naive voters willing to hand it to them. Never, ever forget: Adolf Hitler was elected. How many times have you heard some pinhead begin an argument with a phrase such as, “Hitler went too far, but...”?

Decent people who actually think about complex issues are often paralyzed, by contrast, because they are so disillusioned by the infantile character of our political discourse. It is understandable that so many of them exercise their right to abstain. But there is a difference between abstention, which is a considered position, and not voting because you couldn’t be bothered.

From time-to-time, some of my more politically savvy students on the left tell me that voting is inconsequential. Do they really believe this? I always administer a simple test: would they not protest, then, if voting rights were taken away or denied to certain groups, and we reverted to an era like the one depicted in the photo above?

Voting is, admittedly, only a small part of what it means to be politically active. But democracies function on participation, and voting is an important part of it. So, for any students who are reading (and I know that some of you are), consider your position, and then get out there and vote for the political party that is least likely to destroy our country in the next five years.

Weddings

2011-04-28T08:22:00.008-04:00

I have attended seven, maybe eight. Let me count. My uncle. My brother. My best friend. Two excellent friends and allies from graduate school. My wife’s brother. My wife’s lovely former roommate. A former student, now a friend. My father. So, ten. I was best man at two. Master of ceremonies at two. I killed, by the way.

So, there’s a wedding of enormous significance in the offing. I am referring, of course, to the impending nuptials of my dear friend, Alison Hunter, and her partner Jonathon Stewart, who ranks very high on the list of immediately likable people I have met. What a wedding it will be. I am exercising hard to fit into my dress pants, and even cutting back on the red wine to make it so. Damn you, Hunter. You couldn’t have made it August?

They’re getting married at the end of May.

Oh, did you think I meant some other wedding, readers? I do seem to recall reading in some 10th-rate gossip website, right below reportage of the latest DUIs by a succession of reality TV “stars”, that William, the grandson of Elizabeth Windsor (who some of you call “Elizabeth II”), a young man who seems to have emerged with some strength of character despite having an utter nitwit for a father and a media obsessed shopaholic for a mother, is shutting down a country this Friday in order to get hitched to his admittedly rather charming girlfriend, Kate Middleton.

One hopes that this goes better than some other recent royal marriages, but anyone with a sense of history and strategy would probably advise them to cut their losses and skip right to the mutually recriminating tell-all interviews and tell Kate to get her PR people working on a Weight-Watchers sponsorship now.

Unkind? Please - they can take it. They’re not ordinary folks. Some day, fellow Canadians, they will be your King and Queen, your heads of state, possessing authority, even if only symbolic authority, over you, and only because of an accident of birth. Merit need not matter. The fact that they are not Canadian does not matter. Canada’s future Queen has been chosen without so much as a Royal Tweet in the direction of Canadian voters.

Incidentally, religion does matter. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees religious freedom, but our head-of-state must be Anglican, because of a law passed in Britain in 1701. And you thought we were an independent country. Silly Canadians.

I have a certain sympathy for Kate Middleton, who has an M.A. from a school that might actually show a modicum of integrity about handing them out. It is by now widely acknowledged that the allegedly “fairy tale” romance between William’s parents was as arranged as they come, but there seems to be genuine affection between William and Kate, who met at school. But she is now condemned to a life of paparazzi and tedious ceremony, and also to the duty of producing an heir (and a spare) to throne, an unfortunate child who will one day reign over the wreckage of the Commonwealth. In all probability, this won’t occur until sometime around 2070 or 2080 or so. You used to be able to count on monarchs to die in battle or by intrigue or of some wasting disease, as so many of the positively loathsome despots who have occupied William’s future throne did. Not anymore. Nowadays they run comparatively few risks (though hats off to Harry for his tour in Afghanistan) and have health-care plans that most of their subjects would die for.

Oh, come on now, Broad, you middle-aged grump. Let us watch the wedding. Let us be swept up by the pomp and circumstance. Let our spirits soar to the hymns. Let us draw solemn fortitude from what Churchill called "the long continuity of our institutions and empire". Let us shed a small tear.

Let us eat cake.

Death

2011-04-22T08:26:00.004-04:00

I'm thinking about death because today is my birthday, and birthdays are days for reflection. I have now undeniably used more than half of the upper extremity of years granted me by the 90th Psalm and must face the real prospect that, by the pure mathematical progress of years, there are fewer ahead of me than behind.

Death. It happens to the best of us. I’m not particularly afraid of it — the prospect is more disappointing than anything else — but most deaths these days are drawn out, painful, and personally degrading. Consequently, I want the event to be as brief and trouble-free for me and everyone else when the moment comes, and indeed I’m trying to avoid it, if at all possible. Douglas Adams wrote that the “trick” to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. When the moment comes, I intend to hurl myself, unflinching, at death. And hope to miss.

Many Christians say that life must be considered sacred from “conception to natural death”, although polls show that most of them are willing to make exceptions in cases where they have something personally invested in the matter. I’ll leave the argument about my views on fetal life for another time. Let me instead observe that in our society there is very rarely such a thing as “natural death.” Most dying patients receive highly unnatural forms of palliative care, which often involves essentially stupefying them for their last few days. But there is far more to it than that, even. In the modern western world, even before we are born, we begin to receive the most radical and decidedly unnatural forms of medical treatment and intervention to extend our lives for as long as possible. Any pregnant woman who has had an ultrasound, teenager who has had symptomatic wisdom teeth removed, middle-aged man who has a prescription for blood-pressure; anyone at all who has had antibiotics for a serious infection, stitches to close a wound, a suspicious mole removed, or his tonsils taken out, simply cannot believe in the concept of a “natural death.” If we allowed “nature” to take its course the majority of us would have gone down to the same fate as the majority of people throughout history: we would have died in childhood.

Now, to the moment of death. If we are of sound mind we have a right, of course, to refuse treatment, and when we are incapable of making it for ourselves our family usually is permitted to make it for us. The decision to “pull the plug” is made by thousands of people every day when it is a clear that their brain-dead loved ones are being kept alive only in the sense of having a machine respirate for them. No one serious denies this right, as theoretically machines could keep us all respirating indefinitely, long after the brain has ceased to function. This is non-controversial.

Now, let me put another case to you. Supposing I have been diagnosed with a terminal disease and, at some late point in the disease’s progress, only pain, misery, and total loss of dignity lies ahead. I have an undeniable right to refuse treatment, of course, but with the consequent and probably quite unbearable pain that would accompany such a decision; I have the right to receive large doses of painkillers and spend my last days or weeks in a narcotic haze, which is the standard method of passing for most people nowadays. However, I do not have the right, not even in the clearest of mental states, to ask a physician to give me a lethal dose of drugs to end my life as quickly as possible.

Well, not quite. I can ask, but as matters stand no physician in Canada legally can fulfill my request. He or she can leave me dead to the world but not actually dead. But why not? There are, of course, serious concerns about the administration of such treatments, were they to be legal. There would have to be careful safeguards to ensure that people with reasonable prospects for recovery don’t end their lives prematurely. We mustn’t have angst-ridden teenagers showing up at our hospitals, asking for lethal injections because they can’t go on after their most recent breakup. But if I am in the later phases of a terminal illness, with no reasonable prospect of recovery and – most crucially – I have been professionally determined to be of sound mind, I see no grounds on which I ought not be permitted to choose to dispossess myself of the one thing that is most my own: my life. The easiest method for doing so would be to ask for the assistance of a willing physician to administer a lethal dose of painkillers.

And why can’t I? There is one answer. Because of opposition on religious grounds, by those who maintain that even fully consensual, physician-assisted suicide that meets precise criteria is a violation of the principle that life is sacred until “natural” death, even though very few of them really believe in the concept of “natural death” at all. In this regard, the only people who are being consistent are those members of certain religious minorities who refuse nearly all medical treatments on the grounds that it is a violation of God’s will. I regard this as perverse, but at least it has the virtue of consistency.

Canada’s constitution guarantees me religious freedom — a freedom which must necessarily include the freedom to be free from the religiously motivated dictates of others. I therefore regard my inability to secure a physician assisted suicide as a violation of my constitutional rights. Some will attempt to make the argument that all of our laws have religious antecedents, and that therefore my argument applies equally to laws against murder, rape, theft, and the like. But there are many grounds for opposing such crimes quite apart from the fact that there are religious proscriptions against them. The conditions of human solidarity and of maintaining human society require them whether your particular god wants them or not. By contrast, secular objections to fulfilling the wish of a terminally ill and clear-minded individual to expedite the process are harder to locate.

It goes without saying, of course, that no physician should ever be forced against his or her conscience or under threat of professional sanction to terminate someone’s life; we all recognize that the decision to end a life is, from both sacred and secular perspectives, a momentous one. The suggestion will be made, of course, that to permit physician assisted suicide will serve to further the secular society’s cruelest failing of all: the supposed devaluation of human existence. But as a historian of war and conflict, I am not at all convinced that, in proportional terms, the century recently concluded was any more violent than others that preceded it nor indeed that it valued life less. Indeed, allow me to suggest that it is possible that from a secular perspective the value of life is even greater – it has an inherent and intrinsic value, because it is the only life that we will ever have.

Horror

2011-04-16T08:16:00.009-04:00

Bad news. For some reason, the dead have risen. All of them. They are now shambling about in search of human flesh and their bite turns their victims into more zombies. They can only be killed by destroying their brain. Brains do their thing because they’re part of a nervous system and fed by a circulatory system, but massive bodily trauma doesn’t stop zombies. Pretty much any poke to the noggin will, though. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, bash ‘em in the head, they go down like bowling pins. The trouble is that there’s too many of them. So, the few survivors of this zombie plague are now huddled together in boarded up buildings, fighting to survive as their food and supplies run low and as internal dissent rises – there’s always one asshole ready to screw things up, isn’t there?

This was the premise of a grim, grimy, grisly and really rather seedy 1968 horror film called Night of the Living Dead, and one think that that would be it, really. What else is there to say? The sequel, where the zombies shamble amok in a shopping mall, nearly indistinguishable from Christmas shoppers, provokes, I will admit, a slight crack at the corner of one’s mouth, but this supposed “social commentary” is just a veneer to conceal the real plot of the film, which is running from zombies. And the exact premise has been retold in literally dozens of films now, including quite pointless remakes of both Night of the Living Dead and its sequel, and in a small avalanche books (including at least one best-seller, World War Z, by Max Brooks), and, of course, in video games, where zombies have become the necrotic analogue to Space Invaders. You keep shooting them. They keep coming. Repeat.

Recently some students commended to my attention a new TV series entitled The Walking Dead. Reading up on it a bit I heard it hailed as as being the very zenith of the zombie drama. This is not the highest accolade, of course, but I did take note of the fact that the show is airing on AMC, the network that brought us two masterpieces of modern television: Mad Men, about 1950s-era advertising agents on the cusp of becoming dinosaurs amidst the social turmoil of the 1960s; and Breaking Bad, about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer in order to provide for his family after he’s gone. I watched some of it and thought that, as zombie television shows go, it was eminently satisfactory, and will be loved by people who love that sort of thing. The producers might want to be careful how they promote their program, though.

The alleged “source material” — as if it needs any — for The Walking Dead is an utterly depraved “graphic novel” (that’s a comic book with sex and swearing) of the same name. I dipped my toe long enough into those waters to wish I hadn’t. A few selective readings revealed, among the usual zombie mayhem, decapitated children, vividly portrayed gang-rapes, and a woman shot through the chest with a shotgun while clutching her baby. They die in a spray of blood and body bits. If you meet people who like this sort of thing, I recommend that you take a step in the opposite direction. The comic's creators offer up the defense that this sort of thing goes on in reality anyway. Okay, granted. The horror genre is about the fear of death. But this isn’t about fearing death - it’s about making pornography out of it.

Zombies seem to be the next big thing in horror, perhaps because nearly all of the vampires have forsaken evil in favour of bedding teenage girls instead. You need only visit the “teen” section of the bookstore to see what I mean. Publishers have apparently given up on trying to get boys to read at all (well, somebody has to vote for the Tea Party) while for girls the teenage girl-meets-vampire-classmate genre has resulted in an avalanche of titles on the bookshelves. I’ve complained elsewhere that I invented this genre in 1986 and won’t renew this complaint here.

Anyway, in any other context, the efforts of a very elderly man to have sex with borderline or flat-out underage females would be called statutory rape or worse. (Edward is 98, Bella is 17; Angel is 240, Buffy is 16; Bill is 140, Sooki is, about 20, I guess.) Now add to it the fact that he is not merely elderly but, according to the genre’s own lore, deceased, and moreover almost invariably trembles on the brink of ripping her apart and eating her, and we have something else entirely. Let’s call it sadocanabalistic necro-adolescent-philia shall we? Something for the DSM V, as apparently millions of teenage girls have it.

Is there nothing new under the horror-genre sun? I am tired of vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves, ghosts, science-experiment run-amok monsters, and, above all, the slasher film, where people, usually teenagers, get butchered by a mask-wearing psycho because they act as if the live in a world where they don't have slasher movies. So I admit that I am curious about this, Rubber. It's a movie about a tire that comes to life and starts killing people. And I hereby claim copyright to the genre of teenagers falling in love with tires that come to life and start killing people.

University

2011-04-01T07:34:00.003-04:00

There is a tremendous amount of finger pointing going on in Japan these days. Officials are asking why this emergency procedure and that emergency procedure failed; about how responses such as rescue work and the distribution of food and water might have been improved, and about what the government could have or should have done. All these things should be talked about. But the real problem wasn’t the response. The problem was the earthquake. And the tidal wave.

Charlie

2011-03-14T09:35:00.004-04:00

The catastrophe that befell Japan late last week came on the very anniversary of another: the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo, in which perhaps 100,000 people perished by fire. I had intended the raid to be the subject of this week’s column — complete with a sober assessment of the realities of wartime Japanese imperialism — but when the earthquake, tsunami and now, it appears, partial meltdown of at least two nuclear reactors occurred in the past three days, I recalled something George Orwell said during the London Blitz: that there was much to criticize about England and its history, but now was not the best time to do it.

As of now, the official death toll in Japan is approaching two thousand and many thousands more are missing. The horrific images of the tsunami sweeping remorselessly over towns and fields, devastating everything in its path would, one would think, be enough to move even the most cold hearted reactionary to tears. But a quick perusal of message boards on CNN and Youtube suggests that a great many people are positively busting at the seams to sign up the next time the Brown Shirts role around. A small sample, shall we? (Brace yourself.)

xstongue
Theres a meltdown going on in America, can you news people focus on that instead of other countries news, we need to think about U.S. FOR A CHANGE....

primerib
What goes around comes around nips! Remember, Pearl Harbor, nips? Yeah....

BIG RED 1
Hasnt been that long ago old Tojo and his slaant eye folks were trying to killl all us Americans. They killed a whole lot of our grandparents. Please think before you start praising these people. BY THE WAY . . . THE BIG RED 1 WAS THE HONORED FIRTS ARMORED DIVISION. AMERICAN HEROES.

THEY DESERVE TO BE HIT BY QUAKE AND TSUNAMI,THEY ARE VERRY CRUEL AND HEARTHLESS,I HOPE THAT THEY WILL BE HIT AGAIN (JAPAN,JAPANESE) BY MUCH MORE POWERFULL MAGNITUDE 11 QUAKE AND TSUNAMI 100 METERS HIGH,,FUCK YOU ALL JAPANESE PEOPLE,GO TO HELL!!!
TheCityhunter08 1 hour ago

Who cares about the Japs and their bastard kids!!! They all deserve to die and the ones that r still alive need to melt from those reactors! Whoever does not die, we need to Nuke them to rid these Japs from the world. Justice for Pearl Harbor Baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
notre2010 4 hours ago

And so forth. Need I even get into the immense number of replies that contained the words “God” and “Jesus” “wrath” “revelation” “end times”, etc? Oh, what the heck:

i dont know much about japan but our preacher says they must have done many bad things for God to smite them in this manner. he says that many Japanese are atheists it is no wonder God would eventually take notice this should be a warning to all unbelievers. i pray for the japan people and that they will accept Jesus Christ.
ptl8888 7 hours ago

saudisRbest
Until Japan becomes an Islamic nation, it will continue to experience the wrath of Allah

We are living in a time of history like no other. We are living right at the very end of time. We are that last generation. Every time that God has brought judgment, he has warned the believers (1 Thess 5: 1-5). God is warning the entire human race that the Rapture of the true believers is going to occur on May 21, 2011. That will be followed by what the Bible calls the Day of Judgment after which, on October 21, 2011 God Himself will destroy this entire cosmos. (more info at familyradio,com
horseandhisrider 5 hours ago

As Jesus approached the boat where the disciples were, Peter said, "Lord, if it's really you, tell me to come to you, walking on water." Jesus said, "Yes, come." Peter than walked toward Jesus on the water, but started to sink when he was frightened by the large waves. "Save me, Lord!" He shouted. Jesus grabbed him. "You have so little faith..."
racenuke 8 hours ago

this is only the start of it, earthquaqe, tsunami, earth axis change, vulcan eruption, nuclear plant explosion, and more too come :( the peple are greedy and fill they pockets with money, but what cann you doo with money now ? man kind doesent concentrate on the future :( the power and welth drives us twords selfdestructin :( 2012.12.21 is aproching :( god take care of all japanese victims who didnt hade a chance. PEACE

Now, stay with me. A very large number of postings argued that the real truth is being concealed by the main-steam media, with its corporate (or socialist, take your pick) agenda. In response to a terrifying Youtube video, one poster commented:

In a world full of lies few seem to know the truth. And the truth is simple - this video is fake.
Antikrew 1 hour ago

While others grafted their own social concerns onto the catastrophe since the corporate fat-cats who pull the news-anchors' strings wouldn’t:

glennsky
These are the Great Revenge of WHALES' AND DOLPHINS' HOME. Don't forget THE COVE movie. If Japan won't stop killing these animals there will be another GREAT REVENGE AHEAD.

And don't get me started with the numerologists, who found all sorts of associations using variations on the date of the earthquake and other catastrophic events. For example:

If you add 9/11/01 and 3/11/11 you get 12/22/12!

December 22nd, 2011 being the supposed date of the end of the world. Or, rather, the day after. But never mind.

One idea that many, many posters alleged (try Googling it) is that the earthquake was the result of secret military testing, probably the HAARP program. Officially, this unclassified program involves research of the ionosphere, but, as everyone in the tinfoil hat brigade knows, HAARP is responsible for the earthquakes in Haiti, New Zealand, and now off the coast of Japan, as part of an evil experiment being conducted by the CIA. I'm not sure why they're doing it. Just because they're evil, I guess.

Luckily, the world’s celebrities took to Twitter to solve this whole earthquake business — whatever its real cause — overnight. For example, in British Columbia, the cast and crew of the forthcoming Twilight movie were relocated a little further inland as a precaution, as elevated sea-levels might pose a mild risk to the west coast when the waves arrived in a few hours’ time. Thinking fast, an actress from the film Tweeted that, if this was to be her last Tweet, she wanted her family, friends, and fans to know that she loves them. Confronted apparently, with the paranoia, self-absorption, and absurdity of this shout-out — did she really want what she apparently thought might be her last message to be a Tweet? — she replied, in another Tweet, that she was just “speaking her peace.” No doubt this gave her piece of mind. Or peace of mind. Like, whatever, LOL. Who has time for correct spelling when the cold, steely embrace of Death itself is closing in?

Well, at least the news of the earthquake did something that even the emerging civil war in Libya could not: keep the most appalling and most boring of Hollywood stars – Charlie Sheen — off the front page. For two or three weeks the antics of this raving conspiracy theorist, who starred in two overblown Oliver Stone epics in the 1980s and nothing of worth since, made headlines everywhere. But, no wonder. Read the message boards. He has a potential audience of millions who think just like him. He’s the most famous Internet troll in the world, and gaining greater and greater fame not for the quality of his mind but for having completely lost it.

Some day, I fear, all of this internet chatter will make fodder for a thousand PhD dissertations about the collapse of Western Civilization. They will tell the story of how the healthiest, wealthiest, most educated people in the history of the world decided to make a howling wasteland out of a garden, and all because of their incapacity to stop and think.

Incidentally, one very popular HAARP conspiracy video making the rounds on Youtube is narrated by one Martin Sheen. I admonish my students not to use cliches, but here it seems inevitable.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Spartacus

2011-02-28T07:33:00.006-05:00

Many readers, no doubt, are familiar with the hit TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, about the famous Roman-era gladiator. This is the greatest show ever made in the history of the world. It has no need for such bourgeois banalities as “plot” or “scripts.” Instead, it has full-frontal nudity, graphic sex, decapitations, and nonstop virtuoso swearing that would make a Marine Corps drill sergeant blush like a home-schooled teenager given her first valentine. And abs.

Spartacus is set at a time when Western Civilization was in its infancy, and made as if it died there in the cradle. The first six episodes consisted of Spartacus chopping heads off while bellowing, “I must find my wife!” When he found his wife, and she was dead, he spent the next six episodes chopping heads off and bellowing, “I miss my wife!” I realize that readers who have not seen the show may be baffled by the byzantine nature of its storyline, but try to keep up nonetheless.

Longtime friends can confirm that my real talents, such as they are, lie in the realm of fiction rather than non-fiction writing. As proof, I offer my own script for a new episode of Spartacus, which I humbly submit for consideration to the producers of series. As this is a family blog, I have omitted all swearing, though you should feel free to imagine certain four and twelve-letter swearwords sprinkled liberally throughout.

--------------

Exterior, Gladiator training school. Enter SPARTACUS and his six-pack abs. The sun reflects off them, blinding several stage hands.

SPARTACUS

“I need a new wife!”

Enter BATIATUS, his master, having sex with a slave.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring DISHONOR on the House of Batiatus!”

Enter CRIXUS, another gladiator, preceded by his abs.

CRIXUS

“I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA!”

SPARTACUS

“No, I am the TRUE champion of CAPUA! Still, you think maybe a Gaul like you and a guy like me..."

CRIXUS attacks. They fight, making a point to hit each others’ swords. A tidal wave of blood knocks everyone off their feet. They are about to resume fighting when DOCTORE, the gladiator trainer, appears and cracks his whip.

DOCTORE

“You can’t fight in here! This is the gladiator school! Ah...Ah...get it? Get it? Plus it’s a Kubrick reference, from Dr. Strangelove. But he also directed the movie version of Spartacus. You see, what I’m doing is subverting your expectations by inserting a metafictional reference, and...er...ah...come on, people. Work with me. You can win independent film awards for this sort of thing.”

Enter XENA, naked, with an entourage of NAKED SLAVES in tow.

XENA

“My husband, could you have Crixus brought naked to my room? Make sure he’s spritzed with a thin but glistening sheen of oil.”

BATIATUS

“Certainly, my dear wife. My goodness, how you two seem to be getting on well these days. No doubt you’ll have an enjoyable conversation or something. Anyhoo, I’m off to the market for precisely the amount of time it would take for you to have sex with a gladiator, if you were doing that behind my back, which you’re not, of course. Ciao.”

SPARTACUS (from below)

“While you’re at the market, can you find me a wife? I really need one. Seriously.You have no idea.”

Commercial.

Interior of BATIATUS’S digs. BATIATUS sits at his desk, writing a love poem for his wife, XENA. XENA and CRIXUS can be heard GRUNTING and MOANING and SIGHING and POUNDING THE WALLS in the next room. This goes on for twenty minutes. Enter SPARTACUS, with little frowney faces drawn on each of his abs. When he flexes, they become smiley faces.

BATIATUS (shouting over the noise coming from the bedroom)

“Ah, Spartacus. Your presence brings GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Now pack your things. You’re fighting a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS in the arena this afternoon. I must warn you. No ONE has EVER defeated the TEN FOOT NINJA with FOUR ARMS. There’s nothing I can do. I owe the man a dollar fifty.”

SPARTACUS

“Is he looking for a good husband?”

Commercial.

Exterior of arena. By which I mean interior of arena. The part of the arena that’s interior to the physical structure but actually is open to the air. You know what I mean. Thousands of HALF NAKED ROMANS await the arrival of SPARTACUS. They pass the time by the doing the wave. BATIATUS watches from his private booth. An IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN is there. XENA and CRIXUS are making out in the back row.

IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN

“Oooo how I totally hate that Spartacus. And why do all Romans have British accents?”

BATIATUS

“Spartacus may yet bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus. Or GREAT DISHONOUR. Or, his effect might be more-or-less neutral in terms of its impact on the relative honour standing of the House of Batiatus. There’s no way of knowing without an objective consideration of his win-loss record over the course of the gladiatorial season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, entering the arena. He is BUCK NAKED except that he is carrying a sword in each hand and is also holding a shield. Don’t ask how. The CROWD begins to chant his name.

SPARTACUS

“I am SPARTACUS! Are any of you ladies single?”’

ENTER a TEN FOOT TALL NINJA with FOUR ARMS. He is carrying a sword, an axe, a spear, and an atom bomb. He and SPARTACUS fight. They make sounds such as “ARAAGH” and “OOOGHA” and “BLAGH” and say such things as “Hey! Careful there!” SPARTACUS is slashed across the chest, arms, legs, and nearly gets his shield-holder taken off. His hair is ripped out. His teeth are smashed in. He loses both eyes and has to put them back in to see, but he puts them in BACKWARDS and sees everything upside down. One of his six abs gets removed with a cake-lifter. He is finished off with a horrendous noogie. Spartacus collapses all dirty and sweaty. Four men throw buckets of blood on the camera. The NINJA pauses for a few hours to GLOAT.

Cut to: SPARTACUS, having a vision of his WIFE, who is named MILDRED.

MILDRED

“Is that the best you can do? Typical. You never could keep it up. What will the neighbours think? And you never help around the house. I should have listened to my mother and married a doctor.”

SPARTACUS

“I want my wife!”

MILDRED

“Not now. I have a headache. And If you think I’m washing your loin-cloths later, you’ve got another thing coming, mister. Anyway, get up and kill this Ninja. Get that promotion you’re always bragging about.”

SPARTACUS

“But why?”

MILDRED

“Because everyone wants to see you have sex with Xena next season.”

Cut to: SPARTACUS, raising both his swords and his shield. The NINJA goes to finish him off but stubs his toe. While he’s hopping around on one leg, saying “Ow! Ow! Ow!”, SPARTACUS cuts it off. Then his other leg, his ears, and each one of his fingers in turn. Then his arms, which SPARTACUS uses to wail on the NINJA for about half an hour. A thousand-gallon drum of blood is thrown at the camera. Finally, SPARTACUS chops off the NINJA’S head and punts it for twenty-five yard field goal. The CROWD goes WILD.

SPARTACUS

“That one’s for the ladies!”

Cut to BATIATUS, who is being jostled by XENA and CRIXUS who are rolling about the booth naked in a sweaty embrace.

BATIATUS

“Spartacus! You bring GREAT HONOUR on the House of Batiatus!”

SPARTACUS

“So you’re saying you find me attractive?”

Fin.

Next week on Spartacus: SPARTACUS searches a mail-order tablet for a wife. BATIATUS accuses him of dishonouring the House of Batiatus, and condemns him to fight a BRONTOSAURUS. The IRRITATING ROMAN BLONDE WOMAN tries to frame SPARTACUS for tax evasion. Everyone has sex while DOCTORE throws buckets of blood around. XENA and CRIXUS continue their secret affair.

Heaven

2011-02-15T11:35:00.009-05:00

A parable.

So there’s Gordon. In Heaven. Why? He has no idea - he’s a religious dissenter, after all. He’s holding a tray and is in a short, fast moving line in Heaven’s Cafeteria, which queues past a breathtaking waterfall. The day is sunny and a positively blissful 24 degrees centigrade. A live string quintet is playing a new composition by Mozart and Beethoven. As he approaches the counter, Gordon notices a small sign, written in gold. “Tomorrow’s special: Simon Peter’s catch of the day.” It’s an old joke, but everybody gets a good chuckle out of it.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a day-planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM Continental breakfast
9 AM Stroll on the beach
10 AM Ecstatic reunion with lost loved ones
12 PM Lunch
1 PM John Lennon and Elvis Presley in concert
2 PM Pedicure and foot massage
3 PM Nap
4 PM High Tea with Queen Victoria
5 PM New episodes of Firefly on Heaven-on-Demand
6 PM Dinner

He makes a mental note to get High Tea with Queen Victoria changed to burning.

Gordon gets to the front of the line to discover that God himself is serving today, which explains why things have been moving even more quickly than usual.
“What can I get you?” God asks. He’s wearing a big apron that says “Kiss the Cook!” and he sounds like Humphrey Bogart.
“What’s on for today?”
“Anything you want. Name it.”
“Whew...so many choices. Ummm...Pad Thai. And a side of McDonald’s French Fries. Oh, and a Cherry Coke.”
“I knew you’d say that. Coming right up.”
“God?”
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”
“Can we talk?”
“Sure. Drop by my office later.”

Later, Gordon takes the cable car up to God’s office, which is at the snowy peak of an immense but gracefully curved mountain. God’s secretary (an in-her-prime Grace Kelly) presses the button on her intercom. “Gordon is here to see you.”
“I know. Send him in.”
God is sitting on a blue exercise ball at a big Ikea desk. Behind him there’s a poster of a kitten holding onto a rope. It says, “Hang in there.” On the desk is an iMac, a name plate that says “God”, and a Magic 8 Ball.
“Got a minute?” Gordon asks.
“All the time in the world. Take a load off.” He waves Gordon towards a chair. “So, how you liking it so far?”
“I’m not sure about this whole bliss thing,” Gordon begins. “I mean, struggle was one of the things that gave my life meaning. I enjoyed it.”
“Uh-huh,” says God, who is finishing up deleting spam from his e-mail. “There’s a book you should read. All about struggle. Guy named Hitler wrote it.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean that it was the expectation of serious effort now in return for future satiety that was motivating in life. Here, everything’s handed to me on a silver platter. Literally. Lunch was on a silver platter.”
“Look, it’s your Heaven. You want some struggle, you can have struggle. Have an argument with Socrates. Talk politics with Machiavelli. Play chess with Morphy. Box a few rounds with Rocky Marciano. Try to figure out season six of Lost. Whatever. You could even go back, if you want. The Buddhists do. Oh, how they love to go back.”
“Okay. Fair enough. But there’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask. I assume you know already-“
“Of course.”
“Exactly. That’s the problem. Omnipotence.”
“Oh, Me. Here we go,” says God.
“It’s self-contradicting, isn’t it?”
“Not to me.”
“I mean, if you’re all-powerful and all-knowing, you must be the cause of evil. At the very least, you either can’t prevent it or won’t. If you can’t prevent it, you’re not omnipotent. If you won’t, you’re malicious. No offense.”
“None taken. Ever heard of free will?”
“Of course, but can we even have free will if your omnipotence includes omniscience, which it must? And, moreover, tidal waves aren’t a matter of free will. Plague isn’t free will. And what about the innocent victims of the acts of free will committed by others? Jews in the Holocaust, that sort of thing.”
God bounces a bit on the exercise ball and says, “I see things long term. Trust me, there’s a good reason for those things. Your puny monkey brain couldn’t understand it. No offense.”
“I have a PhD, you know,” Gordon says, rather indignantly.
“Well, I don’t have a PhD, I admit. But I created created space and time. I invented the physical constants of the universe. I directed biological evolution to ensure the developmental of higher-order intelligence. I solved the Rubic’s Cube in, like, two minutes flat. Two minutes. The first time I laid eyes on it. It took you six years to write your dissertation and half your committee didn’t even read it.”
“They didn’t?”
“Of course they didn’t, pea brain. Didn’t you notice the one guy’s proofreading comments stopped at about page fifty?”
“Oh, wow.”
Gordon reflects for a moment and then says, “So...why am I here? In Heaven? A non-believer like me? All kinds of people said I’d end up in Hell.”
“Meh,” God shrugs. “You seem like a good guy.”
“Okay. But there was this philosopher, Pascal...”
“Speak of the Devil," God interjects. "I’m hitting the links with him tomorrow afternoon. You should come.”
“...and he said it was the best bet to believe in God. But he didn’t say which God. And he didn’t distinguish between the idea that you should believe and actually believing. I mean, it’s not like I could believe in something for which there wasn’t sufficient evidence, even if belief is the best bet.”
“Me knows. Look, you don’t need to explain yourself. We get all sorts up here, and we do our best to make everyone feel at home. But not everyone expected it to be like this. Some wanted virgins, for example. Virgins! What’s up with that?”
“You should talk.”
“Don’t be a wise guy.” He really does sound like Humphrey Bogart. “Anyway, I’m a softy, basically. I’ve got a generally salvic disposition. I let in all sorts. Pagans, Catholics, Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Jainists, Scientologists, Wiccans, Secularists, Agnostics, Atheists, Theological Noncognitivists. Nearly everybody gets in. You’ve got to be a real A-Hole not to get in. Some people bug me. Every day I meet Biblical literalists, and I say to them, ‘Really? Seriously? You thought there was a big boat with two of every animal on it? How the hell do you think the koala bears made it from Australia? Did they swim?’ But then I get all soft and let them in anyway.”
“But they believed. I didn’t.”
“So what? It’s not like I gave you guys much proof, and it tends to be the smart ones who picked up on that. I like smart people being around. Smart by your tiny little monkey brain standards, that is. You used your God given intelligence for a purpose other than devotion. Bonus marks in my book. Not that book, though. I mean ‘book’ metaphorically.”
Gordon is about to speak when the phone rings.
“I gotta take this,” God says. “They want to know if I’m interested in saving money on long distance. I am. Really, you have no idea. Could we pick this up later? And don’t forget golf tomorrow. We tee off at 11. Einstein will be there, too, but he’s always running behind.”

That evening, Gordon is back in line in the cafeteria. Ahead of him is the Reverend Pat Robertson. Gordon knows perfectly well who he is, and so decides not to strike up a conversation. But Robertson looks over his shoulder at Gordon and examines him rather dubiously. “So...what are you here for?” he asks.
“Skepticism,” Gordon replies. “And you?”

Hell

2011-01-30T10:11:00.003-05:00

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Armageddon

2011-01-09T12:05:00.005-05:00

Bad news. The world is ending December 21st, 2012. Or at least a lot of people seem to think so, on the grounds that that’s the day when (they claim) the Mayan calendar “runs out”. I’m not quite sure why the pre-Columbian Mayans should be taken as authorities on anything at all, let alone prognostication, especially since things didn’t work out all that well for them. By contrast, the 2012 crowd don’t seem much cheered by the fact that, for instance, China’s calendar doesn’t run out in 2012.

There’s been so much public concern about 2012 that some folks at NASA decided to take time out from unimportant work such as exploring the universe and unlocking its secrets to create a number of public-relations web-pages assuring people that they can go ahead with their advance planning for New Year’s Eve, 2012.

This is probably futile, since people who believe in this sort thing usually are immune to rational argument. Still, it’s good to know that somebody’s trying. Take these people, for instance, who are waging a radio and pamphlet-based campaign against this poppycock that the world is ending in December 2012. According to them, it’s ending May 21st, 2011. Get with the program, people.

I know this because some supporter of theirs handed me a pamphlet outside of Shopper’s Drug Mart yesterday. “The End of the World Is Almost Here! Holy God Will Bring Judgment Day on May 21, 2011!” I did some quick mental math and then headed straight to the LCBO to stock up, because if the world’s coming to an end, I’m getting wasted.

At home, I perused the pamphlet and their website over a cheeky little Beaujolais. Family Radio, I discovered, was founded in 1959 and now has several dozen FM radio licenses in the United States. (According to Wikipedia, these licenses would be worth several hundred million dollars today.) Day after day, these stations broadcast this end-of-the-world business to whoever happens to be listening. Their arrival at the precise date of Judgment is based on a complex numerology explained on their website. Incidentally, they also reject the usual Creationist nonsense about the world being 6,000 years old. Turns out it’s 13,000 years old. Again: Program. With the. Get.

At any rate, their website insisted that “well-known denominations such as Roman Catholic, Baptist, Reformed, Presbyterian, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah’s Witness, Mormon, etc.” are “still in deep trouble with God”. At this, my heart rose slightly— perhaps I might be okay after all. I read on. Alas, it was not be so.

It’s often said that religions are automatically to be accorded respect, and that people are not to be criticized on the basis of their religion. The cultural relativists who dominate the academy are particularly insistent about this, going so far as to argue that criticism of religion – and of certain religions in particular – is tantamount to racism. But this is not a position that they themselves believe, since they are perfectly willing to cast aspersions in the direction of, say, the Catholic Church, over such things as the ordination of women and other issues that shouldn’t concern non-Catholics. By contrast, I remember well how they fell all over themselves to defend those who sought the death of Salman Rushdie, arguing that he really did hurt the feelings of millions of people who never read The Satantic Verses.

Respectful behavior can be mandated but actual respect cannot be. Whatever else they may be, the world’s religions are social institutions into which people have vested enormous and all-too human effort. Some of those people are morons, and it’s hard to treat them respectfully. Some of those efforts have been violent, and preach violence, and we have a right to defend ourselves against them. This goes, too, for crude and crass theological arguments mounted by the likes of Family Radio. If you tell me that I’m going to hell, I get to tell you to precede me there.

The suggestion that religions are beyond the scope of criticism can hardly be taken seriously. Certainly no one who is a devout follower of any given denomination takes such an argument seriously, since his own beliefs almost invariably constitute an implicit or even explicit criticism of other beliefs. Either reincarnation exists or it doesn’t. Either a certain messiah is divine or he isn’t. Either the world will end May 21st, 2010, or it won’t.

I am currently taking bets – of any size – that it won’t.

Treaties

2010-12-23T09:27:00.004-05:00

Merry Christmas to the whole human race from the United States Senate, which ratified the new START treaty with Russia yesterday. Under the terms of the treaty, the total number of operationally ready strategic nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals, already hugely diminished since their 1980s peak, will be reduced to their lowest levels since the mid-1950s. More crucially, the number of launch platforms will be reduced further still – to a maximum of 700 per side. This is far too many, of course, but since those two countries possess over 95% of all nuclear weapons in the world, the significance of the treaty cannot be understated. By the end of the decade, the total number of operationally deployed nuclear weapons in the world will have been reduced to under a tenth of what it was at its peak in 1986, when the United States and the Soviet Union had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons on a high alert. The new START is a straightforward and very good treaty – almost noncontroversial, in fact. It makes the United States and indeed the whole world a safer place. It is Obama’s first major foreign policy achievement, and goes some way to adding some post-facto credibility to his ridiculous win of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Which is precisely why twenty-six Republican Senators voted against it, why Senator Kyl of Arizona fought a desperate, almost hysterical rear-guard action to delay its ratification until the next session of Congress, when a somewhat different Senate with more Republicans might have derailed it. For anyone who has been following the debate closely, no other possible conclusion can be reached about what motivated those twenty-six Republicans. Their goal was to hand Obama a political defeat, regardless of the implications for American national security. The red flags they sent up were all false flags. Senator DeMint of South Carolina actually dismissed the treaty as part of “a continuing pattern of appeasement.” Appeasement! The favourite boogeyman word Republicans use describe whatever Democrats happen to be doing at the moment on the international stage, even if they’re waging war in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan and Iraq. (And need the Senator really be told that, historically, it was his party that enthusiastically endorsed isolationism even after the Second World War began in Europe?) “Appeasement!” Obama’s last defense budget – a staggering $700 billion – was the biggest in American history in absolute terms and the biggest, adjusted for inflation, since 1946. Bigger than any defense budget at the peak of the Cold War. Bigger than any during Vietnam or Korea. “Appeasement!” And who are these liberal “appeasers” who supported this treaty? Well, in addition to the Democrats, of course, there were such famous bleeding hearts as former President George H.W. Bush, Condoleeza Rice and every other living former Republican Secretary of State, the admirals and generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military head of the Strategic Command (the branch of the armed forces that actually controls America’s strategic nuclear arsenal) and seven of his predecessors, and, notably thirteen Republican Senators, including Senator Corker of Tennessee, who as much as called the treaty a no-brainer. “This is not one of those votes where you wonder,” he said. “This is not even a close call.”

There are, of course, real grounds for concern about the manner in which this administration has conducted itself in terms of foreign and domestic policy. But that’s true of every presidential administration. The exigencies of holding high office in such an immensely powerful but also profoundly internally divided country as the United States probably fatally compromises the ethics of even of the most sincere office holder.

This morning, of course, the Tea Party blogs and websites exploded with predictable rage. Their whole conspiracy-driven worldview has received powerful reinforcement. This is yet another sign of what they already know to be true. The President is a Muslim and a communist and a foreigner and this is all part of his master plan to weaken America. Measure of Doubt does not play the race card lightly. But let us be clear about something. There are those on the Tea Party right who say that Obama would not be President if he weren’t black. Perhaps. But there wouldn’t be a Tea Party if he weren’t black, either. They have made that abundantly clear. So if you prefer to read what rational people have to say, there has been excellent analysis of this treaty on the venerable The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. If you prefer your political coverage with a dose of gun-shootin’, Bible thumpin’, Good-Ole’ Boy twang, well, you hardly need pointers from me about where to look.

There is, however, one foreign policy expert who opposed the deal, and whose views might give us a moment of pause, because they carry such immense weight, having been informed by years of dedication to understanding geopolitics. The former partial-term governor of Alaska, who obtained a U.S. passport nearly five years ago and who has been taking occasional trips outside of North America for almost four years now, Sarah Palin, called on the Senate to defeat the treaty.

On Twitter.

Satire

2010-12-07T11:19:00.004-05:00

Note: As you might appreciate, the task of producing a bi-monthly column, written to the extraordinarily high standards my thousands of devoted readers have come to expect, is beyond even my literary talents, talents once described in glowing terms by a former professor as “generally adequate.” For fear of drawing too deeply from my well and coming up empty, I outsourced this week’s column to Toby Guffrey, a senior student at an Ontario high school. His essay, only the second to be written on Measure of Doubt by an author other than myself, appears below. GB.

"In order to understand why Christmas is important we must first try and understand it's origin's. Christmas began in the Year 0 in Isreal when Jesus was born to his parent's Mary and Joe in a manager by sheep and a drummer boy nearby who was one of three wives men who brought presents for Jesus and Mary who was immaculate.This means that she was virginal. Thus establishing the Christmas tradition of giving presents. Although Christians would rather give the present's to someone else they didn't know that yet because Jesus was very young and could not talk his language which was arabic yet. Next Jesus was killed by the Roman's; for trying to make everyone into Christian's the Roman's did not agree with this so Jesus was killed by them after he said "oh Lord why have you forgotten me?" on a cross before he was killed by the Roman's who used him as an escape goat. It was a very sad day but later he came out of his cave and sat on his father’s right hand. Jesus also walked on water that he turned into wine. Now that we understand the origin's of Christmas we can explain how Christmas has an influence today in Canada and Americain society. One problem with this is in Canada is Multiculturalism. This means that everyone get's to give there opinion about things like Christmas tree's and present's. One problem with this is that people like Indian's don't have Christmas but our Government can't make them because of mulitculturalism. Like you can't just stand there and tell people that they have to have Christmas because this would be an unfringement of they're rites and who would it be for then? But we have to remember that everyone has there own views about things like Christmas and also one problem is things like global warming can be caused from people buying too much One other problem s that many people like Christmas music so there has been many teen-agers buying Christmas music now because of inventions like iPod's and computer's. The problem with this is that more car accident's happen because people are listening to Christmas music on their iPod's while their driving car's and on their cell phones'. Also drinking and driving. "As anthropological relativism, once the province of a minority, gradually assumed the position of an organizing philosophy within the academy, the moral significance of religious observances declined proportionately among the professoriate." This quote shows that people don't like Christmas but because of the multiculturalism can't show it but this is unfair because of the Charter of Rights and freedoms. Next we should consider America where Barrack Obama is president after beating George Bush. George Bush was a Christian but Barrack Obama is Catholic. In America they have a melding pot not multiculturalism; because of this they have a Christmas tree at the Whitehouse. In conclusion its' important that every one in December remember Jesus because he died so we could have christmas but also one problem with this is at Christmas many African's and also in Nigeria are starving but because of global warming we should not by present's unless there green."

Postscript: As you can imagine, Toby is currently on his school’s Honour List and will be attending university next year. He plans to major in English and History and then become a teacher.

Poetry

2010-11-21T10:59:00.015-05:00

Things were getting a bit serious here on Measure of Doubt, so I thought I'd inject a measure of levity with a blast-from-the-past, a peek into the mind of your author at age 15 (nearly 16), by posting my winning entry in the 1986 A.B. Lucas Secondary School Bad Poetry Contest. (A portrait of the artist as a young man is on the left.) All hail Mr. Watson, our enormously creative and patient Grade 11 Enriched English teacher.

------------

Rabid Rabbits, Or How Cam the Cannibal Learned to Make Rabbit Stew of Squirrels

Pretty soon there will be lots of rabbits around
Due to their natural multiplicative predilections
(That's how much they screw around
When showing their affections.)

Like a small furry floppy-eared herbivore
Rabbits boldly go where no man has gone before
Except other small furry floppy-eared herbivores
Which aren't really men anyway come to think of it

Clubbing a rabbit to death
Mercilessly with a carrot
The hunter shows his true colours
The way grapes do when you peel off the skin

Fortunately a hunting warden
Arrives to save the day
And clubs the hunter to death
With a baby seal
And eats him up, like breaded veal

It's not so bad being a cannibal
A pound of flesh
Provides more essential vitamins
Than good old fashioned oatmeal

Suddenly – from the door
Comes a loud banging noise
Rabbits lined up four by four
Like great big soldiers, only small like toys

Armed with guns and bombs and tanks and thermonuclear fusion weapons
The rabbits charge
Like a bull at the sight of a red flag
Like a football player at the sound of "hut"
Like a hell of a lot of rabbits trying to get inside a house

The warden makes a run for it
A brook is in his way
It's one small step for a man
But one hell of a leap for a bunny rabbit
This was his chance to get away!

Though he runs faster than a speeding bullet
With the agility of a Chinese acrobat
With the stealth of a real quiet person
Soon the rabbits are upon him

But here's a blessing in disguise!
These rabbits are really squirrels inside!
"Why go after me anyway? I saved you from
that hunter, just today!"

"True," at last, the squirrels confess
"But what's up, doc? With this puzzling mess:
How many roads must a man walk down?
Until he feels the thrill of victory?
Or the agony of the feet?"
-------------------

Postscript:

Alas, so much high school writing was lost when my Commodore 64 and all its floppy disks went the way of yesterday's newspaper — literally into the garbage — when my parents moved in 1995. Whole volumes of poetry, short stories, a radio play, "movie" screenplays, scraps of unfinished novels, countless essays...my own personal Library of Alexandria, hauled to the curb with empty bottles of Cheez Whiz and old copies of National Geographic. A little part of me dies to think of it.

Longtime friends can confirm that, for the same course for which I composed the Award Winning Bad Poem above, I wrote a full-length novel as some sort of project. I have no idea why I went to such extremes, though I should note that I was not the only one: my friend Dave Seguin wrote a longer and much better novel the same year. Looking back, it was fun, and certainly a more imaginative use of a teenage brain than the average 15 hour-per-week foray into hyper-violent video gaming that is the norm for male teenagers today. (And they wonder why boys are falling behind in school.)

Anyway, last week, I happened across the novel while searching for this poem. Having spent an hour or so with it, I can confirm the following: 1) It is so very bad that no power on this earth can compel me to show so much as a single sentence of it ever again. 2) It is slightly better than Twilight. 3) I received a mark of 85. Can I say that again? I received a mark of 85. For a freaking novel I wrote in grade 11. Today parents call to complain if their kids get below 90 for successfully completing a text message while driving. 4) The teacher’s comments were brief but, I recall, filled me with joy. “A Michael J. Fox screenplay for sure.”

Well, it was the Eighties.

Elitism

2010-11-07T07:52:00.008-05:00

Let me put a case to you. Here are two athletes. One is measurably faster, higher scoring, has fewer injuries, and brings out the best in his team-mates. The other is demonstrably slower, lower scoring, has more injuries, and is a well known prima-donna on the playing field. Which of the two would you rather sign for your team? It’s not even a question, of course. In sports we take elitism, which is to say, a regard for excellence, for granted. Would it were so in things that actually matter.

Let me put a further case to you. Here is a political candidate. He speaks five languages, is interested and indeed well read in art, architecture, botany, biology, chemistry, classical music, comparative religion, constitutional law, engineering, geography, geology, history, literature, mathematics, the philosophies of ethics, mind, and religion, political science, physics, and zoology. He is a noted author, political theorist, and can correspond on more-or-less equal terms with some of the greatest minds of his generation.

But none of this, of course, would count in Thomas Jefferson’s favour were he running for political office today, and his enthusiastic Francophilia, his lack of military service, his irreligion, together with the certain-to-be-revealed scandal of an extramarital, interracial coupling that produced a child would sink him altogether. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter would tell him to take his Godless, liberal, family-hating elitist butt back to France and to the stay there with the other book-readin’ peaceniks. We don’t like yer kind ‘round here, Jefferson.

Here is another political candidate. She speaks one language, but is famously inarticulate. Her books are ghost-written. She has never been to France. She thinks that that the world is six thousand years old. She claims to be Christian but demonstrates no knowledge of theology or scripture. She routinely condemns judges for misinterpreting the United States Constitution, but seems to have little conception of what the Constitution actually says, nor can she name a ruling she opposes except one. And yet she wishes to occupy the same office as the aforementioned Mr. Jefferson, and there are millions of people, including the three named above, who would like to make it so.

The problem, of course, isn’t with Sarah Palin, or indeed with any of hundreds of politicians like her. The problem is with the progressive diminution of the intellectual qualities of our political culture. For a great many reasons, expertly unraveled in a recent book by Susan Jacoby called The Age of American Unreason, even the merest hint of higher-order intelligence on the part of a candidate is now labeled as “elitist”, sometimes even by journalists who by any standard are card-carrying members of the elite themselves.

The fundamental problem facing our society is that most of our societal problems are too complicated for people to understand without considerable effort. Climate change, the rising costs of health care, global economic transformation – understanding such issues requires effort and careful weighing of evidence. The obvious response, that people are too busy to think about such issues, misses the point. The point is that most people aren’t even trying — polls demonstrate this very clearly — and there’s little excuse for that when nearly all of us have at our immediate disposal access to vastly more information than any generation before us. If you can find an hour per week for the hockey pool or Call of Duty or re-runs of The Simpsons, is it really impossible to find an hour per week to study issues that are of actual importance?

My own position is that, if it is, it is probably best to abstain from voting. Voting is a responsibility one has to one’s fellow citizens, and voting from a position of ignorance – or voting strictly on the basis of longstanding and unexamined party allegiances – is an abuse of that responsibility. Unfortunately, as it stands, a large percentage of our political leaders are elected on the basis of their ability to mobilize unexamined or pre-existing beliefs. You can go a long way beating the podium about “tax and spend liberals” even when you fully intend to tax and spend like mad yourself, because you count on the fact that a large percentage of people won’t bother to do any independent fact-checking. You can also go a long way in trying to convince voters that your opponent is an “elitist”: somebody who, by virtue of being thoughtful and reflective, can be said to not represent the “values” of most people out there. That claim, at least, would have the virtue of being true.

I’m not a big fan of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, but there’s no denying he’s a serious intellectual with scholarly credentials that would put most academics to shame. So there’s something very sad about seeing the man reduced to wearing cowboy hats and chomping down hot dogs and calling people “folks” at rallies, all in an effort to solve what dozens of commentators have called his “image problem” – which is to say, his inability to “communicate” with the “common man.” Just once, I’d like to hear a politician say what’s demonstrably true: that it’s the “common man” who’s the problem. It’s his inability to put down the remote (or the video game controller) long enough to learn and think about issues that are of actual importance that’s the reason our democratic political process has now been reduced to the most debased and vulgar pandering populism.

Is education the solution? Certainly not: the progressive dumbing down of our societal discourse is occurring at precisely the moment when more and more people are going to school for longer than ever before. The issue isn't "education" as our school-system defines it (education as the accumulation of facts) but thinking. Above all, more than anything else, we need people to stop and think. This means acknowledging that problems of real complexity require careful consideration before we reach conclusions about them. But our political system is geared to go in to the opposite direction, and appeals instead to the basest and crassest gut instincts of people who prefer to have others do their thinking for them. Any candidate who tries to do otherwise is denounced as a spineless elitist, suitable only for the “ivory tower” and not the “real world”.

A professor of mine, recently departed, used to wander the aisles during final exams and quietly admonish his students, “More thinking. Less writing.” In other words, when you don’t know what you’re talking about, stop talking.

Teachers

2010-11-01T13:11:00.008-04:00

Most parents say that they want the best education possible for their children, and that includes the best university education possible. What most of them don’t want is to actually pay for it, and teachers and professors have to endure an almost constant barrage of hostility from people who know nothing about our jobs but who think that we get paid too much. I had this very discussion over an interminably dreary dinner with a group of people not long ago, when one loudmouth parent began the predictable grunting about “you teachers” getting “two month off in the summer”, while blue-collar construction workers like himself were out there every day breaking their backs. (I certainly agree that leaning on a shovel while a machine digs a hole involves all manner of ergonomic compromises not conducive to spinal health.) Anyway, to this my reply was, excuse me, but, I am not a “teacher.” I am a professor. I attended graduate school for eight years to earn an M.A. and a Ph.D. and then earned a tenure-stream position in a job market where perhaps one newly-minted Ph.D. in ten can expect to get one. And, moreover, I don’t get “two months off in the summer”, thank you very much. I get four.

Well, I don’t really get four months “off” in the summer, but it was a pleasure to say nonetheless. But to be fair: my dinner companion never attended university (and not much of high school for that matter) and so he doesn’t really have any conception of what my job entails. His comment was really aimed at “teachers” generally – the kind he knew and loathed as a teenager, those autocratic bastards who expected him to do things like read books and learn French and solve math problems. And, boy, did he ever show them, because he did none of those things.

For years now I’ve put up with this sort of thing in all manner of social settings. And it’s remarkable how often the people who attack our teachers demonstrate that they what they really needed at a younger age was to have paid more attention in school. The first sign you’re dealing with ignoramuses is that they mouth off about things they know nothing about. So it felt good to finally push back a little, and I took a certain pride in saying aloud to all assembled that if they were so concerned about teachers getting their summers off they should write to their MP’s and demand that their kids spend the summer in school, too. You can imagine how that went over. “But that would ruin our vacations!”

Check and mate, I think. The obvious counter-move, though, was for someone to say that the real solution is to pay teachers less, and somebody did raise this point. Again, they want the best education for their children, but not if they have to pay for it.

Well, there’s no way around this. They’re going to have to pay for it, and they’re going to have to pay more, in fact. If parents want to attract qualified people to the field of teaching they’re going to have to make it worth their while, and in a serious way. And if the Ontario government wants to keep insisting that it wants more students to go to university, it’s going to have to compensate the professoriate for the extra seven or eight years they spent, out of the workforce, getting their PhDs, and for the very real gamble they took in choosing to pursue that career path.

And it’s for this reason that I add my very small voice in support of my colleagues at the University of Western Ontario, main campus, who might go on strike this week. The fact that they already get paid more, on average, than most other people, isn’t the issue. The issue is that they deserve to, and that teachers generally deserve to, because there few things are more important than how we educate our young.

Polls

2010-10-14T08:14:00.008-04:00

In September, the Pew Forum released the results of a poll which found that most adherents of most faiths don’t know much about their own religions. On what amounted to a quiz of general knowledge of religion, Protestants got an average of 16 out of 32 questions correct, while Catholics got an average of just under 15. The questions, it should be noted, didn’t concern complex matters of theology but were about very basic issues one would assume were part of any culturally literate person’s storehouse of facts.

For example, two-thirds of Catholics couldn’t name the four gospels and one-third couldn’t name the Biblical birthplace of Jesus. Less than half could explain the significance of communion. Meanwhile, half of Protestants couldn’t identify Martin Luther as a person of importance to their beliefs, a third didn’t know that Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament, and a third couldn’t identify Moses as the person who, according to the Bible, led the Exodus from Egypt. Meanwhile, half of all Christians thought that the Golden Rule is one of the Ten Commandments. And these are the same people who get all uppity about the Ten Commandments being removed from courtrooms and schools. Imagine how they’ll feel when they find out that somebody – Obama, probably – went and took the Golden Rule out of them.

When it came to matters of other religions, most Christians were pretty much hopeless. And they also knew very little about public policy and faith. For instance, most Christians knew that teachers can’t lead prayers in American public schools, but they also overwhelmingly – and wrongly – believed that the teaching of comparative religion was banned, and they even believed that the Bible couldn’t be the object of study in any context, which is also entirely false. That's what you get for listening to fear-mongering hyperbole disguised as journalism.

In some respects, the results aren’t particularly surprising. Polls show that a significant percentage of the population doesn’t know much about anything at all. Canadians tend smugly to assume that this is an American issue. But recent surveys here have shown, for example, that about three-quarters of Canadians have little idea how their own government works. Half think that the Prime Minister is directly elected. Fewer than one-in-four can correctly identify our head-of-state. Two-thirds cannot correctly name the provinces and territories in Canada. Approximately half perform below expectations on elementary-school level mathematics. A third of the adult population reads and writes at an elementary school level. And don't get me started on science. One poll found that 42% of Canadians believe that humans and dinosaurs co-existed (!), while a further 21% are “unsure”. In short, their knowledge of natural history seems to come from The Flintstones rather than school. Results in the U.S. on similar questions are about the same.

Where things get really disturbing is when we start to cross reference polls. To take just one example, polls show that somewhere between a third and half of Americans want the teaching of biological evolution, the cornerstone of the life sciences, removed from the classroom. We can be sure that their opposition is on religious rather than scientific grounds because A) there is no scientific opposition to the existence of biological evolution and B) because the people who want it out don’t know anything about science. But now we find that they don’t know anything about religion, either. So why are they part of this discussion at all?

Now, here's the remarkable thing. In that Pew Forum poll on religion, the group that did best overall, with an average score of 21 correct answers and a whopping 82% scoring higher than 17, was...brace yourself...atheists.

Needless to say, most atheists aren’t gaining their knowledge of religion in churches. Indeed, judging from the results above, hardly anyone is learning much about religion anywhere at all. So what accounts for the atheists' relatively high scores? Well, one possibility may reside in the well-established fact that while atheism is always very rare, it is nonetheless correlated with higher levels of education. You tend to find more atheists among PhDs than you do among high-school dropouts, which is one reason why so many social conservatives revile academia. But the point is that more years of education tends to lead to greater cultural literacy in general, regardless of your beliefs. For example, I don't share the metaphysical assumptions of Buddhism, but I know the difference between Theravada and Mahayana, because I took a course on it.

My own suspicion is that there is another reason, too. Despite much fear-mongering in the past couple of years about the dire threat to civilization posed by the "rise" of the "new atheists", and the "spate" or "deluge" of atheistic bestsellers (apparently three books constitutes a "spate"), the fact remains, as one poll after another has demonstrated, that atheists are a tiny and reviled minority in the United States, distrusted even more than homosexuals and Muslims.

Accordingly, it may be the case that atheists feel the need to arm themselves, metaphorically, against a society that, while declining in terms of religious practice, nonetheless remains very firm in terms of religious belief and its position that non-belief is inherently immoral. (Or, rather, that non-belief in Judeo-Christian religion is inherently immoral. Most people have no objection if, like them, your disbelief applies only to other people's religions.) So perhaps it’s not surprising that a typical atheist’s arguments in this regard are sharper than those of the great masses of cafeteria Catholics and suburban Protestants who go to church a handful of times per year but nonetheless get praised on the grounds that “at least they believe in something” – even if they don’t have the slightest idea what it is.

Lotteries

2010-09-23T08:42:00.008-04:00

I almost never “play” the lottery, although I admit that the prospect of a $50 million win, a few weeks back, was too much to resist. In a moment of weakness, I slapped down five bucks figuring that, what the heck, somebody has to win. And somebody did.

Stupid, really. Nobody has to win, unless every possible combination of numbers is played. And what if I had won? The fact is that I’m not sure what my wife and I would do with $50 million. A change of venue to a more interesting city would be a start, but I like my job and can’t see sudden wealth as grounds for quitting, so moving might not be practicable. I also find the typical material trappings of wealth to be of marginal interest. What point is there in owning a home with more rooms than you actually use? I don’t drive, so expensive cars would be pointless. Motor boats are polluting, and sailing takes too much time to learn. I dislike wearing jewelry. I already have a wardrobe of reasonable-looking casual clothes, indistinguishable from Armani at a distance of greater than six inches. I could buy more expensive wine, but my dilettantish taste buds can barely distinguish between any bottle over $15 anyway. I have no need for more household consumer electronics. I don’t even own a TV, because even the biggest of big-screens fails to provide quality programming. The only thing worse than five-hundred channels of "reality" TV is five-hundred channels of reality TV projected onto a space the size of your living-room wall. As for that hallmark of the leisure class’s daytime itineraries, golf, I agree with Mark Twain that it just spoils a nice walk. Oh, I’d travel more, but moderate travel isn’t beyond my financial means now. Maybe Oprah’s right: maybe wealth doesn’t make you happy.

The lottery serves us mainly as a useful reminder of the remorseless logic of a universe that operates according to constant physical principles that we are powerless to alter. It just goes on, inexorably, and that LottoMax number you play every week will come up, on average, once every 85,900,584 draws – or about once every 1,651,934 years. It could be this year; it could be in a million. It doesn’t matter if you play your mother’s birthday or your lucky numbers or pray for divine intervention. The machine that randomly selects the seven numbers doesn’t care.

Admittedly, that particular game gives you better odds than that, since it generates three numbers on every $5 ticket, increasing your odds to a can't-miss 28,633,528 to 1. Put it this way: write down the names of every person in Canada. Put them in a hat. Draw your name at random. That’s about the same odds.

Unfortunately, statistically, you’d also have to spend, on average, about $150 million to win the grand prize, which never exceeds $50 million and might have to be shared. It’s for this reason that billionaires, looking for a fast buck, don’t simply buy 28,633,528 unique tickets every week: winning would be a bad return on investment.

Most people don’t believe this, of course. They believe that there are other forces at work. Toss a coin ten times. It comes up heads the first nine times. When polled, most people will say that tails is most likely to come up on the tenth toss, because they believe that tails is “due”. Things have to even out, right? Well, no, they don’t, and for a simple reason: the coin doesn’t care. But this “gambler’s fallacy” is nonetheless a very commonplace belief. Our cognitive equipment evolved to seek patterns, and sometimes will find them even where they don’t exist. We aren’t by nature rational – we have to force ourselves to be.

I recall a math teacher, circa the 10th grade, who taught this lesson in a dramatic fashion. He bought three lottery tickets. On one, the numbers were selected at random. On the other, the numbers were the same as last week’s winning numbers. On a third, the numbers were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. When asked, the class overwhelmingly agreed that the numbers selected at random were the most likely to win, and we were divided on which of the other two tickets were least likely to win, with a slightly greater number doubting that the same numbers could come up twice in a row. Even after the teacher explained that the draw is completely random, that the computer selecting the numbers doesn’t care what numbers you choose, and that therefore any combination of numbers is as likely to appear as any other, most of us retained grave doubts. Surely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 can’t happen.

Polls show that most regular lottery players don’t really understand how long the odds are. They also tend to believe that their wins and losses even out, think that their chances of winning on any given draw increases over time (just like they believe that “tails” is more likely to come up after a run of “heads”), and most of all are convinced that the numbers they choose is consequential in the outcome. A disturbing poll in the United States even found that a significant percentage of people believe that lottery winnings will be a significant factor in their retirement savings. I have no doubt that many Canadians think the same way.

It’s at this point that I wish to raise the issue the government’s involvement in all of this.
Back in the day, gambling and booze were the province of organized crime. For some time now they have been the province of the province – the province of Ontario, that is, and indeed every other province in Canada that runs lotteries, casinos, and liquor stores. I’ll leave aside the fact that we pay taxes so that the government of Ontario can sell alcohol to us at inflated prices for another occasion. For now, let’s consider the Ontario Lottery Gaming Association, whose website, overflowing with photographs of smiling, happy people, positively gushes that lotteries and gambling generated $3.8 billion in economic activity last year. But they say this as if that activity wouldn’t exist if the lottery didn’t, as if the $5 that I spent would disappear into a black hole if I hadn’t taken a 28 million to 1 spin of the roulette wheel that week.

Moreover, a closer look reveals that $1.8 of that $3.8 billion (what the website calls “support for communities”) is spent just keeping the lotteries and casinos running, while $1.9 billion of the remainder goes to “hospitals, health related programs, and other provincial priorities”, meaning that it goes into provincial coffers generally to be disbursed as the government sees fit.

Our casinos are jammed to the rafters with gambling addicts shattering their own lives, and the same government that will eventually pay for social services (or jail cells) to pick up the pieces is content in the short-term to help them in the process. As for lotteries, Ontarians spend an average of $550 per year on tickets, with the lowest income bracket spending an incredible and truly depressing 4% of their income on them. The same government that is telling Canadians to save more for retirement spends our money to encourage us to play games of chance from which we will almost always emerge as losers.

State-run lotteries are a form of voluntary communism. Put your money into a pot, and the government will redistribute it for you. It’s a legal, socially sanctioned, massively promoted weekly pyramid scheme in which millions must lose in order that, on occasion, some random individual will win. Here’s an idea. Don’t play. Don’t gamble. Want to support our hospitals? Give directly to them, and get a tax receipt. Want to generate economic activity? Spend some of your lottery and gambling money at local shops and stores on Canadian-made goods. Want to support your community? Save more for retirement, so that the community doesn’t have to support you when you retire. But don’t play. Don’t gamble.You won’t win anyway.

Mosques

2010-09-07T23:07:00.003-04:00

Electoral politics – and in the United States the majority of political effort is devoted to getting either elected or re-elected – is a nauseating exercise in hypocrisy at the best of times.

The Founding Fathers of the United States devised a political system that they intended to be insulated from the whims of vulgar popular opinion but the result two centuries later is a massively dysfunctional government that seems to do almost nothing but pander to vulgar popular opinion. Two centuries ago, political leaders publicly debated the form that their government should take through such epoch-shattering works of literature as the Federalist Papers. Now crass and boorish charlatans like Sarah Palin sell out stadiums by publicly rejoicing in the petrified state of their own intellects.

Well, elected hypocrites have one very great advantage over the unelected kind: they tend not to murder their own citizens, at least as long as they have to keep getting re-elected. I once asked a renowned scholar of the Presidency how many citizens of the United States had been literally murdered by the order of American presidents in the 20th century. He thought about it for some time and said, "I would have to say that, as far as I am aware, the number is zero." Now ask the question about past heads-of-state of, say, the Soviet Union, Germany, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, or Iraq. Given that, it's probably best to learn to live with the infantile sloganeering, the unthinking enthusiasms of the party faithful, and the depressingly predictable mudslinging from all sides of the political spectrum.

Still, it does get mighty tiresome. One terminally boring refrain made by Republicans in the United States is that the Democratic Party seeks to leave America toothless and defenceless in the face of its enemies. A prominent American comedian, Ann Coulter, even says that for this reason Democrats are uniformly and literally guilty of treason. This is easily contested by a ten-minute search for freely-available figures on American defense expenditure since the 1930s, but it's not necessary to do that, even. The most cursory examination of 20th century history will remind anyone that it was liberal Democrats who led the US into World Wars One and Two, who dropped the atomic bombs, who started and escalated the Vietnam War, and that Obama's last defense budget was larger, even accounting for inflation, than any since the Second World War. But, then, facts don't matter when there are electoral points to be scored.

Still, there was something particularly perverse, during the last presidential election, about the Republicans' argument that Obama would not "keep us safe" from the terrorists, when the Americans who actually were attacked on 9/11, the citizens of Washington and New York, voted overwhelmingly for him. And there is something equally perverse today about the way in which millions of Americans who have never been to New York – and who hate the city from afar – have taken a far dimmer view on the question of the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" than have most New Yorkers themselves.

Last week, I visited Ground Zero, and saw the great chasm (now a major construction site) where, nine years ago, a small group of religious nihilists murdered three thousand people. St. Paul's Chapel, adjacent, holds a deeply moving display of photographs, placed in the succeeding days by hopeful loved ones of the missing, that went unclaimed as hope faded. The Church has retained them in the form of a makeshift memorial, one that I found far more touching than the memorial planned for the site itself when construction of the new World Trade Center is finally complete. It occurred to me that day that if anybody has a right to adjudicate on the question of the Ground Zero Mosque it ought to be New Yorkers. I don't agree with but I can at least comprehend the sentiment of the two-thirds of New Yorkers who have said that, while they agree with the legal right of the proposed center to be there, they would prefer it to be elsewhere. If anybody has a right to an irrational fear about this sort of thing it is them. Why the folks at Sarah Palin rallies in Armpit, South Dakota, or Bible-Belt fans of Rush Limbaugh suddenly care so much about issues of public safety in a city that they have never visited and detest for its liberalism and multiculturalism is easy enough to see: they actually don't care. But they do care about making political hay out of a non-issue, and all the better that they should do so at a time when fully a quarter of Republicans profess that they suspect their President is a Muslim. (We need hardly speculate about the percentage of those people who have even the foggiest notion of what Islam is.)

The proposed Mosque is not, incidentally, a Mosque at all, but a community center with a basketball court, a swimming pool, and a prayer room. And as many commentators have observed, Muslim worship is already going on in an old building at the site, as indeed it does daily at the Pentagon. Again, facts are the not the point.

Obama's response – which was that, as President, he ought to have no opinion on this matter –has been called typically clinical and academic, but you can bet that it was the result of a fairly lengthy discussion with advisors about how different response scenarios would "play" with various voting constituencies. (I suspect that it has been eons since any President has genuinely spoken his mind about an issue.) But it was also, coincidentally, the correct position for him to take. One of the fundamental principles of the American constitution, defended by its earliest and most important presidents, is that the state is secular and its citizens religiously autonomous. The same people who howl that Obama is a power-mad dictator and profess that they want "small government" now want him to exceed his constitutional authority on a very small matter that's no business of theirs.

On TV the other night some Fox News mercenary stated that the Mosque might be a breeding ground for terrorism, and "less than a mile" from the new World Trade Center, too. Does he believe that this danger is negated if the center was two miles away or ten? Does he think that terrorists are incapable of taking the subway? But what really caught my attention was something another commentator said: that the site was "sacred". Perhaps it is, but like many sacred things the believers themselves do not agree on what the significance of it is.

Next to St. Paul's, there is another temple, to the real religion of America: Century 21, a vast discount department store, where acreage of "designer" clothing, most of it manufactured in China, is marked down to something resembling its actual worth and set upon by throngs of people seeking salvation through middle-class conformity. I suspect that, when the history of the 21st century is written, the supposed clash of civilizations will have been deemed to have been decided in favour of that faith and none other.

Hitchens

2010-08-13T09:00:00.007-04:00

I met Christopher Hitchens about five years ago when he spoke at my university. I was at dinner with him later that night, and was elated when at random he chose the seat next to me – I was there to meet him, after all, and not engage in the usual doldrums of conversation between academics, which usually involves griping about students.

I had been teaching earlier that day and had missed his talk, but knew his writing and his reputation. I admired his eloquence, the breadth of his learning, his consistent libertarianism, his revulsion for abuses of authority, and above all his abandonment of all political allegiances except one. Echoing Robert Conquest he had described himself as a member of the United Front Against Bullshit. Sacred cows of the left (Chomsky); the liberals (the Clintons); and the right (Reagan, for example, and more recently Sarah Palin) all have suffered under his incisive pen and tongue. And he has given so many years of service to this great and noble cause, that perhaps we should forgive him for having produced a reasonable measure of bullshit himself. He has been called arrogant and egotistical, and Alexander Cockburn went a step further and called him a “sack of shit”, as I recall. My first impressions, when I met him shortly before dinner, however, were very different. He seemed quiet and rather unassuming. We chatted for a bit about his recent volume on George Orwell, and over dinner I found that he was a generous conversationalist and a good listener. He went out of his way to include everyone at the table – I think there were seven or eight of us – and he had more than enough intellectual horsepower to keep us engaged on our home turf. He spoke with great authority on topics ranging from Thomas Jefferson to the politics of India and South Africa to the life and writings of John Buchan, and, for my benefit, the twenty-volume “Aubreyiad” of Patrick O’Brian.

But I reflected that, to this journalist who had traveled the world, witnessed wars and revolutions, wrestled with saints and presidents and dictators, who could count three of the greatest living novelists as close friends, we must have seemed an unimpressive bunch, and I, poorly traveled and depressingly monolingual, most unimpressive of all. He was outwardly convivial (we shared an appetizer, which he said was an essential part of “cementing a friendship”) but I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was bored. As the evening wore on, he made various efforts to start an argument, professing at one point his great relief that Bush had beaten Kerry the previous November. I knew that this was, at least in part, his contrarian streak emerging, for his own support for Bush in the week before the election had been so attenuated that his editors at Slate had initially marked him down as supporting Kerry. (He clarified that he had made no pick.) But there were no takers at all, no one up to the fight. “Everyone here is so nice,” he said, and I don’t think it was a compliment.

The reputed alcoholic, incidentally, did not show up. His intake that evening was decidedly moderate: a scotch and a couple of glasses of wine, I think. Several of us at the table did rather better than that. The enthusiastic and unapologetic smoker was present, however, and he excused him on several occasions to brave a very cold February night in Canada to go outside for a puff.

His defenses of this addiction were disappointingly ordinary: nobody likes a quitter, he said. I recall an older classmate who used to say the same thing, and who used to add for good measure that he’d rather die in his 60s from cancer than succumb to Alzheimer’s later. When, at age 63, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer (he survived just a few weeks), he professed that, given the opportunity, he’d roll the dice against Alzheimer’s now. Hitchens, I understand, did in fact quit smoking a few years back. Too late, apparently. Earlier this month, in his regular column at Vanity Affair, he revealed that he has been diagnosed with advanced esophageal cancer. The five-year survival rates are not good. On television, at least, he seems stoic, philosophical, and realistic.

No one would ever think of asking a serious Christian if he planned to abandon his belief merely because he was diagnosed with cancer – on the contrary, he would be urged by fellow believers to cling to his faith all the more tightly, and to be accepting of God’s mysterious “plan”. But almost immediately after Hitchens’s diagnosis had been made public, some people started to ask if a deathbed conversion weren’t imminent, as if the malignant mutation of cells was somehow evidence that, yes, there’s a God, and he wants you to change before it’s too late. This is unsurprising, perhaps; especially to those on the political right who thought, mistakenly, after 9/11, that Hitchens had become one of their own, his atheism has been observed not so much with anger as with disbelief, as if they want to say, “Come now, you supported the invasion of Iraq. How can you not accept Jesus?”

And it’s worth noting, too, that there are at this moment a good many people who are positively rubbing their hands with glee, that the bigmouth atheist, the foremost spokesperson for the most reviled minority in America, is getting his comeuppance. To Hitchens, of course, this will only serve to prove his larger point that among those who claim to be morally superior there are a great many bad people and, what’s worse, bad thinkers. The premature (if it comes to that) death of one atheist is no more evidence for the existence of God than the extreme longevity of another proves that there isn’t one. Yes, Hitchens has been unkind to the faithful. But he has never said that they deserved to be punished for their sincerely-held convictions, never said that what awaits them in the afterlife is a fate far worse than anything any terrestrial dictator could inflict in this life.

Well. There's no need for an obituary just yet. He is, as he once said of another famous contrarian, a useful citizen in ways that many of his detractors are not, so long may he live. Any oncologist will tell you that remarkable – I certainly won’t say “miraculous” – recoveries do occur, and that a 5%, five year survival rate means that thousands and thousands of people so afflicted do survive that long and much longer. Certainly there's a much, much better chance of that than a book entitled God is Not Great becoming a bestseller in a country where nearly half of the population believes that the Bible is literally true and inerrant.

Statistics

2010-07-28T08:06:00.003-04:00

The phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” has been attributed to various people, most notably to Mark Twain, and some variation upon it gets trotted out every time somebody doesn’t like the direction a statistical line of argument is going. I spent the summer of 2005 in Toronto, three months that the media referred to as “the summer of the gun.” An usual number of gun-related murders occurred in the city that year, and the media (most notably the local commuter rag, The Toronto Sun) took every opportunity it could to prove the old adage that what bleeds, leads. Worst of all were the pundits and radio jocks, both left and right wing, who positively rubbed their hands with glee at every new killing, because every death reinforced, or so they believed, their thesis that society was going to hell (and sometimes quite literally to Hell). The only thing they differed about was the root cause of it all. Some said it was because of a decline in "values." Others said it was because of rising poverty. Some blamed it on guns and the United States. Others, on TV and video games. The consumer culture. Drugs. Alcohol. Masculinity. Rap music. Hotter summers. In more whispered tones some said the culprit was multiculturalism and immigration.

Occasionally, some courageous fool would attempt to inject some rationality into the discussion. On one talk-radio show, up against a notoriously fickle gadfly of a host, a visiting criminologist threw a series of haymakers that should have positively demolished the sense of crisis. He pointed out that, while the individual deaths were often very tragic, it was nonetheless the case that Toronto’s homicide rate was only about average for Canada as a whole, very far below the average when Toronto was ranked alongside American cities, and – this is the crucial point – actually much lower than it was a generation ago, back in the hallowed past when men were real men and families went to church and TV was inoffensive and Canadians didn’t let all these foreigners in. On average, he said, a typical Canadian could expect to be murdered about once every fifty thousand years. As if on cue, the host replied, “You can use statistics to prove anything", which is what people usually say when they can’t.

A few years ago, a scholar named Barry Glassner wrote an important though admittedly rather commonsensical book called The Culture of Fear, in which he pointed out that people are afraid of the wrong things. Take, for example, school shootings. The statistical fact of the matter is that children are safer from violence in school than just about anywhere else you’d expect to find them, including their own homes, and are more likely to die getting to school than in it. And yet Glassner found that something on the order of three-quarters of television media coverage of children concerned incidents of violence. Another example: people are unafraid to drive to the airport but take all kinds of drugs to get themselves calmly into the air, even though the total number of deaths in the history of commercial aviation – that’s globally – is about half of the annual death toll from car crashes in the United States.

We could go on and on. On a basic level, my point is that the media has a way of amplifying the significance of individual tragedies. I don’t think there’s anything conspiratorial about this – not at the level of basic reporting, at any rate. As a famous Monty Python sketch reminds us, it would be absurd for the media to report that nothing happened. Nonetheless, there is something askew about the fact that a single school shooting will produce days of coverage, while the fact that tens of millions of schoolchildren make it home safely alive every day is ignored. Similarly, in 2007 and 2008, commercial airlines in the United States carried 1.5 billion passengers without a single fatality, but that fact will receive far less attention than the next statistically improbable but nonetheless inevitable commercial air disaster.

All this brings me to an appallingly bad column I read in The Globe and Mail on Saturday. It was a small, rather hysterical article about a serious and emotional issue – drinking and driving, in which the authors did what authors of that sort of column always do: put emotion before reason. The authors began by reporting with alarm that drunk-driving citations had increased by nearly three percent the previous year. (We’ll leave aside the fact that the population increased by a little over one percent last year, since the authors did, too.) Very briefly, the authors acknowledged the possibility that this might simply be the result of the police citing more people, and then, having stumbled over the truth – quoting Churchill now – they picked themselves up and carried on as if nothing had happened. What is the source of this alarming increase of drunk driving they asked? The usual suspects were rounded up, and an assortment of experts with hobby horses were quoted. Youth culture is the problem. Alcohol advertising. Tough economic times. (I'm surprised they didn't blame video games and the Internet.) "Social engineering," the authors write, "stops at the bar counter." Uh-huh. Ask the owner of any of today's blessedly smoke-free watering holes if he thinks that statement is true.

The basic fact of the matter is that the authors failed entirely to prove to drunk driving actually is increasing. We have no idea how many drivers are drunk behind the wheel at any moment. We only know how many citations police hand out. These are two entirely different things, and they might not even be related. For all we know, the actual numbers of drunk drivers could be plummeting. Thus did Canada's national newspaper run a column about the cause of something that might not even exist.

Want to make the world a better place? The first step is to suspend judgment before the facts are in. Debates over momentous and complicated issues such the economy, health care, public safety, climate change, and so forth, are extraordinarily complex. Understanding these issues – let alone finding solutions to the problems that attend them – requires careful thought and consideration. In some cases, such as the issue of climate change, it may even require major study. Yet to read the newspaper or listen to talk radio or watch TV pundits is to encounter people who are paid to do opposite. Their job is to express views on matters about which they seldom have expertise, and to do so through the prism of ideology in order to attract comparably minded audiences, and to reassure them that, yes, not to worry, everything is going to hell.

Protesting

2010-06-29T08:54:00.004-04:00

That will show them. We burned two police cars and smashed the windows at American Apparel. Now they'll dismantle the whole apparatus of the capitalist system and then we can...uh...become farmers and start growing our own food. Except I don't know how to farm, so I guess I'll buy my food from...oh, wait...

We elect our leaders (well, some of us do) and it’s good that they meet, but judging from some peoples’ reaction we shouldn’t have leaders at all, and, if we do, they shouldn't have meetings. There’s a certain appeal to this, I admit. Government is too big and tries to do too much. A large percentage of our elected leadership has a very marginal mandate, is demonstrably incompetent, and is almost entirely self-interested. These facts tend to discourage people, but it’s actually precisely because of them that it’s so important for people to get involved. Politics, by definition, involves the exercise of power, and it’s vital that people use such influence as they have to ensure that governmental authority is exercised by consent, justly, and with restraint.

As citizens of a liberal democracy, we have the right to alter the calculus of costs that go into governmental decision making. We can make our views known, we can vote, we can get involved in politics, we can peacefully protest. In ancients Athens, they had a word for people disinclined to do so: the politically uninvolved were called “idiots” - hence the origins of the word. So I have no objection in principle to those who demonstrated at the G20 summit, inexplicably held in downtown Toronto last weekend. I doubt that the marches had an particular impact on the decision making that went on within (the leaders didn’t see the protests and the media didn’t report on the agenda of the various peaceful demonstrators) and I doubt, too, that many of the marchers were particularly well informed about the issues about which they were marching. Indeed, something is seriously bonkers with the leader of a major union who says, “Working people have never been given anything” when the rank-and-file union membership he represents earn, on average, nearly $60 per hour when pension and benefits are factored in.

But let me put the following case to you: supposing that you’re a member of an organization that’s concerned about the ecology or the women’s rights in developing countries. Here are two courses of action open to you: in one, you can go to the G20 summit and peacefully demonstrate, in the small hope of making your views known, or you attend the same demonstration, don a mask, and throw bricks through windows and at the police. Which of these two actions are more likely to garner public sympathy and support for your position?

It’s not even a question that needs to be posed. Tim Horton’s franchises were vandalized in downtown Toronto over the weekend, and to most Canadians that’s an act that falls below spray-tagging the exterior of a cathedral on the list of things that are likely to get you sent to hell. And the acts of violence committed by various thugs claiming to be demonstrators reveal rather conclusively that the members of the “Black Bloc” aren’t interested in politics at all. They’re interested in pointless violence. Oh, they claim to be “political anarchists.” Very well: take ten of them are random. How many of the ten, do you think, could engage you in learned discourse about the philosophies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rudolph Rocker?

“We’re living in police state!” I keep reading on internet chat boards and hearing on Youtube. Was the police response overzealous at times? Of course it was. The police are an organization like any other, and amongst their ranks there will be a measure of bullies. There are also bullying garbage collectors and mail carriers and librarians and teachers. Given a slightly different trajectory in life, they might have been members of the Black Bloc. The difference, of course, is that your typical librarian doesn’t have legal powers of arrest and an assortment of weapons with which to take out their grievances on others. But for my students with a head full of steam and inclined to be more in sympathy with the Black Bloc and their ilk than with the police – who are themselves working people, remember – here’s something to bear in mind. The first sign that you’re not living in a police state is that you survive the experience when you say that you are.

Cycling

2010-06-16T18:53:00.005-04:00

We’re from London, so Amanda and I spend quite a bit of time in Toronto, which is where the culture is. In fact, I propose that Tourism London should adopt the motto, “London: Just Two More Hours to Toronto.” About the only thing we dislike about the place is the traffic, and anyone who has ever driven on the Gardiner knows the tedium of interminable gridlock on a road that is incongruously called an “expressway”. They will also have fantasized about what it would be like to go hurtling down the Gardiner without any other cars in sight. As I don’t drive, I picture myself on my bicycle, instead. On Saturday, I realized this rather modest dream. Let me explain.

It was on Saturday that me, my wife Amanda, my friend Alison, and her brother Colin (that's us, above) participated in the Ride to Conquer Cancer, a 200 KM bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls in support of the Princess Margaret Hospital. We departed the CNE around 8 AM with 3,100 other cyclists, and headed for the Gardiner Expressway, closed for the time being in order to accommodate the riders. About four minutes into ride, Alison and I were side-by-side when we both heard the unmistakable sound of her tire blowing. A flat, after four minutes! We pulled over. Within a few minutes, an official Ride support vehicle arrived, and the ride volunteer, a remarkable fellow named Don Ryan, trailed that day by a CBC news-crew, went through one faulty tube after another trying to get the bike fixed. (An aside: for our first-ever television appearance, Alison and I will be seen wearing form-fitting bicycle shirts and shorts, and I’d like to remind everyone that the camera, as is well known, adds thirty pounds.) After about twenty minutes or so, I was told that I should ride on, while Alison would be taken forward to the first rest stop with her bike in the truck.

I therefore was the last – the very last – of 3,100 riders. I positively hurtled down the Gardiner, propelled by a hefty tailwind and by the sudden and rather terrifying realization that, behind me, they were starting to let cars back on. But for about four or five minutes, it was just me and the empty lanes, and as I left onto Lakeshore (also temporarily closed), it occurred to me that I was experiencing something that very, very few of Toronto's perpetually frustrated commuters ever have. Then the terror started – fast cars re-entering Lakeshore (a vehicle ahead of me was picking up the pylons that they had laid down to demarcate where riders should be), and I actually went through a tunnel with a very considerable dump truck beside me, the driver no doubt puzzled and angry as to what I was doing out there, where no cyclist should be at all.

After another minute of frantic pedaling, a police-car pulled up beside me. The officer said, “You are last. I will be your escort.” Last! Last of 3,100. There was no time for explanations. I felt quite humiliated, and did my best to put in a credible performance for the next fifteen minutes, or as creditable as a rather dumpy middle-aged academic can be expected to put in. So, while I pedaled furiously to catch up with the back of the pack, I was followed by this slow-moving police car, its lights going the whole time, in what bewildered onlookers must have thought was some sort of bicycle-car equivalent of the O.J. Simpson “car chase”.

But it was there, at the back of the pack, that I had my most humbling experiences of the weekend. It was not the gifted competitive cyclists who impressed me the most that weekend (on Sunday, one such rider crossed the finish line in Niagara, then, announcing he was from Hamilton, turned about, and headed back). The people who impressed me most were a variety of differently-abled individuals, at the back of the pack but undaunted. There were no fewer than two one-legged cyclists, and several who were legally blind, accompanied by other cyclists as guides. And there were an assortment of people who did not meet the expected standards of what distance-cyclists ought to be: elderly, riding beaten-up bikes, they nonetheless pressed on, motivated, no doubt, by some personal grievance against the most dread of all diseases.

Those first moments of the first day were frustrating, at times humiliating, at times scary, and above all humbling; the last moments of the first day, as we ascended the Niagara Escarpment at Hamilton in the driving rain, were cold, wet, exhausting, and actually painful. In short, it was everything that a ride against cancer ought to be, and in the many moments that I felt like quitting on that steep, long, and winding hill, I thought of my mother, who never, never did.

Blasphemy

2010-05-21T09:18:00.005-04:00

My students tell me that Judeo-Christian ethics are at the root of our legal system, but are they really? I can convert to Hinduism, on Sunday, lie to my parents about, and then say, “Goddamn, I covet my neighbor’s wife – and his ass, for that matter,” and the police don’t care, even though seven or eight of the Ten Commandments have just dropped before me like so many bowling pins.

The process by which religious precepts gradually become private rather than public observances is called secularization, and even highly observant followers of most faiths would probably agree that, up to a point, at least, it’s a good thing. Imagine, if you will, a society where it was a criminal offense to dishonour one’s parents. The courts would be teeming with teenagers. Conservatives would howl that we need to get tough to deter future dishonouring; liberals would whine that we need to get at the root cause of the tendency to dishonour; and lawyers would clean up, as usual. We needn't imagine the horror of societies where "thou shalt have no other Gods before me" is enforced by the power of the state, because religious fascism has existed throughout human history, and still does.

Yesterday, thousands of people took part in “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”. Measure of Doubt did not. I’m not Muslim and therefore Islamic moral and ethical precepts do not apply to me except where they overlap coincidentally with laws and moral and ethical codes that do. But I chose not to participate in the day anyway. There are millions and millions of non-violent Muslims who consider the depiction of their prophet to be offensive, and I see no reason to offend people who are doing me no harm. Deliberately offending others is a weapon of second-last resort.

Having said that, I would very much like to digitally thumb my nose at the minority within every faith who believes that blasphemy ought to be punishable by law and perhaps even by death. Get a grip, people: you’re not the ones going to Hell. As I’ve said to religious friends many times over the years, it’s not the atheists you need to worry about. They just think you’re wrong. It’s the fanatically devout of other faiths who should concern you. They’re think you’re wrong and that you’re going to Hell for it. Some of them are even willing to expedite the process.

We need to get past all this. Our societal discourse on matters of religion is positively infantile, worse even than the dreary and depressing state of public discussion of electoral politics. It doesn’t help that books by nonbelievers tend to take the form of shrill diatribes, but there is little opportunity for sensible discussion when so many of the faithful themselves argue that religious beliefs ought to be exempt from criticism.

Sarah Palin was almost certainly the least impressive of major political candidates to come along in recent memory. But she had one quality that the Senator from Illinois did not have: she was consistent on the matter of religion. She was unapologetically evangelical and said that, you betchya, her faith would influence her decision making in office. For this, secularists and liberal Christians jumped all over her. But why? What did they want? For a ridiculous woman to be a hypocrite on top of it all? It is absurd to suggest that a politician should “keep her faith a private matter” when in political office. Either her faith has meaning to her, or it does not. If it does not, she should abandon it. If it does, we should expect it to influence her decision making. But our political culture practically demands religious hypocrisy, and in all sorts of ways. I trust everyone saw Laura Bush, very recently, confessing that she’s pro-choice and a supporter of same-sex marriage?

So I had a small flicker of admiration for Palin for a moment or two, for at least having the consistency of her beliefs (that’s how the low the bar was set). But it passed. Because when some of the weirder aspects of her belief hit the fan, and some people started to ask whether, for instance, a woman who believes that the world is 6,000 years old should be involved in policy making on scientific and educational issues, Palin and her supporters ran for the customary but hypocritical defense that religion was a private matter and therefore off limits.

No, no, no. A thousand times no. Politicians can do one of two things. They can do what the liberal secularists demand of them, and keep their faith to themselves and out of their politics, or they bring their faith into the public sphere and accept the fact that it’s going to be subject to criticism, just like every other aspect of their decision making.

The same goes for everybody. You don’t get to use your religion to adjudicate on all matters of truth and morality, up to and including speculating upon the disposition of the immortal soul of others, and then demand immunity from criticism in return. In short, if you tell me I’m going to Hell, I get to tell you to precede me there.

From the very beginning, this blog has been a defense of the principle that people should be free to do and say and think and read whatever they want, provided they’re not stopping other people from the doing the same, and provided that they’re not harming other people in the process. Blasphemy does not, can not, and never will fall into that category. No prophets were harmed in the making of this picture.

Posting

2010-05-08T08:22:00.007-04:00

Do you want to be really, really frightened? Deeply and truly terrified about the state of the world? Do you want to experience the long, dark, night of the soul, paralyzed with fear for the future of humanity? Forget global warming. Put nuclear terrorism out of your mind. Worry thee not about declining potable water supplies. If you want to be truly afraid, spend an hour trolling through posts on Internet message boards, the ones that follow virtually every news-story or video clip. Then consider: these people have the right to vote. Here is the electronic community’s infinite equivalent of obscene scrawls on the inside of a public bathroom stall: people at their most nasty and cowardly and illiterate and crass. In a recent column, the outgoing editor of the local newspaper gushed that reader input of this kind could “democratize the news”, as if what’s factually true and worth presenting was a matter of majority opinion. Can you imagine? “Next on News Now, the stars of Twilight discuss why they think Bush planned 9/11.” It would happen.

But the most subliterate, irrational, and mean-spirited message boards anywhere are to be found on Youtube. People there find ways to start vitriolic (but illiterate and uninformed) fights about Obama on clips of otters holding hands. Just to see, I selected a video at random from Youtube’s main-page. It turned out to be a clip of a UFC fighter, “talking trash”, as they say, about his opponents. You can imagine the kinds of messages that followed. Even the profanity is spelled wrong. So it’s not necessarily to click the following link. But, if you do, be aware that there’s swearing and racist epithets being thrown around:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmfquIjKmJo&feature=topvideos

Now, admittedly, there was some selection bias here. Click on your typical link of, say (I sense the sports fans starting to rise from their seats already), a UFC video or an NHL game or a even Tiger Woods these days, and you’ll get decidedly less literate commentary than if you clicked on a link of, for instance, a performance of Mozart’s Great Mass in C or a replay of a famous chess match.

Anyway, it’s of no particular consequence what the average person thinks of last night’s game or who is a better fighter in the UFC (or what they think of the Great Mass, for that matter.) It is of importance what the average voter thinks about politics, and the posts in response to events of actual importance on most Internet message boards actually leave me rather thankful that most people don’t vote.

Issues such a climate change, the threat of fundamentalist religion, the global economic downturn, etc., are extraordinarily complex problems. Understanding them requires study and careful consideration. Solving them will require serious people who have a clear mandate to act on behalf of a properly informed citizenry. Reading message boards on CNN.com, Youtube, Slate, and, well, almost anywhere, one gets the sinking feeling that tens of thousands of people are totally ill-informed but, what’s worse, nonetheless think that they’re right. They are exemplars of Russell’s famous adage that the whole problem with the world is that smart people are full doubt while the stupid ones are sure of themselves.

So what is going on here? I mean, apart from the fact that the most educated generation in the history of the world has apparently resolved itself to do nothing with that gift? I have a theory, and it has to do with human nature.

After World War Two and until the 1980s at the earliest, many cultural anthropologists, sociologists, cultural theorists, feminists, and others, argued that the World Wars had demonstrated that the problem with humankind was not a lack of civilization, but civilization itself, or at least the racist, sexist, militaristic, environmentally destructive civilization we’d built over the last 10,000 years.

By contrast, prehistoric humans, they contended, including various indigenous peoples prior to European contact, lived noble lives in harmony with nature and one another. The biological anthropologists tended to argue that this was the natural outcome of our evolutionary heritage. Just look at our nearest biological cousin, the chimpanzees, after all: they’re fun-loving creatures who spend their days cuddling and grooming one another and learning sign language.

Well, it’s not that simple, of course. Today many anthropologists and archeologists tell us that the death rate from violence in hunter-gatherer and early agriculturalist societies (including those of most pre-contact indigenous peoples) was probably about 25 or 30 percent. Just by way of comparison, about 4 or 5 percent of Germans died from violence in the first half of the 20th century, and that was after losing two worlds wars and suffering through one genocidal dictator. For Canadians, the figure is probably something like a quarter of a percent.

An important Israeli political scientist, Azar Gat, says that the reason for all this is simple. Contrary to what was once believed, our natural, evolutionary predispositions are exceedingly violent. Consider those cousins of ours. In the early 1970s, Jane Goodall discovered that chimpanzees do, in fact, wage war, commit murder and rape, and that nearly every female chimp who survives to adulthood loses at least one offspring to infanticide. That’s what evolution conditioned us for, Gat argues. We’re a grisly species that likes to fight. Fortunately, we don’t just obey the dictates of our genes. Civilization, is, well, civilizing. It encourages us to build hospitals and give Mother’s Days cards and write symphonies and get to work in rush hour without killing anybody. Our weapons are more lethal, true, and there’s more of us to kill these days, but in proportional terms the average European — even accounting for Hitler and Stalin — or North American living in modern times, is far less likely to die in war or by violence than the average person in medieval Europe, antiquity, or prehistoric times, when wars were smaller but far more frequent and death by murder was an everyday event. Life back then was, as Hobbes famously put it, nasty, brutal, and short. By historical standards, modern liberal democracies are practically Heaven. Today, the average Canadian can expect to be murdered about once every 54,000 years, and more Canadians die from accidental falls every year than have died in war in all the years since 1945.

And what on Earth has this to do with Internet message boards? Well, it’s simple, really. Civilization – and liberal democratic civilization in particular – encourages us to restrain ourselves. But the Internet is an uncivilized place. It is not liberal and it’s not a democracy – it’s anarchy. The restraints of human solidarity that keep you and me from pelting each other with bananas (or arrows or spears or stones) are not in place when people log anonymously onto Youtube or CNN.com. And night after night, on the message boards, the chimps return to stake out territory and fight. You can read their grunting for yourself.

In fact, I admit that some primal part of me desperately wants to go to that Youtube clip of Mozart’s Great Mass and leave a message saying “Mozart sux. Beethoven rulez” just to see what would happen.

Aging

2010-04-22T07:14:00.006-04:00

Well, this won’t do at all. I awoke this morning to discover that I’ve turned forty, and I haven’t the slightest idea how this happened. Last I remember, I was nineteen, and setting off to choose my courses at university.

Forty! The most shocking thing, perhaps, is the state of decrepitude into which my body has fallen in the past ten years. Always prone to rather substantive fluctuations in body mass, I now find that the fluctuations have ceased. In their place comes a pattern of steady change, and all in one direction. Hairs sprout from alarming places, except in the one place where I want them to be. My teeth? Worn down to nubs and now crowned with porcelain. I have a six pack, true, but I bought it at the LCBO. I get tired walking up stairs. My feet hurt and my hips ache. Were I a dog, and were you a farmer, it would be getting to the point where you’d be thinking, yup, pretty soon we’ll have to take the ol’ feller out back of the barn and shoot him.

Well, maybe not just yet. The 90th Psalm grants us that the number of our years shall be “threescore and ten” or, “by reason of strength” fourscore, which I rather prefer. (Must do those push-ups.) Still, this upper extreme constitutes a mere twenty-nine thousand days, and by virtue of pure mathematics alone, I am confronted with the rather depressing possibility that there are fewer days ahead than behind.

If there’s one thing that has, for me, indicated the passage of time, it is the growing incomprehensibility of the world that my students inhabit. More and more I find myself asking why they dress that way (why wear the ball cap and the hood up while you’re inside?); why they seem to have been genetically engineered to be one with their laptops and cellphones (what could be so important that you must text at this moment?); and why they call that crap “music” (back in my day, songs had something called “a melody”). In short, I’ve begun to wonder what every generation in the history of the world has: what’s wrong with the kids these days? So, there it is. I’ve become a grump. A middle-aged fogey. A curmudgeon.

Still, the passage has time has not been without its advantages. There’s a famous line in Tennyson, “Though much is taken, much abides”, but this implies a steady erosion against which we, like Ulysses, must strive and not yield. But surely there are qualities of mind that only come with age. Knowledge easily is gained by anyone willing to crack a book (“Lend me an hour a day,” Will Durrant once said, “And I will make a philosopher and a scholar out of you.”) Wisdom, on the other hand, is something that comes with experience. The difference? Knowing that, too, is the product of experience, and it is something I did not know when I was 30. Knowledge is when you know something. Wisdom is knowing when to say it.

I mentioned before, how I biked up to the university shortly after my 19th birthday to meet the registrar at the college where I had just been accepted. Everyone who attended Huron in those days remembers the registrar – a formidable woman who left an impression upon a generation of students as great as any made by any faculty member of that era – and I still recall retreating backwards into my chair as, with crooked finger jabbing the air, she recited Shaw’s dictum that youth, a wonderful thing, is wasted on children. “You’re not here to socialize,” she said. “This is about your life. Don’t miss out on this opportunity.”

Indeed. Well, I’m not sure I would ever tell my students that they ought not to socialize. My own happiest moments as a teacher have been the result of seeing lasting friendships form among students – that is something that will outlast every lesson taught and even those few that actually are learned. But it is also true that, aged 18 or 19, my students do not yet realize that time is the most precious asset they possess, and that the world of learning is too fertile to mark time.

So, forty. I will embrace thee with all the enthusiasm of embracing an in-law. And it is tempting to quote Tennyson again: “Come, my friends. ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” But I think my grandmother put it best when she that the thing about aging is that it’s better than the alternative.

Cancer

2010-04-06T20:27:00.006-04:00

The most dread of all diseases, but also one that, I am thoroughly convinced, can be brought to battle and defeated within our lifetime.

My own life was touched by this disease when my mother, Marilyn Broad, a survivor of breast cancer, died, five years ago this May, after a subsequent contest with liver cancer. In the years since, several dear friends have lost parents to the disease, and another is helping her mother through a struggle against cancer of the brain.

On June 12th and 13th, my wife Amanda and I, along with our friend Alison Hunter and her brother Colin Hunter, will be participating in the 2nd Ride to Conquer Cancer, a 200 kilometer charity bicycling event to raise money for the Campbell Family Institute at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital. Our team goal is to raise in excess of $11,000.

You can make donations to us as individuals or to our team by clicking on the link on the sidebar. Any and all donations are hugely appreciated.

Coulter

2010-03-30T08:12:00.006-04:00

There’s a passage from one of the great plays of the 20th century, Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, that comes to mind at times like these. Sir Thomas More inquires whether his son-in-law, Roper, would cut down the laws of England to get at the Devil. Roper says that he would do so without hesitation. To which More, in a famous riposte, replies,

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's. And if you cut them down ... do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

It’s over-quoted a bit, but it’s one of the more succinct and useful defenses of the principle of freedom of speech, and of civil liberties generally, to be found in 20th century literature. (I doubt that the real More would have been so liberal in his views.)

Last week, protesters at the University of Ottawa did an appalling thing. They succeeded in preventing Ann Coulter, a prominent right-wing comedian, from speaking on their campus. Well, I’m glad to know that some students are motivated enough to protest something, but I for one don't trust other people to tell me what I'm not allowed to read or hear or say. Coulter appeared recently on my own campus and I wouldn't have gone if you’d paid me, but that's not the point. The point is that it’s nobody’s business if I had wanted to go.

Coulter herself is not interesting and not even funny, and her followers, with their thunderous applause for her cheap and easy jokes — often made at the expense of people asking serious questions — reveal in the process something important about themselves: they are far too easily amused. It's because of people like them that reality TV keeps chugging along.

If Coulter's enemies really insist on doing something other than ignoring her (and why anyone would devote more than a paragraph or two to this clown is beyond me), it should be encouraging her to speak and write as widely as possible. If anyone is likely to discredit the right-wing, it's people such as her, much as the Michael Moores of the world do more to harm the authentic, anti-totalitarian, and humanitarian left than anyone on the political right possibly could.

Bolt’s version of Thomas More believed that there was safety in the laws of England, and the whole play serves an important reminder that in politically charged environments it’s probably good to keep your mouth shut most of the time – you never know what innocuous remark will be used against you by people such as Richard Rich. But if the quotation is about the law rather than about an ethical principle — which is the way in which it usually is employed — it doesn’t quite work for Canada, where our own laws categorically do not defend your freedom of speech in cases where other people can demonstrate that you've hurt their feelings.

Sooner or later the political winds will shift direction and the left will rue the day it ever conceived of the idea of "Hate Speech". Critics of the Church’s stance on same-sex marriage or the ordination of women will be hauled before Human Rights tribunals for “spreading hate” against Catholics; advocates for abortion rights will be charged with "hate crimes" against the unborn; opponents of Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza will have the charges of anti-Semitism that are sometimes lofted their way taken seriously. All this will happen, and in some respects it already is happening. Coulter herself has made murmurings about filing a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. I doubt she will do any such thing, not because she herself cares about freedom of expression, but because there’s no particular reason why she should be bothered. She’s raking in money hand over fist precisely because some people take her seriously enough to protest her.

Lesson: give the Devil her day in court, people. For your own safety’s sake.

Compassion

2010-03-14T08:28:00.003-04:00

Busy week. Rather than a column, I thought that this update would take the form of a longish quotation on the subject above. This passage from Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" (1913) expresses in some respects a remarkably Christian sentiment for a man who once wrote a famous essay about why he was not one. For Russell, it was a rejoinder to the claim that a non-believer's life must necessarily be without purpose. I first encountered it in my teens, and it has never been far from my thoughts. Actions, on the other hand...

"United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible forces, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need -- of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.

And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed."

Athletes

2010-02-28T10:57:00.006-05:00

Stupid Headline of the Year Award goes to The Globe and Mail: “World Stops for 13 Minutes”, in reference to Tiger Woods’s televised apology for his affairs. Do the editors of The Globe and Mail really think that the people of Haiti, Darfur, and Afghanistan ceased, for thirteen minutes, picking up the shattered pieces of their lives in order to hear an American billionaire confess that he has had trouble keeping his nine iron in his golf bag? No doubt they were positively riveted to their screens. Or, they would have been if they had screens.

Newshound that I am, I have found this event inescapable. There it has been, on nearly every news home page I have bookmarked. I am not sure why it is of any conceivable interest to anyone, but, then, I consider an afternoon of golf to rank alongside an afternoon of root canal on the desirability index. My interest in the sordid details of the personal life a professional golfer diminishes proportionately.

At any rate, from what I’ve gathered the Woods business has followed the usual parabola of celebrity meltdowns: the embarrassing event exposed, followed by seclusion, rehab, religion, and then re-emergence, before televised audiences, while all the while asking for the press to “respect my privacy at this difficult time.” (And if you wish to learn more about the “privacy at this difficult time” policy, please contact my press agent, or tune in to see me on Oprah next week.)

I feel queasy even taking this amount of time to write about it. But there are some lessons to be learned here. First, some newspaper editors seem determined to incite a worldwide peasant revolt. Page One: “The World Stops for 13 Minutes.” Page Two: “Let Them Eat Cake.” Second, and perhaps more importantly, this case reinforces my belief that there’s no particular evidence to support the claim that is repeated ad infinitum in our schools: that playing sports promotes moral character.

Or do we think of character when the likes of Mike Tyson, Tonya Harding, Jose Canseco, Michael Vick, and O.J. Simpson are mentioned? Do we even need to raise the fact that it is by now established beyond all doubt that the overwhelming majority of professional athletes and, indeed, amateurs at high levels of competitive play, routinely use banned and often illegal performance-enhancing drugs? The website “Cheat or Beat” used to maintain a week-by-week “roundup” of drug-related infractions in competitive sports. One can understand why they stopped. After about a month or so, the point was made. Check out this list of a five-day period in October 2008.

I know, I know. I’m being unfair. Many people find watching and playing sports to be harmless fun, and sports can, I am willing to concede, teach young people important lessons for the larger game of life when the games are well conducted and properly supervised. (I just never experienced this myself.) And let’s not forget, too, that some athletes are authentic humanitarians who will hit home runs for orphans, and we'll overlook the fact that there are a few "bad apples" who would hit orphans for home runs.

Take, for instance, a certain recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a figure lauded in his own six-story museum in Louisville, Kentucky, as having the core values of "respect, confidence, conviction, dedication, charity, and spirituality", a man once described in a documentary series as “the foremost citizen on planet earth” and who was the subject of an adoring Hollywood bio-pic, the much-beloved “Greatest” himself, Muhammad Ali. In a 1975 interview with Playboy, the resurgent champ, fresh from his victory over George Foreman, made the following remarks, which to my knowledge he has never retracted:

Ali: “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman.”
Playboy Interviewer: “And if a Muslim woman wants to go out with a non-Muslim blacks, or white men, for that matter?”
Ali: “Then she dies. Kill her, too.”

The fact that an athlete can make racist, misogynistic, and homicidal remarks in a single sentence and still come off as a “hero” is indicative, perhaps, of how low we set the threshold of acceptable behavior for our athletes, and serves as yet another reminder that Orwell was right when he said that we should judge saints guilty until they are proven innocent.

Dresden

2010-02-14T19:48:00.003-05:00

This week's blog entry appeared as an Op-Ed piece in the London Free Press on Saturday, February 13th, to mark the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Dresden bombings.

The column is available on the London Free Press website and also appears below.
---------------

This weekend marks the 65th anniversary of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, a horrific raid that killed 30,000 civilians and left much of the city a smoldering ruin. With the exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski, no action by the Allies in the Second World War has generated so much moral condemnation. Ever since, critics have charged that the city was defenseless and of no military value. Neither of these claims is entirely true, but even Winston Churchill conceded that the attack represented a serious “query” against the moral conduct of Allies.

Area bombing — the indiscriminate targeting of enemy cities rather than specific war-related industries and military targets — was a tactic adopted by the RAF’s Bomber Command in 1941. It was a sensible decision at the time. The British were without major allies and confronted by a totalitarian enemy that had conquered all of western Europe. Without the technological means to target war industries precisely, Bomber Command aimed at what it couldn’t miss: whole towns and cities. By late 1944, however, area bombing had taken on an enormous inertia of its own, and Bomber Command continued to reduce towns and cities to rubble and ash long after there was any prospect of German victory.

Major anniversaries of this kind always stir up a brouhaha, but the controversy over the strategic bombing offensive has been simmering away for decades now. Historians and military men of unimpeachable patriotic credentials have been raising serious questions about the campaign’s efficacy and morality ever since the first bomb fell. Today, most scholars agree that the Anglo-American bomber offensive cracked German morale, destroyed the Luftwaffe, and dealt heavy blows to Hitler’s war industry.

But were the attacks moral? This is a different question entirely. Historians tread lightly here, for we are wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy. Some people would argue that historians have no business making moral judgments at all, but clearly this will not do. Surely no one would deny us the right to condemn Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao. Nor should we submit to the temptation of moral relativism, for we cannot judge monsters by their own monstrous standards. By what standard can we judge, then? Certainly not our own. What about judging by the moral standards of the time? Again, we must be cautious. There was no consensus about the morality of killing enemy civilians at the time, as evidenced by the fact that Allied propaganda consistently downplayed or even covered up the fact that British, Canadian, and American bombers were killing women and children. These are difficult matters. But where the moral debate over the bombing of Dresden goes awry, in my opinion, is in focusing too much on the actions of the Allies, and not enough on the war guilt of the enemy.

In about sixty days in the late spring and early summer of 1943, the Second World War turned decisively against the Germans. In May 1943, they effectively conceded defeat in the Battle of Atlantic by withdrawing their U-Boats from convoy routes. Then, in July, a succession of haymakers sent the Axis reeling: the German offensive against the Soviets at Kursk was repulsed with catastrophic losses; the Allies invaded Sicily and Mussolini’s government fell; and a dreadful firestorm immolated Hamburg and perhaps 40,000 of its people following a heavy raid by Bomber Command. After that summer of 1943, and certainly no later the D-Day, a year later, it was no longer possible for any rational person to doubt what the eventual outcome of the war would be. The Nazis’ continued resistance was explicable only in light of their pathological addiction to redrawing the racial map of Europe through murder. Fighting on served no purpose except to continue the bloodletting for its own sake. Too often, we forget this, and instead chastise the Allies for their heavy handed prosecution of a war that the Nazis started in the first place and then refused to end. After the Holocaust itself, this is the worst of the atrocities that the Nazis committed: their refusal to surrender unconditionally, even long after it was clear that unconditional surrender would be eventual outcome anyway. How many millions died, in the final months of the war, to satiate the Nazis’ insatiable bloodlust?

We cannot know, for certain. But we can certainly add the dead at Dresden to their numbers. The thousands who died by fire and asphyxiation at Dresden were victims not just of the remorseless logic of Allied area bombing, but also the death fetishism of a government which many of them had once cheered onwards to victory.

Movies

2010-01-21T09:22:00.003-05:00

We went to see Avatar. The movie is about a soldier who is sent to conquer a non-hierarchical, non-aggressive indigenous people who live in perfect harmony with nature, but who ends up defending them against the evil forces of modernity and corporate greed. It’s a story we’ve seen before many, many times. South Park got it right when they called it “Dances with Smurfs”. And need I even point out that the movie wouldn’t even exist without the forces of modernity and corporate greed, since non-hierarchical, non-aggressive indigenous people who live in perfect harmony with nature don’t spend half a billion dollars making 3-D movies. They’re too busy dying before the age of 30 for that.

We had a rather more interesting movie-going experience the following week, however, when we went to see another Christmas blockbuster. The interest was in seeing the succession of trailers that preceded the movie itself.

In one, Denzel Washington plays the survivor of a nuclear holocaust, who is being pursued by an army of post-apocalyptic goons. He turns out to be a one-man killing machine, and the trailer contains one rapidly cut scene after another of him shooting, slashing, stabbing, punching, kicking, and blowing up waves of adversaries. There are also stupendous car crashes. Although it is not shown, this will probably culminate in him fighting the leader of baddies, played by Gary Oldman, while the life of Washington’s fish-out-of-water-but-learning-the-game female sidekick hangs in the balance. The bad guy will probably be killed by falling from a great height. I don’t recall the movie’s name.

The second trailer was for an action-buddy caper starring John Travolta and that British actor who is in everything these days but who is not Jude Law. You know the one. Anyway, they play spies or something, with the not-Jude Law as the fish-out-of-water-learning-the-game sidekick, while John Travolta, who turns out to be a killing machine, does much shooting, slashing, stabbing, punching, kicking, and blowing up waves of enemies. There are also stupendous car crashes. The sidekick has a wife. Although it’s not shown in the trailer, I predict that in the final act of the film the wife will be kidnapped and held hostage by the leader of bad guys, while Travolta and sidekick fight him and his minions in an abandoned warehouse or a factory at night. The factory’s machinery will be producing a great deal of steam and red and greenish lights will be on, even though there is nobody around. The leader of the bad guys will probably fall from a great height. I don’t recall the movie’s name.

The third trailer was for a revenge flick starring Mel Gibson, who plays a tough cop whose daughter is murdered in front of him on Christmas or something. He sets out to investigate her death and discovers a vast conspiracy. Waves of baddies are sent against him, and much shooting, slashing, stabbing, punching, kicking, and blowing up follows. There are also stupendous car crashes. Although it’s not shown in the trailer, I predict that Gibson’s character will be framed for a crime he didn’t commit at some point in the film, and will end up the run from the police and so on. I also predict that the final act of the film will involve Gibson fighting the main bad guy, possibly in an abandoned warehouse or in a factory at night. The leader of the bad guys will probably fall from a great height. I don’t recall the movie’s name.

The came the movie itself: Sherlock Holmes. As you probably know by now, in this movie, Holmes is re-invented as action hero, and it follows Holmes and Watson (played by the actual Jude Law) as they shoot, slash, stab, punch, kick, and, yes, blow up waves of enemies who are part of a vast conspiracy. There are no stupendous car crashes (it’s the 1880s, after all), but a ship does crash rather stupendously. In the end, Holmes fights the leader of the bad guys on London Bridge, still under construction, but with nary a construction worker in sight. Needless to say, the life of the female lead hangs in the balance. The leader of the bad guys falls to his death from a great height. Notice I do not say “spoiler alert!” above, as there’s nothing to spoil: anyone who has been watching movies for the past twenty years or so knows the formula.

A common criticism of movie critics is that they are out-of-touch with what the general public likes. But if you watched two hundred or more movies per year, and half of them were action films like these, and the other half were romantic comedies (and half of those starred the same half-dozen actors), you’d crave something different, too. I often hear people say, “But when I go to the movies, I don’t want a complex story or deep characters or a message. I just want to shut my brain off for a couple of hours and enjoy myself.” Uh-huh. May I suggest that the kinds of people who like movies such as Transformers 2 hardly need an excuse to shut their brain off? Turning it on, on the other hand...

Later that night we (legally) downloaded and watched a wry observation piece, Away We Go, about two 30-somethings, about to have a baby, who visit friends around the country in an effort to find a place they can call home. It was a good movie, not great, but worth the download, and it was nice to see something where nobody was shot, slashed, stabbed, punched, kicked, or blown up, and where every car survived the movie intact. And the female lead wasn’t held hostage while the boys fought it out in an abandoned but steam-producing factory.

They say that the Hollywood system is on its last legs. The media continues breathlessly to report the biggest opening day weekends year after year (have these people never heard of inflation?) but the actual number of tickets being sold is in decline as people abandon the monsto-plexes for increasingly affordable home movie theatres. For about $2000 now – relative to inflation, a fraction of what TVs cost thirty years ago — you can get a big screen, surround sound, high resolution movie players, and, of course the comforts of movies at home, including pause buttons and beer.

Is the Hollywood system on its last legs? I don’t know. I don’t fully understand the economics of it. If it is, good riddance. Because right now that system is creatively dead, holding audiences of hyper-hormonal late teenage males in their thrall while more discerning viewers are metaphorically shot, slashed, stabbed, punched, kicked, blown up, run over, and then pushed from high heights.

Sickness

2010-01-14T08:43:00.004-05:00

On Tuesday, a catastrophe of almost unfathomable proportions struck Haiti. In the right wing (I won’t say “conservative”) press in the United States, the denunciations of the island nation and its people began at once. Screw ‘em, the message has been. Why should our socialist (or communist, depending on the commentator) President send even a dime of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to Haiti? These same sorts of people — the predecessors of the hysterical Fox news types — were far less concerned in decades past when successive US administrations sent millions of dollars to provide economic and military assistance to Haiti’s hereditary dictatorship, the Duvalier crime family, whose human rights abuses were, by even the most favorable appraisals, far, far worse than those committed by Castro’s dictatorship in Cuba in the same period.

Anyone looking for evidence of a civilization in decline need only spend a few minutes reading the nearest message board on any given news website. There you will find legions of the unthinking and semi-literate, handed a megaphone. Right now they’re shouting that we shouldn’t be sending money to Haiti when there are problems right here at home. And, indeed, there are such problems. But what, you ask, are they doing to help solve those problems? No doubt they’re planning to get right on it after a six-pack of Coors and the football game. Harsh, you say? Unkind? Elitist? Perhaps. But read the message boards and ask yourself if you’re really that concerned about declining voter turnout. Perhaps it’s best if some people don’t vote.

One such example would be the people who consider themselves the “flock” (that is, the sheep) of the “Reverend” Pat Robertson. Yesterday, Robertson offered these words of wisdom and comfort to his viewers in order to explain the Haitian tragedy:

"They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."

I won’t get into Robertson’s complete incomprehension of the history of the Haitian Revolution, a vast slave uprising which secured that nation’s independence from Napoleon Bonaparte’s France in 1804, and which did so on Jeffersonian principles. But this sort of thing is to be expected by now from Robertson, whose television program is watched daily by millions of American evangelicals and who has been kowtowed to by successive Republican presidents of the United States. I know that some among the faithful consider themselves subject to public ridicule for public expressions of their faith, but it is equally true there are priests, reverends, and imams who get away with saying the most hateful and even threatening things precisely because they claim and are granted a religious exemption from the requirement for public decency. If, for instance, I went about saying, as Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell did, that the September 11th attacks were God’s punishment for gay marriage and feminism and the separation of church and state, I would probably lose my job. Never mind that their position was essentially indistinguishable from those held by the people who planned and perpetrated the attacks, Robertson and Falwell, far from losing their jobs, gained millions of viewers.

Well, let us be clear. One of the most meaningful and practically important statements ever uttered in defense of the Haitian people was made in 1983 by the former Pope, when, on an official visit to the island nation, he said, “Something must change here.” Within three years the Duvalier dictatorship collapsed. And amongst the blood and mud and rubble of Port-Au-Prince right now are members of a dozen or more religious denominations who had devoted and ultimately gave their lives to help the people in this poorest of nations. What Robertson professes, by contrast, is not so much a religion as a political ideology he wields in the hopes of bringing about a theocracy, a kingdom of hell were Osama bin Laden would feel, in every significant aspect but one, perfectly at home.

Donations to the Canadian Red Cross can be made here.

Didacticism

2010-01-05T08:28:00.004-05:00

What do we want from our students? Like parents, teachers should want something better for their students - to want their students to exceed their own achievements, by whatever corresponding measure of success is applied along the path they choose. And we hope that, in choosing their path, we have helped to teach them how to think, to reflect, to find answers on their own, and to make moral and ethical decisions. That, above all, is important: we want our students to be decent people.

But education can sometimes result in conceit and arrogance. As a teacher, one’s heart sinks to find a student, possessed of a little learning, who thinks that he’s smarter than everyone else, or even that his superior education has endowed him with moral superiority. This quality isn’t confined to the educated, of course — there are droves of know-it-all drop outs — but, lest we forget, it was educated men who invented Auschwitz and the atomic bomb.

In the postmodern university, where a soft relativism is the order of the day, it is unfashionable to speak of teaching moral or ethical lessons to students, even though questions of how we ought to behave are central to whole fields such as literature, philosophy, and comparative religion. After all, the relativists insist, who is to say what is right or wrong? But allow me to say, once again, that to claim that there are no absolute moral standards is to make an absolute moral claim of the strongest kind. And, moreover, by their own standards the relativists must acknowledge that the opposing claim, that certain moral truths are timeless and unchanging, must be as valid as their own.

The suggestion is sometimes made that historians have no business asking moral questions about the past. But in what school of moral philosophy is the boundary between past and present also a barrier against moral judgment? If I committed murder yesterday, I can hardly defend myself today on the grounds that the murder is exempt from moral scrutiny because it happened in the past. A spurious argument, you say? Very well, then. At what point, then, does the past become such a barrier? After a week? A year? A decade? A century? Give me a number, fellow historians. At what point in the future will historians shrug and say, “Not for us, students, to judge the Holocaust, only to understand it.” One hopes that the answer is, “never.” Alas, in many classes it is already happening.

Achievement

2009-12-14T12:18:00.005-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell’s study of overachievers, Outliers, has been on the bestseller list for some time now, and this meditation on it comes rather late. But I just read it, and it is rare to come across a book so intriguing that I literally lose sleep over it. Gladwell begins by asking what it is that makes exceptional people exceptional, and in a series of case studies powerfully repudiates conservative (and self-help book) dogma which holds that the world is a functioning meritocracy where you, and you alone, determine your fate. Talent and hard work are factors in success, to be sure, but, as Gladwell demonstrates, they are very far from the only ones. It avails you nothing to be Mozart if your parents are drug addicts who beat you every time you make some noise.

In fact, innate intelligence, as measured (ostensibly) by IQ, doesn’t seem to matter – one needs only sufficient intelligence. Where you go to school doesn’t seem to matter much, either – from a list of Nobel Prize winners, for example, Gladwell demonstrates that graduates from Ivy League and other elite institutions are no better represented than those from second and third tier institutions. Any decent school will do. Even racial prejudice doesn’t always work against an individual. What does matter, then? Well, for starters, how early you’re born in the year and, indeed, the year you were born; the extent to which your parents supported you; the number of hours — 10,000 seems to be key — you put into developing your skills at a young age...the list goes on. What matters is an accumulation of advantages, many of them objective factors outside the control of any individual. In other words, our talents and our efforts must be met with a great heaping dose of dumb luck if we want to excel.

I recently raised this point to a group of graduate students when I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on the topic of getting hired in the academic job market. You could be the Mozart of your subject area and never get hired, I told them. Now, I’m no Mozart (not even Salieri), but I asked them to consider my own path to a rare and coveted tenure-stream position. At least four things had to occur: there had to be a position to fill (somebody had to retire); my department had to seek to replace the retiree with a new hire in my field (by no means a given); my institution had to agree, in the midst of an economic downturn, to the department’s request for a replacement hire (probably the biggest hurdle); finally, they had to hire me out of all the dozens and dozens of qualified people who applied for the job. Of those four factors, I could affect the outcome of only one, and even then only up to a point. In the end, I was hired over many people, including some friends, who would have done the job excellently had they been chosen. My personal merit — which certainly did not exceed that of any of a number of other candidates — was one factor among many.

My own view is that my former students, now entering grad school hoping to become professors, are starting out at the worst possible time, when the advantages are least likely to accumulate in their favour. They are facing the worst academic job market since, well, ever. They will graduate into a job market positively saturated with immensely qualified PhDs swarming for a tiny handful of jobs. The cruel mathematical reality is that there are simply far fewer positions than there are good people with PhDs, and how accomplished they are in terms of teaching and publication is only one factor among many in the hiring process. Life isn’t fair, and the world is not a straightforward meritocracy. If I had to guess, I’d guess that fewer than one-in-five will get a full-time, tenure-stream position. I know they don’t want to hear this, but it does no good to hide from reality, either.

I’ve talked about this before, and less pessimistically. But that roundtable I participated in got me thinking. The assembled graduate students were told everything except the two things that they needed to hear the most. The first is that the objective circumstances are stacked against them, and so they will need to work very, very hard to accumulate as many advantages as they can in those fairly narrow areas where their efforts actually make a difference.

The second, and most important thing that I should have said but didn’t, is that the quality of your CV is not the same as the quality of your person, that your academic successes and failures are not moral successes and failures. Alas, truly excellent job candidates can sometimes have their accomplishments held against them, or minor faults blown out of all proportion to their actual significance. Academics trained to hone their critical faculties to a razor's edge too easily turn them on one another. It happens in class, it happens in over beer, it happens in meetings, in the pages of journals, at conferences, and on hiring committees. Never underestimate the capacity of people with tenure and six figures to be threatened by the least little thing, and to find not just nit-picky but positively pathological grounds for passing over qualified candidates for jobs. At that recent panel, a colleague remarked that the order in which a candidate describes her teaching and research on her cover letter could make the difference between being interviewed or not, and that moreover people who make the wrong choice might actually offend some hiring committees. I have no doubt that this is true.

Anyway, that’s my advice for graduate students. For any professors reading this, I have different advice. If that sort of thing would offend you, well, get a therapist.

Christmas

2009-11-29T08:58:00.010-05:00

Last Christmas, I wrote a long column in which I objected most strenuously to the whole season. I consider it my best and most important blog post to date, and I made several reasoned arguments against the Christmas season, the foremost of which is that it sucks and I hate it. At the mall this week, however, I was dismayed to discover that my objections have gone entirely unheeded. Unaccountably, Christmas has returned. Come on, people! Is no one reading this thing?

If this blog has railed against one thing from the outset it has been against the hypocrisy of compulsory sentiment, and nothing so exemplifies this condition as a visit to the shopping mall or supermarket this time of year. The same dozen songs, endlessly repeated (however often they are re-recorded - I see that Bob Dylan has an album of Christmas standards out); the same message (be merry, or else); the same visage of the Merry Leader (Santa, not Jesus) and the incessant reminder that he is watching you and knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake. There's an Orwellian thought for you. I say again that in the seven weeks separating Halloween from Christmas we get a small taste of what it’s like to live in North Korea. Merry! Merry! Merry! Happy! Happy! Happy! Joy! Joy! Joy! Merry Leader is Watching You And Expects You to Conform.

And, please, don't get me started again about the clichéd holiday specials ("Next week, on a very special episode of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons learn the true meaning of Christmas" etc.) and the vapid holiday films with trailer tag lines like, "This Christmas, the only things some families can stand more than being together, is being apart."

Come on now, Broad, you middle-aged grump. It's not all bad, is it? Well, I admit that I don't mind some Christmas music. Emile-Claire Barlow does a thumpingly great version of "Little Jack Frost" (if you have iTunes, download it now – you won't regret the 99 cents) and, of course, there's Dean Martin's effortless take on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." But these are songs about winter rather than Christmas per se. In my view, there's only one authentically good modern Christmas song: Fairytale of New York, by the seminal Irish band the Pogues and the late Kirsty MacColl. It’s about a drunk and a druggie and the sentiments of genuine affection (and contempt - she calls him a "scumbag" and a "maggot", he calls her an "old slut on junk") that they share at Christmastime. Brings a tear to these jaded eyes of mine.

I find myself in complete accord with my Christian friends who regard the season as too commercial. There's nothing new about this complaint – C.S. Lewis made it half a century ago and he wasn't the first. Indeed there is something cold and crass about the idea that we will express our affection for family and friends once per year through the mandatory purchase of commodities that are in most cases both unwanted and unneeded. In many families it's reached the point where people simply tell each other what to buy for them, which raises an obvious objection about cutting out the middle-man. I know, of course, that for many parents Christmas is a time of genuine joy — many children love it — but let us not forget, too, that for many parents of modest or little economic wherewithal Christmas is a time of genuine anxiety. Young children are consumer aware but not, generally, comprehending of their parents' economic circumstances. And let's not forget that some parents, too, are positively insane this time of year. Remember the Cabbage Patch Doll riots?

Judging the volume of e-mails I received (about a dozen), my blog last year was my most widely read ever. After it was published I was approached by a couple of activist-minded students who had seen it and who were preparing to petition my workplace over its overt displays of Christian Christmas symbols. This, they felt, created a "hostile" atmosphere for non-Christian students, faculty, and staff. Would I join them? My reply was "certainly not." Apart from the obvious objection that it's rather silly of anyone to voluntarily work at or to attend a Catholic institution and then act surprised to discover Christian symbols there, I explained to them that my affinity for the Grinch goes only so far. Like him, I find the season loud and crass. But we have an emphatic parting of ways over the fact that he believes that it's his right to stop other people from celebrating it, too.

The fact that the students — and they are by no means alone in this — could not differentiate between these two worlds-apart positions, is indicative of how badly our educational system often handles such things. Out of mistaken notions of "respect" for differing worldviews, many schools have decided that it's best if people don't express their differing worldviews at all. But respect, of all things, is a sentiment that cannot be made mandatory. It emerges, if it emerges at all, through a process of engagement — which must necessarily include argument and disputation among people who do not always agree. The efforts at this time of year to ban carols and lighted trees and harmless expressions such as "Merry Christmas" are not merely silly but insidious. They undermine rather than promote discussion between faiths and between people of faith and nonbelievers.

Memorization

2009-11-15T09:49:00.007-05:00

Last month, my wife and I moved. Moving is best done regularly or not at all, and after the events of the past four weeks, the idea of spending about fifty years in one house, dying there, and then forcing the inheritors of my estate to go through my decades of accumulated crap has a certain appeal. Take that, you vultures.

At any rate, I consider myself a modest adherent of Robertson Davies's admonishment to "keep everything." Amongst the discoveries in our attic — my prized comic books, located at last! — was a pile of undergraduate papers and tests. I re-read a few of them, and was struck by the fact that Graham, aged twenty, was in some ways a better writer than he is now. He was highly imitative of whatever he was reading at the time, but a careful and economical writer and one with certain spring in his sentences. He might have made a good novelist had he worked at it. He didn't. In fact, re-reading the essays now, I see quite clearly that he was also a remarkably lazy researcher, and much of what he wrote comes across as likeable but insubstantial, like fast food or a hollow Easter-egg. One senses from the remarks of various professors that they were more amused than impressed, and occasionally one saw through the whole stylistic juggling act and called it for what it was. In 1991, Graham received a mark of 40% for a very clever but paper-thin review of Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. He was very angry at the time, especially since another professor had just given him a 90% on a similarly conceived book review. And here's an important point, students: re-reading the essays now, and reflecting upon the professors' comments, I realize that it was the first professor, and not the second, who was not only right, but who really cared about twenty-year old Graham's academic progress. The second exemplified what the recently departed Theodore Sizer called the "disengagement compact" – the all-too-common understanding between teacher and student that they won't demand much of each other.

Another thing: among my discoveries was a mid-term test I wrote in 4^th year. (Some years had passed: young Graham went through the academic grist mill and emerged as the person I will now refer to as "I".) The course was "The Intellectual History of Modern Japan", taught by a great professor, Barry Steben, who was very probably the person most responsible for my decision to pursue history professionally. His was a straightforward pedagogy. He arrived with a sheath of notes and an idea and started talking (with you, not at you); you finished each class feeling winded but with a sense of real accomplishment –the kind of really intellectually demanding classes that would be offered by more professors if teaching evaluations weren't forever being dangled over their heads.

His tests were hard. Here's a typical essay question: "Describe the structure of loyalty under the Tokugawa order, giving the name in Romanized Japanese of each major node in the authority hierarchy. Explain some of the principles by which this order functioned at its different levels, and make some mention of potential contradictions within the society (or contradictions between the system and the actual realities of Japanese society) that contributed to its collapse at the end of the Tokugawa period. In outlining the structure of the system, you should explain why the concept of direct, unmediated loyalty to Heaven was considered subversive."

A curious thing: I scored 11/12 on the multiple choice and 23/24 on the essay question, for a cumulative mark of 94%. The professor felt that my answer to and explanation for one question was good enough for a 2% bonus, and thus my final mark came to 96%. Well done indeed. That was the highest test mark I ever received in university.

Now, the point, and for anyone who teaches history, it's a sobering though perhaps unsurprising one. Were I to write that test tomorrow, I would unquestionably fail it – with a mark of (probably) zero on the essay and, presumably, results according to chance expectations on the multiple choice, for an average of 6%. So, here I am, a professional historian, and I would fail a history test that I aced fifteen years ago. So much for the standard claim that we study history in order to accumulate facts that will aid us in the present, or the hope of those dour and fusty antediluvians at the Dominion Institute that if a kid can pass a history quiz he can be deemed well educated. As I've argued elsewhere, several conditions would have to be met for this to be true, not the least of which is that we'd actually have to remember what we're taught for more than a few months. Few of us can.

To illustrate: a few weeks back I was mildly irritated but also unsurprised when not one of twenty students in my 4^th year history seminar could correctly explain Confederation to me, and last week I found that none could tell me anything worthwhile about the French Canadian nationalist Henri Bourassa, and this after they all had completed a Canadian history survey. (Shame, senior students, for not looking it up – something you can do much more easily than Graham could at your age.) But the fault isn't really theirs: the overwhelming majority of us simply don't recall facts that we don't regularly require. Now, I happen to believe that a degree of cultural literacy is important. As one friend and colleague of mine has often observed, if you're studying modern European history and don't know what the French Revolution is, you're in trouble. The problem is this: the methods of education that the Dominion Institute types want —methods that center on rote memorization — are the ones least likely to produce cultural literacy in the long term. And they remain at the core of our educational system. Oh, I tell my students that I want them to think about what I'm saying in lecture, but when mid-term and exam time rolls around what I'm looking for is accurate recall of raw information.

What Steben understood is that the curriculum was taught not just for its own sake but also and perhaps predominantly to cultivate a love of learning and scholarly habits of mind. I was fortunate to have half a dozen or so professors who saw it that way, and who made an authentic effort to do more than just pay lip service to this ideal. So, yes, I'd fail that test if I took it tomorrow. But give me two weeks to prepare for it, and I'll beat the pants off Graham, aged 25, without blinking. I have something that he was just beginning to cultivate: an understanding of disciplinary methodology. This is the second most important thing we can teach our students. (The first is ethics.) Knowing the name of the first Prime Minister and the date of Confederation is, well, trivial, by comparison.

Pedagogy

2009-10-24T08:22:00.010-04:00

When people meet me for the first time, it is usually not the Aristotelian sophistication of my intellect, but, rather, the nearly Herculean perfection of my physique that positively arrests their attention. "How can I be more like you?" they ask, before adding, inevitably with a tone of remorsefulness, something along the lines of, "but I dream…"

I kid, I kid. I am, in fact, balding, gap-toothed, approximately porpoise shaped, and with each passing year new hairs begin to sprout from alarming places where hairs have no business being. This does not, unfortunately, include the top of my head. I am the apotheosis of every fitness magazine's "before" picture.

Having said all this, you are reading, comrades, not just the musings of a PhD, but a scholar whose arsenal of accreditations includes the necessary classroom work to be a certified personal fitness trainer. It's true. It is something I did back when I was young and fit, before the crushing gravitational pull of academe shortened and broadened my physique. And, as The Simpson's once said of becoming a police officer, you don't get to be a personal trainer overnight: it takes a solid weekend of training.

At any rate, my interest in matters concerning personal fitness remains, tucked away like a half-finished novel, awaiting better and fitter days. (On the issue of half-finished novels, incidentally: old friends can confirm that, age 17, I actually wrote a novel about a high school girl who falls in love with a classmate who turns about to be a vampire. I kid you not. But I thought the idea was stupid and clichéd and never pursued it after the 11^th grade. Well, it was stupid and clichéd. But it turns out that stupid and clichéd can make you a billionaire.)

Okay: the point. Personal trainers will argue interminably about optimal exercise protocols for their clients: should they do cardio first, and then weights? Or weights first, and then cardio? Or is cardio even necessary, if weight training elevates the heart rate sufficiently and for long enough? And when they do weights, should it be with free weights or machines? What is correct number of sets and reps and at what speed should be they performed? The journals of exercise physiology and fitness magazines are full of articles on these issues. But these discussions often ignore the fact that for most people, the real problem isn't deciding on an optimal exercise program, it's that they aren't exercising at all, and that almost any safe exercise program would do them a world of good. Shiny new programs that purport to make exercise fun can attract people for a certain amount of time, but gyms make a killing off of members who pay their monthly dues and never go. What sedentary people need, is to be persuaded that to be physically active is a vital part of living well.

The relationship to pedagogical debates over optimal teaching methods couldn't be clearer. Open any teaching journal and you'll find articles contrasting this method of teaching to that, and in the past ten or fifteen years most of the discussion has been about how technology should be deployed in the classrooms. But these debates fast reach a point of diminishing or inconsequential returns, when the real issue is that a significant percentage of students are the equivalent of sedentary North Americans who have gym memberships but don't really use them. What they need is any good method of education to inspire them to get learning.

I don't deny that the question of how one teaches happens to be important as far as any given class goes, but the student engagement one achieves through technological wizardry and over-the-top pedagogical theatrics probably lasts no longer than the class itself, and may actually discourage learning in the absence of such wizardry and theatrics. (This is of special significance at a time when the evidence is conclusive that students simply aren't reading as many books as they used to.) The goal of any professor worthy of the name is to produce students who can go on learning after their formal education has ended. For those purposes the question of how to teach is far less import than the question of why we teach and why students should want to learn. The answer, of course, is because a good education, which is one that leaves us with a love for learning and method for doing it, can be a vital part of what it means to live flourishingly. But when our own pedagogical discussions center on such matters as how Twitter can make learning fun, or what the correct number of PowerPoint slides should be, it brings to mind the parable of the Zen master, pointing towards the moon, who looks down to discover that his students are staring at his finger.

Blogging

2009-10-13T19:53:00.007-04:00

I like to claim that I live without bigotry, but in fact I harbour a secret prejudice. I loathe opinion columnists, those hacks who get paid to spew at the mouth two or three times a month on issues about which they have no expertise. As a professor of history, I consider it my very great responsibility to get my facts straight before lecturing to my thirty or so students every week, but there are opinion columnists who make a living by pontificating to tens of thousands without, as near as I can tell, giving a moment’s consideration to what they’re saying. Indeed, there are certain well-known columnists who I read with great devotion - not because I like them, but because it has the same appeal as a horrific and bloody roadside car wreck: can’t look at it, can’t look away. They are everything good scholars should not be: certain, smug, self-righteous and, worst of all, consciously contrarian — making arguments that they know to be false because it amuses them to do so.

Looking back over this blog’s fifty columns, I have begun to see that coming off as certain, smug, and self-righteous probably is an inevitable consequence of regularly writing about one’s views. I admit that, in person, I can exhibit these traits, too, but I’ve been making a concerted effort to do better (it would help if others would at least try to act smarter than they are). Here, on this blog, however, matters are different: when sharing one’s opinions without rebuttal it’s hard to avoid coming off as very sure of oneself. And the very curious thing is this: I am not - hence the title of the blog itself. I can, however, claim with good conscience that I have never, at least not on Measure of Doubt, argued a position that I do not believe for the sake of doing so.

At any rate, the whole thing has been immensely therapeutic, and it has lasted much longer than I had anticipated. Much to my own amazement, I have fifty posts — some 41,000 words — under my belt. As I said in one of the earliest posts, I’m doing this for my own sake, not in anticipation of anyone reading it. However, while I don’t keep tracking statistics, gradually I have discovered that people actually are reading this thing: friends, colleagues, enemies, students, and even random passers-by.

So, up for another fifty? I am if you are.

PS

I would like to announce the creation of a second blog: Suspended Judgment, which will be devoted solely to the discussion of teaching-related issues. Already reading Measure of Doubt? Never fear - for now, at least, nothing will appear there that won’t also be here. The point is to cleave off a small part of cyberspace strictly for my professional work.

Dinner

2009-09-28T07:10:00.009-04:00

For this, my fiftieth post, I promised to turn to the eternal question, the one that has bedeviled human beings since the first of our protohuman ancestors vocalized a thought, namely: “What’s for dinner?” I wonder how you would feel if I told you that Dawkins, pictured on the left, was on the menu.

Did that thought fill you with revulsion? It did me, because I rather like the little girl, even though she bites our feet and tracks slightly moist kitty litter onto the bed in the morning. But, really. Why not eat her? Why not brain the little sucker, bleed her, skin her, cut her into parts, hang her up to let her age (the meat we eat is decomposing, you know - after all, rigor mortis makes for tough chewing), then joint her, and cook her up in some olive oil, sprinkled with rosemary, sea salt, and freshly ground pepper? Yum yum. Why make pets of some animals, but imprison, fatten up, slaughter, and then chomp down others? Intelligence cannot be the dividing line — she’s is not very bright, trust me — so why should cuteness be?

I have been troubled by this question for some years now. On what warrant do we claim the moral right to select certain animals for food and lethal medical experimentation, but not others? I have no satisfactory answer to the question. Clearly the mere fact that something benefits us does not make it moral. I long ago concluded that higher-order primates, our evolutionary cousins, must absolutely be left alone, regardless of any impediment it puts in place to scientific research. We share something on the order of 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, for example, and I can locate no rational defense for performing experiments on them, or for making them perform circus tricks for us, that, were we to be consistent, wouldn’t also apply to certain human beings with cognitive impairments.

Anyway, dinner. About a year ago, my wife and I made a quite conscious decision to become flexitarians - consumers of a mostly vegetarian diet who aren’t dogmatic about occasionally eating meat. We reduced our consumption of meat, poultry, pork, and fish from about six dinners per week to one, and did the same with lunches. (Breakfast was mostly vegetarian anyway.) Some flexitarians would say that we need to go further still, which is why I prefer Mark Bittman’s term “lessmeattarianism” to describe our diet. We did this for a variety of reasons.

First, we are utterly convinced that industrial meat production is cruel to the animal and environmentally damaging. On these grounds alone, there would be sufficient cause to stop or hugely reduce meat eating. Add to that the following fact: the average steak or piece of pork or poultry from the supermarket, shrink-wrapped onto styrofoam, doesn’t taste like anything - it's basically a dead delivery vehicle for spices and sauces. Might as well save the money.

When we do eat meat now, we try to select it carefully from those rare vendors whose practices, we believe, are more ethical and ecologically sustainable, and which result in a better-tasting critter. (We have abandoned our former favourite fast-food, sushi, altogether: either it’s fake, the seafood equivalent of McDonald’s — that bright red tuna is dyed, people — or real but involving endangered fish flown in from the Pacific, in which case it’s environmentally catastrophic.) I realize that some vegans in particular would rebut that we are therefore simply reducing the amount of murder that we’re complicit in, but, as I’m constantly reminding my moral relativist students, the number of corpses one generates does matter.

Our second reason for reducing meat consumption concerns matters of health. While we’re convinced that there’s no particular evidence that eating meat generally is bad for your health, the enormous quantity of meat that most Westerners eat almost certainly is, if only because it comes at the expense of other things that are good for us, which is to say, plants. The dismissal of vegetables as "food's food" used to be a joke around our house, but no more, and people who don't eat them would be amazed with how good they taste if you prepare them properly.

And what has been the consequences of all this? Well, for one, we’re better and more imaginative cooks. I’ve lost 14 pounds by this expedient alone. My resting heart rate is down. My blood pressure is down. My cholesterol is down. Our grocery bill is down, too - by about one-third per month.

But, for me, at least, there’s something lacking. An important point of any personal ethics is that you should never ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t be willing, in theory, at least, to do yourself. (Educators take note.) Therefore, I feel that it’s rapidly coming to the point where I’m going to have to get my hands dirty or else give up meat altogether. That means that I either have to try hunting or at the very least witness the slaughter of a cow, pig, or chicken first hand. I made this point earlier when I discussed the death penalty - that people who support the death penalty, it seems to me, have an obligation to support public executions or at the very least must witness an execution sometime. The people calling for blood, I said, don’t get to shield their eyes from it when it’s spilled. And the people eating the flesh of animal shouldn’t get to pretend that it’s something other than what it actually is.

Psychics

2009-09-12T09:13:00.002-04:00

Here’s a headline that you don’t see very often: “Psychic Wins Lottery.” And why not? If their powers of divination are real, then that sort of headline should be as trivial and commonplace as ones about Senators having sex with staffers. Moreover, clairvoyants should be cleaning up in casinos, racetracks, stock exchanges, and on their SATs. But they never seem to. Well, they say, we only use our gift for good, not evil. The powers of prognostication come screeching to a halt when personal gain is involved - and the Psychic Friends Network, I suppose, is a nonprofit organization. But let us take the point as granted. That being the case, why not win the lottery and donate the proceeds to charity?

A couple of years before she died, my mother, on a lark, went to a psychic for a reading, and returned slightly surprised by the accuracy with which the alleged medium could divine the details of her life. Reviewing a tape of the proceedings later – this was provided for an additional fee, of course – she was rather less impressed. Upon a second glance, it was clear that the alleged psychic was doing nothing more than the crudest kind of cold reading and was not even very good at it. Her supposed “hits” were actually generalities or elaborations upon information that my mother had herself volunteered. And would it be grotesque of me to mention that the alleged psychic failed to note a rather big event on my mother’s horizon - the imminent discovery of a nearly 100% lethal form of cancer?

Some psychics, quite clearly, are entirely conscious charlatans. Others, I think, really believe they have some sort of gift. By way of comparison, a British psychologist named Christopher French did an interesting study of dowsers, and demonstrated quite clearly that none of them could locate water at a level above what we’d expect by random chance. A curious thing, though: the dowers themselves concluded that it was it the test that was faulty, not their alleged powers, even though these had conclusively failed them. In any case, no psychic or alleged mindreader has yet met managed to demonstrate their abilities under reasonable scientific controls. Nor have they have been anecdotally impressive, in my opinion. Not one among America’s psychics gave us a clear warning of the events of September 11th, 2001? None among the mystics in that most superstitious of cities, New Orleans, saw Katrina coming? Is it too much to ask for just one accurate, specific prediction of a forthcoming global event? No, the powers don’t work that way, they say. The spirits of the departed are with us and sending us messages, but, for some reason, the messages arrive in the form of generalities and banalities or in messages left in tea leaves and Tarot Cards. They never arrive as clear as day: “Your grandmother is saying, ‘I left the meatball recipe tucked into page 580 of the Joy of Cooking. Also, go with the 5-year, 6% GIC instead of the Mutual Fund. Trust me on this. Weather is terrific - wish you were here. Love, Grandma. P.S., my new e-mail is grandma@afterlife.net.’ ”

Polls show that about half of people believe in psychic phenomenon, past lives, reincarnation and the like, but, then, half of people also believe that the sun goes around the Earth, and a Harris poll from 2003 found that more than a third of people believe in astrology. In other words, a lot of people will believe in anything. Allow me to observe that since about 80 percent of people in the United States and Canada are Christians, the simultaneous belief by about half of them in such things as Horoscopes and reincarnation and spirit photography means, as I have said before, that many among the allegedly religious haven’t got a clue what their own churches teach.

Belief in paranormal phenomena tends to decline as education rises. People with graduate degrees are much less likely to believe in psychics and astrology and whatnot than, say, your average high-school dropout. I point this out because it reinforces my belief that education tends to cultivate the rational mind. Admittedly, I have met some smart people who have told me some spooky things about psychics that I can’t explain. But I do know that elaborate deception, trickery, or the failure of one’s own comprehension of an event are vastly more probable than the idea that a weirdo with a deck of cards or a crystal ball can violate the physical laws of the universe - but never win the lottery, too.

Nonetheless, some people will say that they do believe in this sort of thing, and that in times of trouble it gives them great comfort to drop some money on a reading by Madame Mysteriouso and her crystal ball. Who am I to rain on their paranormal parade? Fair enough - whatever gets you through the night. But who are they to rain on my rationalist parade, to make me smile and nod while they profess their belief systems without giving me a moment to express mine? The possession of any belief carries with it a vital corollary: you can believe whatever you want, provided you leave other people alone. And if you can’t keep it to yourself, if you absolutely must tell it on the mountain, then you have to be willing to listen to others in return, and sometimes you aren’t going to like what they have to say.

I want more than anecdote. I want real proof - the kind of proof that would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal. If you tell me that there’s a ghost in your house, I want cameras from multiple angles to capture the moment that the candlestick moves on its own and Newton’s Second Law falls. If you tell me that there are spirits all around us, I want scientific instruments to measure their presence, not some crank with a crystal ball telling me that somebody whose whose name that starts with “M”, possibly Mary or Margaret or Melissa, and who might have had some sort of illness related possibly somehow to the chest area, and who possibly passed in the last few years, is here with us now, and wants to send me some messages that could have come from any greeting card. Please.

Want to really impress me? I’ll pick a word at random from the Oxford English Dictionary, write it down, and seal it in an envelope. Get your psychic to tell me what the word is.

Addresses

2009-08-29T07:23:00.013-04:00

What follows is the preliminary text of an address I will deliver to incoming undergraduates during their orientation the week after next. I believe that the most important quality a teacher can have is empathy. As time passes, however, I wonder more and more if I’m able to empathize with teenagers. How would I, at age 18, have received this talk? I’m honestly not sure. Let me know what you think. I borrowed the bit about students today and when they’re going to be retiring from Ken Robinson’s talk at TED, and I’ll say so in the speech itself when I deliver it. GB.

My Address to the Undergraduates
September 2009

Probably you’ve heard people say that a BA means absolutely nothing - that everyone has one. It’s not true. Only about one-in-five Canadians have a BA. In your age group only one person in three is in university. Those numbers are going up but it will be a long time before it reaches one-in-two. It’s also not true that a BA doesn’t count for anything in the job market. The job market is tough for everybody. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like for PhDs. A friend of mine with a PhD just spent the summer working in a bookstore. I kid you not. It’s rather frightening, isn’t it? But the statistical fact - and we have study after study to prove this - is that, on average, the higher your education the higher your lifetime earnings. It isn’t always true, but it’s true on average. A person with a BA will, on average, make more money than a person who has only a college diploma, and that person will tend to make more money than someone just high school.

But what I want to suggest today is that there’s a lot more to it than that. It has to do with the real value of an education in the liberal arts and social sciences, and it’s a value that is constantly under attack and that we have to do more to defend. And I want you to think of it this way. The purpose of an education isn’t just to help you get you a job in three or four years. It’s to help you lead a good life - which means that your education has to serve you over the course of your life, not just in the years immediately after graduation. But the problem is this. Most of you are going to be retiring sometime around 2060. I’ll say that again. Most of you will be retiring sometime around 2060. No one in 1910 could have predicted what the world would be like in 1960, and no one in 2010 can make that prediction about 2060. One thing I can promise you, though: most of the information that you accumulate over the next four years will be forgotten by then. If you take my Canadian history class next year you won’t remember much of it by 2060, and the same goes for most of your other classes. I took a class in medieval literature. It was wonderful. I’d take it again in a second if I could. And I’d need to, because I’ve forgotten every word of it.

So you might ask, then, what’s the point? Some people would say - and you’re going to hear a lot of this sort of thing - that all you learn in university is a lot of useless nonsense that gets you a useless degree. But they’re wrong. We need to stop thinking of an education as merely the accumulation of more facts that will help you get a job. We teach history and philosophy and literature and all of the other subjects not just because they’re rewarding in their own right, but because studying them teaches us how to think, and learning to think well is one of the keys to the good life. This isn’t a new idea: it’s one of the oldest ideas in our tradition: it goes back to the one of the very first institutions of learning in the Western world, the Academy, in ancient Athens, where the motto was “know thyself.”

But it seems like an odd idea, doesn’t it? Teaching someone how to think. Because you’re sitting there saying, “Well, I know how to do that already.” But consider it like this: nearly everyone can move their arms and legs. But that doesn’t mean that they can play professional sports. Playing professional sports takes long and arduous training. It’s the same with thinking. Everyone can do it, but not everyone does it well, and you can learn to be better at it.

If we do our job right - and if you do yours - over the next four years, through the study of the arts and social sciences, you’ll learn to think better and more creatively, to reflect, to ask questions, and to find answers on your own. Because, whatever else happens, those are skills that are needed in the job market, and those are qualities that that will serve you over the course of your life, and it’s one thing we can say for certain that the world will need in 2060, and that the world needs more of today.

Well, you may be asking, how do I do that? How do I become a better thinker? Going to a good school helps - and you’ve done that. There are professors here who can stand alongside any teachers and scholars anywhere in the world. Second, you have to take advantage of what the school has to offer. The main difference between high school and university is this: here, you are joining a community of scholarship. Your professors aren’t just teachers - they’re scholars who are actively engaged in research and publication in their field. You are being invited to join that community, and that means your education is for the most part self-directed. We try to point our students in the right direction - whether or not they go there is up to them. And that means that you’re going to have to work hard, and that means putting in a lot of time.

But, fortunately, because you’re young people, time is something you have a lot of. Time is the greatest asset you possess; it is also the one asset you have less of with every passing minute. And so let me leave you today by encouraging you to use your time here as well as you possibly can.

Thank You.

Signs

2009-08-14T08:28:00.011-04:00

Last summer, an atheist organization put some rather silly signs on buses, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as if riders were going to get off at the next stop and torch the nearest cathedral. As I’ll argue in the near future, it isn’t nonbelievers that the faithful need fret about, but the damage being done to religion by some among the faithful themselves. On my way to work — depending on which way I go — I pass probably a dozen or more church signs day after day, and it strikes me that, in many cases, nobody is working harder to keep people from churches than the churches themselves. Does the local corner parish really think that “Exercise your heart: walk with God!” emblazoned on an ugly roadside rental sign is going to get me through the door this Sunday?

Over the course of the summer, I’ve made note of a few such signs. These range from the inane and the unfunny (“Hot outside? We’re prayer-conditioned!”), to depressingly asinine (“if you’re going in the wrong direction, God allows U-turns”); and, perhaps most commonly, the straightforwardly menancing: (“Pray now or Pay later”.) My favourite in the latter category is this one: “Afraid of burning? Ask Jesus for Son block.” Nothing like the threat of torture to make people see things your way.

From time to time, I admit, I’ve noticed church signs that struck me as vaguely clever. Some years back, a local adult video store put up a sign that read, “membership has its privileges.” The adjacent church countered with, “membership here has its privileges, too.” Well done. Then again, this was the Church of England, which holds that pretty much everybody is saved without effort, so it’s not clear what those privileges are. (The comedian Eddie Izzard has observed that a Church of England inquisition would give heretics a choice between “cake or death”, and then be surprised that there was “such a run on cake.”)

In a summer of looking, I found signs that were coy, some that were smug, some that were straightforwardly hateful, but never once did I see one that was profound. And why not? With one of the great works of English literature — the King James Bible — and millennia of theological thought before them, surely they can do better than something that sounds like it was written by the runner-up for a job at a greeting card company. The threatening ones, at least, had the virtue of sincerity, and I’ll take “Pray now or pay later” over “Rainbows are God painting" any day.

Taken together, the manner in which so many churches sell themselves these days suggests something slightly pathetic and out-of-touch, like those television and movie-trailer ads that use the latest slang to get teens to stop using drugs. (In my day, they told us that staying clean was “rad” and “totally awesome”, and while I never did drugs I was tempted to start, just to hit back at whatever boneheads thought it was a good idea to condescend to me and my friends.)

One needn’t accept the metaphysical assumptions upon which churches are based to recognize their importance as social institutions, making contributions to the conversation about how we ought to lead our lives. It is therefore painful to see so many of them reduced to hawking their wares like the most undignified used car salesman. There is the rule about books and covers, of course, but a lack of imagination and whiff of desperation in exteriors seldom bodes well for the interior contents.

I could go on and on. Just last week I saw, “Christians never meet for the last time” - in my books, at least, that's not a selling point if it includes people who think up slogans like that. Same for, “prayer is the key to Heaven’s door”, since keys can lock doors, too. And just this morning I found a blog — defunct now, sadly — that catalogued crummy church signs. My favourite is: “Heaven is not Burger King. You can’t have it your way.”

Damn. And here I was hoping for extra pickles upon arrival.

Orientation

2009-07-29T07:47:00.007-04:00

A mentor of mine said recently that I was wrong when I told my students that the purpose of education was to get smarter. No, he said, the purpose of education is to get wiser. The difference, you ask? A smart person knows when he’s right; a wise one knows when to say it.

I raise the point because last week I received an intriguing invitation to address the incoming class of undergraduates during their September orientation. I'm going to do it, but I'm not sure what to say. Certainly not that I’ve always been mildly irritated by "O-Week" – the initiation of first year students to university life. Twenty years ago, I attended the first few events of my own and then headed for the hills. How I hated it. Everything about it: the binge drinking; the compulsory “fun” (two words that should never go together); the uniformity of, well, uniforms; the inane group cheers; the shabby slogans; the unimaginative activities; the inculcation of "school spirit" amongst students who have not yet had time to decide for themselves if their school is any good, struck me then and strikes me now as antithetical to one of the larger purposes of university education: to produce independent thinkers.

On my very first day, twenty years ago, a trio of third-year students, complete with painted faces and enormous excesses of personality, made me sing the national anthem – readers of this blog know my feelings about that song – before handing over $20 for my "mandatory frosh kit", which turned out to be a bag of flyers, pamphlets, and junk being freely distributed elsewhere. Well, hell. I left high school hoping to escape precisely that sort of nonsense and precisely those sorts of people, and there I was in the thick of it two months later.

Over the years, I’ve had a great many students, and even organizers of these events, tell me that they found none of it "fun" in the least. But try being the one who says, "Actually, I don’t want to paint my face and wear this t-shirt another day and chant this, well, rather insipid and offensive cheer. And my roommates are binge drinkers who won’t do dishes and think it’s funny not to flush the toilet. This isn’t quite what I was promised at the University Fair, where all the talk was about cultivating the mind and the human spirit."

A few years back, during "O-Week", members of my former faculty's "student fun team" scrawled "Social Science: the Biggest and Best Faculty!" in chalk on the sidewalk outside of our oppressively ugly faculty building. (Some wag respond by writing: "Would you like fries with that?" underneath.) Later, I saw students practicing a cheer on the same theme. But a good education in the social sciences should actually call such conclusions into question. A proper slogan might read: "Objective, long-term consideration of the available evidence leads to the highly tentative conclusion that for a significant portion of motivated undergraduates in the social sciences, their undergraduate experience is, on the whole, intellectually fulfilling. More longitudinal studies are required to determine whether or not social science degrees are of actual utility in the rapidly-reorienting job market in terms of both starting salary and lifetime earnings. " But try making that into a cheer.

Anyway, there I will be, during O-Week, and when the time comes I hope I'll have the wisdom to not say what I'd really like to say, which is that if you’ve come to university to learn to think for yourself, now is the time to start. In fact, consider O-Week your first test.

Twenty years. Did you catch that part, students? It was twenty years ago this month that I hopped on bike, rode up to the university, and chose my classes. English, History, Political Science, Philosophy, and Psychology (stupidly, I did not take French.) I remember all the profs. They seemed unfathomably old and learned to me, but I know now that two of them were ABDs, and a good deal younger than I am now. Twenty years. I can scarcely believe those words as I type them. And so I've decided that there is one thing I'm going to say for certain five weeks from today, and it's this:

"You’re seventeen or eighteen. I don’t mean to condescend, but it’s hard to appreciate at that age the rapidity of the passage of time. Twenty years ago this week I started university. The intervening years have passed so quickly I can hardly describe it. I still have projects, left over from high school, that I’ve been meaning to work on. For me, there have been good things and bad things in the past twenty years. I wouldn’t go back, even if I could, but I can tell you that I would like an extra twenty years before me. So my essential message to all of you is this: the greatest asset you possess is time. It is also the one asset that you have less of with every passing second. It is therefore urgent that you use your time well. If there's one thing that you derive from your education, I hope it's a better understanding of how to do that."

Time. Hear that ticking sound, students? It gets louder with every passing second.