editorials – GV Loewen

Is Religion Worth your Tax Dollars?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-private-school-funding-explainer-1.5043035

Canada does not have a clear cut constitutionally defined separation of church and state, unlike our American cousins. This reflects our sense that a nation can be, or should be, more of a mosaic than a melting pot. It also reflects the history of our immigration, also rather different than that of the USA. There, Europe’s unwanted found new lives and often wished to dispense with the old ones. Here, disinherited second sons aped their European betters. More recently, there, marginal labor seeks to improve its lot, while here the developing world’s elites ramp up real estate prices.

And also start up private schools based on ethnicity and religious credos. What are we to make of the fact that the rest of us – the vast majority of us who neither send our children to elite wealth and network based private schools or to those ethnic or creed based – witness that the state helps pay for these institutions to exist? Without government funding, most simply would not survive. Those that are religious based have legal exemptions from certain basic human rights laws, which no other organization may flout. That apparently only ten of some 640 transparently use this exemption is beside the point. Or is it?

The article linked above seeks to explain this situation but in fact it merely describes it. Journalism doesn’t really have the mandate to explain things, because any explanation could be seen as being generated from a specific point of view. Even philosophy is grounded in both the experience of the tradition and our historical consciousness thereof and therein. It holds certain kinds of values to be inalienable much like religions do. And for those who send their children to private schools based on ethnicity and/or religion, this is the key issue. They want their values to be taught, alongside provincial curricula. It is interesting, to say the least, that while such schools have human rights exemptions they have no such out for curricula. One would think that the former supersedes the latter by some light years. This points to another kind of explanation, one that is only partly related to the cost-savings that private schools bring to the state. Indeed, one could see a rather simple solution to the face-value issue: absorb the added costs of those ten offending schools with the dubious policies, change the law and shut those ten down. The other 630 or so would be presumably unaffected, and the vast bulk of the 430 millions saved each year would be secure.

In fact this is not the essential issue. What of the definition of the state itself? What is it for? What does it do for its citizens? The mission of government in Canada is, as Dr. Weaver put it, not to favor one group over the other. No doubt he is thinking of Rwanda and many other such cases. Canada has at least a self-image of being a tolerant society, where one lives and lets live. We do not have overt ‘culture-wars’ here – the term has been quite rightly criticized by Sontag (2007) and others as being vacuous – and it is ironic that the constitutional separation of church and state in the USA has in part fostered this schism in that country’s social fabric. However smug we tend to be about comparing our land with theirs, the upshot of this current situation is that we show much of our vaunted tolerance to governments who, from some other vantage point, might appear nothing less than cowardly.

Though we are getting warmer, the needs of the state to preserve social tolerance by allowing various communities and other cultural groups to have some distance from the public education system and conveniently saving a lot of money while doing so, is also not of the essence. In fact private schools increase social division. Ethnic and religious based schools are not as dangerous to this regard as are the straight-up wealth-based elite schools, which, though they may receive correspondingly less public funding, nevertheless presume upon its continuation. Children are sent to these schools not for metaphysical or even cultural reasons but because they are the children of existing social and political elites. They need to find appropriate marriage partners so that the family and lineage wealth is not dissipated. They need to be ingratiated into networks so they can attain employment and thence authority suitable to their family status. Only in this way can both be maintained over the generations. Our tax system is supposed to mitigate the first, but nothing can alter the second, and it is through these networks that elites reproduce themselves over time, at our expense.

The credo and ethnic based schools attempt something similar, but insofar as it is a half-baked attempt they are not to be hoisted on the same ethical hook as are the class-based institutions. Given that private schools are essentially anti-democratic – simply due to costs; this is why we have a public system in the first place – the reality of general revenue tax dollars being used to officially ‘crowd-fund’ these organizations – also essentially helping the rich preserve their wealth and reproduce their networks at our expense – is yet closer to the key issue here. In turn, we must ask ourselves what kind of democracy are we content to live within. One in which class differences are exacerbated by publicly funded institutions which are not in fact public, or one in which there is a single system that teaches in its curricula everything one could ever want to know about ethnicity, religion, and class etc.. Wherein all children are given the same opportunity to develop and learn, funded by all tax-payers, share and share alike. This is my definition of a viable democratically inclined education system, and not one wherein social tensions due to wealth disparities, dissassociative trends due to social enclaving, and the simple issue of individuals existing in a society that is made up, not of their peers, but of a few superior beings and a great many inferior ones continues unabated. It is this final and fatal flaw of Western liberal democracies that allows for elites, or ethnicities, or soteriological acolytes to have the confidence – to express it diplomatically – to ask the rest of us to pay for their continued sense of betterness, of self-worthiness, of superiority, of elect status, not to mention the reality of better opportunities.

I have cited Paul Ricoeur (1993) on more than one occasion: ‘The love we have for our own children does not exempt us from loving the children of the world.’ Indeed, this is very much an ethic that descends to us via religion, specifically Christianity, but also Buddhism and Islam. That is, the historically more recent agrarian world systems. It is this idea and those like it which eventually led to democracy in the manner we idealize it to be. Caste-based world systems, ethnic based religions, social contract cosmologies, and cultures which maintained their wealth and limited citizenship through slavery – our much vaunted Greeks and Romans come to mind here – do not favor democracy in any essential form. You can do the math.

It is now time to respond to the question in the title: if the religious based schools are teaching about love your enemy, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, favoring the concept of the neighbour rather than that of the socius (the role based persona of modern society), and that all of us are children of some abstract creation whose actual cause can generally remain occluded, then the answer is perhaps a surprising but nonetheless resounding ‘Yes!’ Religious ethics in this form are invaluable, especially in today’s fractured world. So it may be rather than being concerned about social cohesion, the state is actually worried that if these radically democratic ideas get out into the public system and our young people are convinced of their ethical superiority, then everything we know and most of us suffer from would be altered. Now you can do the higher math: it is not the state being nice to the church in the way one would be kind to a defeated party or a victim of history, it is rather the state working, as surreptitiously as possible, to save its own skin.

G.V. Loewen is the author of three dozen books in religion, education, ethics and aesthetics, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the human sciences for two decades.

The Importance of Writing in a Visual World

https://haven.ca/program/session/writing-and-thinking-may-17-19-2019

The Importance of Writing in a Visual World

The ‘thousand word image’ is something we all have heard about. It is, ironically, only understandable as a series of words, and not truly as an image. For which image, precisely, entails an exact number of words of any count? And which word does not provoke for us countless images from which we must choose based on our own experience? It is, in fact, language that both represents and defines the world. We describe and interpret our experience to ourselves not in images, but in words.

And we also communicate these experiences to others through language. We can share the imagery of our lives with another, but there will inevitably be questions: how did it feel to be there? And no further set of images can tell of this experience. Visual imagery is a document that provides a frame for further discourse. It may direct the beginning of such expression, but it cannot foresee its ends. Humans are through and through beings of language, and one may say with confidence that our linguistic facility, our literacy, is an aspect of our essence as conscious and thinking beings.

Just as we are historical beings, so we are beings of words. Though we live in a world often dominated by the image – advertising on the instrumental side of things and nature on that sublime – any kind of purely visual experience is inherently limited by both the media and the perception involved. The latter limitation is mitigated by our ability to communicate, in words, what we have experienced. The former is itself constructed through the use of words,; an exchange of ideas, whether practical or profound.

Coming to understand ourselves through writing is, then, a fundamental enterprise for any human being. Writing is arguably the greatest gift bequeathed to us by our own history, and its advent transformed human consciousness from an oral memory to an archival one. Storytelling became less abstract, more detailed, and lasting in a very different manner than before. More importantly, writing allowed the invention of discourses that no longer were sourced in myth. From bureaucratic records to the sciences to philosophy, discourse remains the most potent tool that we have at our disposal in attempting to understand both ourselves and the wider cosmos.

We cannot be said to be fully literate unless we have a nominal comprehension of the major discourses of our culture and of world culture. Primarily, it is the applied sciences that dictate to us their discoveries and their advantages, but at the same time we are moved yet more deeply by poetry, prose, and argument. To refrain from encountering any of these forms of discourse is to limit one’s very humanity.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books. He is an internationally recognized writer in ethics, religion, aesthetics and education. Please join him May 17-19 for The Haven’s retreat, ‘Writing and Thinking for the Human Spirit’.

The Pros and Cons of Parricide

“Now there are times when a whole generation is caught [ ] between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standards, no security, no simple acquiescence.” – Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.

We cannot let 2018 pass on without noting that it was the fiftieth anniversary of the now obscure social movement known as ‘The Weathermen’, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). While SDS itself was a large movement dedicated to structural change – and incidentally, the name of an Iranian metal band before all such music was banned in that country – the Weathermen were small, more radical, and advocated violence. In their manifesto, the striking statement occurs: ‘kill your parents; that’s where it starts’.

What starts? Well, on the one hand, the revolution begins at home, certainly. But as well, all that denies change also begins there. Heeding one’s parents makes the new into the old, the younger generation into the one that is past rather than directing it to its own future, and condemns us to reproduction rather than creativity. Metaphorically it is well known that each of us must kill one’s parents, from Freud’s imaginary ‘primal horde’ to Greek tragedy and all the rest of it. We desire to be our own persons, and no one over forty can be said to be truly mature if they have not substantially let go of their parent’s ways and means, waylays and meanings.

But the literature of everyday life was not what the Weathermen intended by their pronouncement and accompanying truncated protests. No, they exhorted their generation to literally kill its parents. What can be made of such a statement today, fifty years on? It does seem plausible to suggest that the generation which gave birth to the baby boomers had lost a significant amount of its humanity during the Depression and World War 2. The twin shocks, from which we are still trying to recover, of both Nuremberg and Hiroshima resounded like a thunderbolt of darkness in the sunrise of victory. One could be forgiven for thinking, perhaps, that if the adult who had witnessed these world-defying events as well as having endured their wider pedigree thought lightly of the concerns of his or her children and responded to them with patent violence of which the baby boom was all too familiar. The Weathermen were hardly alone in their criticisms, and in the succeeding years many other groups kindred to them would arise in diverse nations, most infamously, the ‘Red Army Faction’ or RAF, sometimes known as Baader-Meinhof, in West Germany. But it takes more than domestic tyranny to suggest a revolution that must needs nonetheless begin at home.

Social control as we know it today is not itself out of control, though there have been disturbing trends over the previous twenty years that this sensibility is again on the rise. The migration to private schools is one symptom, as is the virtual paranoia surrounding digital media and young persons’ use thereof. Now that my generation is well into their own child-raising years, I am all the more disconcerted by such trends. I recall Gen-X being an anti-institutional and anti-authoritarian bunch. But I have to accept that it is my demographic peers who have become not so much sheep, but sheepdogs, ever on the alert to strays and overtly concerned with marking and maintaining boundaries. Surely the Ohio father who made his ten year old daughter, Kirsten Cox, trudge eight kilometers to school in near freezing weather represents a new low to this regard. Apart from being poor parenting, one wonders at the motive, though now we know where the youngster learned to bully others. (Just as one is taken aback by the whims of punitive adults who imagine their own bullying to be scrupulous, I was also unmanned by the petty detail that because ‘Kirsten’ happens to be my favorite name for a girl I felt that I myself was more concerned than if she had happened to have been named ‘Lucille’ or ‘Sophronia’, for instance).

We are fortunate, on the one hand, to have difficulty imagining what life for a young person was like in 1968, though many of these people are of course still with us. Their tales of heroism are a poignant and sometimes still pregnant mix of nostalgia and righteousness. Certainly as this demographic remains a huge and wealthy market, entertainment fictions that are dedicated to them seem to increase yearly. All of this wealth and power held by the once revolutionary generation that in one short year went from the summer of love to the summer of hate does suggest that more time in front of the television is the safest bet. But this would be to annul both the gift and the task with which the 1960s presents the present day. Fifty years on, there was no summer of anything much in 2018. People now take to the streets regarding fuel prices, sports team defeats or victories, trade agreements and the like. None of this is particularly inspiring. In a world concerned with boundaries and their maintenance, from the petty territories of family to international borders alike, perhaps even the power of the metaphor is lost to us.

So if the Weathermen, or any other kindred movement were extant today, what might they say to us, and indeed, how would they say it? I imagine that they would be more or less speechless, fatalistic, resigned, aghast. More or less, in other words, what the once revolutionary baby boomers actually are. Having long since been parents themselves, one wonders how a good proportion of them, reactionary neo-conservatives by the 1980s, avoided the fate their radical peers once suggested.

However that may be, does the exhortation, the call to arms, have any merit for the youth of today? Metaphorically, always. Literally? What one can say to this more palpable reveille is this: we need to be very cautious, consistently critical, and readily reflective regarding anything that tastes of the misuse of authority, the desire for the control of others for its own sake, and also the sexual undertones of familial dynamics, including the rule of metaphoric thumb, the assertion of dominance and the occluded thrill of coitus cloaked in actio distans. The more taboo a topic is, the more serious is it a threat to human freedom. Speaking of television, as the irascible and critical Inspector Morse once said, ‘As soon as a person says that they do not wish to talk about something, I do.’

To publicly shame our children because of this or that passing infraction is to seek the sanction of the mass. Driven in part by a rancid resentment – newly ripened youth are placed on our cultural pedestal so that we can then throw the over-ripe fruit of embittered half-dreams and lurid fantasies at them – this very mass sounds off in a frenzied expression of child-hating heat. This is also symptomatic of our digital days when at the same time we feel the imminence of some kind of ending. Kipling’s poem ‘The Fabulists’ says it well:

“Even in that certain hour before the fall,

Unless men please they are not heard at all.”

Yet we also know that most of us go utterly unnoticed, so there is also a sense that within this loathing, stigmatizing, and vindictive moralizing, there must also be present a desire simply to be recognized as a human being amongst others; in short, a desire for the freedom that only the call of conscience can provide.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books in ethics, education, religion, social psychology, aesthetics and social theory.

To Still a Talking Turd? (maybe not); Peel School District and Harper Lee

I was recently placed in the unenviable position of agreeing with an interpretation that was subsequently enforced by Draconian and anti-democratic measures. When Peel School District in greater Toronto announced that from here on in, the official manner of teaching Lee’s famous novel To Kill a Mocking Bird would be lensed through an ‘anti-oppression’ rubric, I was both disconcerted and delighted. That the text appears to be some kind of ‘white man’s burden’ propaganda, dear to all liberal hearts who imagine that heroism comes from taking up a cause due to irrevocable deficits on the part of those so benighted – from the cognitively disabled black defendant to the obsequiously slatternly and slavish servant; are these characters not metaphors for how white persons imagined blacks at the time and beyond? – that they require their very oppressor to free them from their bondage, and on his terms, presents a problem. The bravado masculinity of the lawyer and the cliché naivety of his daughter round out most of the narrative stage. In a word, the book stinks. And yet it still speaks to us. It is, if you will, a ‘talking turd’.

But to still its voices, to narrow the interpretive lens to such a degree that other things that just might be in this book somewhere, or any book, is to step uncomfortably close to the very social frameworks that are sourced in the attitudes the book seems to represent. One correct way, one lens. Beyond this, to attempt to enforce this through official suasion within a set of institutions dedicated to learning, consciousness, knowledge, and ultimately, human freedom, is ironic at best. Teachers who were interviewed fear that this is but the opening salvo in a war against the written word, cannons versus canons. I think this at least is premature. There is no evidence Peel SD is out for the lifeblood of the Western literary world. But their actions still presented a puzzle. Why not simply issue a statement regarding the text itself? It could contain what I think is a strong argument that the book is a piece of internecine colonialism and a decoy against structural change. That it was recently voted as the best American novel of all time is not, as one journalist had it, an indirect indictment against Peel SD, but rather is suggestive of the plausibility that racism in the USA has not altered much since c. 1960 as well as of a general illiteracy throughout the American public.

It is the scandal of art that evidences its relevance and its radicality. But popular art can play at scandal while in fact defending social institutions as they currently are. Much popular music charts this duplicitous course, its apparent critiques commoditized and glamorized in a way that serious art eschews. Not that we do not try to assuage the world in the face of thought and art. The art market, especially for paintings, has never been more lucrative. Even so, the effect of art, the aesthetic object, is to provide a consistent and even constant objection to the way things are. In short, it is its own lens. Very often, the content of such lenses are in themselves vulgar – Lolita comes immediately to mind – or they are sentimental – Romeo and Juliet – or are yet updates on ancient parables – East of Eden. Lee’s content is secondary to its quality as a cultural artifact, like these other works. But just here, we have to confront the bad conscience that the book avoids so scrupulously, just as Lolita, for instance, avoids the wider issue of age-related lust simply by having the protagonist, if he can be labelled such, a criminal.

The thoughtful response to any sign of the halting process of species maturity is to open these questions up as radically as possible. Works of would-be art that provide rationalizations for wider iniquities and disquiet can serve such a purpose, perhaps at most. Nevertheless, it is a noble purpose. This or that work can always be reduced to a precise if narrow editorial, popular or serious. Harry Potter? Arthurian romance meets the tuck shop. Narnia? Not-so-cunning soteriological sop. Or yet my own Kristen-Seraphim; X-Rated Enid Blyton. Surely there is more to it, and it is up to educators to discover that more, just as we charge our scientists to discover more of that cosmic truth in which all of us remain enveloped. So as with other discourses, the duty of educational administrators is to radically encourage their pedagogic colleagues to open up the texts at hand and to never shy away from scandal, even evil, for within the realm of the arts, both of these effects are salutary to an enduring human freedom.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books and is one of Canada’s leading contemporary thinkers.

Writing and Thinking for the Human Spirit; retreat at Gabriola Island, May 2019

I am delighted to invite one and all to the first installment of the writing retreat at The Haven, a resort for transformational learning located on beautiful Gabriola Island, BC, Canada.

https://www.haven.ca/program/session/writing-and-thinking-may-17-19-2019

You will find all of the necessary information to register at their site through this link.

warmest regards, Greg

We Other Theocrats: a note on school dress codes and the like

Adolescents will get up to harmless mischief uniforms or no. Perhaps we adults need to go to school on them.

There were no dress codes in the schools I attended in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We guys were not ‘distracted’ by the young women any more than they were by us. It is true that females mature in all ways more rapidly than males. This is in fact the only salient clue we need to decipher the fashionable official tempest regarding something as regressive and archaic as the presence of dress codes in our public schools. Adults are the ones being distracted, end of story.

Numerous news articles have of late given head to this seemingly innocuous and obscure item. Students protesting – the #takeastand movement is the latest and hopefully greatest of these – and administrators aping their peers in Iran. But the idea that forcing young women to cover up there oh so dangerous bodies promotes a culture of rape and violence against women in general is only a slice of the entire issue. The wider pedigree of this latter day fascism is the puritanism of new world religious movements and the more general insensibility imported by European (and now other) immigrants of all kinds. The fanatics of Europe, cast out of a society rapidly changing politically, scientifically and intellectually only to wash up on the First Nations’ shorelines and promptly set up the residential school system amongst other atrocities, are the darker ancestors to today’s school dress codes. Woman-hating, certainly, but more than this, life-hating. Earthly, sensuous, beautiful life.

Christianity is hardly the only religious suasion that carries this baggage around with it to this day, but it remains the most pronounced in our society. Yet religion is a mere rationalization for other, more structural forces. One may read statements from schools across Canada that young persons need ‘guidance’ regarding their professionalism, citing workplaces as the obvious and indeed misguided homology. Case in point: I have never been asked to alter my apparel in any workplace in which I have been employed. Do I have a mysterious intuitional faculty that allows me to understand the mores of professional workplaces without ever being subjected to dress codes as a young person? I wish I had more of those kinds of occlusive skills. Of course, men are often exempted from such sanctions as these. Why? Because men, in the main, are the one’s who invent them for others to follow. No, religion is used by some as an excuse for fascism and the exertion of social control over those members of our society who are not really human beings in our eyes, those we resent because they still know how to love life, silly mischief included. But other excuses, especially in the public sector, come across as yet more inane than those scriptural, misunderstood or no.

Kudos to the Victoria school district for considering banning dress codes in their public schools. The sooner the better. Those nameless trustees mentioned in the news item who are concerned about ‘modesty’ should simply move to Tehran, where they can openly practice their women-hating etc. proclivities without hiding behind the guise of responsible and voluntaristic citizenship. Shame on the Essex school district, and countless others, for defending them. By way of analogy rather than homology, in BC at least, labour code regulations state that employers may not force their workers to wear items of apparel that are demeaning or affect their health, like heels, which are well known to cause back and joint problems. Could it be that the mental health of young persons is negatively affected by having so much control over their nascent lives? Anorexia is one response to this stultification of youthful desire for what freedoms are available to us. Addictions is another response. Repressed sexuality – hence the rape culture thing again – yet another.

We adults feel and bear all of these repressions ourselves and we imagine that imposing them on our children will even the existential score. I have written in other places about the issue of ressentiment which all aging humans feel toward the young. It is, at base, a symptom of the will to life, though a perverse and unethical one. Our suburban existence is itself a schizophrenic scherzando of public puritanism and private perversion. Instead, upon such matters as these, we might well need to learn from youth. Like the firearms issue, the problem of poverty in a society where we originally teach children to share and share alike – where does that go, by the way? – and the hypocrisy of telling youth that they can do anything they want with their lives, be anyone, male or female; be creative, critical, seek justice in all things and peace on earth and yet provide none of the institutional or wider bases for these things to take hold and manifest themselves in adult life, are all symptoms of the same sorry malaise.

Ironically, uniform schools show a greater sense of esprit de corps. Of course they must deal with the most infamous fetish item – the young woman in tartan pleats and coloured tights, etc. – our sexualized objectification of womankind has ever invented. While respecting and evening out the sexual tension in such schools by flattening out the view, so to speak – adults can gaze out over the independent school classroom landscape and not be as distracted by individuals – one still has to deal with the archetype. So uniforms present their own unique array of challenges and do not unequivocally answer the issues supposedly plaguing the public schools. It is also well known that young women hailing from different social class backgrounds find ingenious ways to set themselves apart that their peers can easily recognize, since even the more limited options of the uniform can vary widely in price and brand cachet.

Once again, as with the firearms issue in the USA, the only counsel I can give young people is the same: walk out of the schools and don’t return until the dress codes are abolished. It is possible their presence may be a charter issue, though I am not a lawyer. There are so many of you that you will not be sanctioned. The schools need you more than you need the schools in any case. Shut the system down, legally, non-violently, but with purpose and dignity, with rational argument and insight like Mallory Johnston in Windsor demonstrated – whoever Sheila Gunn is, imagining that a fifteen year old has ‘tantrums’, she needs to rename her shtick ‘the reactionary’ for she is surely no ‘rebel’, at least on this issue – and change will occur.

In the meanwhile, and even more importantly, we adults need to re-examine the manner in which we remain within and retain the suppression of basic elements of a wider ambit of human freedoms to the point of questioning our daily subsistence practices and the regulations that enforce them. If we already know we are jealous to the point of the grave regarding our children, then it is but a short cognitive step to ask the question: why so? If we’re not having enough fun, sex, engaging in silliness and loving life on a day to day basis; if we’re instead working too much, addicted, suffering from mental illnesses, in uneasy relationships at home and at work, hating those wealthier and prettier than us, doubting our senses regarding the environment, pretending to believe in world systems thousands of years old and hailing from another metaphysics entirely different than our authentically own and further fearing our own Jungian shadows, let’s at least not foist all that on our kids. If we don’t adjust the world accordingly, their time will come in any case. We will see to that.

G.V. Loewen is an internationally recognized student of ethics, education, religion and aesthetics. The author of over thirty books, he is one of Canada’s leading contemporary thinkers.

Kimmy smack porn (and I don’t care): on demonizing the internet as decoy behaviour

Max Weber warned us long ago that we should always question expertise. Like Sagan after him, Weber saw science as a tool, more theoretically sophisticated than mere technology, but still an instrument to inform our choices, ethical and social, and not a messianic force. When CBC Ottawa implies to us this week that someone from the IT field is an expert as well in ethics, education, social relations and sexuality amongst other things, it caught my attention. Needless to say, from what was reported, none of those latent claims – either made by the staff writer or the expert himself, one Paul Davis – appeared to be the case. Admittedly, I was myself miffed. Uh, no, folks, I’m the expert on these other things, and the tech guy can stuff it. Let’s see if I can shelve that gut reaction for a few moments and speak to the issues involved.

I think Mr. Davis and I hail from the same generation. It was true, at least in my experience, that we spent all day outside sans souci. No pedophiles stalked us, and no cougars either, that is, of the natural feline variety. Growing up in paradise was a return to Eden, unbesmirched by adult knowledge and its corresponding loss of innocences. He states that it is crucial young persons have an active childhood. Agreed. But of what sort? I too share a personal disdain for video games and social media, gambling and erotica. What the media – all media mind you, and not merely the internet – teach youth is to consume and consume again. Everything you can, as fast as you can. This lurid daydream arguably bleeds over into human relationships in work or in the homes and schools. But it is also the leverage upon which our economy continues to rest. The alternatives that Mr. Davis suggests, including sports etc., are also vehicles for consumption, competition, bravado and fantasy, just like the internet is. The price for enrolling children in such activities is far higher than leaving them be using media. So what are we actually gaining from enacting such a shift?

Organized sports, also extremely rare in my generation, teaches teamwork, but also tribalism. Us versus them. It’s only a game, we say to ourselves, but the ‘sports parent’ is a notorious figure (as well as the sports fan cum fanatic), as can be the ‘arts parent’, or any other thing a young person becomes inured to through parental vicariousness. Such so-called adults seek to live again a childhood they wished they themselves had, and are amongst the most pathetic human beings on the planet today. Not so different from pedophiles themselves – psychology explains to us one of the patent features of such people is the desire to rob a child of his or her love of life and sense of wonder as the criminal in these cases has none himself or herself – vicarious parents do not so much ‘enrol’ their children in activities as rather enlist them. Such activities are no more authentic, or to use Mr. Davis’ term, ‘real’, than anything portrayed on media. Indeed, self-posted or even so-called ‘revenge porn’ contents are much more real and also more realistic. Actual people, not paid professional actors, did these things with and to one another. And the knowledge that we gain from encountering these sometimes sordid affairs is worth a great deal more than the fantasy paraded in official posts of any kind, including much of the news. Should very young people be exposed to such things? This a related, but other question from the one that is claimed to drive Mr. Davis’ statements. But kids aren’t concerned about data breaches, election fraud, and targeted marketing surveys. We can, and should teach them about these things and how all of us are entrapped by them, once again to use one of Mr. Davis’ own words. After all, young kids don’t post professional erotica or much of anything sexual at all, nor do they own and purvey gambling venues, nor run social media networks. These are all adult concerns and profit is the main if not the only goal. Mr. Davis’ expertise comes from being an IT consultant to the private sector. So we are to understand that he helped corporations protect themselves from their competition and also aided them in schemes to make money. A much-in-demand expert, no doubt, and a well remunerated one.

But the Ottawa school board should take a second look at what he is peddling publicly in their venues and now on state-sponsored media. He foists the moral panic surrounding cyber-bullying, which would include sexting amongst other things, as an essential concern. In our shared generation, when schools cared not a whit about bullying of any kind, it took place everywhere. On and off the school grounds, in the ‘dark sarcasm of the classroom’, and in the malls. On the playing fields, courtesy for the most part from ‘loving’ parents, and in the homes, when bullying your own children with real violence was still a socially accepted norm. His comment regarding ‘no tech at the dinner table’ calls to mind the vacant puritanism of the pater familias. My father had the TV news on throughout dinner, turning the antiquated stand around on its fragile wheels so we could all watch it together; his version of the internet, I suppose. This can be overdone, no doubt, but it did spark semi-educated conversation at the daily family gathering that would not have occurred otherwise, and was a variable in myself and my sister’s chosen vocations. He also advises that parents should be ‘in the vicinity’ when children are on the net. But at the same time he tells us that parents are generally incompetent with regard to technology, and the kids are the ones who are ‘tech-savvy’. Of course, he also informs us that in homes operated by IT people, this apparently isn’t an issue. Make me laugh. I would if it wasn’t such a serious deadpan.

No, the facts are these: 1. adults run the media; much of it is there to socialize consumer behavior and uncritical acceptance of our current political, educational, and other social institutions. We consume them as well by our very acceptance and use thereof and therein. 2. Children are both social and sexual beings. Ever since Freud’s discoveries, though part and parcel of the Victorian anxiety concerning sexuality in general, we have been liberated by the self-understanding that desire is not itself a sin, though it can produce evil, or if that word offends, at least negative consequences. His naïve comment asking children to ‘please be a kid’ after being on the net suggests the banal nostalgia of the ‘good old days’, which has long been known to be a fantasy itself. Are we then simply to tell our youth that they can only trade fantasy for fantasy? Where, exactly, is the reality in such commentaries as Mr. Davis’ and many other popular writers and speakers?

Let me submit that it lies in the effort to truncate any truly subversive aspects of experience young people might encounter. Some of that is even on the net. Thankfully, a person such as myself and my peers do not have to resort to the so-called ‘dark web’ to express our opinions. Dissidents in many states use this other venue to communicate and even simply to write. The governments of Iran, China and a host of other places force this upon them. But let’s look for a moment at how our own system of checks and balances marginalizes thinking and keeps its characteristic subversion suppressed. ‘Keep it real’, yet another tired tag Mr. Davis utilises, was also used in anti-drug campaigns and the like. Can we please apply it to our politics? Our curricula in our schools – why do schools who teach non-historical and non-factual religious beliefs still have a market, for instance? – and our fantasies about sports. Media coverage of organized professional and even amateur sports (more Olympics, anyone?) outdoes by far any analysis of geo-political issues, the enforced culture of poverty, the structures of capital and any other serious topic one cares to imagine. Boring as hell? That tells us one thing about contemporary socially and institutionally organized existence: it itself is a fantasy.

‘Who benefits?’, that time-honoured sociological question cleverly coined by Robert Merton, could be the very title of a daily news program in the genre of PBS’s Macneil-Lehrer, nightly viewing at the dinner table when I was growing up. Yes, who benefits and why. It is sage to note that Mr. Davis, an IT expert and private sector consultant lest it be too rapidly forgotten, is himself quick to note that when used ‘properly’, social media is ‘awesome, it’s great.’ Right, oh, like awesome as in ‘The Lego Movie’, got it.

I don’t often take umbrage at what’s going on with this or that hired gun or self-styled expert. There are far too many of them, echoing the ancient Mediterranean penchant for messiahs who were at that time a dime a dozen. Their level of discourse is shallow and unabashedly apologist, often puritanical and almost always nostalgic. They are, in a word, kindred spirits with almost all of our media. The internet, when it is real, expresses the human undertones that media and its vouchsafes consistently and conveniently remove from view: unscripted sexual desire and violence amongst and between actual people; jealousy as cruel as the proverbial grave projected in status seeking social media posts – how many ‘followers’ does one have is a question that rings itself of messianism – resentment projected at successful commercially attractive persons that shows up in comments sections in sports or entertainment columns and even in part fuels my own editorial today – I do resent the attention paid to uneducated ‘experts’ who walk blithely yet also with a kind of cunning calculation into arenas they seem to have no background in; and other shadowy motifs such as sites expressing the very ethnicism, bigotry, and hate speech that Mr. Davis says parents must protect children from viewing.

Utter nonsense. That is what’s real. Real people do feel this way or that, and we need, more than anything in our troubled times, to understand the reasons for the ongoing presence of all of these feelings that endanger all life on earth. Not exposing our children to these things and working with them daily to explicate them is an exercise in patent irresponsibility. It is unethical, fantasist, and pure laziness besides. It is poor parenting, not good parenting. And the person who makes plain his case that this is what we should be doing is someone who must be interrogated with all due vigilance. In spite of all of this, it remains true that the world is also a beautiful place, and that some small portion of that is due to the human endeavour. Where are the nightly broadcasts of a Mahler symphony, of a tour of the Louvre, of the ongoing revelations of archaeology and astronomy? YouTube will find them. How about that?

G.V. Loewen is an internationally recognized student of ethics, education, pedagogy and aesthetics. He was professor of the social sciences for over two decades in both Canada and the United States, and is the author of over thirty books.

The barricades of banality: some streetside thoughts

‘I’d like to think I’m past the age, of consciousness and righteous rage,

I found out just surviving is a noble fight.

I once believed in causes too, I had my pointless point of view

but life went on no matter who, was wrong or right.

Billy Joel (1976).

Anarchism in Hamilton of all places? How, well, unCanadian. I’m old enough, sadly, to recall our own coastal version, the so-called Squamish Five – though by Red Army Faction standards we could have called them the ‘Squeamish Five’ – who plotted and planned to no avail regarding the state of society as they saw it. Now who am I to castigate activists of any kind? They’re putting it on the line, whatever one they have drawn in the shifting sands of culture and history, and at least they know they’re in the right, unlike we thinkers, who, though tempted, can never imagine such a thing is so clear and exposed.

This newer cabal refers to themselves as ‘The Tower’. Not made of ivory, no doubt, but perhaps rather the butter made famous in Henry V. Even so, what the group’s Facebook post does say that is difficult to argue with is that we continue to live in a society filled with both inequity and iniquity. Very often the two go hand in hand. The fact that it isn’t illegal to make someone homeless is a scandal to be sure. Not that we should exchange iniquities, however unequal as the case may be, and make it legal to vandalize property in its various forms. We might rather consider acting within the frameworks available to civil persons to alter the egregious forms of our culture that promote incivilities such as evictions based on poverty alone as well as wanton mayhem in the streets.

It is also reasonable sociologically to suggest that all of us are in on the general ‘conspiracy’ to thwart efforts at social reform of seemingly radical tenor and timbre. Shopping at high-end boutiques isn’t my thing – I’ll never be able to afford it and I’m too old to worry about fashion in any case – but we need to remember that of all of us who work in capitalism (i.e. all of us), a scant few work for it. That is, more than uncritically accept it or tolerate it while wishing we could do better and perhaps even be better, but rather in fact those who are zealous acolytes of technological capital to the expense of any other sense of selfhood and society. Even the vast wealth of a Gates or a Buffet is equivocal, and I can guarantee it has done more good in the world than any band of anarchic brothers that has ever existed. Now of course no dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary would think much of someone like myself, a phenomenologist and hermeneuticist, two threads of thought known (unfairly) for their ‘conservative’ stances. Conserving, yes, for there is still much to be gained from reading Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of those ancient fellows in spite of the fact that much of it is also certainly misogynist, xenophobic, and simply factually incorrect. The art of interpretation is precisely doing the work necessary to sort such things out. This kind of work is what Marx and Engels did, for instance.

But to raise the call to arms by making a public nuisance of oneself, by aggravating hard-working fellow citizens, by contributing to costly affairs of restitution, the courts, and rehabilitation is to cheat yourself and your human brethren of the dignity and freedom necessary to engage in the conversation that we are. There are no laws preventing the formation of political parties, NGOs and NPOs that espouse tax reform, rent controls, affordable or even free housing, free education and better funded health care, the banning of violence in the homes or in media, and education in the history of ethical ideas. Not in Canada at least. If ‘The Tower’ operated in Syria we would be less judgemental of them or any other such group. People in such places really lay it on the line, simply because they have to. If any Canadian wants to make our society into a place where we are forced to behave uncivilly to get what we need as human beings then I for one would stringently, perhaps even illicitly, oppose them. And I’m betting that 999 out of 1000 of my fellow citizens would as well. Maybe more.

At the same time it is also reasonable to suggest that we do little enough to care for our own margins. The fire always starts at home. I’ve had a privileged career and soapbox and I rationalize my own efforts at culture critique as doing ‘what I can’ or what I am suited to. But there is an element of comfort involved, and perhaps what we can take away from the actions in Hamilton is that there also is an Aufklarung to be both rung and heard. It is not merely the responsibility of governments or social movements, anarchist or otherwise, to engage in this call and response. It is rather both our collective and our individual responsibility at once. There are far more of those who work hard and honestly to survive than those who can be cast as shameless profiteers or even sleazy jerks. In a democracy these latter have, theoretically, little power. Perhaps we can try using the laws we do have to make the course corrections we need before abandoning each other at best to the churlish and childish rants of political extremities – the Facebook post mentioned above is actually quite guarded and relatively inoffensive compared to say, much of Fox et al – or at worst to civil war.

It does need be said that violence of any kind in a democratically based civil social organization cannot be sanctioned. The lens that violence casts always doubles back on itself without exposing to the critical light the structures and habitus of the violences, symbolic or otherwise, that organize the thoughts we have, the institutions we work in, the places to which we send our children. This is not an ‘all you need is love’ petition. But the nature of love is such that it can be made to dispute its own self-criterion by the sudden turning away of the other. It takes some time, no doubt, but reason, argument, dialogue and dialectic remain superior in all forms to the abrupt decision of violence and what follows therefrom. To engage in the frustrating, painstaking, and seemingly endless effort of the examined life is part of both the human condition and the condition for humanity to remain a part of the very world it has so wrought.

The Bravery of Youth and the Bravado of Firearms

The Bravery of Youth and the Bravado of Firearms: a note on the character of social violence.

The ‘NeverAgain’ and ‘#menext’ movements that have quickly arisen following the latest in a lengthy pedigree of mass murders stateside are a belated response to more than mere gun violence. They are to be commended at every level of society, by every honest and noble human being, but their task is enormous. For violence also exists at every level of society, can consume even the most honest and noble among us, and is part of the character of contemporary humanity as it has been since we have been human. Notwithstanding its primordial character, it is nevertheless not ‘human nature’ to be violent. There is no single human nature, and nature, as we know it in the world apart from we humans, is made up mostly of instinct. There is no human instinct above the bare physiological and base-cortical functioning of the body. As history is the greatest argument against nature – specifically that human, but also in other species given the evolutionary course of natural selection – what passes for social habit changes and thus can be changed. But actually changing it means to confront its fullest traditions and deepest convictions.

Youth are eminently suited to do just that, for they do it, in ways both petty and profound, already everyday. From simple disobedience of so called ‘authority figures’ such as parents and teachers to inventing new forms of art and craft, music and machine alike, young people the world over gradually practice the manner in which they will eventually age and take over the very world they so disdain. But it is precisely through this process of aging out of their youth that the heavier responsibility for caring for the world as it is comes into the foreground, and with this, the frustration, the questions, the anger, and the disbelief in the way things are, in adults’ ways of running the world, gradually dissipate, become dissolute, and ultimately disappear entirely. So the greatest task facing any youthful movement is not simply to overturn this or that law, habit, prejudice, or custom, but rather to maintain its own revolutionary abilities and actions throughout the life-course. Yes indeed, shame on us, we adults, who have given up doing so. When the young leaders of these two new movements – so far mostly social media based – shouted ‘for shame’ at politicians and others responsible for the way things are in the United States today it was an epithet that all of us who are no longer young or yet even young at heart needed to face up to.

It is a shameful thing, amongst other things, that a child cannot go to school and feel safe, concentrate on his or her studies, kindle the humane wonder at the world and through unbridled curiosity and question, unlock the secrets of the wider nature within which all life and non-life alike is ensconced. It is a shameful thing that much of our entertainment culture glorifies violence as a means of negotiating with one’s fellow human, much of it with firearms, on screens everywhere, from film to television to video game. It is a shameful thing that the geopolitical competition amongst nation states is so often premised on deadly violence. It is a shameful thing that in twenty states so-called ‘educators’ can assault young defenseless human beings with weapons under the guise of ‘discipline’, and in all fifty states such is the case in the home, with so-called ‘parents’ at the helm. And it is more than shameful that we do not recognize that all of these settings and the violence that occurs within them are intimately related, for they are.

This is not the place to play the smug Canadian. But it is worth noting that the level of violence up here is far less than due south. The fact that physical discipline has been all but outlawed, that firearms are controlled vigorously though not banned outright, and that per capita acts of violence in Canadian media occur far less than in Hollywood is of some small interest. But these are epiphenomena. The deeper reason that there is a difference between our two closely related nations has to do with the cultural personality and history of the places in question.

I lived for six years in two very marginal, rural areas of the United States. I found great friendship there, I found much love, and Americans came across to me as mainly noble creatures, generous to a fault, refreshingly honest – you always knew where you stood with your ‘average’ American, like it or not – and most importantly, willing to hear you out. Stating one’s case is part of the ‘American way’, whether in court or on the street, in a church or school, the workplace, or yet under the bed sheets. I did so in all of these contexts many a time. Sometimes I was pilloried and sometimes I was celebrated. I was both demon and angel to my southern cousins and I was called every name in the book, for better or worse. But that was just me doing my job, for which I was fortunate enough to be handsomely paid for a quarter century. The youth who have organized and are pushing forward these two new movements are not being paid. No gun lobby will support them with its powerful networks and wealth, no media lobby with its even more powerful networks and wealth, and no political lobby either. Some parents perhaps, some teachers, some officers of the law. But I think that they know that they’ll be mostly on their own, as all authentic culture critics of any make and mark always are.

Hailing from bygone days, the beginning of a new religion, the self-proclaimed messiah piloting its radical course, represents the ancestor to modern social movements which also must use the language of the unfamiliar to get their point across. To seize this kind of day, when the disgust factor of most people may safely be assumed – who can defend the absolute cowardice of Las Vegas, of Florida, of Sandy Hook etc. etc? – is certainly of the moment. But the moment is, in the end, exactly and only what it is. If young people can organize consistently, act considerately, think constantly, then there may be a chance of success.

Here’s some free advice from a philosopher and professional human scientist: empty the schools and cease consuming violent media until the laws are changed away from the habits of violence. Include in your arc all of the contexts within which violence breeds, including institutionally sanctioned currently legal assaults by adults against your person, commodities such as violent games and films etc., and force all adults to be forthright about their viewpoints. Let them state their case and then evaluate it. Make us provide for the health, safety, and dignity which is your collective birthright. Be ready to compromise when it is reasonable to do so – for instance, it is true that an AR-15 is not necessary to defend one’s home; an old-fashioned .38 special will do just fine, but do not imagine you can ban firearms in your country because only about one-quarter of Americans own them anyway, and for the record, I myself do agree that one should be able to defend against home invasion or wanton personal assault with deadly force if necessary – and be ready, more than anything else, for adults, hiding in our collective shame, to put you down and try to blunt your critique. Don’t let us do that to you. Don’t give in on the basic principle that sociality can change for the better even if we older folks have given up long before.

Children: the people we love to hate

Children: the people we love to hate

I was saddened to hear of the decision in the case of the adolescent girl in BC who was assaulted by her parents on Valentine’s Day 2015. One year’s probation for both mother and father which, upon successful completion, would result in no criminal record. They were also forbidden to use physical coercion on any child in their care. But given this is against the law in any case for those aged 12-17 it hardly seems an appropriate judicial response to their behavior; wanton assault with weapons. Quite aside from being criminal, it appears rather that such an act is also dishonorable, despicable – even unchivalrous especially given the gender of the victim, though this may sound sexist in these our days of false equality – and simply lazy parenting to boot. Laziness is not against the law, mind you, and neither are a surfeit of other actions that would perhaps equally qualify under the adverbial categories I have so listed. But assaulting a child, any child, let alone your own, is at least, illegal. The parents claimed ignorance of this, but as is proverbially cited, such is ‘no excuse’. The parents also claimed Christianity but this is also irrelevant. The law is the law. Well, not quite.

It is difficult to know how to interpret the decision given that a harsher verdict would likely mean foster care for the victim, which is also an unfair outcome. When my wife and I first heard of this case when the parents were publicly sentenced, our first thought was, ‘give her to us, we’ll take her right now!’. We are planning on adopting an older girl, just somebody nobody wants as it is well known that the older the child in the human services system the more difficult it is to find a home for them. This fact must have entered into the decision-making process. In spite of this, however, one wonders if the victim’s interests will be served. She herself is on record saying that she did not want her parents to have a criminal record. Now that is chivalry etc., but perhaps it is misguided as well. So while the action was clearly a violation akin to rape, the reaction, given the legal and child service rationalities and bureaucracies, was ambivalent at best. So I am going to interpret this decision in this way: as a call to arms.

Can the parents now be trusted to actually take care of their daughter? Is there a manner in which trust and love can be built out of this debacle? Will the parents, in a moment of anger, laziness, or yet self-styled ‘righteousness’, offend again? The community at large has no responses for the victim. All of us, most especially her, will have to wait and see. Somehow I am uncomfortable with that.

Now we also all know that none of us asks to be born. Living on as a human being with others equally human is no mean feat, and there are risks at every step along the way. We like to think that we preserve the dignity of our children in the face of the world as it is. I’d rather share the world with them then attempt to control their world. I’d rather help them explore human freedom as it is and can be than coerce them into this or that box of unthought. Loving one another, whatever the relationship, is indeed that aspect of the human condition wherein there is presented to us the gravest risks. We know that the death of the beloved is the event that endangers our own mental stability more than any other, for instance. How ironic that the victim was expressing her own love for her youthful mate when the parents appeared to exhibit another kind of feeling to her, their lust for control; sexual, logistical, ideological. A New York based journalist recently published a book explaining that the furor and anxiety concerning ‘sexting’, so-called, is nothing but a moral panic. The phrase is sociological in origin and the author’s interpretation is quite correct. Of all the thousands of ‘sexts’ sent daily by people of all ages, how many result in blackmail or even humiliation and bullying? There is some small risk, no doubt, for putting yourself out in this manner, so to speak. But the ‘expert’ opinions on the matter constitute a projection based mainly in ressentiment. A moral panic is just something to give people a decoy for their own errant behaviors about which they have bad conscience. And ‘religious’ people are hardly the only ones who do so.

Quick comparison: the judge in Alberta who made misogynist remarks in a recent sexual assault case has been officially rebuked by a peer, and feminist groups have been in on the fracas. Rightly so. But where are the supporters of the adolescent victims? Do they have networks and groups to call upon to defend them in the face of adult criminality and judicial ambivalence? If you can’t trust your own parents – and we know that the vast majority of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children and teenagers occurs in the home and by family members; perhaps this is rather the great moral scandal of our suburban days, not on-line eroticism etc. – then who are the adults that are trustworthy?

That’s why I am going to say to the adolescents of Canada, those between 12 and 17, that this decision from BC represents a call to arms. This is what it means: you need to use every legal means at your disposal to defend yourselves against any adult who transgresses your space, mentally, physically, emotionally etc. You have a right to do so, even if you can’t rely on the system to always back you up. Fight back, call the police, social services, your friends and neighbours. Use the internet to construct support and action groups. Let your youthful comrades know they’re not alone. Make it as public as possible. The wave of community opinion regularly alters its course. You can, with organization and persistence, alter it in your favor, as apparently the still recent election of the new government in Ottawa has in part presented itself regarding children’s rights. You have to think of yourselves first, and not what the going rate is, or what adults might say about you, or even your own peers. You’re old enough to be learning about what love can be, but the first step in doing so is learning how to love yourselves.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over two-dozen books on such diverse topics as ethics, education, aesthetics, religion and science. He was a professor for a quarter century in Canada and the United States.