March 16, 2024
August 24, 2024
HERE'S MY TAKE
It was in the 1970s that philosopher E. F. Schumacher visited Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and, uncertain as to where he was, consulted the map he had been given. He looked around and saw that he was in the town square with several large cathedrals nearby, but he could not locate them on the map. When he asked his guide about this he was told that in communist USSR, churches are not included on maps.
That story came to mind as I participated in an editorial retreat this week. Our Comment magazine editorial team was joined by our Advisory Board and a few other friends who are leaders in their own right. For a few days, the two dozen of us discussed some of the big cultural themes that should inform our editorial thinking over the next few years. But as I mentally placed the themes from the early sessions onto a cultural map of our times, I realised how our most common conceptual maps are frequently incomplete. I could only conclude that some of the core building blocks we need for flourishing (which include truth, value, purpose, and suffering) are like those landmarks for orientation that are missing from our official cultural maps.
Let me share four questions raised by others which shaped my map-sketching in my notebook.
When does narrative become story-selling? The world of words and argument has been largely replaced by a world of images. The lack of cultural and religious literacy has become a real problem. One participant quoted Shakespeare’s “Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Our discussion explored some of the expressions of this 400-year-old insight for our particular cultural moment. We wondered whether the combination of technology, marketing methods, and philosophical and religious illiteracy is reshaping language more into a tool of deceit than of meaning today. How do we live with each other when we end up thinking of ourselves more as the avatars we have created on social media than as persons who inhabit a shared moral universe?
Is it wealth or an ATM machine? One participant pointed to “the poverty of wealth” as a condition we are experiencing in which the creation of wealth is divorced from community and understood by some to be the result of gaming of the market system. The result is that those with wealth become viewed as social ATM machines for the community. A community built only around transactional, rather than more human relationships, is distorted and ripe for difficulties.
When do institutions lose their purpose? “If colleges enforce high standards, they will go out of business” lamented one educator as he shared the challenge of teaching undergraduates, some of whose literacy rates were inferior to those of his elementary school-aged children. Another participant talked about what happens to the medical profession built around the Hippocratic Oath—“I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked nor offer any such counsel”—when doctors are mandated by the government to provide euthanasia. A third talked about how the separation of morals and purpose as it relates to sex has resulted in a culture where anything is acceptable as long as it is consented to within your own self-defined boundaries. Relationships become about policing boundaries and the very nature of the activity ends up being changed.
Does the paradigm need to change from “pursuing what’s just” to “responding to suffering”? In our current circumstances, the problems we face can seem insoluble in the short term. On the one hand, this is always true, but perhaps now more intensely so, at least when the world is viewed from the perspective of those living in Western liberal democracies. There is an almost inevitable instability that will characterise the upcoming decades. But, as one participant helpfully pointed out, this might be a hopeful sprout in the midst of the desert landscape we are describing. Sometimes when the big picture questions are dark and dreary, we can find hope and meaning in personal interactions. We certainly don’t desire suffering, but there can be eye-opening learning both through the experience of suffering and in responding to suffering with care. This may serve an important remedial function for a generation that has missed some of the lessons needed to build a more flourishing society.
Finding meaningful answers to these questions forces us to deal with the categories of truth, value, purpose, and suffering that need to be restored as landmarks in our culture. The typical cultural maps highlight alternative categories like feelings, utility, pleasure and autonomy. And so many of our cultural activists, trying to find the road to flourishing, are finding themselves as confused as Schumacher was looking at the map of Leningrad in the 1970s. What was being described on paper did not match the reality he was seeing.
Much of what is being described here is, “life in the shadows,” to borrow the metaphor of one participant. “But,” as he reminded us, “you can’t have shadows without light.” Diagnosis is a prerequisite for prescription. Whether we use the metaphor of shadows or an incomplete map, both speak to the reality that there is something more than what is presently seen in all of these discussions.
Committed as we are to offering imagination toward a thriving society, here’s hoping that future editions of Insights will provide a clearer map as to how we might get there.
WHAT I’M READING
Temporary Foreign Worker Program Not Working
A United Nations report describing Canada’s temporary foreign worker program as creating an underclass comparable to modern-day slavery provoked a fair bit of critical commentary, at home and abroad. The system which for decades has provided workers primarily in the agricultural sector was amended by the Trudeau government, and now brings in five times the number of workers than were allowed in 2015. Economist Mike Moffatt, ordinarily one of the government’s go-to advisors, was direct in his Star op-ed: “The federal government must phase out the non-agricultural low-wage stream of the temporary foreign worker program. The harms it causes to workers far outweigh the benefits to corporations.”
I Spy With My Little Eye
The role of national security intelligence, or “spying” to use the label most of us use, has been in the news spotlight in recent years due to alleged foreign interference in Canadian elections. I found this Global News piece (ostensibly about the process of picking a new Director for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) very helpful in identifying some of the challenges on this file which follows rules that are foreign to most of us non-spies.
Not-So-Independent Trade Decision
This interview by Sean Speer with Steve Verheul, (Canada’s chief negotiator for the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement) highlights how the decisions regarding tariffs and trade have as much to do with alignment with our allies as they do with decisions about desiring trade liberalisation as an economic principle. The specifics of this discussion are prompted by the ongoing debate regarding tariffs on Chinese-built electric vehicles (EV), but the discussion provides insight into the balancing act between economics, human rights, national security, and the policy decisions of our allies that goes into trade considerations.
African Energy Crisis
I was surprised to learn that the 600 million Africans who lack access to electricity is a number that is 4% worse than in recent years, a number that is expected to become considerably worse as the continent’s population continues to grow. The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes how it is impossible to overcome the energy poverty deficit in Africa without fossil fuels. However, notwithstanding that Africa’s contribution to the global GHG emissions is comparably small, the global trends regarding the reduction of fossil fuels are having a disproportionate impact on Africans who already suffer from energy shortages.
MEANINGFUL METRICS
Tax to GDP Ratios
Usually GDP rates and taxation rates are presented on separate charts, but this Visual Capitalist chart tells an interesting story by portraying a tax rate to GDP ratio. Not surprisingly, European countries have among the highest tax burdens in the world, but that also reflects a greater expectation regarding the role of government services. I was a bit surprised that Canada at 33%, while still above the US’s 28%, was closer to the US than to the top European countries (several above 40%).
TAKE IT TO-GO
De Gaulle of Those Artful Thieves
August 21st marked the anniversary of the legendary theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris. It does cause a smile, although not one quite as elusive as the one made famous by da Vinci’s famous lady. The international sensation prompted by this theft certainly contributed to the popularity of this painting. We can easel-y turn the thieves into folk heroes for their ingenuity in giving this artwork a free train ride out of Paris that Sunday morning 111 years back. The lead thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman, framed this theft as true patriotism, claiming Italy should be the rightful home for this masterpiece. But we know that his argument, just as the art he was smuggling away, was on the wrong track. It did take two years to recover the painting. (To put this in perspective, this is a mere fraction of the 16 years it took da Vinci to paint it.) This story, however, has a happy ending. The painting was recovered and continues to hang today in the Louvre where she attracts more than ten million viewers each year.
If you thought the foregoing was a setup for a dramatic conclusion, I confess to drawing a blank. So forgive me for just brushing off that temptation lest I ruin things. As I leave you to ponder Mona Lisa’s smile, I’ll remind you that you’ve got some extra time. Next week is Labour Day and Insights won’t appear in your inbox again until September 7th.
Until then.
Reply to Ray