I tremble for my country whenever I see the bland, pasty face of our new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, on television. It’s not that Harper is dumb. He is actually quite clever, and stands out dramatically in a party that is notoriously filled with ignoramuses and barely literate yahoos. It’s not that Harper is incompetent. He has shown remarkable political acumen, and he ran his election campaign brilliantly. It’s not that he is dishonest, or corrupt. I’ve seen no evidence of either. The problem is not that he is “socially conservative” or promoting a religious agenda. He shows no evidence of being any more socially conservative in his personal views than the average Canadian. Besides, there is not much market for the social conservative agenda in Canada, where people remain, on the whole, individualistic and fond of personal liberty. Canadians find religious zealotry distasteful. Read more »
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Monday, May 15, 2006 — French Canadian Swearing
The Catholic Church in Quebec has surprised everyone with a peculiar publicity campaign. They have purchased space on billboards, bus-stops, and other advertising places, in order to display swear-words. This requires some explanation. French Canadian swearing is the lamest on Earth. Don’t expect anything like the baroque splendour of Mexican swearing, or the earthy imagery in Russian curses, or even the repetitive sexual obsessions we are familiar with in English. The basic French Canadian swear words are distorted forms of the words for the articles used in a mass: “tabernacle”, “chalice”, “host”, “sacristy”.
However, this cannot be explained by any religious sensitivity. French Canada, especially in Quebec, is one of the most secular societies on the planet. Church attendance is very low in Canada, but by far the lowest in Quebec. The overwhelming majority of French Canadians have little or no interest in organized religion, though many will say they have some private, personal faith, uninfluenced by any church. Most people have no idea whatsoever what any of these “swear words” mean. If you catch your finger in car door, you say “tabernac’ ”, or “tabernache”. It doesn’t call up any image. It’s just a meaningless word. The average person, if asked to explain its origin, probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. By contrast, nobody who swears in English is unaware of the meanings of the swear words. Read more »
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 — Death of Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs died last week. I did not always agree with her ideas, but I always had tremendous respect for her intellect and integrity. She was among the century’s most brilliant and original thinkers, and her presence alone made my city of Toronto an important intellectual center.
She was born in 1916, in Scranton Pennsylvania. Her first, and best-known book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was published while she still lived in New York City. It revolutionized thinking about urban planning and the nature of city neighbourhoods. But her subsequent books are equally important. They logically moved from the small scale questions she began to ask, such as “why is one street popular and safe, and another shunned and dangerous?”, through progressively larger issues of macro-economics, and finally to unexplored areas of ethics. She moved to Toronto, with her architect husband, in 1969, largely because of her opposition to the Vietnam War. Once in Toronto, she quickly became a public figure, spearheading opposition to urban policies that had already crippled many American cities. Thanks to her influence, Toronto avoided many of these disasters. Like any truly good thinker, she managed to be arrested at least twice, but she was never an enthusiast for the poses and pretenses of the professional “activist”. What she was good at was looking at the real world without the filter of ideological orthodoxy, and then writing down her common-sense conclusions with in a clear, simple style, more akin to the work of Montaigne than to the obscurantist fashions of her time. So it didn’t surprise me when I learned that, as a lonely child, she amused herself by carrying on imaginary conversations with Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and an Anglo-Saxon chieftain named Cerdric.
I first read her work when I was a teenager. One sentence of hers had a profound impact: “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” Remembering this sentenced saved me many times from being taken in by the waves of fake “rationalism”, pseudo-science, and mysticism masquerading as reason, that characterized the century I grew up in. John Sewell, the mayor of Toronto who actually took her ideas seriously, did not waste time explaining her writings, or their meaning. Instead, he spoke of her as a charming dinner companion, addicted to sweets (especially butter tarts), and relentlessly curious and questioning. Sewell was eventually ousted by an alliance of developers, corrupt police, and sleazy politicians, but in his term in office, Toronto blossomed, while other North American cities sank into decay and chaos. Many credit this positive era to her influence. The sad thing is that Jane’s struggle will go on in a new form. In all likelihood, her ideas will be oversimplified and grotesquely distorted, and used by some future generation to do harm. That is the most horrible thing about being an original thinker.
Sunday, April 23, 2006 — The Cosmopolitan Dream
My friend, the artist Taral Wayne, recently showed me some ancient Indian coins and asked me what I could tell him about the city-state for which they were minted. He thought I might be interested because he was sure they were from one of the ancient republics. He thought it might be named “Yaudheva”, which was what was scrawled by the coin dealer on its mounting card. There was also another word describing the figure au verso, but neither Taral nor I could make it out clearly.
This was all a bit misleading. Yaudheva would mean something like ” — ? — which is godlike”, an unlikely name for a city. But after looking through my old notes on ancient Indian republics, it dawned on me that it must just be a mix-up between “v” and “y” by the dealer.
Once I knew that it was actually Yaudhiya, then it was simple to untangle. That is the name of one of the republican confederacies of north-western India. I have extensive notes on the Yaudhiya republics. They are not as well-known as the Audumbara republics, but they are reasonably well-recorded from the 5th Century BC onwards. They are mentioned in lots of ancient literature, including the Mahabharata, the Puranas and in Panini’s treatise on grammar. They acquired fame, and a reputation for valour, by defeating Alexander, halting his progress into India. The coin is probably from the Yaudhiyan republic of Rohtika (or Rohitaka), some ruins of which survive in the minor provincial city of Rohtak in the State of Haryana.
The Yaudhiyan confederacy was a collection of city states sharing the same tribal ancestry, much like the early Latin cities. The Yaudhiyan tribes spread across what it now the Punjab. They developed republican forms of government quite early, and maintained them quite late, despite temporary submissions to the Kushan kings. When they threw off the Kushans, they proudly re-established their republican constitutions. But they continued to mint coins following the Kushan model, and corresponding roughly to the Greek drachma, on which the Kushan coin was based. Read more »
Tuesday, April 11, 2006 — A Giant Fence of Fools
The weather is too beautiful for me to take politics very seriously. I’m also too engrossed in finishing my fantasy novel to pay much attention.
An American Senator is interviewed on Canadian television, explaining his plan to build a fifteen-foot high, barbwire-topped wall along the 6416 kilometre (3987 miles) border between the United States and Canada. The interviewer is rendered speechless by incredulity as the Senator expresses his inability to understand why Canadians would take offense at the project. I wonder what will happen in the adjacent New Brunswick and Maine towns where the border runs through the middle of the Public Library and the book check-in desk is in the U.S. and the book check-out is in Canada?
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 — Dick Gephart Quotes Us (How’s That Again?)
In 1992, I wrote a little essay in which I criticized the widespread belief that democracy is nothing more than a mere local custom of a few “western” countries, of little interest or applicability to most of the world. This orthodoxy, taught in countless university courses and glibly (and gleefully) chanted by all the world’s enthusiasts for tyranny and exploitation, was, I wrote, without historical or anthropological foundation. I pointed out that the elements on which modern representative democracies were built exist in every major cultural tradition, and are the common experience and heritage of humankind. I sketched out a series of examples that supported my thesis. But the article was nothing more than an anecdotal “think piece”. Read more »
Saturday, March 18, 2006 — Corporatism and Colonialism
I just finished reading Dean Mahomet’s Travels, an autobiographical account of a career in the East Indian Company’s armed forces during the eighteenth century, by a self-educated Bihari Muslim who eventually immigrated to Ireland [see Reading for March 2006]. There are many things to learn from this book, but I would like to use it as evidence for my views on the history and nature of the Corporation. Read more »
Tuesday, March 7, 2006 — Thinking of Timbuktu
Something made me think of Timbuktu, today. For a moment, I could smell the wind-blown sand, the acacias, the drying dung. For a moment I could hear snorting camels, the rapidfire street-talk in Chiini, the wailing muezin, the griots playing gurkels and koras, the slender Fulani traders walking like gods through the market place, jaunty in their conical hats. Fabled Tombouctou, the name itself has come to mean “far away and unreachable”. Sad Timbuktu, the fading shadow of an ancient greatness.…“Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, but the wealth of wisdom comes from Timbuktu.” Few can now read the manuscripts from its centuries-old libraries, and the children who tumble out of the Lycée may not care about their loss. Outside the city, the monstrous sand dunes march southward, threatening to swallow what’s left of the city, like so many others that have sunk and drowned and vanished into the sand sea. Years of war among the desert nomads, ended only by uneasy truce in the late nineties, did not do it any good. Nor did decades of exploitation and brutality by a parasitic Marxist aristocracy, before that. Read more »