Blasphemy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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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.

Twilight

People who make a living by writing fiction are as rare as rock stars. One study found that the average novelist in the United States makes less than $10,000 per year from his or her writing - and that’s before taxes, the cut his or her agent takes, the cost of doing business, etc. So kudos to Stephanie Meyer for selling cargo ships full of books and for making a fortune from the sweat of her creative brow. It’s not for me to begrudge her, personally, for writing something that millions and millions of people adore. I hope that, before it’s all over, she makes a hundred trillion dollars. I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity if I could. That’s right, faithful readers of Measure of Doubt, your noble author would sell out in a second, if he could. The trouble is that nobody wants him to.

It might have been different. Longtime friends can confirm the following facts. Aged 16, in the 11th grade, I wrote a full-blown novel: 120 single-spaced pages. A sequel followed that summer (90 single-spaced pages). I have retained a hard copy of them but have not looked at them in years. The first novel concerned a high school girl who discovers that she’s a wizard. Or whatever a female wizard is called. The geekiest guy in school turns out to be a great warrior (ahem) and the two of them set off to foil the plans of an evil Dark Lord who killed the girl’s ancestors and who has now returned for her. I kid you not. And there was a giant named Hagrid. Okay, now I’m kidding you. Anyway, the sequel involves the girl falling in love with a boy at school who turns out to be a vampire. I also kid you not. His name was Edward. I am still not kidding you. The main difference is that my Edward was evil, whereas Meyer’s is merely boring. In fact, you could have a more interesting time having a conversation with his plastic doppelganger, pictured above.

Yes, I actually read Twilight. I did. There it was, staring at me in the used bookstore and I decided that it was time. Bearing in mind, once again, that I would never begrudge Stephanie Meyer for her success, allow me to say the following: Twilight is a piece of crap. It is not so much a work of literature as it is a work of typing. The plot is unoriginal; the writing is banal; the dialogue never rises above cliche; the characters, even the vampires, are entirely uninteresting; and nothing happens. The book goes on and on and nothing happens. Chapter One: nothing. Chapter Two: nothing. Chapter Three: nothing. (I think you see where I'm going with this.) Even the climactic fight scene doesn’t happen, because the central character mercifully loses consciousness (I was tempted to myself, at that point), thus sparing everyone the agony of reading Meyer, who has probably never even hit a golf ball, trying to write action. And the most preposterous thing about the book is not that there are teenage vampires, but that these teenage vampires spend decade after decade in high school without ever once deciding that, that’s it, I can’t take this crap anymore, I’m sucking this place dry.

Why is it popular with certain audiences? Why have millions and millions of young people fallen in love with it? I’ve heard all kinds of psychological gobbledygook about this (e.g. “At this point in their lives blah blah blah when they are exploring their blah blah blah teenage girls especially need blah blah blah and to vicariously resolve the tension that blah blah blah” - thanks, doc, where did you mail order your PhD from?) but the bottom line is this: if you’ve only ever eaten at McDonald’s, you’ll hate the first real food you eat. In short, teens eat it up because they don’t know any better.

And this, in turn, leads me to the point that I want to make. Schooling is only part of a young person’s education, and is not, in the overall scheme of things, the most significant one. University professors argue about students today – whether the student body as a whole is getting better or getting worse and others arguing you can't compare apples to oranges. Whatever the case may be, it is demonstrably true that many university students in arts and social science programs today read less than they did in past generations. Nothing is more detrimental to their education than this, and, in all likelihood, it’s too late to do much about it once they’ve reached second or third year university. We create lifelong readers — and hence lifelong learners — from a young age or probably not at all.

I count myself as fortunate (and I know that at least one of my readers was similarly blessed), to have had parents who took the time to read to me, and later to encourage me to read by furnishing me with books by the likes of Roald Dahl and C.S. Forrester and Jules Verne. Some people say that Stephanie Meyer and her ilk are “at least getting kids to read” as if Twlight were some sort of gateway drug. Today, teenage vampires; tomorrow, Anna Karenina. Maybe. Or it might be that the opposite is true: that people raised on salt and grease and Coca Cola will just seek out more of the same and get fatter and lazier as life goes on.

Any professor will confirm that the most common criticism we receive from students is this one: “It’s boring.” The readings, the lectures, the discussions, the professor him or herself. Boring. No wonder. If Stephanie Meyer is the extent of your literary horizon; if your idea of a great film is anything starring Adam Sandler; if your musical tastes extend no further than Susan Boyle; if your most significant artistic experience to date was winning Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, it will be difficult to understand that many of the cultural experiences worth having in life are not always or immediately gratifying. On the contrary: they are supposed to difficult, they are supposed to demand something of us, and they are supposed to change us by destabilizing our worldview.

Oh, we all need diverting entertainment, of course. It helps, though, if the entertainment is actually diverting, as opposed to time-wasting. And my comparison between Twilight and McDonald’s was not entirely fair. McDonald’s serves reliable french-fries. Twilight has nothing to recommend it except to serve as a rare example of a case where the movie, dreadful though it was, was actually far better than the book.

Movies

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

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

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

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 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

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

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.