Tango

It may take a village to raise a child but it only takes two to tango. Or so you might think.

I’ve always found the tango mysterious and obvious, exciting and repulsive, liberating and vaguely fascistic. Really, all that slicked back hair, the quick quick slow slow rhythms. The locked gazes and perfectly still shoulders. All the while the hips slipping and grinding above the staccato of leather clad feet.

The tango — the perfect Latin expression of suppressed sexuality.

So what the hell is it doing in bars in the south of London? Well you might ask.

During my last visit to London I had the pleasure of spending a weekend or two with my wife’s daughter and her boyfriend. One evening they had a few friends over and it was suggested we all go down and check out the Tango lessons being given at the bar beneath our very feet. Why not? I had, many years ago, taken Tango lessons from a lovely Filipino lady in Yellowknife who had carefully explained the origins of the dance as a way to flirt under the watchful eyes of chaperones. Because the upper body stays still, in a crowd you can’t really tell what the lower body is doing. Ah, the folly of youth.

My dancing is generally described as — eccentric. I have a sense of rhythm, a well-defined one but my dancing is often to a different drummer than the one who is currently playing. Fortunately, Liz is a trusting and talented partner who can pretty much follow wherever I lead.

In any case we heard the music and leapt to the dance floor, much to the delight of the much younger members in our party. But wait, said the instructor, you can’t dance like that. You are disrupting the flow of the other partners. Indeed we were, or could have if we weren’t occupying the empty middle of the floor while the pasty English couples moved scleroticly in a tight oval around the perimeter. We were shooed from the floor.

Outrage ensued. Not from me. I’d been banished from much better places than this — and not for dancing. However, our table mates were furious and soon discovered that it was not our dancing per se that was the problem but rather the fact we had not paid for lessons.

We had bought a bottle of wine so we had to stay until it was done, glaring furiously at the rather sad folks following the stern demands of their English mistress. Then we went upstairs, put on jive music and danced as loudly as we could above their heads.

Take that Eva Peron!

And that’s ten minutes.

Vigilantes

There are many people on the left and some people on the libertarian right who view Anonymous in an exceedingly romantic way. Perhaps they are influenced by the movie V for Vendetta or by the occasionally useful things they have done to reveal wrongdoing by governments or corporations —by ‘The Man.’

Of course it doesn’t help that Anonymous per se doesn’t really exist. It is simply a cover name for a wide assortment of hackers, activists, anarchists, revolutionaries, tricksters, malicious pranksters, government operatives (oh, yes, that too) and assorted free riders, disaffected rich guys and teenagers living in their mother’s basement.

But most of all, it is a group of vigilantes who place their engorged sense of justice above everyone else in the world. As such, they are no more or less reliable than the posses we used to see in western movies. Sometimes the posses did good things — tracked down known criminal gangs and brought them back to town for trial. Sometimes they turned into lynch mobs.

Either is possible with vigilantes. They may — more by accident than intent or because they are led by a person who is filled by a sense of justice rather than simple moral outrage — help uphold the law. More often than not, they do all they can to break it down.

Their reasons are many but the idea at the heart of it is this: the law only protects the rich and powerful and any truly just person will always need to take justice into their own hands to see justice done. And how will we know it is just: because it will feel good.

People come to this view for very good reasons. The instruments of the law: police, lawyers, courts, prisons, do seem to favor the rich over the poor and the privileged over the oppressed, whites over every other race.

Not only do they seem to do it — in too many case they do favor them.

The law has always been uneven. The situation is not a new one; rather what we see today is a return to the early days of ‘law and order’ which very much meant using the state — dominated by a very narrow group of society — to impose order on the masses by the use of force (and call it law). Think: riot squads against striking workers or peace protesters.

The bias was built right into the creative moment. Since then people have been struggling to reform the justice system to remove biases of class and race and gender. Progress has been made but it never seems to be enough.

Yet, that doesn’t mean we have to give up on it and turn justice back into simple vengeance. Vigilantes may seem to be heroes now but, in the end, when civil society breaks down and it becomes, as Hobbes called it, the war of all against all, they may not seem so laudable. But by then it will be too late. It is always easier to break than to build. If the justice system is broken we have to fix it or replace it with a better one, not simply throw up our hands and do without.

But that’s ten minutes.

Ferguson

I’m not sure what people expected would happen with the Ferguson Grand Jury. While most grand juries deliver indictments when prosecutors desire them, the record in the case of police officers appears to be the opposite. There may be many reasons for that. Jury bias or public pressure on prosecutors to seek indictments when the evidence is weak. In this case, race was almost certainly a factor if only because race is always a factor in American justice issues.

Most Canadians don’t even know what a grand jury is or what it does. We don’t have them in Canada; in fact, they are a unique feature of the American system. In other democratic countries the role of the grand jury is played by the ‘preliminary trial.’ This process involves a judge or sometimes a panel of judges. The prosecutor has to demonstrate that there is sufficient evidence to go to trial.

In some cases, the prosecutors don’t even go that far. They determined in the case of a police officer in Quebec who killed a five year old in a fatal collision that there was insufficient evidence even for a preliminary hearing. A public protest – and apparently new evidence — has prompted them to reconsider.

There is a fundamental problem for progressives and more importantly for the oppressed in understanding the role of the police in a democratic society. People on the right have a hard time understanding it too but their bias leans in a different direction. The former are wary of the police, concerned that they get away with too much, that they are nothing but agents of the privileged classes using force to maintain the status quo. The latter view them — each and every one of them — as heroes saving us all from the forces of criminality and anarchy.

They are both right. And they are both wrong. The police have a sometimes dangerous job acting on our behalf; the alternative is vigilantes and lynch mobs. The police have demonstrated a willingness to turn a blind eye to criminality in their ranks. These conflicting world views combined with the proliferation of guns, the racial divide and the ready willingness to resort to violence in America made Ferguson inevitable.

People are outraged that no indictment was reached, that no trial will be held where the evidence could be made public. The prosecutor says he’ll reveal the evidence anyway but that will hardly be sufficient. In any case everyone has already made up their mind. The police officer either is a racially motivated murderer or he is a hero.

Both views can’t be true. The real tragedy of Ferguson is that there is no longer a real way to resolve those differences. No way to be sure that the people we entrust to hold up the law and ensure order have not betrayed us.

Dialogue is dead in America. All that leaves is riots and broken windows; tear gas and arrests. If we’re lucky it will stop at that. Until the next time.

But that’s ten minutes.

Volunteers

According to the CBC several Canadian veterans are planning on (or are already) fighting against ISIS. They say the Canadian government is not doing enough in the battle by sending over jets and advisors. The Minister of Public Safety says he doesn’t mind while the Chief of Defenses suggests they should simply re-enlist in the Canadian forces. Neither says what the consequences are.

Technically, it is not illegal for a Canadian to fight for another nation’s army. As long as that nation is not actually at war with Canada. Or, in this case, as long as the group you are fighting with is not considered a terrorist organization. In the case of the people who are fighting ISIS in Syria and Iraq — some are not considered terrorist while others are. Wind up in the wrong foxhole and you will be tried for supporting a terrorist organization and perhaps even treason. In this case, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

Then there is the question of who takes care of you if you are captured or wounded. If you are killed, who, if anyone, takes care of your family? The Minister and the military is silent on this but the evidence is pretty clear.

No-one will take care of you. Go and fight in a foreign army and you are on your own. Now, one might cynically ask: how is that different than if you fight for the Canadian army? However, while veterans’ programs are completely inadequate, at least they do exist. Medical services are available above and beyond what is available to the public (and the recent announcement of more is welcome) and some form of payout or pension is provided. Again inadequate, but compared to what these volunteers will get, it is substantial.

Canada has a long history of having men, and sometimes women, volunteering to serve in foreign forces. Quite a number fought with the Americans and British in Iraq. Before that, thousands of Canadians enlisted with American forces to fight in Vietnam. The most famous contingent was the all-volunteer Mackenzie-Papineau battalion that fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Of the former, they may have received some compensation from the governments of the countries they fought for — though most were not eligible for Veterans benefits. But they got nothing from Canada. Perhaps a country has no obligation to support those who choose to fight for other countries but maybe we shouldn’t put them in jail if we actually approve of who they are fighting.

The Mac-Paps were treated even worse. Not only were they not provided any compensation while fighting, they were treated as ‘communist scum’ when they got home.  Most were not actually communists at all but were drawn by an early understanding of and hatred for fascism. I expect the ‘scum’ quotient wasn’t high either. Even after it became clear that Franco was nothing but a puppet for Hitler and Spain a testing ground for German weapons, these volunteers were not rehabilitated — though they did become heroes of the left and that’s something.

But that’s ten minutes.

Minority

The Proclaimers ask the question “What do you do when minority means you?” And they should know. Christian Scottish Nationalist rock stars. At least one of those categories is a minority, I’m sure. Everyone belongs to a minority, right? Take women. Oh, wait, they are actually the majority but much of our society treats them as a minority. But what does that mean?

Well, in a system that argues for majority rules it sometimes means that your rights are contingent on the will of the larger group. And you ask, what is wrong with that? And I say: You are clearly reading the wrong blog.

Minority rights are enshrined — in a way — in most constitutions. That is to say there is a negative protection — discrimination on the basis of gender, race religion and so on is prohibited. The struggle for society is often to create affirmative rights. Canada’s grand experiment with official bilingualism and multiculturalism is an example of that — one that has worked well enough that people from all over the world come to see how we did it.

Politics, of course, played a role. Many politicians learned quickly that what may be a minority in one place could well be a majority in others. Parties who did a good job at including minority concerns in their platforms and minority candidates in their running slates did better than those who didn’t. Historically, this was the Liberals but the Conservatives have been playing this game quite well too. Jason “Curry in a Hurry” Kenney has been particularly active wooing minority groups by appealing to their supposed conservative cultural and religious values. This is, of course, also a government that calls other cultures ‘barbaric‘ on the world stage. Logic is not their strong suit — politics is. Still, language matters no matter what your goal,

In any case, the inclusion of minorities in a larger culture is not simply a matter of law and politics though it is almost certain that a legal framework and an active participation in the political system are important. In large part, however, it is a matter of history and values.

Canada has succeeded as a multicultural and multi-ethnic state because we have a long history of immigration. Most of us are from immigrant stock. (Even First Nations but they had a 10000 year jump on the rest of us so we’ll leave it at that). My own family came here in the 1770s but were really no different than people who came last week — seeking security, freedom and a better life.

Living together is a big part of it, too. When you see and work with a whole range of people you soon realize that the similarities far outweigh any superficial differences. It’s not that people’s language and culture don’t distinguish them one from another but really it is more in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle (or mosaic) than square pegs and round holes.

Is it perfect? Hardly. Remember how Ben Johnson went from Canadian Olympic hero to Jamaican Canadian to disgraced Jamaican immigrant.

Too often minorities have rights until they do something wrong.

But that’s ten minutes.

Majority

Majority rules, right? It’s the fundamental principle of democratic systems. We all know that, don’t we? Well, not quite. Majority rules is simply the rule that is made valid by lots of exceptions. And so it should be.

‘Majority rule’ taken literally is a recipe for personal and social disaster. This is abundantly clear when it comes to populism, discussed yesterday, but it is equally true in simpler forms of representative democracy.

Few parties — and face it in most jurisdictions, parties are here to stay — ever command majority support. There is simply too wide a range of opinions for any one party to obtain 50% of the electorate’s approval. In Canada, like most western democracies, a political party has only received over half the votes in a four general elections (since the first appearance of third parties in 1917) and even then it was just barely over 50%. Nonetheless we have mostly had majority governments — that is parliamentary majorities made up of parties who received from 38% or more of the popular vote (generally around 42% is sufficient to win a solid majority). The situation is similar in England which has a strong history of multi-party competitions. Europe, of course, has mostly adopted proportional representation so outright majorities are rare though not unknown.

Only in the USA which seldom has a viable third party do parties win elections with regular majorities. But even then it is not a sure thing. George Bush won the presidency with fewer votes than Al Gore and typically Republicans win more congressional and Senate seats with fewer votes than those obtained by Democrats. There are lots of reasons for that — small states with two Senators for example or blatant gerrymandering of House seats.

So, okay, majorities don’t quite mean what you think they mean.

But in a lot of cases we don’t trust majorities at all. For example we don’t generally allow constitutions to be changed by simple majorities. In the USA for example an amendment has to be ratified by three quarters of the states to pass. In Canada we are a little less rigorous, requiring 70% of the provinces representing more than 50% of the population — a kind of double majority — for some changes and unanimous approval for others. In many other jurisdictions — municipal and First Nations — double majorities are also the rule for significant changes to land tenure or financial systems.

We also build in all sorts of safety systems to make sure majorities can’t override fundamental individual or minority rights. These are often ensconced in constitutions with all kinds of political and legal protections.

What it really comes down to is this: democracies are not simply a crude mechanism to express the shifting opinions of the majority of its citizens at a particular moment of time. They are complex systems of political institutions, legal safeguards and cultural mechanisms to ensure a level of stability, protection against tyranny and requirements that change can only occur through sustained and thoughtful argument and struggle.

All of which create their own rigidities and problems for attaining social justice.

But that’s ten minutes.

Populism

Populism bothers me; I don’t really trust it. Which seems fair enough since populists certainly wouldn’t trust me. It’s not that I’m too left wing; there are plenty of left-wing populists (Mao was an example). No, the problem with me is that I am too intellectual.

Populists don’t believe in intellectuals or more precisely, they don’t believe in rational analysis. They prefer appeals to common sense, that is, to raw emotion. Populists operate on the basis that the people are always right, that their instincts are always the correct ones.

As a democrat, this appeal to the people has a certain attractiveness. Shouldn’t the wishes of the people always be supreme in a democratic society? Perhaps, but the narrowest definition of democracy — some Greeks called it ‘rule by the mob’  — can result in simple ‘majority rule’ where the rights of the minority or of the individual are crushed by the demands and desires of the many.

Then there is the problem of what constitutes a majority. The only real way to know would be if every eligible voter voted on every single issue (which in the USA has led to people voting for contradictory propositions on the same ballot). Since most of them don’t vote in general elections (41% voted in the American mid-terms) this is a fairly high bar. So we generally say that a majority of those voting is sufficient. But with first past the post systems and with most decisions being made by elected representatives we can easily and usually do have majority government elected by a plurality (large minority) of those voting.

Populism doesn’t care about that at all — because populism tends to believe (if a movement can believe anything) that the will of the people is encapsulated in the words of the leader. And of course it is the charismatic leader rather than any other political element that is central to the populist system. Put your faith in the Glorious Leader and all will unfold as it should.

Which, of course, is where my disagreement with populist politics and politicians begins and ends. I don’t trust other people — especially not glorious leaders — to protect my rights or even to remotely do the right thing. Once people give themselves over to charismatic leaders to express (or likely define) the popular interest, then anything becomes possible. Not every populist movement becomes a fascist —left or right wing totalitarianism are largely indistinguishable— party but every fascist party began as a populist movement.

So when you hear a politician talk about common sense, they are calling on you to rely on gut instinct and raw emotion to make decisions. Those functions (as useful as they might be in evolutionary terms) are singularly unhelpful as a means of running a complex modern society. If we are really all going to get along, we need thoughtfulness and reason, as weak as those tools sometimes are.

Or we can all just hand it over to the Leader and do what he tells us we want to do anyway. And if we have a little niggle that maybe we shouldn’t — those are counter revolutionary thoughts and must be stomped out. Re-education anyone?

But that’s ten minutes.

Reading

I’ve been thinking a lot about reading lately. Sometimes I think if I read more and thought less I’d be better off. That certainly seems to be what many people do — though, of course, not you, dear reader.

When someone tells me they read 200 or 300 books a year I feel a little gobsmacked. How can anyone read a book every one or two days? Don’t they do anything else? Do they actually read every word or even every sentence? When I see the books they read — 1200 page fantasies or 800 page historicals — I have an even greater sense of wonder.

I can remember reading that fast. As a young teenager I could and sometimes did read a book in a single day. But that was a treat not an everyday occurrence. I didn’t keep track but I suppose, at my fastest, I might have read 80 or 90 books a year. But once I reached university where I stopped reading as entertainment and started reading to retain, that dropped off considerably.

These days I manage to read between 30 or 40 books a year depending on how much I’m flying. Because I no longer have the time to read for my own purposes every single day. I do read a lot for work both as a publisher and as a policy wonk on Parliament Hill but the former is mostly slush — which sadly cannot be called reading for pleasure — while the latter consists of government reports or magazine articles — which too often is nothing more than drudgery.

No reading for myself is what reading a book in a day used to be — a treat. Still, when it comes down to it, reading is a major part of my life and, as long as my eyes and brain hold out, will remain so.

But why? What does reading give me or give anyone that we can’t get from movies or Facebook or hanging with our friends?

Reading fiction, in particular, is an interesting experience and I have developed theories as to why we do it. When you watch young children explore books (which I’ve been doing over the last few years as I’ve somehow acquired grandchildren), you realize that one of the things they are doing is practicing life. One of the reasons they will read the same book over and over (and repeat watch movies too) is they are trying to figure out how to be human. It is not an easy task and that’s why so much of early reading has to do with sorting things out — making distinctions between this thing and that and between emotions.

Reading gives us emotional insights that we can’t get anywhere else. As adults, we are constantly trying to get inside other people’s heads: does my boss respect me, will Joe support me, does Jack love me, what does Harry really want? But, with the exception of a few experiments in thought transfer, we are always alone in our own heads. Except when we read. Only then can we see what others see, think what others think.

Now, reading non-fiction is an entirely different thing.

But that’s ten minutes.

Virginity

There is nothing special about virginity. Everyone was a virgin once. Some people, apparently, more than once. Rob Anders, the doltish soon-to-be former MP, always claimed he was saving himself for marriage. Frankly, looking at Mr. Anders, he should have made wiser investments.

Still, some people seem to put inordinate value in the state of virginity. Suicide bombers and other terrorist martyrs are promised a specified number of virgins when they get to heaven. 72 seems like a lot but really a young vigorous fellow could go through those in a month or two. And then what do you have? Frankly I’d rather be promised a half dozen experienced older women who might appreciate an eager young man romping around paradise. An argument for quality over quantity, perhaps, though I might make a stronger argument for skipping it altogether. Particularly since I don’t think forcing women to do anything – even under God’s orders — is particularly attractive.

In any case what do female martyrs get? Seventy two pimple faced boys? Really who could possibly want that? Male virginity, Mr, Anders aside, is pretty much an unproveable quality or perhaps indefinable (does it include masturbation?). All you really have is the guy’s word for it. So yeah, it doesn’t exist (unless other people have made the decision for him).

Of course it is not much more provable in young women, despite the claims of some who are prepared to examine them medically to prove it. The hymen is a delicate flower that is easily plucked — isn’t that the expression? But it can be as readily plucked from vigorous athletics, bicycle riding, or quite often simply by day to day living. Methinks the doctors often tell little white lies to make their clients’ families happy.

Because they often know the consequences of a false negative. In some cultures it can be devastating or even deadly to be accused as a girl of not being a virgin. Surely, only an evil person would bring that punishment down on someone. Unless the loss of virginity leads to pregnancy or disease, what difference does it make anyway? And even those results are not a matter of punishment but of care.

Still it seems to matter plenty to some, if we are to believe those fathers who take their daughters to purity dances and require them to pledge their virginity to dear old dad. I mean, even for a non-Freudian like me, that just seems wrong and unnatural. Yet they — the Dads — defend it as the most natural thing in the world. And why is that?

Because like everything else that calls on men to pronounce on the value of women’s bodies it comes from the desire to own them, objectify them, enslave them.

Yeah, virginity, yet another tool of the patriarchy to reduce women to possessions and to keep them children all their lives.

Not sure where to go from there but fortunately,

That’s ten minutes.

Road to Damascus

Recently I demonstrated a significant shift in my views on a topic. When asked how that came about I gave a couple of answers. Like Keynes, when I was exposed to evidence that showed my previous position wrong, I changed my views. More precisely, I told them that observing their life had given me a deeper emotional understanding, which lead to a shift in my feelings about it. The combination of reason and emotion (or intuition) was at play.

In fact, changing ones viewpoint on almost anything is quite an accomplishment. Our brain is not wired for us to readily listen to evidence. We have built in to our unconscious (where most of thinking likely occurs) all kinds of bias. Confirmation bias is a major factor— we tend to only listen to evidence that confirms what we already believe. Indeed, when presented with contrary evidence we filter out the contradictory parts and re-enforce our own opinions with what is left.

This can be overcome using introspection, calculation, logic and so on but that is hard work. And our brains are inherently lazy. They like to decide on things with the least effort and at the lowest level of awareness. They had to be that way in order to survive in the harsh environments that they evolved in. People who thought too long about the dangers of predators were often eaten.

The second method of changing our minds is much more powerful if not necessarily more common. We undergo an emotional shift that changes our perspective on a person or an idea or a cause. Remember that moment when you stopped looking at a person as an acquaintance and started to think of them as a friend or a lover. You may have known them for a long time but the moment of transition is swift —in the blink of an eye.

Similarly, there is the ‘road to Damascus‘ moment when entire world views change. One minute we believe this and are the cynical Saul and the next we believe something quite differently and are the faithful Paul. These changes are dramatic and often terrifying.

My mother used to say — none so pure as the purified. And don’t we know that to be true. The convert is more willing to follow the true cause than those who may have grown up with it. It is no wonder that many of the lone wolves — whether we are talking about radical politics or fundamentalist religions — are converts to the cause. The role of conversion has always been to sweep away what has existed and replace it with a new way of thinking.

But in the process, the anchors that hold people to a moral worldview are shattered and what is produced is not a convert but a monster. It is not lost on me that the road to Damascus these days is filled with converts to dangerous thinking. But we don’t have to look to other countries to be warned. Extremism in any cause is always fraught and converts to any cause — from communist anarchism to Tea Party militarism — frequently need a reality check so their legitimate grievances don’t boil over into illegitimate actions.

But that’s ten minutes.