The New Age of Ignorance. . . . . .

  Few things seems more bizarre to me, more strangely twisted and disturbing, than a group of people that prides itself on its ignorance. And yet there is, in human society a strong tradition of 'Know-nothingism' which still emerges in these days of complex knowledge. Perhaps this strange ideology is partly sustained by the very fact that we live in such a complex age and people find comfort and solace in the idea of eschewing knowledge, as though by maintaining their ignorance they will somehow recapture a more simple (albeit completely imaginary) time in which there existed greater social, political, and philosophic clarity.

Of course, whatever the present state of the ideology of 'know-nothingism,' its roots are to be found in those who promoted it (and sometime still do) with the aim of maintaining control. Dictators and their ilk have long known that an ignorant population is an easily controlled and mailable one. And this promotion of ignorance was for centuries enshrined in the power and control maintained by the Roman Catholic church which prohibited on the threat of execution, for example, the translation of the Bible into common vernaculars comprehensible by the people. Besides undermining and threatening all those who would promote new forms of knowledge, for centuries the Church promoted ignorance as more or less a good thing, often couching this idea of know-nothingism in notions of attractive simplicity, an escape from all the trials and tribulation of worldly pains and knowledge. Later, more modern advocates of Conservative ideologies have promoted know-nothingism as the bulwark against ominous changes that lead, according to these advocates, to threatening chaos and radical, if often nondescript, social changes. The Tory-reactionaries of the late 18th century used this kind of argument in an attempt to hold back the looming changes in England which promised more universalized suffrage and education while threatening to undermine the absolute power of the British aristocracy. The aristocrats and their supporter knew what such changes meant to the maintenance of their authority and thus they actively and blatantly railed against education for the working and poor class, suggesting that any knowledge acquired by the masses would simply lead to dissatisfaction and rebellion.

Today, in most Western countries, we see varying degrees of resurgence in this ideology of know-nothingism. But nowhere is it more pronounced than in North America where openly fundamentalist politicians promote ignorance as a way of life. But our current government in Canada has taken this ideology to new, and unexpected, heights. As many commentators have begun to notice, this government is making every effort possible at closing down the knowledge based aspects of government. From killing the long-form census to firing ombudspersons whose job it is to monitor government with their expertise, this government has raised the bar on know-nothingism. For a generation now, neo-conservatism has been actively attempting to undermine knowledge in an effort to promote its agenda of near absolute and usually blind corporate power. From the Trilateral commission's condemnation of 'too much democracy' to the privatization of education, conservatives have attempted to shut down debate and knowledge based politics in order to maintain and ignorant and compliant population.

Conservatives in general, and Harper's Conservatives in particular, promote this agenda because they know that that cannot prevail in the face of an educated and informed population. They know that their cause would be profoundly weakened in the face of genuine and open discourse and thus the promotion of ignorance is their greatest weapon in the fight for dominance. Even their most hallowed argument of 'market efficiency' is largely a fabricated myth which is undermined time and again by actual discourse and investigation. Privatization of everything from transportation  to Third World social services has ended in disaster because the presence of middlemen that make huge profits consistently undermines rather than contributes to efficiency.

Conservatives everywhere are eager to keep people in the dark about almost everything because they know that knowledge will put an end to their efforts of control. And unfortunately a certain group of people lap this know-nothingism up because it eases their anxiety and feeds into a myth of simplicity and pastoralism. One needn't be a blind advocate of scienctism or technocracy to understand the benefits that knowledge, even specialized knowledge, can contribute to our social effort at constructing a better life. And in many cases it is actually simple knowledge that requires no specialization to understand which can contribute the most to these efforts. But this is a difficult struggle in an age in which our government can, for example, condemn an opposition leader for essentially being to smart.

Just the other day we witnessed a terrible example of know-nothingsm in action as the Manila police contributed to the deaths of eight people. Typical of a corrupt and brutal organization the Manila police lacked the expertise to handle the situation and were far too steeped in their own ignorance to understand what they lacked. After the fact, the police had to admit that they had "inadequate skills" to handle such a situation, but only a disaster brought them to this public conclusion. Luckily we averted a similar disaster when our government fired the nuclear watchdog, Linda Keen, for simply doing her job in attempting to avoid a literal meltdown.

Know-nothingism has threatened our civilization for centuries and our own government is keeping up the pressure. Will Canadians resist this ideology of ignorance? I am not sure.

Arun Gandhi and the Palestinian Question. . . . .

A few years ago Gandhi's grandson, Arun Gandhi became imbroiled in a controversy when he had the gall to criticize the State of Israel for using the memory of the Holocaust as an excuse to oppress the Palestinian people. Arun quickly learned the incredible power of the Israel Lobby in the US as he was essentially hounded out of his position as the president of the Gandhi Institute for Non-violence for daring to question the intentions of the Israeli State.  I remember reading of the controversy at the time and being quite depressed by the fact that it has come to the point in much of the West that if anyone dares speak against the blatantly expansionist policies of Israel one is instantly branded an Anti-Semite in a sad effort to silence the truth. But Arun Gandhi's credentials for the cause of peace are unimpeachable in my mind and though I would not have used the same words as he did, I think his central point was correct. We have indeed created a culture of violence from which no one is totally immune. Many in the state of Israel have used the Holocaust as an excuse to take the land of the Palestinians and ensure that they live in a state of terrible degradation and indignity. Arun was raised in South Africa during the age of Apartheid and, having seen the Palestinian refugee camps, he said that the Palestinians were suffering even greater indignities than the Blacks in South Africa. There is no doubt that many of the leaders of the Palestinian people have also succumbed to the global culture of violence. But they have practiced violence from a position of extreme weakness and poverty. It seems that any peoples, robbed of their land and identities and dignity will eventually respond with violence. This is why Arun Gandhi advocated a completely peaceful resistance on the part of the Palestinian peoples to the State of Israel. A kind of modern day Salt March. Most famously he advocated a peaceful march of fifty thousand Palestinians crossing the River of Jordan to return to their homeland. I believe that such a nonviolent resistance would be remarkably successful strategy against the State of Israel because I think it would expose the brutality and chauvinism of the Israeli State. This exposure would demonstrate to the world that Israel has also succumbed to the culture of violence. Every settlement in the occupied territory is another act of violence to the people of Palestine and to the people of Israel because it is an extension of the violence that ravages us all.

 I believe that the Jews and Palestinians can live in peace and harmony and even prosper together. But it means a genuine commitment to humanity, and the leaders of Israel, no less than the leaders of Palestine, have demonstrated that they are not interested in mutual prosperity. While the West invests billions in Israeli weapons in a country with a remarkably high standard of living, a relatively small trickle flows into Palestine which is barely enough to keep malnutrition from the door of the occupied territories. Enough is enough.

The NDP and the Gun Registry . . . . .

I have to take a few moments out of my birthday to make a few remarks about the NDP and the gun registry because I just cannot stand listening to NDP party hacks who are defending the NDP MPs who have previously voted, and are again going to vote, to kill the gun registry. A number of critics and bloggers have been defending Jack Layton for allowing a free vote on the gun registry because it is a tradition to allow such free votes on so-called private members' bills. In fact some people have even gone so far as to claim that Layton is adhering to 'principle' because to do otherwise would be to abandon the tradition simply because the bill contravenes the policies and spirit of the party. Now this argument seems fairly lame to me simply because while this bill may be a 'private members' bill' de jure, it is de facto a government bill and everyone knows it.

But let us accept, for the moment, that argument and say this is a private members' bill and tradition demands that we have a free vote on this issue. We could then absolve Mr. Layton of any ill effects of the death of the gun registry and say that he, at least, acted in an appropriate manner. The problem is that this still leaves a bad taste in my mouth and it simply shifts the unprincipled behavior from the leader of the party to the individual MPs who vote to kill the registry. Because what possible 'principle' could these MPs be adhering to? There are only two possible principles that they could argue. One is that they don't believe "in principle" in the gun registry. This argument surely stretches the limits of credibility. Given the history of the party to which they belong and the fact that we live in a country where, in most municipalities, you have to register your dog, I find it incredible that a member of the NDP would object to registering a gun. The argument just won't do. On the other hand, one might argue that these MPs are adhering to some populist principle that suggests that MPs are morally bound to vote the way their constituents want them to vote. Now the NDP is not a populist party and we have a representative form of government rather than a direct democracy. I don't think the NDP MPs who are voting to kill the registry would vote to outlaw, say, interracial marriage or vote to eliminate all corporate taxes just because a majority of their constituents wanted them to. Thus, I think it is very clear that this argument also fails to convince.

There is, of course, one rather convoluted argument that these MPs and their supporters might appeal to in defense of their vote to kill the long-gun registry. The argument goes like this; if those MPs voted to maintain the long-gun registry in certain rural ridings, they would surely lose their seats in the next election, thus allowing Liberals and/or Conservatives to win more seats, weakening the NDP's presence in the House and, in the long run, undermining the overall influence and impact of the party and its concerns. This argument is, of course, not 'principled' but it is, rather, pragmatic. The argument depends on the idea that the negative impact of killing the registry is less important that the over all impact of having fewer NDP Representatives in the House. Though I am sometimes sympathetic to this kind of political pragmatism, I am not particularly sympathetic to the argument in this case. I find this kind of argument particularly distasteful because no one ever admits it. MPs don't talk to the media or their constituents and say "I don't agree with this bill but I am going to vote for it because I am being pragmatic and strategic." Thus the whole project seems disingenuous.

If one is going to argue against the long-gun registry 'on principle' then one has to have a fairly strong libertarian streak and would therefore be opposed to many, if not most, government registry programs. You could also oppose it based upon a principle concerning the potential oppressive nature of militarist governments but I don't think there are many making this argument. Thus I admit that while there are principled reasons to oppose the gun-registry, most people who actually oppose it are hypocrites because they are not actually libertarians and don't actually oppose many government powers and intrusions. On the other hand there are fairly strong 'principled' arguments, from the NDP point of view, to be found for supporting the long-gun registry. The registry allows us to keep much better track of the guns in society, most of the country's police forces suggest that it helps 'fight crime,' a majority of gun crimes involve long-guns, many of which are stolen and a registry allows us to know their origin etc. Furthermore, the registry in no way undermines anyone's rights, at least more than already existing registry programs for, say, pets or motor-vehicles, or numerous other things we possess.

The fact is that even if we are to absolve Mr. Layton of responsibility here, there are no credible 'principles' on which NDP MPs can hang their political hat if they are going to vote to kill the registry. And since they are not appealing to the 'pragmatic' argument, at least not publicly, I am compelled to believe that the only real motivation for NDP MPs voting to kill the registry is a self-interested one. These MPs are looking after their own political skins and saving their pensions rather than acting on some principle. And bloggers who are making vague attempts to defend the principles of these MPs are barking up the wrong tree and sounding rather pathetic if you ask me.

If certain NDP members are integral to the death of the long-gun registry, you don't have to blame Jack Layton. You can blame the individual members for being wrong headed and unprincipled. But more fittingly, I think we can blame the party as a whole which, this whole affair suggests, has lost its way and its moral compass. If the NDP is unable to stand up for something as relatively minor as the long-gun registry then this party has had its day.

Shakespeare retires . . . . . .

In 1610, exactly four hundred years ago, William Shakespeare, age 46, the very same age that I turned today, retired from his literary career.

Not having reached the skill and competence that the Bard achieved, I think I will continue to write.

Toronto and the Death of Bookstores. . . . .

   I got back from Toronto last night. Because my dad had been sick for a while I hadn't been to the big smoke for what seems like a long. Well, it has gotten a lot bigger and crazier since then. I told my wife that I thought the down-town area was a lot more congested than it was when we first started making regular trips there twelve years ago. She insisted that I was just noticing the crowds more as I was getting old but given the number of very large high-rise condos that have gone up in the lower end of downtown I said there must be tens of thousands more people living in the area than there was a decade ago. Either way, to me the city seems considerably more crazy and crowded than it was just a few years ago.

   One day while I was driving around town I saw six car accidents, two of them I witnessed first hand. One was a fender-bender involving two women who proceeded to get into a slapping match on the street and another was a older man who seems to have lost his concentration and went up on the curb and knocked down a sign. Another accident at which I arrived moments after it occurred consisted of a guy who had attempted to weave his way between a parked bus and a moving semi and found himself completely stuck. Luckily it looked like the only thing that was injured was the poor guy's pride and from an outsider's point of view the whole thing looked rather comical.

   Car accidents could not, however, be as comical as the train-wreck that is the Toronto mayoral race. This Robert Ford character would be laughable if he wasn't so obnoxious. The idea that this offensive, race-baiting, Neanderthal has a chance of leading the country's biggest city is profoundly depressing. The fact that he shares a name with the cowardly disloyal man who shot Jesse James in the back is an interesting coincidence.

   One thing I was sad, though not shocked, to see was that the gradual trend of bookstore closings continues apace. Pages, arguably the best independent bookstore in Canada is gone. One thing that made Pages so good was that it had a large section of small-press books, the kind of books that you never hear about and are, therefore, best found by browsing, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to do online. Atticus Books, the finest academic used bookstore I have ever seen is also gone, though they continue their efforts online. There are now only one or two used bookstores of any consequence in all of Toronto and those surely cannot last much longer. I must confess that I have surely contributed to this trend because I have purchased many books online over the past few years. And overall, though online books have killed flesh and blood bookstores, they have been a boon to readers and collectors. In the past six years or so I have amassed a library of antique and collectible books that would have taken a lifetime and a small fortune to collect before the days of the internet. And thanks to ebay I have managed to acquire sets that are still valued at hundreds of dollars for only a fraction of that cost.

I did manage to purchase two books while in Toronto from private sellers. Many online sellers will allow you to purchase a book directly from them and save on the postage which is sometimes almost as much as the book itself. So I got two rare biographies of Coleridge that I have eluded me for a couple of years. It was good too because I met two interesting people who sell books online and I had a couple of entertaining conversations. The books that continue to escape my grasp are various books of German philosophy including Schlegel, Fichte, and Schelling. These books are so rare that even the internet has not produced decently priced translations of these authors. One can, of course, purchase modern paper-back reprints of such books but that undermines the aesthetic pleasure of the reading.

   Anyway, though the trip was difficult to make without my dad who for several years joined us on our summer trips to Toronto, everyone had a good time. Cairo, despite a few meltdowns, had a good time and I will upload some photos onto my facebook page for those Cairo fans out there.

Kite Flying. . . .

When kites are outlawed. . . . . . only outlaws will have kites.








If you have seen this child please notify your local police department immediately!

The frustrating Hypocrisy goes on . . . . . .

As I have said on a number of occasions, it is blind partisanship in politics that I find most objectionable. When you find people vociferously defending their party for some political move that they would just as vehemently condemn if taken by an opposing party, then you know that politics has become more or less useless. And I think this is the most important reason that so many people are alienated from politics today, rather than corruption.

Yesterday the government orchestrated another obvious effort at political interference when their wiping boy at the RCMP, Bill Elliot, removed the director of the Firearms Program, M.J. Cheliak, from his job on the eve of a police conference where he was set to present a significant report supporting the Long-gun Registry. Many, even some who are usually fairly sympathetic to the present government, have condemned this move as obvious and dangerous political interference. Check out Don Martin's article. http://tiny.cc/donmartinRCMP

But after you read Martin's article, read the comments left on the sight. These people condemn Martin as a Liberal stooge (a remarkable accusation if you have read his work carefully over the years) and some of them actually admit the political interference and say it is a good thing because Harper is sticking to the Liberals. Others try to spin it as coincidence etc. But almost all of the comments are, in one form or another, a defense of the government's moves on this and similar cases of interference. But you can be absolutely certain that almost everyone of these conservative defenders would be the first condemn another party for the very same things. It is so frustrating to see people who are so blind to their own hate and anger that they can't even be politically honest enough to find some consistency. But so it goes.