Category: editorials

‘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: 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

 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.

Orwellian by Omission?

If one by chance read the public service directives regarding what to do in case of a real nuclear attack that were suffered upon the residents of Hawaii and elsewhere and were reported in the media after the false alarm of last week one could be forgiven if one imagined that one had been dropped back into 1958. Either that or someone working in said service has a poor sense of humor. Taking shelter behind concrete, in basements, staying away from windows, getting inside rather than staying outside and the like, all duly and blandly listed as ‘recommended’ just in case the attack is real, will not save you. Save us. The US president is admired by many as a ‘straight talker’. Some straight talk on nuclear warfare might be handy, and as it is so succinct not to pressure even the sound-byte attentiveness all of us exhibit now and then, here it is: urbanites are vaporized no matter what they do or where they are; suburbanites are burned alive by the heat blast no matter what they do or where they are, and rural folks get to die an agonizingly slow death through the combination of radiation poisoning, nuclear winter and disease. If things drag on long enough, they will get to see a single generation of Chernobyl children take the last breaths of the human species. End of story.

Of course the propaganda machine of state media cannot afford to be honest in such matters, for then citizens would actually have to make up their minds regarding the continued presence of such weapons systems. Either we accept them and their implications by stating with all honesty to ourselves that we would rather end the world than adapt our way of life to anyone else’s, or that they should not in fact exist and must be banned for the sake of the human future, whatever its cultural stripes. We would, in other words, have to make a real choice between indefinite human life, which would mean discarding our bigotries and anxieties concerning the other, or that the other is simply too much for us and if we go, everyone must go. No doubt there are many cultures, perhaps almost every other one, that I myself would not wish to live in. Perhaps, since the death of any individual is relatively insignificant when compared with the death of human consciousness as a whole – we are not simply ready to kill ourselves in the present, but for all times, past and future, the Beethoven et al we have known and loved and any possible versions of him or her to come will also die forever and ever – those of us who cannot abide the other, either inside us or that external round the globe, ought to simply kill ourselves before it is too late for the rest of us. That said, the other has to try to be more amenable to us as well; there has to be a modicum of give and take in this our conflicted world, but I think, perhaps naively, that most people who live on our singular and unique planet do not think the way some politicians and a few others do and have no interest in ending the species simply because we could not agree about this or that specific issue. At least I hope this to be the case.

One way to begin such a reality check is for supposedly responsible arms of government to cease the spreading of utter nonsense regarding one of the most serious issues of our age. It is disconcerting that the ‘duck and cover’ domesticity of the 1950s has made an unexpected return to the pages of our news items some half century later but the vague misgivings our grandparents must have felt at the time surely have been made more rational and palpable by now. If not, read the above again and again until you get the message.

 

            Salem Revisited:

     Two stories out of Calgary this week deserve comment. The first we shall have to gnash our teeth through, but the second provides some opportunity for levity, though in the end they speak of the same thing.

1. Misplaced Vigilance:

The worse news first. A young man was convicted and sentenced for having ‘sexually interfered’ with a yet younger woman. The ninety days less one could be served on a part time basis. This fellow has for three years been attempting to get on with his life, and is now a university student. The mother of the victim has supported a petition to ask that this school bar him from attending.  The father of the perpetrator has publicly defended his son in the media, with the sense that this latter has paid for his mistake through the courts and no further action is admissible. Agreed.

Not being a parent, I have only a partial understanding of the emotions involved. But I do know that they can be overwhelming. Case in point: I was enraged when I read of the two parents who were convicted in BC of assaulting their daughter with weapons back in 2015. I was almost as infuriated with the ruling; a suspended sentence, one year’s probation, and some other limitations which under the law were illegal anyway. (You can read a more measured and detailed response to this in another of my posts to come). My desire was to rescue the young woman and, with my wife, provide for her a safe home with decent civilized parents. I wanted her actual parents imprisoned, at best. I, like the Calgary mother, was entirely dissatisfied with the ruling of the courts.

Such disparities remind one of Churchill’s apt, if over-quoted, comment on democracy, it being the ‘worst of all possible systems, except for all the rest.’ In a democracy, we must not only trust that the legal system is just in itself, but that it can as well enact justice. Equally, we must feel free to question it regularly. But though I exercise this last as part of my job as a social philosopher and culture critic, – which is merely a professionalized version of what any citizen of a democracy must do – I do not act on my personal sense of what I imagine should have occurred in the courts. I am not my own justice. Neither is the Calgary mother, nor are any of us. While it is sometimes difficult to digest the proceedings and rulings of the courts, we must trust that they have reviewed the evidence as fully as possible and produced rational decisions based upon it. Indeed, we may seek to alter the law, and that too is a democratic act. But this adjustment, whatever it may consist of, must be effected through the due process of politics and law, and cannot find a home in vigilantism of any kind, petitions or otherwise. Indeed, if we are so strongly offended by this or that aspect of the current justice system, we must seek ourselves political or legal office, and be tempered by all that stands between ordinary citizens and the robes of the courts or of parliament. If we did so, we might well find that the system we imagined we disdained has been constructed in a certain way for good reason.

Certainly any institution can be corrupted, and my reaction to the BC ruling of early 2016 hedged towards imagining that the courts were in collusion with abusive parents, perhaps because many families practice such clandestine abuse and indeed, since ninety-five percent of child abuse happens within the family home, were merely protecting their own, the rest of us, perhaps, by firing a warning shot over the bows of parents who too publicly injure their apparently precious children just to warn the rest of us to be more careful about hiding our domestic iniquities.

However this may be, the principle that we must accept, in a democracy, is that the ruling of the court is the final word regarding this or that case. The Calgary case is no different. It has been three years since the incident; has an appeal been launched? If the victim’s family is offended by the ruling, this must be the first resort. Every one of us, in a democracy, deserves both the give and take of restitutive justice. We must do the time if we do the crime, but no more than this. In this age of fashionable ‘shaming’ and mere accusations which seem to already and always carry all the weight of conviction at their back, we must be all the more vigilant against overcompensating for and second guessing the courts. We deserve a second chance, a chance to get on with our fragile and finite lives. Collectively, we also must trust that the perpetrators in these and thousands of other cases will not re-offend, that they have, to borrow the father’s words, ‘learned their lesson’. We may hold our breath in the case of a murderer or rapist, snort in the direction of an exhibitionist, or gnash our teeth in the face of an abusive parent, but nevertheless we must exhibit both trust and forbearance, no matter the emotional cost. Another bit of the quotable Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’

If we do not trust, we retreat into Salem, MA. Worse still, Dachau. Vigilantiism of any kind is a more or less mild guise of anti-democratic fascism, and must be spoken out against. Though it is the professional duty of people like me to do so, it is actually everyone’s civic and ethical duty to stand against ‘private justices’ of all stripes and creeds. (Such an ethics could well be extended to private and charter schools, clubs, and other exclusionary social contexts, but that topic is for another day).

2. Wanted: Naked Cops

Ditto for the second story. Another context, apparently not criminal, another petition seeking to redress. This time, a nudist group plans to hold a water-park evening for all ages and genders at a local leisure center. This event has now been cancelled. The objection is that children would have been present, which is in fact par for the course at nudist gatherings, so I’m told. The defender reminds us that nudity is not sexuality, but under the lens of aesthetic discourse, this is in fact not correct. We can instead remind ourselves of Kenneth Clarke’s famous distinction. On the one hand, the nude is at the very least a body that has been transformed into a sensual object, perhaps even sexual. Nakedness, on the other hand, is simply an unclothed body; you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, as a woman once explained to me regarding her vagina. Though I know of no male who has ever quite accepted this potentially home truth, she had a point.

Admittedly, I raised my very much non-puritanical eyebrows when I read of the event being ‘all ages’. Wondering if what the petitioners claimed had any merit, I searched through the net. In no time at all I was directed via dubious links to equally dubious imagery. Given that one can easily find still photographs if not rolling stock of minors, the kind the petitioners were concerned would be taken at this event– indeed, it seems some nudist groups deliberately transform their mere nakedness into a very much objectified nudity by holding beauty pageants for adolescent women; one sees them parading quite happily holding little numbers up as they pass whoever the judges may be, receiving bouquets of flowers and even trophies etc, and one also wonders if this might fit the definition of child pornography, though the young women appear to be quite consenting to all of this rapturous attentiveness and it is likely such events are taking place in nations where the laws are different from our own – we must exercise some caution, I think, in imagining that what occurs at this or that nudist event is only nakedness, unadulterated with any adult dross. This would include, most tellingly, the neuroses we adults harbour regarding our waning sexuality and thus the resentment we project against our youth for so effortlessly parading theirs around. This parade is, by the way, most evident not at nudist events but in local schools and malls where wearing clothing is not optional. In any case, the petitioners taking umbrage and calling for caution might well, as did one of my former intimates, have a point.

Two options present themselves that shy away from Salem or worse: one, hold age-graded nudist events. Children, teens, and adults all separate. One might perhaps have a couple of life-guards on hand for the children so that they don’t go about drowning one another, but that should suffice. The older minors should simply be left alone. Not knowing how teenagers converse, naked or otherwise, I can only imagine dialogues such as:

Boy: ‘Hey there you stunningly beautiful young thing, you, wanna get it on?’

Girl: ‘Absolutely, you studly well-hung colt of my dreams, fire away!’

And so on. Ah, to be Jung again. However this may be, it is clearly adults who spoil the party in these cases. By an extension, one might imagine erotic web-sites for minors only. Educational, one might say, without the leering perversity of adults impinging on the nakedness of youthful freedoms. Indeed, given that the term ‘libertine’ in the 18^th century simply meant free thinker – and not what the 19^th century came to associate with it – we could do with backing off our neurotic vigilance of young people in all quarters in view of a healthier democracy. It’s Calgary folks, not Calvary. Don’t martyr yourselves. The other option? Let the all ages thing go ahead and have a few of Calgary’s finest in attendance, naked of course.

All nay-saying aside for a moment, it is a sign of health in a democracy that persons feel that they can object publicly to what their fellows are getting up to. We need more of that directed at whatever is taking place behind the closed doors of our suburban society, but we also need to be alert to the manner in which we do it. Private justice is inadmissible. It also tends to be hypocritical and cowardly to boot. Do we see citizens banding together to take on organized crime? Thought not. Those people fire back, unlike nudist groups and tried and convicted university students. But public justice through formal legal processes is a hallmark of a democracy and we are duty bound to support it no matter our personal enmities and prejudice. At risk of redundancy, we can iterate that it is only in a free society that we are both free to subject ourselves to due process and object to it simultaneously. It’s either that or very much not naked cops on every street corner and in every bedroom. The vestments of fascism are hanging in each of our closets. In lieu of burning them, let them hang there undisturbed.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over twenty books in the areas of ethics, education, religion, art, social psychology, science and health. He remains a fan of Mark Twain and Stephen Leacock.

Another Kind of Bodyguard (a note on thinking today)

There are professional bodyguards aplenty. Especially in Vegas and Monte Carlo. There are bawdy-guards too. The rights enshrined in democracies protecting our foibles and fetishes. And there are spirit-guards, even in this day and age. The Pope and the Dalai-Lama come to mind. But the body comes and goes and fantasies surrounding it and its capabilities go with it. The spirit has had a rough ride over the past four centuries; on that score, we don’t really even know what it is we’re guarding anymore.

But there is another kind of guardianship that is more perennial, that of the mind. No less fragile or maligned than its sibling human elements, it is yet more important. The youngest, the most daring, the most human of all, the mind is what truly sets us apart from all other forms of life, so far as we know. There are very few mind-guards, especially in my generation. I’m one of them. One of six. We hail from around the globe. We’re a working team that doesn’t work together. Each of us has his contributions: De Botton has the widest readership and the best networks, Montefiori the best job and institutional career, Harris the most book sales, Chalmers is the best communicator, Marder is off to the best start and perhaps thus has the most potential, and myself, who has written the most. It hasn’t been very long. Gen-X is but an afterthought already. But enough time has passed that we know now that no one else is going to come along and join us. The next generation’s thinkers are nascent but still hidden. We do not know who they are, but their problems will be different than ours. Different, but also perennial, also that is, in the most fundamental manner, the same. The same questions that humanity has always asked of itself and of the cosmos.

To ask those kinds of questions in a systematic way, informed by the history of consciousness, is to be a mind-guard. De Botton, the Swiss-Jewish gent in the history of ideas and popular sociology, Montefiori, the Italian humanist, Chalmers the fiery Aussie epistemologist, Harris the atheist critic of American culture, The Russian-Jewish Marder, the last embodiment of the Frankfurt School, and myself the Canadian phenomenologist and hermeneut. If we were a hockey team, the six of us on the ice at all times, we’d all be point men. Shot-blockers. Back-checkers. Playmakers. We’d be Bob Gainey with goalie pads. Under the radar. There only when you need us.

But who needs a mind-guard? State, Church, University, suburb and countryside alike would sleep more easily if we didn’t exist. Business has no time for us. Science left us behind in the eighteenth-century. Culture is now something that everyone has, thanks to anthropology, its nothing special. But speaking on behalf of the ‘team’, our tiny knot of thinkers and writers, and speaking as one, consciousness – reflective, reasoned, impassioned, and discontent – is the only thing that stands between our species and its imminent demise. Every human being is responsible for our collective future. The social role of the philosopher is merely a guide, a resource, and a role-model. Society doesn’t like us. Perhaps we’re not only a team, but also a gang. The most dangerous persons in the world. Public enemies number one.

Change is difficult. Even the thinker is sometimes fooled into complacency, the world of ideas alone becoming both our mantra and our refuge. Who has the time and energy to question everything? Why not let well enough alone? But it is a life’s work. It’s undertaken on behalf of everyone else. We have a few cousins, in the artist and the fiction writer, but these much more spontaneously radical beings are too easily commodified, bought and sold, and they tend to lack the historical consciousness of even their own discourses. In the history of thought as well as in its dynamite only the thinker is so versed.

And what do we do with that experience? We score little. We defend what appears indefensible to most. We are unaccepting of the going rate. We think humanity can do better. But more than that, we think the species should and must do better. It is neither a question of technique nor technicality. It is the replacement of morals with ethics, knowledge with thought. It is the confrontation with tradition. It is the overcoming of custom and law alike. We are libertines in the original sense; free-thinkers. We’ve been identified in popular culture as ‘modern day warriors’. But we fight the good fight against the good. The moral. The customary. The accepted truth of things is always farthest from the manner in which truth is pursued and explored. We tip our hat to the best of science, where as Sagan used to say, ‘arguments from authority are worthless’, and where ‘the only sacred truth is that there are no sacred truths’. But science alone is not enough. It too is too easily commodified. Its technical accomplishments overshadow its purpose. We do as a society ‘accept its products and reject its methods’.

No, philosophical questioning, culture critique, the examination of one’s conscience, the patient study of social formations without customary bias, these are the exiguous threads of a human consciousness that has raised itself beyond what it has been and now stands, perilously and yet precociously, longing and wondering, on the threshold of the firmament.