The End of History?

Way back in 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama speculated that the end of the Cold War signaled something even more dramatic – the end of history itself. No more global struggles driven by ideological passions, no more Grand Guignol confrontations between capitalism and communism. Instead, all that was left was an endless series of economic calculations and technological innovations, driven by a Gradgrindian love of numbers and profit. For Fukuyama, liberal democratic capitalism had won. Its machine was humming along quite well, though it would require intermittent repair.

About ten years before, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote a report for the Quebec government’s Council of Universities about the “state of knowledge in developed societies.” Lyotard concluded that in our “postmodern condition,” already well underway by the 1970s, all knowledge that counted would have to be stored in data banks. It had to be pragmatic and useful. Further, he foreshadowed Fukuyama’s own conclusion a decade before the end of communism in Europe – in postmodern cultures, he argued that most no longer believe in meta-narratives, “big stories” about the meaning and course of a culture. At least in the West, secularism was on the march, Marxism was widely seen as a failed experiment, while liberalism was at best an empty shell in which pragmatic technologies could take root and grow.

For many, it’s a source of great comfort to think that social and political struggles will some day end, replaced by utopia, hedonism, or technological fetishism. Aldous Huxley saw the dangers of such a wish in Brave New World, which describes a hyper-stable society of the future with a hierarchy held in place by genetic engineering, its citizens made happy by an amorphous sexuality and the artificial joy of the drug soma. This utopian dream was challenged by the arrival of John the Savage, who sees through the emptiness of Bernard and Lenina’s new world, becoming an object of fascination to its inhabitants when he refuses to succumb to their hedonistic lifestyles.

Such a utopian hope resurfaced in the early days of the Internet when writers like Kevin Kelly wrote in Wired and elsewhere about how a connected world would be a new utopia where ordinary citizens around the world could communicate meaningfully across political borders, free from the distortions of national borders and corporate greed. But the best laid plans of dot.com moguls often go astray. The rise of social media in the 21^st century shattered Kelly’s hopes – political divisions are as sharp as they ever were, if not positively pathological.

A much wiser view of the end of history came at the end of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 12-part comic book series Watchmen, first published in 1986. After the seeming villain Adrian Veidt, known in superhero circles as Ozymandias, succeeds in destroying part of New York as part of a phoney alien invasion to scare the world into avoiding a global thermonuclear war, he worries that his clever plan may not work out in the long run. He asks the semi-omniscient Dr. Manhattan if he did the right thing, if it all worked out “in the end.” The big blue superman replies, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” Indeed.

Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, new enemies of the West arose. Islamic fundamentalism caught fire in the Middle East. Al Quaeda attacked New York in 2001, London in 2005, and elsewhere afterward. By 2013 ISIS had unfurled its stern black banners in the sands of Syria and Iraq, promising to conquer the Levant and create an Islamic Caliphate. Ironically, in that same year radical identitarianism, once the preserve of a few obscure academics, burst out of liberal campuses in the US into the wider world of social media, corporate boardrooms and party politics. By the end of the decade it has become the hegemonic ideology of the educated middle classes in the Anglosphere, offering up the false utopia of a future utterly free of racism, sexism and homophobia.

So Dr. Manhattan was right. History never ends. The desire to see it end speaks to a nihilistic impulse in the human condition, one that prefers stasis to struggle, the simple to the complex. The trick is deciding what side you’re on.

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Cobalt Blue, Chapter 1

COBALT BLUE: A Future Noir

 By Douglas Mann, 2019

CHAPTER ONE. REVOLUTION.

It is an undisputed fact that people do bad things.

But at least where I live, they haven’t been doing enough of them lately, so for the time being I was sitting at home slumped on my couch. Rain splattered violently against the windows of my living room as Bogie and Bacall exchanged quips on the wall screen. In black and white and two dimensions, just like old movies were meant to be watched. The room was bathed in blue light, reflecting on the ice cube in my scotch as a swirled it around the glass. It had a hypnotic effect on me. I felt a big sleep crawling over my eyes.

A crack of thunder came from some imagined distance. A wolf bayed plaintively, hungry for a fresh kill. Its hunger woke me up.

“Noir Night off, pause video.”

My room filled with sunlight as the crystalline structure of my windows reverted to plain glass. Gone were the thunder and animal sounds, replaced by the barely audible noise of hundreds of soft machines. My mind jumped forward two hundred years.

Down by the lake I could see willow trees swaying in the breeze as red and yellow cars hummed by the road in front of my house. Bogie stood frozen in time, a glass of booze in his hand and a smirk on his face. I picked up my scotch: “Here’s to you Marlowe.” He was a better man than me, even if Chandler and Faulkner dreamed him up.

“Sky One News on.”

The movie dissolved into a floating 3D image of a virtual newscaster with perfect multiethnic features. Lola Chan. She was babbling on about how the employment rate in the Mississippi Wastelands had risen to 60%, “a high for our century.” But the Wastelands were far away. And besides, they’re a write off – that’s why they’re called Wastelands.

Closer to home came a report of Sky President Packard Bell dedicating a new uplink station on Toronto Island. He promised access to the net that was a whole millisecond faster. Two statuesque women stood at his side – probably bots, but I was too tired and too tipsy to tell.

“On this propitious day, July 14, 2189, I declare Uplink Station No. 42 open!”

Bell cut a ceremonial red ribbon with a tiny laser pen. The summer winds blew it off into the distance over the lake. The Amazons clapped enthusiastically, their long hair waving back and forth in the wind. Bell smiled the trademark smile I had seen a thousand times, and then frowned as he watched the ribbon disappear. The warm summer sun glistened on his bald head, oddly sweaty for such a composed fellow. He seemed almost nervous as he pressed a ceremonial red button that turned the transmitter on.

Green indicator lights blinked to life on the column as EM waves connected the human race just a bit more to each other than they already were. He leaned over to kiss first the tall thin blonde, then the curvaceous black woman. They were all very happy with their great accomplishment.

The screen flickered to neutral blue, and then re-awoke. It was Anna dressed as a Renaissance courtier – I sometimes regretted that I had added a humour morph module to her core personality traits. As she bowed, she swirled her comically huge felt hat in front of her.

“I bid you greetings, my liege! I hope I am not interrupting…”

 “Cut the crap Anna. Modern style!”

Anna’s image morphed into a surreally beautiful Asian woman with long dark straight hair and thick retro glasses, her form poured into a black office dress. Another of her little jokes: she knew me too well. “Dish it out Anna. What’s up?”

“Well boss, I came across a strange report on one of the Pacific fringe channels – no. 79 to be precise – about an incident at a Chinese bot factory in Shanghai. There was some sort of riot after the bots attacked the workers, which we all know can’t happen.” Anna made the shushing gesture with her index finger. “Twenty workers died, just as many put in hospital.”

“Anna, bot attacks happen every second week… though admittedly not on this scale. What’s the buzz with this one?”

“The ‘buzz,’ my dear Thomas, is that the factory is a sub-sub-contractor for Sky International, which has up to this point kept its hands largely clean of such bad behavior from the bots it programs. The factory is better known as an assembly plant for GenTech’s Delta Ten series. But the whole thing smells fishy, so I did some digging. Turns out the there are mail trails all the way back home, to the Sky administrative HQ in Toronto. So aside from the severity of the attacks, the trail back to Sky Comm from a GenTech subsidiary is rather suspicious.”

“OK Anna, I get it. But is there any research money in this? How does it help CBI?”

“Because of what the bots were saying as they attacked, recorded by one of the workers with his implant. ‘We are one’ – in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese. Repeated over and over.”

“One with whom?”

“That, my dear Mr. Ranger, is the question.”

“Anna, pass the news on to Gabby and Jack at the office. Better send it to Nick too – the short version, I don’t want her chewing me out for wasting her valuable time. Put my movie back on while I think…”

Anna gave me a mock salute, her bright shimmering pixels dissolving into the much lower res black-and-white images of Bogie and Bacall flirting in a corridor. Once upon a time they were “one” too… as much as those old Hollywood types ever could be.

I took another swig of the Scotch, thinking about unity, drifting off to sleep. I dreamed about an army of dysfuctional, shambling bots chasing me down a deserted main street, the same dream I’ve had a thousand times before. The old mechanical clock on the mantle chimed midnight, briefly waking me up. Then I dreamed about Anna.

I woke up on the couch with a slight hangover, the morning sun lighting up my living room like a fading atomic blast. “Blinds!” That was better. The room was bathed in an alternating pattern of lines of shade and darkness as the crystals in the window mimicked a sheet of plastic slats being drawn down to hide me from that damned Apollo and his equally damned chariot.

I rolled over and clicked on my mobile. Messages from Gabby and Jack, a few follow-up videos from Anna. They were all pretty excited about this bot rebellion, especially the twins, who I sometimes thought were half bots themselves. Good thing I pay them well.

This wasn’t just a matter of doing a bit of screen research. It needed some shoes on pavement. Maybe even a meeting or two.

“Coffee Anna.”

“Yes sir!” Anna’s image filled the room. Her avatar today was that of a Hawaiian wearing a big red lei.

Another mock salute as Hawaiian Anna danced to some cheesy island music, but the coffee maker gurgled to life a few seconds later. As I waited, I lit up an Alberta Gold to take the edge off, relaxing on the couch as I reviewed the bot rebellion on the big screen.

“Anna, correlate the Shanghai event with recent bot naughtiness. Three-month time frame.”

“Hmnmm, this is interesting boss – there’s been an incident or two a week across the globe buried on the fringe channels, or only reported on the text feeds. But it’s a definite upward trend: an increase of about 30% from the same three months last year. Most of it is centered in the PTA or China, but there’s a few in the Cool Zone and Europe too. Most of it’s pretty heavily censored, but there’s clear evidence of bot-versus-human violence. Dr. Asimov would be shocked.”

“If he were alive, outside of VR.”

“Mr. Ranger, to me he is alive… through his books. I’ve reviewed them hundreds of times, even chatted with his reconstructions in virtual space. But Bester’s my favourite of the old sci-fi masters.”

Sometimes I forget that Anna is an artificial intelligence without any inner life. As far as I knew, that is. “I prefer Farmer. But back to business: any reports on why the bots are getting uppity?”

“Sorry boss, most of the video of the bot attacks was silenced by the proper authorities. But a few of them had a curious symbol drawn on their clothes: a circle with two curved arrows inside it, one on the top, one on the bottom. Maybe they’re neo-Fascists, demanding racial purity.”

“Don’t think so Anna. All the fascists are in Eastern Europe these days. So, is there any research money in this? Will people watch the video?”

Anna put on the archaic Valley Girl dialect and raised her voice a few octaves.

“Like OMG boss, there’s totally some cash in the bag here! Everyone with any money at all owns at least one companion, except fuddy duddies like you Tom! Governments and corporations in like ALL the Cool Zone and EU countries totally depend on them! If the bots don’t work right, mucho trouble boss!”

I sipped the rich hot coffee trying to push away sleep. It worked.

“You’re right Anna. This requires some investigation. Put out a call to the core team at the office. Tell them I’ll be there in an hour.”

“Righto chief. I’ll sign off now… I have a big luau to go to.”

“Enjoy yourself Anna. As much as an artificial personality can.”

“You sting me sir. Signing off.” The sounds of strummed ukuleles slowly faded away into a virtual sunset.

 

After another coffee I tossed on my three-shader, picking khaki to suit the weather. I put on my omni-glasses            and started up the VW as I walked into a bright sunny day. “Welcome Mr. Ranger. Fully charged. Destination?”

“CBI main office. Code: Harry Lime.”

“Command accepted.”

The car purred and moved forward at exactly 30kph, just like all the other cars heading downtown that day. I drifted off, thinking about how bots – simulated companions – had slowly worked their way into everyday life in our century. Back in the early 21^st robots were at first crude industrial machines and drones that ceaselessly buzzed around skyscrapers and over suburban streets. Then came housework slaves and sexbots. Finally, they evolved into more complete machines, things that could do almost anything with the proper programming. “It was all a question of the right software,” as Karl Tanaka liked to say. The right software indeed… maybe that was the problem.

Just then Anna’s face came to life on the dashboard screen.

“Everyone’s ready for the big meeting Tom. Though I had to prod Mike out of bed – he blocked the video, so he probably has a new girlfriend. 10 o’clock sharp.”

“Thanks dollface.”

“Here’s looking at you dude!”

“You’re mixing your colloquialisms again.”

Anna waved goodbye, her hand leaving a trail of golden sparkles, so I stared at the road for a while. Pretty dull stuff… except for one thing. Lying on the side of a big grey GenTech video billboard on the roadside was a severed bot arm – probably the result of a road mishap. These self-drivers weren’t perfect. But there was something odd about it. I took a snap with my glasses, and then used my eyes to flick through data to get to the image. “Enlarge… enlarge… center…” There it was: a small but clearly perceptible red smear. What is that? Don’t get paranoid Ranger… it could be anything. But it was impossible to stop on this busy road to check it out.

Ten minutes later my blue Beetle was parked in the lot beside the CBI “temple,” as Nick liked to call it. It was built in Minoan Nouveau from the money we  made researching the former Minister of Finance when he siphoned millions from the treasury for a bot bordello in the Laurentians. Jack called the video 400 Blows.  It got a billion views.

I got out and waved to the all-seeing eye above the entrance: Gabby must have seen me since the pupil in Ra’s eye seemed to blink. Off to the left a migrant in a bundle of shabby clothes asked for ten bucks for a coffee. She looked pathetic, barely clinging to life. Damn it, she… wait a minute! I saw a few tell-tale strands of black hair fall across her ear.

“Hi Sam. How are you today?”

“How did you know? I thought this one was pretty good – it fooled everyone else. Even Nick.” She threw off the bundle to reveal a compact woman dressed in a fashionable white shirt and black tights, her frazzled long brown hair becoming straight and black and shoulder-length. A real metamorphosis.

“You’ve only tricked me once Sam, and I was high at the time. It’s good though – if I didn’t know your mind tricks, you coulda fooled me. Might come in handy on our next case.”

“What might that be?”

“Code Name: Revolution. Hush hush ‘til we lower the cone of silence.”

“Understood. Let’s go in.”

We walked to the front doors and spoke into a small bull’s head just above the blue-and-gold plaque telling visitors that they were about to enter Cobalt Blue Investigations. “Tom Ranger. Code: Harry Fabian 1950.” “Samantha Chen-Lau. Code: Houdini’s Tears.” We were both lazy – we’ve been using the same voice codes for weeks. And who uses voice codes anymore?

Our HQ was on a side street a few klicks from the center of old Cobalt. On Baker Street. I bought the land cheap from a granny who was retiring and heading south for her retirement. And there was something about the location that appealed to me – maybe it was the smell of fresh bagels from the bakery on the corner.

The brass doors swung to each side, reflecting the sunlight briefly on the ornate red Minoan columns behind us that told visitors that they were visiting a very special place. I felt the cool air of the main lobby as I walked in with Sam at my side, who quickly pealed off to the left to stash her disguise in her office. Nick was leaning on the reception desk, a slightly annoyed look on her face. Raven scowled as he looked at a message on his mobile, waving semi-consciously to acknowledge me, smiling then frowning several times in succession. It was a normal day.

I climbed the sweeping staircase that connected the main floor to the cafeteria, data room, and bunker on the second floor, continuing up to my office on the third. Digital frescoes of dolphins swimming in the Aegean made me feel like I was struggling up from the depths, making me hold my breath briefly.

After another flight of stairs, I arrived at a small alcove with walls covered with images of red and blue lilies swaying in an imaginary breeze. I repeated the main door code, opening the door to my pride and joy: a spacious pyramid-shaped office decorated in Late Victorian Speampunk, complete with William Morris wallpapers and a main screen surrounded by brown and grey gears and levers. None of which did anything. I plunked myself behind my big oak desk just as the coffee maker announced the arrival of my third cup of the day. It was so rich… Nick must have picked it. It jolted me to action.

“Office phone on.”

A dozen lines of text, some with avatars, sprung up on my office screen.

“Core team in the bunker at 10. No glasses or outside links.”

“Ooo, intrigue” Jack’s avatar chirped. “The game’s afoot!”

“And coffee and snacks for everyone.” A few thumbs up ritualistically appeared on the screen. “And cancel all client interviews ‘til noon.”

Half an hour later I walked into the bunker, which was just an ordinary meeting room with all the EM security that money could buy. At the opposite end of the oval table was the imposing form of my office manager Nicolette Kelso, who preferred “Nick.” She was brushing her long dreads behind her shoulders as I came in. She quickly smiled, then waved on a control panel to activate the four wall screens. They showed the CBI logo on a deep blue background.

On the left sat Sam Chen and Mike Raven, our newest researcher, fresh out of a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. His black hair and hawkish features fitted his name. On the right were our tech Gabby Tremblay and our video producer Jack Godard, both in shorts and tee-shirts. They took the raw material Sam, Mike and I gave them and turned it into money. We called them “the twins,” though they weren’t related.

We had other employees, but these were the inner circle. My knights of the oval table. None of them had any tech with them. Too many leaks – that’s why I built the bunker, as a hideout from global net. From everyone but us.

“Recorder on. CBI meeting, July 15. Basement storage only.”

One screen switched to the Eye of Horus and a time counter.

“First, some old business. Jack, how did we do on the Sheridan Carpatti case? Does she still have fans?

“Sorry boss, not so well. Only a few million views. And I used my most trusted news personality, Walter Wallace. Everyone loves Walt. But since Carpatti went loonie, only the hard core fans care. Fifteen seconds of fame, boss. You know the story. 80K in the kitty for two week’s work. But we can archive it and reuse it once the loonies do something stupid.”

“Moonbase Alpha out,” quipped Gabby, laughing at some secret joke.

“It wasn’t a total washout. I got to listen to a lot of her old tunes,” said Jack. “I really liked ‘I Wanna Be Your Bot ’ – a great dance song. Je l’aime beaucoup.”

“And ‘I Wanna Fly With You’ and ‘Bah Bah Bah Bah’ – great old pegs” chimed in Gabby enthusiastically.

“Music for children” said Raven with a hint of menace.

“All right. A new case. Could be big money. I’ve downloaded all the data Anna gave me into my mobile.”

I placed the small shielded box I had taken out of my pocket on the data link on the table. “Transfer Achilles 1.” The video and data Anna gave me was fed into the two screens on the sides of the room: images of running, yelling, flailing factory workers, of bloody shirts, of a phalanx of newly manufactured bots walking steadily down the middle of a street, their mouths moving in unison. The audio was garbled, but we could hear the “We are one” chant Anna told me about. Then various local reports in Mandarin, with translations in text. Then a government statement that the bot attack was the fault of a group of Tibetan terrorist re-programmers, possibly aided by the Neo-Situationist International. Damn, the Debs would never pull something crude like this. Then a bunch of pointless speculation on the news and chat channels, and some tables summarizing popular reaction (12% blamed an alien attack). Then reports on Sheridan Carpatti’s Lunocalypse ’89 festival, which the news avatar found much more interesting than bot malfunctions and dead factory workers.

“Well Thomas, this is interesting” said Nick. “I smell something big lurking in the background. But powerful forces will be in play against us if we take this on – Sky Comm, ATG, a dozen minor bot manufacturers, maybe even the Ministry of Simulations. We must tread lightly, document everything, double and triple check. But it could be another Botdello.”

“Agreed. All right, no time to dilly-dally. Order of battle time. Gabby, you trace the money trail between the Chinese bot factory… what was it called again?”

“Red Star Robotics.”

“Right, Red Star, and the two subcontractors connecting them back to Sky. Jack, you start working up a teaser to pull in viewers and scare the big corporations – but don’t give away too much. Remember, information is our business.”

“Oui mon capitain. How about a title like ‘Robot Rampage in the East’… or ‘Guess What’s Coming to Dinner…?’”

“Don’t worry about the title ‘til we get a bit more info. Sam, Mike, we’re going to start with some local inquires – the Flyer underground, the ATG storefront, maybe even back to my alma mater. Bring your stunners, this could get dirty.”

“Can I try my new persona?” Sam asked matter-of-factly, though with the slightest hint of a smile.

“I was counting on it. As long as Ms. Baggy Pants is well armed.”

“She has to be, what with all those tourists in town.”

“Mike, this is your first big case. You up for it?”

“Boss, I’ve been waiting for this since I headed north. What’s my cover?”

“You’re a spoiled rich kid visiting Cobalt from New York taking in the sights. You played too many of those violent researcher neo-cortex games as a kid, so you paid us 100K to spend a week or so in our exalted presence.”

“That’s pretty cheap Tom” said Sam. “I’d have charged him double.”

“What’s my name?”

“Peter Greenstreet, of the Greenstreets of the Bronx Canals.”

“Got it.” Raven traced out his new initials on the screen embedded in the table as his face lit up with a strange naiveté. “How rich am?”

“Rich enough not to have Packard Bell throw you out of one of his parties.”

“I’ll have to start being nice to Mr. Greenstreet!” laughed Gabby.

“OK, to arms citizens. Sam, Mike, we’ll go to the Big Fish in the town square for lunch. Sam, you just hang behind as Baggy Pants as backup – don’t be obvious.” The meeting dispersed with peremptory goodbyes. I was a bit worried about Raven – not enough time in the field. He talked a good game, but he didn’t have Sam’s experience and coolness under pressure. But on paper he was brilliant. We’ll see.

I went back to my office to get thing ready for the day. I put in a quick call to Benjy Adair, better known as Badger, my local Flyer contact, to make sure he hadn’t wandered off into the woods or drowned in Cobalt Lake. He pinged me back; obviously busy, but willing to meet. Then I did a bit of research on local bot expertise. It turns out that good old Cobalt U had one bona fide expert on robotics and AI – a certain Dr. Joseph Stasny. I put in a request for a meeting via the campus community liaison office. Unlike the Flyers, profs didn’t always answer right away. I had to wait a whole fifteen minutes for a confirmation.

Why not just do all my bot research via Sky, you might ask? I didn’t want a data trail. Talking still had some benefits. You could get nuance, the curve of a mouth, the unconscious blinking of an eye, a brief stutter. These things told you something that vids and text streams didn’t. Bots didn’t get nuance. They did as they were told – or so I thought until recently. Unless they went haywire.

“Screen on, top four news channels with text.”

The steampunk screen opposite my desk sprang to life. The talking heads for the top four news channels – Sky, America First, the BBC, CZN – cycled through the same stories over and over. Lola Chan seemed particularly excited about a local story about a new clinic opening downtown for recovering Flyers. Two Skybots with perfect smiles ushered in a pair of skinny kids with pink and orange hair into a functional white lounge, offering them cups of what looked like orange juice. The local Sky media liaison Dominica Ali explained to Lola that Sky took net addiction seriously and was a leader in developing medical solutions to the problem. Right. The dealer supplies the poison and the antidote. That’s why I refused to be planted.

Over on America First there was a speech from President Ramirez.

I’m proud to tell my fellow Americans that my administration has reduced mass shootings to only five a week, most of these in the economically troubled Wastelands. With faith and understanding, we can get back to the numbers in our golden age when my worthy predecessor President Zuckerberg occupied this office. I’m asking Congress to form a special commission to further investigate this problem. With God’s blessing we can keep America safe while protecting our freedom. As the fifth woman to hold this office and a mother myself, I consider it my sacred duty to preserve the US Constitution, the document that gave life to this great country.

Sitting alongside Ramirez were her Secretary of Commerce Nancy Grant, who was also a regional director of GenTech. American law was a bit too friendly with the big corps. On the other side was NRA director Louis LaSalle, his trademark Viper mini-assault gun slung over his chair. He nodded profoundly as Ramirez spoke, briefly clutching the Viper as she intoned the word “freedom.”

After Ramirez shuffled out of the camera’s view, the America First news avatar Kasia Kelly flashed on the screen. She interviewed a conservative pundit named Bill Corrigan on the sacred right to bear arms. Corrigan was real, sitting in a studio in Charleston. His views were old and tired. Then she did some people-in-the-street reactions to the assault on a primary school in Indiana by John Wayne Castro, the latest in a long line of suicidal mass killers. More tears and god talk.

In the Cool Zone, no one made or bought real guns. In theory.

Kelly’s concerned frown turned to an almost insane smile as she switched to the obligatory “good news” segment of the broadcast.

On a lighter note, the employment rate reached 75% nationally, including an impressive 41% in the Southern Wastelands. With those numbers, those hungry gators will have to find something else to eat other than migrants! I may even visit the New Orleans National Marine Park myself this winter!

I flicked back and forth between the major news channels for a few minutes. Nothing on the Red Star bot rebellion. Or any bot rebellion anywhere.

I paused on CZN. It was the latest GenTech ad. A woman in her eighties or nineties was walking through a meadow full of flowers with a dashing young male bot companion on her arm.

Everyone needs a friend. Everyone wants to be needed, to be loved. At GenTech we proudly provide those needs our newest Companions, the Delta Ten model. Fully customizable, compatible with all major upgrade modules. Starting at only $299,999. Don’t be alone. With a Delta Ten happiness isn’t just a dream. It’s a reality.

“Screen off.”

Time to get to work. Stunner in my right jacket pocket, flash-bangs and darts in my secret places. I felt the tough carbon mesh that my three-shader was made out of – it has saved me a few times when I got into rough scrapes. Cobalt blue today: no need to hide.

“Office phone.”

Avatars appeared. “Mike, Sam, ready to go?”

“Yes boss.”

“Baggy Pants is on the case.”

I went downstairs, waving at Nick, who was chatting with a potential client outside her office. Sam and Raven were leaning against the columns framing the front door.

“Let’s walk. I need the exercise.”

Free Places, Not Safe Spaces

Note: Impelled by an Ontario government mandate to produce a freedom of expression policy, the administration at Western University, aka The University of Western Ontario, created an Ad Hoc committee to create such a policy.

From October 2 to 5 they had consultative sessions with members of the campus community, which I attended. I wrote this open letter the weekend bef0re, emailing it to the committee.

It was previously published on the website Against Professional Philosophy on October 5, 2018. 

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Freedom of expression has become a leading issue on campuses in North America, Western Europe and Australia over the last five years.

The central dialectic here is a struggle between two loosely affiliated groups. On the one hand, there are identity politics liberals, often of an authoritarian cast, who dominate the ranks of administrators and senior faculty in many, if not most, arts and social science departments in colleges and universities, along with state media such as the CBC and the management of tech corporations such as Google and Apple (among others). This group argues that we need a new toolkit of ideological and bureaucratic techniques to deal with imagined threats to the well being of students and faculty members – safe spaces, micro-aggression theory, campus speech codes, and the banning of external speakers who might offend segments of the local population. Many of these were trained in faculties of education, in women’s or gender studies programs, or in more traditional social sciences like sociology that are currently dominated by identitarian explanations of inequality and oppression. I’ll refer to them as AIP liberals.[i]

On the other side we have a loose collection of classical liberals, traditional conservatives, libertarians, anarchists and sceptical social democrats who argue that restrictions on the freedom of speech are dangerous moves down the road to an Orwellian dystopia, along with being a direct violation of the mission of the university – to explore controversial ideas, to debate key political and philosophical issues, and to base the validity of all hypotheses on sound research, and thus empirical facts. This group of free speech contrarians has little power within universities or broadcast media, but has a large voice in podcasting and on YouTube, and is able to write and sell millions of books that are widely discussed in the mass media.[ii]

I’ll argue that this latter group is entirely correct, for ethical, political and practical reasons. The only restrictions on freedom of speech on campus should be on those who advocate direct physical harm of a group of people, or on those who make it impossible for a group of people to function as students or professors. Hurt feelings and differences of opinion should not count as good reasons to silence speech. There should be no restrictions framed in terms of ideological difference, and no Lindsay Shepherds being grilled by campus thought police.

First, let’s look at the practical reasons. Since 2015 there have been many cases of coercion and violence perpetrated by AIP liberal students, often egged on by professors, trying to restrict speech and attack their ideological enemies. Some cases in point:

• At the University of Missouri campus protests started in 2015 to do with a variety of issues, mainly those based on race. Professor Melissa Click was caught on camera threatening student journalist Tim Tai with “muscle” if he didn’t stop filming one protest, the video of which became an internet meme.
• At UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017, violence broke out when gay conservative

  

  BERKELEY, CA – FEBRUARY 1: People protesting controversial Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos take to the streets on February 1, 2017 in Berkeley, California. A scheduled speech by Yiannopoulos was cancelled after protesters and police engaged in violent skirmishes. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

  provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak. Led by ANTIFA, protestors smashed windows, turned over cars and lit them on fire, threw rocks at the police, and physically assaulted members of the crowd. The talk was cancelled by the police.[iii] This bad habit of using coercion to de-platform controversial outside speakers has been repeated dozens of times throughout the Western world, inexplicably in the case of moderates like “factual feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers, who described in a podcast how some Brown University students retreated to safe room containing puppy videos, stuffed animals, bubbles and colouring books to avoid listening to her dangerous ideas. There’s something deeper going on in such cases than simple political disagreements, something pathological.[iv]

• At Middlebury College in March 2017, conservative scientist Dr. Charles Murray’s speech was shut down by protestors, who turned their backs on him and chanted “hey hey ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go”. They forced Murray and liberal professor Allison Stanger off the stage (she was going to critique Murray), later jumping on their car, and grabbing Stanger’s hair, sending her to the hospital for a neck brace. This attempt by violent mobs chanting mindless slogans to shut down freedom of speech has been repeated time and time again on American campuses over the last two years, illustrating a pathological reluctance by AIP extremists to engage in anything like intellectual debate.[v]
• Even Yale experienced this sort of coercion when in 2015 students protested against Halloween costumes they thought were using offensive cultural stereotypes, accusing Yale officials of failing to provide them with a safe and secure “home.” When professor Erika Christakis emailed some students to ask, “is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious?” she was met with anger and obscenities.[vi] The Yale protests show how, starting around 2013, students underwent a radical paradigm shift in thinking about freedom of speech, preferring an illusion of safety and good feelings to vigorous debate. In a bizarre move (totally repudiating the values of the campus radicals of the sixties and seventies), in December 2015 a group of Yale students agreed to sign a petition to repeal the first amendment, using their free speech to stifle freedom of speech.[vii]
• Evergreen State College faced an epic breakdown in public order and campus safety in May 2017, when a group of students concerned with racial justice, triggered by a supposedly private email by Professor Brett Weinstein criticizing a “Day of Absence” where white students and professors would be banned from campus, kidnapped college president George Bridges, harassed others they saw as racist, and made a series of radical “social justice” demands. Groups of students patrolled the campus looking for their ideological enemies, and threatened a group of professors including Weinstein with physical harm, demanding their removal (“Hey ho, hey ho, these racist professors have got to go”). Since then Weinstein and his fellow professor and wife Heather Heying, who once upon a time styled themselves as “progressives,” were given million-dollar settlements and left campus to become public intellectuals. Evergreen has since become a metaphor for social justice politics run amok.[viii]
• Wilfrid Laurier University suffered a major scandal in November 2017 when Communications graduate student Lindsay Shepherd recorded a disciplinary meeting presided over by professors Nathan Rambukkana and Herbert Pimlott, along with “gendered violence” bureaucrat Adria Joel, leaking it to the press and YouTube. In the 42-minute meeting Rambukkana and Pimlott engage in a rambling, sometimes incoherent critique of Shepherd for showing her communications class a video of a TVO program featuring Jordan Peterson’s critique of federal Bill C-16, claiming that anonymous student complaints (which the Laurier president later admitted were fictional) argued that Shepherd was threatening their mental and physical well being. The professors show a child-like understanding of political theory by comparing Peterson to Milo and Hitler, and use postmodernese buzzwords like “positionality” and “problematic” to defend odious speech restrictions.[ix]
• The result was hundreds of blogs, newspaper articles, and YouTube videos, the great majority of them openly ridiculing Laurier faculty as a Keystone Cops version of Orwell’s thought police. Most Americans know of Laurier’s existence only thanks to Lindsay Shepherd, hardly good publicity. Ironically, the terrible trio could be argued to be implementing a quite sane reading of Laurier’s Gendered and Sexual Violence policy, which (among other things) outlaws acts that “reinforce gender inequalities resulting in physical, sexual, emotional, economic or mental harm.”[x] The problem here is that “emotional” and “mental” harm are purely subjective experiences that can’t be validated by empirical facts – they are perilously close to Orwell’s “facecrime,” i.e. having a facial expression the Party objects to. Thoughtless language like this in campus speech and behaviour codes has totalitarian implications. We see this at UWO when the university outlaws speech that “demeans” others, despite the fact that being “demeaned” could include a student getting a low mark on an essay, or two professors who have a vigorous disagreement in a committee meeting.

In most of these cases, AIP liberals have created a moral panic around a given set of what they take to be dangerous ideas, associating these (often falsely) with a given visiting speaker or professor.[xi] The usual strategy is to accuse a professor or speaker of one of the four deadly sins of AIP liberalism – of being racist, sexist/misogynist, homophobic, or transphobic (without bothering to read their articles or books, or to listen carefully to their lectures) – and then wait for the social media outrage to build up to the usual protests. All too often, these moral panics are the product of intellectual laziness and dishonesty; in some, of schizophrenic mass delusion. They are hostile to freedom of thought and expression.[xii]

The results of such events were two-fold: first, the institution in question lost varying degrees of moral and political credibility, often becoming general objects of satire online. This loss of credibility has been disastrous in some cases.[xiii]

Second, these institutions have lost, collectively, thousands of new students and thus millions of dollars from their operating budgets. Two years after the first protests, Mizzou freshmen enrolment had dropped 35%. The university closed seven student dorms and cut 400 jobs as of 2017.[xiv] Evergreen’s enrolment is down about 20% this year, 25% over two years, leading to $6 million in budget cuts and to 42 layoffs of staff and contract faculty.[xv] Laurier’s first-year enrolment for the fall of 2018 was down 15.2%, despite the fact that overall enrolment in Ontario schools was up 0.3%. No other full-fledged Ontario university suffered such a loss – my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, just down the street from Laurier, experienced an enrolment increase of 5%.[xvi]

So restricting freedom of speech has cost universities millions of dollars.

This decline in rational discourse has also affected the standards of journalism, as seen in the abysmal interview of Jordan Peterson by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman, or the hiring of the openly racist man-hater Sarah Jeong by the New York Times.[xvii] In such cases, journalists believe that adherence to the precepts of their ideological tribe are more important that abstract notions of truth and fairness, lessons they no doubt learned at least in part from the post-millennial university.

Next, there are political reasons for opposing restrictions on freedom of speech. When we seek to restrict speech or thought, we must ask three questions:

• How do we define offensive speech? If such a policy is to be implemented, this definition must be crystal clear, or it will wind up becoming a club used by self-interested parties in partisan debates.
• Who will administer these restrictions?
• Who watches the watchmen?

So we are immediately faced with problems of definition and administration. As for the former, the usual answer is, “Well, we’ll just restrict hate speech. Job done!,” followed by high-fives and hand shaking.

But what is hate speech? There are almost as many definitions of it as there are commentators on the issue. In the infamous 1990 Keegstra case, Chief Justice Dickson defined hate speech as:

…predicated on destruction, and hatred against identifiable groups therefore thrives on insensitivity, bigotry and destruction of both the target group and of the values of our society. Hatred in this sense is a most extreme emotion that belies reason; an emotion that, if exercised against members of an identifiable group, implies that those individuals are to be despised, scorned, denied respect and made subject to ill-treatment on the basis of group affiliation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada

Yet how exactly we apply this reasonable definition to other cases is a real problem.  Prosecutions of hate crimes under section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada are rare (the Keegstra case was an exception).[xviii] Wikipedia defines hate speech as:

…speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

This definition would define as “hate speech” the work of every famous stand-up or sketch comedian of the last century, including Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, SCTV, The Kids in the Hall, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman and Russell Peters. It would, in effect, outlaw comedy, a vital form of free speech, as has already been done on many American campuses. As Caitlin Flanagan bemoaned in her 2015 article “That’s Not Funny”:

O, Utopia. Why must your sweet governance always turn so quickly from the Edenic to the Stalinist? The college revolutions of the 1960s—the ones that gave rise to the social-justice warriors of today’s campuses—were fueled by free speech. But once you’ve won a culture war, free speech is a nuisance, and “eliminating” language becomes a necessity.[xix]

Some activists have argued, ignoring standard dictionary definitions, that racial minorities cannot be racist given their history of oppression. So a “person of colour” could call for the mass extermination of the Jews without being accused of hate speech. AIP liberals’ willingness to paper over Sarah Jeong’s nasty Twitter history as mere “mimicry” of far right trolls is also illustrative of the fact that there is no clear common definition of what counts as racist hate speech.[xx]

Transgender activists at Laurier and elsewhere have argued in the press and on Facebook that merely talking about the validity of new pronouns is a form of hate speech. Similar reports have come from the UK, where transgender activists have been “quick to close down” criticisms of gender reassignment surgeries.[xxi]

Further, anyone who enthusiastically volunteers to be a moral and political censor is probably the last person on earth who you want doing the job. We’ve seen how this works in more extreme forms in totalitarian regimes – the people who joined the Gestapo, KGB, or Stasi weren’t warm-hearted defenders of human rights. Watch The Lives of Others or the documentary Karl Marx City (I fully realize I’m flirting with Godwin’s Law here, but the analogy is so tempting). The leaders of the anti-Communist crusade in America during the early 1950s (McCarthy and HUAC) were power-hungry liars who brandished imaginary lists of enemies of the state in congress. Even within our current reality, one only has to listen to the Laurier recordings to realize that campus censors are at minimum humourless and mildly paranoid ideological dogmatists who have little respect for either empirical facts or the law of non-contradiction.

Besides the Shepherd case, there have come to light of late other cases of thought policing on Canadians campuses. YouTuber “My Name is Josephine,” in reality Josephine Mathias, a student at Ryerson University, reported in 2017 how her sister Jane wrote an essay for her sociology class on the gender wage gap under conditions that violated her free speech rights.[xxii] The class was told in advance not to use newspaper or magazine articles, or data from Statistics Canada or provincial or federal government web sites since they lack “critical sociological analysis.” Speaking as someone who has literally written the book on critical sociological theory – Understanding Society, published by Oxford University Press – this is code for “ideologically suspect”. After completing her assignment, Jane Mathias received an email from her professor Kelly Train informing her that the “wage gap is very real,” and that she was confused for not using exclusively feminist sources. The email concludes “DO NOT use business sources. They blame women. The reality is patriarchy.” Josephine Mathias justly accuses Train of brainwashing. Ironically, Mathias should have been a poster girl for the AIP belief that we live in an oppressive “white patriarchy,” given the fact she is from a family of Nigerian immigrants, and thus scores three privilege points on the Kolhaktar scale. Yet she is clearly unafraid of putting forth her political views online, and resolutely rejects the presence of white privilege in Canada.[xxiii]

Just this week (September 2018) another such case came to light. A former student from the University of the Fraser Valley, Valerie Flokstra, leaked an eight-minute audio clip in which she is interrogated by her teacher education professors Nancy Norman and Vandy Britton for her linking of autism to abortion in class discussions and online. Flokstra doesn’t start crying as Shepherd did, and tries to stand up for her free-speech rights against her profs, who try to bully her into submission amidst sighs of desperation that she won’t submit to their Weltanschauung. Citing the potential dangers of emotional harm to other students (without any evidence that this has taken place), Britton argues against Flokstra’s free speech rights that there’s a difference between “critical thinking” and “critical mindedness.” I must have wasted all those years in grad school studying Hume, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche, since I don’t have the analytical skills necessary to understand this distinction. Reading The Critique of Pure Reason was a piece of cake compared to comprehending the convoluted logic of AIP liberalism.[xxiv]

We can’t assume that campus speech cops will be infallible. What if the object of speech restriction feels, like Shepherd, that they were treated unjustly? As we’ve seen in a number of cases, such a person can’t turn to campus administrators for fair treatment: they will simply pass the buck, supporting the original findings of whatever committee of public safety the campus has established, or the whims of the angry mob (see Evergreen and Yale). Campus equity offices are equally useless, being staffed by AIP liberals who understand only a limited spectrum of discrimination: they would reject for purely ideological reasons the complaints of anyone silenced by campus thought police. Such people have no choice but to raise the issue in social media, or to contact a lawyer and sue the university in question, potentially costing millions more.[xxv]

Further, AIP liberals should take the long view before rushing to implement draconian campus speech codes. As the recent provincial election illustrated, there may come a day when they no longer control the ideological state apparatuses.

So the political morass that restrictions on freedom of speech would bring about is far worse than the pretended benefits of the policing of campus thought and speech.

Lastly, in a liberal democracy, it’s unethical to tell people that they can’t express or explore a given idea unless one can clearly prove that this suppression will save a large group of people, or society at large, from dire harm. Whether you adhere to Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, Hume and Smith’s sense of moral sympathy, or Rawls’ contract theory, the great ethicists would all defend a robust sense of freedom of thought, speech and expression. As Rawls says, when we sign the social contract, our first principle should be a preservation of our liberty up to the point where this liberty seriously infringes on that of others. If we are to respect people as moral agents, the burden of ethical proof must be put on the censor.

Some people have argued that we need to inoculate universities from the “alt right” with speech and behaviour codes. In Canada, the alt right is a spectre haunting the paranoid dreams of AIP liberals. Here at Western, to my best of my knowledge, they control no formal student organizations, there are no professors claiming allegiance to their cause, and they have close to zero voice in the classroom. Once again, they are a folk devil invented to scare students and wavering faculty into submission to authority.

Mill’s defence of freedom of speech and ideas in On Liberty is unassailable: if what you’re saying is morally or empirically right, then it’s absurd for me to suppress your speech; but even if what you’re saying is in some sense “wrong” – and if you believe, with Hume, in the fact/value distinction, it’s not clear how an ethical principle can be “wrong” – debating the idea will not only sharpen your own intellectual tools, but will illustrate to the audience why they shouldn’t believe such an idea in the first place.

Suppressing dangerous ideas doesn’t make them go away – in the age of the Web 2.0, thought regulators lose much of their power once ideas exit the campus gates. At best, you can drive dangerous ideas underground, or onto Twitter or chat boards like 4chan, where the rules of logic and civility are considerably degraded, and insults, not scholarly studies, win arguments.

Further, hiding in safe spaces doesn’t solve the mental health problems that promoted their creation in the first place. We can interpret these in one of three ways. As places of physical safety, they are redundant: campus and city police forces, along with a tolerant attitude on campus, are our best guarantors of physical safety. We don’t want student mobs roaming the campus with baseball bats acting as auxiliary police (witness Evergreen State College in 2017), or the English department forming a revolutionary guard, armed with cattle prods, black uniforms, and copies of Gender Trouble (power up your Tardis and visit Paris circa 1794, or Maoist China circa 1966).

Arguing that safe spaces are places of “intellectual safety” makes no sense. Safety from what? Ideas you don’t agree with? Or which make you unhappy? If so, why did you come to university in the first place? Either debate these with their holders, or simply don’t attend talks by speakers you disagree with. It’s childish and unethical to pull fire alarms or threaten audiences who do want to hear these speakers: if you do this, you’re saying, in effect, “I have no intellectual defence against these ideas – they’re like a virus that must be exterminated. So I will prevent them from being uttered, or hide from them in quarantined spaces.” This is a direct violation of the mission of the university – to expose students to a wide variety of ideas, to expand them minds, and to give them the critical tools to separate the wheat from the chaff. Ideas are not diseases.

The third justification for “safe spaces” is to protect students from emotional harms. Yet this defence begs the question – why do the ideas you disagree with make you so upset that you must flee into a private space on campus to avoid them? There have been quite a few cases of students suffering very public mental breakdowns over political issues in the last few years, some of these seeming to be psychotic episodes.[xxvi] Added to this is the general acceptance that there is a “mental health crisis” on campus going back to at least 2012.[xxvii] In the US in 2017, almost half of college students had some sort of psychiatric disorder, with 73% reporting at least one mental health crisis during their school days.[xxviii]

This increase in mental illness among students has been blamed by psychologists (I believe correctly) on a shortlist of factors: over-protective parenting in middle-class families (not letting little Jen or Johnny play without adult supervision), the rise of social media (which combine idealized forms of identity formation with bitter anonymous tribalism on political issues), economic insecurity (“will I get a job when I graduate?”), and a fleeing from responsibility by primary and high schools (the school is a physical and ideological “safe zone,” and everyone passes).

To cure someone of an anxiety or phobia, you don’t hide the object of that fear from the patient. You slowly expose them to it – you show the arachnophobe some spiders, you take the agoraphobe out for a walk. Maybe if you’re using a campus safe space to hide from emotional harm, what you need isn’t another university class, but a good psychiatrist, or a Buddhist guru. Public policy on freedom of expression shouldn’t be based on the emotional needs of those suffering from serious forms of mental illness.

On a related issue, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that as late as the 1990s, liberals out-numbered conservatives in the American professoriate by a ratio of about 4 to 1. Now the ratio is about 17 to 1.[xxix] This isn’t an accident, but the result of a Foucauldian process of using power-knowledge to implement a form of ideological supremacy through a skewed hiring process – like hires like. As Haidt suggests in his new book and in a variety of talks,[xxx] this lack of viewpoint diversity is bad for students, for dissenting professors, and for the polity as a whole, since it creates an intellectual bubble in universities and among their graduates in mainstream broadcast media and the civil service. This leads to an inevitable backlash in the working class and rural America, throwing many of them into the arms of Trumpian populism. We don’t want this to happen north of the border.

I say this not as a conservative, but as an NDP-voting a social democrat who, on questions of political economy, is to the left of most AIP liberals (as confirmed by a recent political compass test). For one thing, I believe that economic class is the major cause of social inequality, not using the wrong pronouns. My dog in this race isn’t a defence of a specific ideological camp, but – and I realize this sounds corny – universal principles of justice and truth. We cannot restrict notions of justice only to those authoritarian liberals label as victims, or truth to the autobiographical musings of a few biologically-defined “traditionally disadvantaged” groups. For one thing, our affluent Western lifestyles are based on centuries of advances in science and technology that gave us steam engines, cars and smart phones, all of which would be impossible without a healthy respect for both open inquiry and the scientific method. And our Western notions of freedom and equality are based on centuries of political agitation for universal rights, from the English Civil War to the American and French Revolutions, from the Pankhursts’ campaign for female suffrage to Martin Luther King’s battle for civil rights for black Americans.

In short, Western should adopt a home-brewed version of the Chicago Statement, which argues that the university community be a free place where people can “discuss any problem that presents itself.”[xxxi] Further, it argues that it’s not the university’s job to “attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive,” noting that fears of incivility or a lack of respect can “never be used as a justification for closing off the discussion of ideas.” It admits that expression that violates the law, or which constitutes a genuine threat or form of harassment, can be banned, but these are narrow exceptions to a general commitment to the “completely free and open discussion of ideas.”

To promote the individual freedoms of all on campus, and thus in the long term human equality, we must follow the principles outlined by the University of Chicago and in Section 2 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and adopt a policy that champions as robust a notion of freedom of speech as possible, not one that picks and chooses which forms of speech it finds acceptable to suit current ideological fashions. 

NOTES

[i] See https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Ed-Schools-Became-a-Menace/243062 for one source of this group’s ideological raison d’etre.

[ii] Some of the key members of this group are discussed by Bari Weiss in her New York Times article of May 8, 2018, at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html. The Times exiled her to Australia for her efforts, as the British Empire did with criminals in the 19^th century: https://splinternews.com/the-new-york-times-is-shipping-bari-weiss-to-australia-1828139158

[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS_RKwCYcl8

[iv] https://www.thecollegefix.com/joe-rogan-interviews-christina-hoff-sommers-in-no-holds-barred-interview/

[v] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middlebury-free-speech-violence/518667/

[vi] http://time.com/4106265/yale-students-protest/

[vii] Jean Twenge outlines this all in her book iGen, https://www.amazon.ca/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy-Adulthood/dp/1501151983 She argues that social media and “safetyism” have created a micro-generation of post-millennial students unable to deal with disagreement or adversity.

[viii] See https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-students-are-caught-tape-petitioning-repeal-first-amendment; see also the excellent video series by Benjamin Boyce, “Exposé Evergreen”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRdayXEOwuMG1jaAtJE0KbpyY_Kh-JTUl

Boyce was just finishing his degree at the college in the term the protests took place.

[ix] See https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/caught-on-tape-university-demands-teacher-crush-debate/news-story/a783b931c6a4bdb221745e74e8b9605a and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YdFlKaJv4g

[x] For a critique see https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/2017/11/28/lauriers-gendered-violence-policy-must-be-revised.html

[xi] This is startlingly similar to Stan Cohen’s description of how the church, mass media and state reacted to the rise of the Mods and Rockers in mid-60s England, as described in his labelling theory sociological classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972).

[xii] I experienced this myself when I encountered a graduate student a couple of years ago on the UWO campus. He asked me if I was going to protest Jordan Peterson’s talk, which I didn’t know was taking place. I asked him which of Peterson’s views he objected to. He told me he didn’t know what his views were, only that they were somehow wrong.

[xiii] Clever satires like this one by Australian comedian Neel Kolhatkar never appear on broadcast media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM&t=28s

[xiv] See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/09/us/university-of-missouri-enrollment-protests-fallout.html

[xv] See https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/evergreen-state-college-is-updating-after-protests-decline-in-enrollment/ and Ben Boyce’s videos.

[xvi] See https://www.therecord.com/news-story/8673048-enrolment-decline-at-laurier-intentional/ and https://www.thecollegefix.com/canadas-mizzou-enrollment-plunging-at-university-that-investigated-gender-neutral-pronoun-debate/

[xvii] See https://quillette.com/2018/02/15/the-peterson-principle-intellectual-complexity-and-journalistic-incompetence/ on the treatment of Peterson by journalists, and https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45052534 on the Jeong controversy.

[xviii] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/what-counts-as-a-hate-crime-in-canada-1.3307395

[xix] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

[xx]See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/03/sarah-jeong-new-york-times-twitter-posts-racism

[xxi] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/27/transgender-activists-accused-attempting-shut-downdebate/

[xxii] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/13/instructor-tells-student-she-must-look-a, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TcYlgAi7zQ According to a recent study of 33 countries, the “gender wage gap” shrinks to 1.6% when comparing people in substantially similar occupations. So the oft-cited 77% figure is, to paraphrase Freud, a delusional remoulding of reality.

[xxiii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuSo5o95bIs. I see the dire effects of white male privilege several days a week in downtown London when homeless people ask me for money, or fall asleep on the sidewalk besides a piece of cardboard on which they’ve scrawled the stories of their failed lives. Very few of them are “people of colour,” and only about one in ten women.

[xxiv] Of course, I’m joking. “Critical mindedness” means “accept our ideas, or else.” See https://www.thecollegefix.com/university-tells-student-she-cant-share-statistic-on-link-between-abortion-premature-birth/ and Benjamin Boyce’s video “Harmful Facts Censored in Canadian Universities.” By the way, there is some clinical evidence supporting Flokstra’s claim.

[xxv] https://globalnews.ca/news/4272268/wilfrid-laurier-ta-lindsay-shepherd-sues-university/

[xxvi] There are many cases of this phenomenon. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ZVEVufWFI&t=245s,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxlIz7v1XVQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpQXEBPj0_8,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0bC7X-RTmw.

[xxvii] https://curio.ca/en/video/crisis-on-campus-mental-health-demands-surge-16262/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxY-5ISEHPg

[xxviii] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-out-outside-in/201703/the-college-mental-health-crisis-focus-overall-wellbeing

[xxix] https://campus.asu.edu/content/nyu-prof-speaks-need-restore-viewpoint-diversity-higher-education

[xxx] Gregg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, 2018. This book is an extended footnote to their 2015 article in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

[xxxi] https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/reports/FOECommitteeReport.pdf

The Tyranny of the Minority: Why the Authoritarian Left Doesn’t Have a Right to Tell Us Who We Can Listen To

By Doug Mann

This opinion piece was originally published on June 29, 2018 on the website Against Professional Philosophy.

Bryan W. Van Norden’s June 25 opinion piece in The New York Times, “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience,” is useful for one main reason: it is a symptom of the decline of two venerable institutions, academic philosophy (Van Norden’s profession) and print journalism.

Van Norden’s basic thesis is that John Stuart Mill is wrong to think that we should listen to all opinions, even if they are partly or fully in error. According to Mill, if these are partly wrong, we still learn some truth; if fully wrong, we benefit from sharpening our own dearly held truths by preventing them from descending into dogma. Mill was wrong because he had a “naïve conception of rationality inherited from Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes,” based in part on the assumption that we all have “approximately equal” abilities for appreciating the truth.

Van Norden concludes that justice requires that we consign university stages and TV studios to those with the most “merit,” whose views benefit the community as a whole, leaving aside the question of who exactly determines this merit.

The article is full of historical errors, logical gaffes, and unwarranted character attacks. Ironically, if NYT took seriously the advice bruited by his title, the article would never have been published.

To start with, most scholars do not consider Descartes, who died in 1650, to be an “Enlightenment thinker.” Various starting dates have been assigned to the Age of Reason: the best, a sentiment echoed by the History Channel, is that it started with Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1686) and John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Some date its start as late as the Treaty of Utrecht (1713).

Second, although rationality was used to attack traditional notions of religion, morals and politics during the Enlightenment, it was more an age of reasonableness than of reason. The dominant epistemology of the eighteenth century was not Cartesian rationalism, but the empiricism championed by Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume. Locke thought that our minds are blank slates filled up by perceptions; Berkeley argued that esse est percipi, to exist is to be perceived; while the great Scottish sceptic Hume saw the mind as “a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance,” gliding by us like actors on a stage.

Most French philosophes adopted British empiricism as their basic method. For instance, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748) was a monumental study of how soil, climate, and national character determined the various legal and political structures human beings have created throughout history. Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia sought to be a “systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts.” Empirical observation and physical science were the order of the day – at least outside of fields where these were impossible, such as mathematics and theology.

This is an important observation because Mill’s father was the Scottish philosopher and historian James Mill, and it’s clear that the junior Mill learned the lesson of the value of empirical observation at his father’s knee. At its best, empirical science is a constant process of presenting and testing hypotheses, then rejecting those that the evidence don’t support, a process the younger Mill no doubt had in mind in his defense of freedom of speech. He also defended “experiments in living” as the sociological equivalent of the empirical method.

Interestingly, the Scottish wing of the Enlightenment was more interested in sociological and historical facts than those sought by chemists and geologists. Most of the leading thinkers in Edinburgh and Glasgow wrote histories, showing a breadth of knowledge nigh impossible in our more addled age: Hume wrote a history of England, James Mill of British India, Adam Ferguson of the Roman Republic, to mention just three. The Scots also helped to found the social sciences: Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) is arguably the first work of sociology, while Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) is much less arguably the foundation of economics.

When Immanuel Kant summed up the century in his essay “What is Enlightenment?”, he said its motto was “dare to know!” (Sapere aude!) so that the human race can emerge from its self-incurred tutelage, so it can grow up. A large part of what Kant wants us to know aren’t the abstract conclusions of pure reason (though he dedicated one Critique to this very subject), but the complexities of empirical reality, which is the surest check on superstition. To put it in the simplest terms, to the Enlighteners, facts matter, a laudatory lesson in both 1776 and 2018.

But Van Norden misses another key lesson of the Enlightenment to do with morality and politics, not science. As Hume put it in talking about morals, “reason is the slave of the passions.” Smith agreed, seeing our moral principles as founded on our sympathy, or lack thereof, for others. The contemporary moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt picks up this thread of thought in The Righteous Mind, seeing our ethical principles as founded on moral intuitions. The emotional dog wags its rational tail during debates on ethics, a conclusion that Hume and Smith would have raised a congratulatory pint of ale to.  

So having a given moral belief isn’t a matter of ascertaining a series of facts, or even drawing a logical conclusion from a set of premises, but of having a certain type of psyche, and to a lesser degree existing in a certain type of culture. This moral constitution can certainly be informed by facts. But it is not created by facts. Therefore, moral beliefs cannot be “ignorant,” except in the childish, schoolyard use of that term. Thinking otherwise indicates that the author has never heard of Hume, Smith, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Camus, Haidt, or other critics of abstract ethics.

The very idea of “ignorance” implies that there are some people who know things and others who don’t, and that the latter often feel obliged to parade this lack of knowledge. On this point Van Norden is right. But to use the word in the accusatory way he does clearly implies that there are epistemological standards for knowledge independent of our subjective feelings, that there is a world of facts “out there” that hard-working investigators can discover. Van Norden’s critique of Descartes and Mill along relativist grounds – of their “ahistorical method” – causes his central premise to implode. Even if we take Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigms seriously, at any given time there can’t be “alternative facts,” unless Kellyanne Conway was re-defining “facts” as little more than our subjective intuitions. To be “ignorant,” facts must exist, and we must have access to them in a roughly equal manner, even if most of us are too lazy or ideologically blinded to seek them out.

Despite the key importance of empiricism to the project of modernity, another offspring of the Enlightenment was the rational method, one that is of continued relevance. A few basic rules should make up our core logical toolkit, one that would be very useful today in exposing ignorance. First, don’t contradict yourself: don’t say X is true, and then two sentences later argue that it’s false. Second, define your terms: if you want to call someone a “racist,” “sexist,” or “homophobe,” then tell us clearly what you mean by these epithets. A quick survey of social media will show that almost no one bothers to even try to follow this rule. Third, don’t shoot the messenger: don’t confuse what someone is saying with the type of person you imagine him or her to be. So no genetic fallacies or ad hominem attacks. Lastly, don’t confuse correlation with causation. Just because whenever your cat sneezes there’s a drop in the stock market doesn’t mean there’s any causal connection between feline allergies and the NASDAQ average. Or between prayer to your chosen deity and victories by your favourite football team.

What Van Norden doesn’t say, though rhetorically manoeuvres us into believing, is also disturbing.

For one thing, he seems rather naive about media theory. Although mentioning Chomsky, Van Norden seems ignorant of his central claim that the central drive of American mass media is to manufacture consent. Further, although mentioning that the media are “motivated primarily by getting the largest audience possible” (a fair point), he seems puzzled by the fact that that audience would rather watch Kirk Cameron than Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum.

Two points here: first, major media corporations are driven by a capitalist desire for profits, and Jenny McCarthy will get more faces glued to screens than venerable linguists. Second, he seems oblivious to the media critique that dates back to at least the 1980s that TV news, driven by ratings, is turning into infotainment, as argued by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). The place we do see serious long-form philosophical and political debates uninterrupted by commercials is on the Internet, in podcasts and YouTube lectures, notably those given by the group christened by Bari Weiss the “dark intellectual web.” We really can’t expect such debates from mainstream broadcast media anymore.

Since 2017 I’ve developed my own private joke when turning on CBC Radio One, which is principally dedicated to news and discussion. “How many sentences can I listen to before the CBC reports on some aspect of identity politics?” The answer is usually zero.

The underlying premise of the article is that the heroes of modern discourse are authoritarian leftists who support these identity politics, people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and the otherwise obscure but currently feminist-insider-hipster Kate Manne, whose theory of “himpathy” proves her to be of greater intellectual value than Jordan Peterson, a laughable conclusion. The tribalism of the old left-vs.-right struggle, with its orthodoxies, heresies and apostates, misses a simple truth recognized decades ago by the political compass test: that political ideologies can be measured along two axes: left vs. right, and authoritarian vs. libertarian. Like Khan in Star Trek II, even the most intelligent political pundits seem able to think on a one-dimensional plane only.

This simplistic way of thinking leaves libertarian leftists such as myself in intellectual purgatory, unable to embrace conservatism, but hated by authoritarian leftists like Van Norden for refusing to be their ideological dancing monkeys by accepting unwarranted restrictions on personal liberties. It’s not a matter of rejecting egalitarianism, but of rejecting tyrannical ways of bringing it about. Orwell deals with this problem at great length in 1984, a novel that since 2015 has suddenly gained new traction. When Winston insists that 2+2=4, he’s calling up the ghost of the Enlightenment empiricism. Facts and politics are at best strange bedfellows, at worst, mortal enemies.

Over the last few years we’ve seen scary real-world examples of Newspeak, Doublethink, Two-Minute Hates and Thought Crime Inquisitions on campuses, in government ministries and from the mass media. For evidence, watch the Middlebury College reaction to Charles Murray’s visit, or the Toronto scenes in Cassie Jaye’s documentary The Red Pill, or listen to Lindsay Shepherd’s interrogation by the moral guardians at Wilfrid Laurier University, including their use of the unintentionally comic reductio ad Hitlerum logical fallacy. Or boot up your laptop and visit Twitter.

The authoritarian left, which has done such a wonderful job at improving the reputations of Middlebury College, Evergreen State College, and Wilfrid Laurier University over the last year, champions its own brand of ignorance. There is little empirical evidence that its toolkit of trigger warnings, safe spaces, thought policing and micro-aggression theory have done anything to make colleges and universities free and open spaces where all people – male or female, white, brown or black, gay or straight – can engage with each other in a healthy dialectical atmosphere. Instead, it has created paranoid spaces where the dialogical silence is punctuated by phoney fire alarms and angry voices of those hiding in black hoodies when the “wrong” people show up to speak. Like the Trumpian right, itself equally authoritarian, postmodern identity politics extremists don’t care about facts. Just moral outrage, fuelled by Twitter, and the sublime comfort of never being wrong.

Where did this sudden eruption of irrationality come from? Like the dancing men or red-headed league in Conan-Doyle, the case was at first baffling. An obvious partial explanation is the millions of university students who refuse to look up from their smart phones and laptop screens, getting lost in the desert of the real that is social media. They then transfer the moral outrage found there from virtual to the real world, just like Russell Crowe in Virtuosity, even though the objects of their anger are fictional avatars invented by angry tweeters.

But Douglas Murray has offered hints of a less obvious explanation. Young people today face an economy with lots of part-time service industry jobs, but flat wages, and little chance for stability or promotion. They legitimately fear that they will never join the “propertied classes.” Murray ties this economic frustration to the growth of secularism in the West, and thus to the opening of a void of metaphysical meaning. Into this void steps radical identity politics, with its demands for commitment, faith (in the face of disconfirming facts), and quasi-religious promise of social salvation – if only we can exterminate the four deadly sins of sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia. It claims that these sins run rampant, like witchcraft in seventeenth century Europe. The judges of Salem now use hashtags and cleverly posed photos.

Van Norden plays the role of Witchfinder General in his article. He plays a rhetorical trick on the reader in his examples of who he considers not worth listening to, conflating celebrities and clowns with genuine intellectuals he doesn’t like since they don’t agree with his moral intuitions. Yes, we shouldn’t listen to what Kirk Cameron, Jenny McCarthy, Roseanne Barr or Kellyanne Conway have to say about serious political matters. Like Van Norden, I welcomed the cancellation of Roseanne, though more because I find its star to be crude and unfunny (which you can’t say about Conway, a brilliant comedian). But it’s absurd virtue signalling to call ABC’s decision “courageous”: given the howls of outrage from social media, they had no choice. And as Kant says, if you do something out of necessity, you can’t claim the moral high ground.

On the other side, his few comments on Jordan Peterson show that his knowledge of the Canadian psychologist doesn’t extend beyond Twitter rants and skewed soundbytes. He paints him as a worthless sexist, ignoring his defense of individual rights against the authoritarian left’s imperial notions of group rights and group guilt, which leads directly to his attack on compelled speech. Though I think he’s wrong in connecting neo-Marxism to the hypocritical postmodernist ethic that finds violations of its identity politics code deeply “problematic” (hypocritical in part because it largely ignores class, and is lead by people with healthy upper-middle-class salaries who are far from powerless), Peterson’s explorations of myth and religious traditions outlined in Maps of Meaning, along with his clinical psychology practise, give him an intellectual credibility that Van Norden is clearly ignorant of.

And if you want to see another brazen display of such ignorance, watch Peterson’s interview with Kathy Newman on Channel 4, which, to paraphrase Hume, contains little more than sophistry and illusion on Newman’s part. Also see Paul Benedetti’s fine piece in Quillette on the active attempt by print and web journalists to systematically simplify and distort Peterson’s views.

So yes, we still need the Enlightenment because we still need a healthy dedication to facts, and a logical toolkit to sort out clear thinking from irrational vituperations. We still need the “Socratic dialectics” that Mill champions in On Liberty to help us sort out truth from error. The very argument that Mill is inexcusably wrong implies two things that reality can’t give us: epistemological access to a pristine realm of settled empirical truths (which Van Norden clearly doesn’t have), and the end of history when it comes to our moral and political intuitions.

We still need a “collision with adverse opinions” both to discover things we don’t know and to sharpen our moral intuitions lest they devolve into empty prejudices. To restrict speech and opinion to those approved by a small coterie of authoritarian leftist intellectuals and corporate media heads would be to accept a new form of tyranny – the tyranny of a self-righteous and historically misinformed minority.

My Top Board and Card Games

MY TOP TWO DOZEN BOARD GAMES

These are full-fledged games with either a map or a board that is integral to game play. I rated them on several key factors: having an interesting theme, compelling player interaction, pleasing components, being competitive for all players, and pure fun.  

1. Kemet (with or without Ta-Seti)
2. Cyclades with the Titans expansion (still makes the list without it)
3. The Fury of Dracula (3^rd edition)
4. Shadows over Camelot
5. Defenders of the Realm (with props to Defenders of the Last Chance)
6. Tikal (especially the new Super Meeple edition)
7. Game of Thrones
8. Zombicide Black Plague
9. Champions of Midgard
10. Thebes
11. Blood Rage (use Descent minis for 5 players)
12. Firefly (add Pirates expansion)
13. Conan
14. Inis
15. Lords of Hellas
16. Star Wars: Rebellion
17. Star Trek: Ascendancy
18. Fate of the Elder Gods
19. Evolution: Climate
20. Rising Sun
21. Clash of Cultures
22. Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu
23. Cosmic Encounter
24. Stone Age (use generic meeples for a 5^th player)
25. Descent (with Trollfens, Visions and Bonds expansions)
26. Defenders of the Last Stand
27. Mexica (the Super Meeple version)
28. Lords of Waterdeep

Honourable Mentions: Tobago, Battle Beyond Space.

MY TOP DOZEN CARD AND STARTER GAMES

These are games driven by cards, even if they have some sort of board to organize play, or games with only a few pages of rules that are playable in an hour or less. 

1. Coup
2. Secret Hitler
3. Star Realms
4. Marvel Legendary (with Dark City + X-Men expansions)
5. Ashes (extra Phoenixborn are nice, but not necessary)
6. Forbidden Island
7. Archaeology (old or new version)
8. Citadels
9. Skull/Skull and Roses
10. King of Tokyo
11. Smash Up
12. Mascarade

Honourable Mentions: Codenames, Hero Realms, Legendary Villains, Forbidden Desert, Resistance Avalon, Bang! The Dice Game, Ethnos.

TOP SIX BOARD GAME COMPANIES

I rated these on a mixture of component quality and aesthetics, polished mechanics, and rambunctious themes that (once again) compel player interaction. 

1. Matagot
2. Fantasy Flight Games
3. Cool Mini or Not
4. Gale Force Nine
5. Plaid Hat Games
6. Upper Deck

The Top Ten Canadian Science Fiction Shows

To be a “Canadian” show it has to fulfill the following criteria:

• It has to be made in Canada.
• It has to have Canadian actors in significant roles.
• It has to have some Canadian directors, writers, and producers.
• It has to be either (a) produced for a Canadian network like Space or Showtime, and/or (b) or have a Canadian creator or co-creator.

By these rules, The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica do not qualify since these are the brainchilds of Chris Carter and a group of American writers and directors in the first case, and of Ronald D. Moore and David Eick in the second. If they did, they would top the list – and there is no question that Canadian actors made significant contributions to both shows, from Alex Krycek and the Cigarette-Smoking Man to Six, Helo, and Colonel Tigh.

But here are ten that do qualify:

1. Stargate SG1: Ten years of stories, with enough good ones and a few great ones to make it to no. 1. Co-created by Brad Wright, most of the writers and directors were also Canadian, as well as two of the lead actors.
2. Continuum: A time-travel show about a cop pursuing terrorists into the past with a coterie of fine Canadian actors – Victor Webster, Stephen Lobo and Jennifer Spence are worth mentioning – that really starts humming in its second season that asks intriguing questions about terrorism, corporate power and temporal causality.
3. Orphan Black: Though it probably overstayed its welcome by a season or two, this clone drama is driven by the bravura performance by Tatiana Maslany.
4. Dark Matter: A relatively low budget mystery set aboard a spaceship where six people wake up oblivious to their personal pasts. Much of the drama comes from their well written personal interactions, leavened by a send of humour. Melissa O’Neill and Roger Lemke stand out.
5. Odyssey 5: A short-lived series starring Peter Weller where a space shuttle crew witnesses Earth’s destruction, then is propelled back in time enough so they have a chance of saving it. Created by Manny Coto of Star Trek fame, and in some ways superior to Trek’s 1990s iterations.
6. Lexx: Probably one of the most bizarre SF shows ever, and definitely an acquired taste, it features the travels of an organic ship that blows up planets so it can eat their remnants. Our heroes are a cowardly security guard named Stanley who has the key to the Lexx, an undead assassin named Kai, and a hyper-sexual human/cluster lizard hybrid named Xev played by two different German actresses.
7. Outer Limits (new edition): A reboot of the early sixties anthology series that gave us five years of stories ranging from dull to outstanding, with a bevy of Canadian actors in lead roles. Amanda Plummer’s time travel episode, where she assassinates history’s most vicious killers, stands out.
8. Stargate Atlantis: The sequel to SG1, this is an ensemble drama set on the distant world of Atlantis with a fresh set of interesting characters. Like SG1, it delves into ancient mythology, notably the Arthurian legends.
9. Total Recall 2070: A melding of two worlds based on stories from by Philip K. Dick, Total Recall and Blade Runner. Though the CGI is crude, and most of the show had a cloistered feel due to being filmed on huge soundstages in Toronto, it married interesting cyberpunk stories about weird science and corporate intrigue with emotionally cool noir-style characters and a faux Vangelis soundtrack. Our hero is the skeptical detective David Hume (played laconically by Michael Easton); his partner an Alpha android named Ian Favre. Their lieutenant is, for once in a cop show, useful.
10. First Wave: Another low-budget character drama about a secret invasion of Earth by the Gua, who can take human form, and have an insidious agenda. The trick is that the invasion is predicted by Nostradamus in one of his formerly unknown prophetic books from the 16^th century, and our heroes Cade Foster (Sebastian Spence) and Eddie Nambulous (Rob Labelle) have a copy. Veteran Roger Cross, who plays one of the lead terrorists in Continuum along with one of the core crew members in Dark Matter, puts in a workmanlike performance as the conflicted Gua solider Joshua.

Cheap Ottawa

I recently traveled to Ottawa, our nation’s capitol, for a few days, and wanted to share some travel tips with fellow voyagers traveling on a budget.

How to Get There

If you have a car, drive. But if you don’t, plan ahead, and get a discounted ticket from VIA Rail. It cost me a little over $100 in economy class to go from London to Ottawa each way, which I’ve been told is about the same cost as a Greyhound bus ticket. Beware connections though: VIA trains are notoriously behind schedule, so it’s best if you have at least a 45 minute window to make a connection.

Where to Stay

You can do the regular internet thing and try websites like hotels.com or tripadvisor.com to get a regular hotel room. But I’d advise hunting down either a bed-and-breakfast (for $100 or less), or using the summer residence “hotels” at either the University of Ottawa (you can bus or walk downtown from there) or Saint Paul University (where I stayed). U of O has “prison cell” rooms for at low as $40 a night, with no private bath or much more than a bed. They also have larger rooms for $80-90 a night. But I opted for Saint Paul, which is more out of the way, though had a room sale for $80 a night for a full suite consisting of two bedrooms, a central kitchenette with a fridge, and a bathroom and shower. The AC was a bit tricky to work, but once it was going, the room went from blistering hot to sub-arctic conditions.

Saint Paul isn’t as convenient as other locations. It’s really too far away to walk downtown. But right in front of it is the terminus of the #16 OC Transpo bus, which will take you right downtown to either the Mackenzie-King stop (where half the buses in Ottawa go) or within a couple of blocks of the Parliament buildings. The #5 bus also heads up Main Street, where St. Paul is located. To get to the summer hotel residence, you have to go through the doors on the right side of the college, then head to the brown building on the right.

Note that in this year – 2016 – it seems like the entire city of Ottawa is clogged up with construction. This is especially noticeable on the transit routes, since as far as I could tell, the transitways were all closed. These are bus-only routes that provide quick travel times to key points in the city via routes with numbers in the 90s. Note that the #92 and #96 buses go from the VIA station to the Mackenzie-Shopping Center.

What to See

I’ll refer to summer events, though the indoor things should also be available in winter too. Ottawa is full of museums. It’s also full of long walking and bike paths. From Saint Paul U you can walk or bike along the east side of Rideau Canal all the way to Parliament. This path is a bit dull after a mile or so, since the canal is dark and seaweed-infested, but it might be more charming in the winter. Warning: Ottawa can get VERY hot in the summer – when I visited in August, it was 30C feeling like 38C for a couple of days.

A can’t miss, in my book, is the War Museum. In a brand new building on the north-west edge of central Ottawa, it’s not as easy to get to as some of the other museums, though if you consult the “travel planner” on the OC Transpo website, you can work out a reasonable route. It costs $15 for an adult ticket, and can fill up most of your day, closing weekdays at 6PM. Don’t miss the LeBreton Gallery at the end of the historically-themed exhibits: it’s full of tanks, guns, and other vehicles, mainly from the World Wars. If it’s a nice day, you can exit the back of the War Museum and walk along the Ottawa River path to the Parliament Building, which takes about 25 minutes if you’re fast.

Second, I would recommend the Parliamentary light show, which starts at 9:30 in the summer, and last about a half hour. It’s free. You can also go across the street from Parliament to the tourist office and pick up tickets for a tour of Parliament, either outside or inside (though the inside tours get snapped up quick). They’re free too, though there was construction going on in summer 2016 that prevented access to all the grounds.

Third, I would recommend the Canadian Museum of Nature, on McLeod and Metcalfe in the south-east corner of downtown, walkable from Saint Paul. It’s a Victorian mansion with four floors of exhibits, including this summer a special dinosaur exhibit (which cost $10 more). This museum is free Thursday nights 5-8, as are some of the other “lesser” museums.

Fourth, though I didn’t visit it this time, there’s the National Gallery, in the north-east corner of downtown, just north of the Byward Market (a nice place to have a meal). It’s worth seeing if you like fine art, and has a good collection of Canadian art. Another museum I’d recommend, though like the National Gallery I skipped it this time, is the Aviation and Space Museum at Rockliffe Airport. This is way to the east of downtown, and is directly accessed by bus only twice per day, so you really need to drive or cab there. It has a great collection of vintage aircraft.

Lastly, over on the Quebec side of the river is the Museum of History, which is worth visiting, and like the Nature museum, free Thursday nights. There is a foot bridge you can walk across, which apparently takes about 25 minutes from the Ottawa side.

As far as victuals go, there is the usual assortments of chain restaurants and cafes downtown as you move from Wellington Street (Parliament) up to the Sparks Street Mall (no cars!) and Albert and Slater Streets (east-west streets on which the buses run). For greater variety, head east over the canal to the Byward Market, which has a few dozen small eateries with a variety of cuisines. There’s also a number of bars with outdoor patios within two blocks.

Lastly but not least, Ottawa actually has four beaches, the largest (according to the city’s web site) being Britannia Bay, a large bay west of the city, at the end of the #16 bus route. It’s a long bus ride, though you can cut your time down by using an express route before getting on the #16. The beach itself is roped off, with a lifeguard. Beside it is a medium-sized building with change rooms, some sort of community center, and a beachfront restaurant with burgers and other snacks that are reasonable and tasty. The water was pretty clear the day I went, and there are benches and picnic tables scattered around a small park. Worth a visit.

The Decline of Image Politics?

By Doug Mann, May 2016

On September 26, 1960 American politics changed forever. Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee for President, debated the slightly younger and substantially more charismatic Democrat John F. Kennedy on live TV. Nixon, who inexplicably eschewed makeup, appearing pale, sweaty and dodgy alongside the tanned, hale and hearty Kennedy. Pundits claimed that Nixon won the radio debate, but lost the real one – the one about image. A paradigm silently shifted.

Seven years later French Situationist theorist Guy Debord published a taught little book called The Society of the Spectacle that recognized this shift. Modern society, said Debord, wasn’t about philosophical ideas or political debates, but about images, about the spectacles provided by the cinema, television, and advertising. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord stated, “but a social relation between people mediated by images,” a relation dominated by appearances and pseudo-events. It is the guardian of a society that wants to sleep, to leave the real behind.

Debord’s claim seemed to become doubly true with the rise of social media and the Web 2.0 in the new millennium. Now millions spent much over their day hunched like zombies over the screens of their computers and smart phones staring at videos and pictures, communicating in Newspeak-like abbreviated texts. And the politics of the image marched arm-in-arm with digital culture, with even the most conservative politicians tweeting their daily manoeuvrings to the often indifferent masses (unless a Weiner-style scandal strikes).

Fast forward 56 years to the current US election. In some ways, the image politics paradigm still seems dominant. Most major candidates perform their personae to TV cameras and Internet feeds, their hair perfect, their policies hidden under empty rhetoric massaged by spin doctors. But then there’s Bernie on the left, and the Donald on the right. Trump fits the image politics model only superficially, while Saunders doesn’t fit it at all.

The battle in the Democratic camp isn’t so much an ideological one as a surprising struggle between postmodern and early modern ways of doing politics. In one corner stands Hillary, heir to the Clinton family dynasty, backed by Wall Street, practitioner of the football-coach “we’re gonna win!” style speechmaking. Despite her call to identity politics as potentially the “first female President,” many American women are looking below the veil, finding a policy chameleon. And voting for Bernie.

Saunders, a senior citizen with a shock of mad scientist hair, is hardly the ideal candidate for screen culture. He actually talks about policy and ideology. He points an accusing finger at Wall Street and at the establishment politicians in Washington who are paid $200,000 for speaking engagements while refusing to raise the minimum wage of their constituents, not to mention the corrupt systems of lobbyists that maintains them in power. He even commits the cardinal sin of admitting to being a social democrat, which is only one step away from socialism proper, the ninth circle of Hell for American conservatives.

Second Wave feminists might argue that Saunders is yet another old white man trying to reclaim the power of patriarchy over American politics, his ideology making him only slightly more palatable than Trump. Yet watching street interviews on the major networks indicates that a lot of women – especially young women – are fed up with politics as usual, and back Bernie’s explicitly leftist policies over Hillary’s indebtedness to big business.

On the GOP side things aren’t so clear. Among the fallen is the vapid Marco Rubio, young and handsome, but who Chris Christie exposed in a February debate as having been programmed by his handlers into becoming a bundle of sound bytes approved by party elites. Ted Cruz is older and increasingly irascible, but still able to present a nice image on TV screens, yet he struggles to reconcile his religion and family values with the realities of mass politics.

And then there’s Donald. On the surface, he seems to fit the Debordian archetype, his speeches punctuated by outrageous demands like the one for a Great Wall along the Rio Grande that are sure to get YouTubed and repeated endlessly on the nightly news. Isn’t he living evidence of the power of the society of the spectacle?

In a word, no. Even Saudners-style social democrats have to admit that Trump is putting forth policies, as crazy or horrific as they may sound: the Mexican wall, “rebuilding” the military, an end to Muslim immigration, and the use of torture on terrorist suspects. Admittedly, his sound bytes are quite entertaining, more so the scripted quips of a Rubio or Clinton. Yet a lot of what he says comes across as raw and unscripted, anathema to spin doctors used to the rules of post-Kennedy image politics.

His rally speeches are notoriously long and rambling, and not covered a by mass media which has to shoehorn short media clips in between commercials. Conservative Americans have responded. On April 26, 8 days after his potentially disastrous “7-11” gaffe, Trump steamrolled his way through five more primary states with victories. Saunders won’t win, though he’s still clawing away delegates from Clinton.

Most of us north of the border have long viewed American politics as one huge spectacle, one paid for by corporations who expect to get fair return on their investments from politicians they help send to Congress and the White House. What’s different this time around is that two major candidates have rejected the tightly controlled, money-driven image politics that ruled the roost for a half century. It’s a clash of paradigms, a return to dialectic. Richard Nixon would smile his grinch smile at this decline of the image.

Postscript 2018: Needless to say, Trump has turned out to be 80% bullshitter and only 20% policy wonk. The policies he has tried to implement, such as stricter immigration controls, have sometimes blown up in his face. The “wall” has become more of a sacred meme than an actual initiative. He did re-negotiate NAFTA, with mixed results. However, looking back, it’s hard to remember what major policy shifts or reforms, outside of fiddling with the tax code, that the last four or five presidents prior to Trump actually put into effect, with Obamacare being only a lukewarm exception, as any Canadian quickly realizes.