Fasting and Justice

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season. By Christian tradition, Ash Wednesday is  a day to contemplate the reality of our lives: our mortality, our faults, our weakness, and begin a process which, as we hope, we will move toward redemption, reconciliation with the world, the universe, and God who created it. 

By tradition, fasting is a part of that process. We speak of the Lenten Fast, and some of us speak as though Lent was the fast and little more. Long ago, the question of what to give up for Lent morphed into a humorous reversal: many of us claimed to have given up giving things up for Lent. 

The wrong man

Doug Ford is a people pleaser. His government works on that principle. He doesn't conceal the fact; indeed, he proclaims it. He is "for the people". If the people want to drink, he'll have alcohol, including  pre-mixed cocktails, available in corner stores. If people want to drive, he'll build a highway. If people want a spa and water park, he'll arrange it. If the people want entertainment, he'll lease out the waterfront venue to a promoter (never mind the promoter in question is a predatory monopoly).

That has made Doug Ford popular with an enthusiastic base. It also makes him extremely unsuited to lead during what look like the very hard times ahead of us. There is very little that is pleasing about our situation. Doug Ford will have very little to offer in the way of gratification if Donald Trump follows through on his threats. We don't need a premier who promises us everything we want; we need a premier who can rally us to stand together, even if the government can offer us nothing but toil, tears, and sweat. 

January 20, part 2

Just a few hours from now, Donald Trump will take the oath of office, and we will learn which of his threats, or promises, he intends to carry out.

In my last post, I wrote about the hazards of taking Mr. Trump's implicit promise to make Canada a state with caution; I believe that if we surrender before Donald Trump's economic aggression, we would find ourselves residents of a territory, not a state, and Canadians, or former Canadians, as we would be if we surrendered, might well find ourselves classified as US nationals, rather than citizens with voting rights. 

But if too many Canadian commentators have been mistakenly optimistic about our prospects should we surrender, we have been unreasonably pessimistic about our ability to face the kind of economic pressure Trump's government could or would bring to bear. 

Yet another modest proposal

There is no such thing as he "war on the car". Whether we view cars as their physical reality, tin boxes with a wheel at each corner, or as concepts, or as cultural tropes, cars are not moral agents and do not have a right of self defence. If we as a society choose to limit or even eliminate the operation of private automobiles in our society, or particularly in our cities, we can do so. It requires no war and no conflict. We are not in a war; we are having a debate. 

Thinking About the Rule of Law

 When Rudolph Giuliani called for a "trial by combat" on January 6, his hearers probably did not envision the ancient Germanic judicial ritual. Indeed, to judge from the number of supporters of the "Q" conspiracy theory attending the rally where he spoke, his call for "trial by combat" probably evoked, in at least some of his hearers, an imagined reckoning which, had it taken place, would have resembled the baptismal scene in "The Godfather", with Donald Trump reciting the oath of office as his surrogates systematically slaughtered his enemies. This displays a profound detachment from the rule of law; paradoxically, it also illustrates the importance of the rule of law. The Godfather movies chronicle the profound tragedy of a man drawn into a corrupt and violent system despite his intentions, and the baptism scene in that movie vividly illustrates, in its hypocrisy, the corruption behind the violence. To imagine a similar scene as a triumphant vindication, as the believers in "Q" appear to have done, with Donald Trump beginning his second term with a mass hanging following a military coup and unlawful tribunals represents a catastrophic corruption of the American imagination. 

What's wrong with David Frum's excellent article

by HiMY SYeD via Wikimedia Commons

David Frum recently wrote an excellent article in the Atlantic Monthly on the possible development of an authoritarian populist state under Donald Trump. Read it if you haven't already.

David Frum comes from Toronto, but he left many years ago for the United States. He did not live through Toronto's experience with insurgent populist conservatism. That may or may not have led to what I regard as the most interesting omission in a very good article.

The corruption of freebies in politics

By Kiwiev via Wikimedia Commons

By freebies, I don't mean swag ; I don't mean rides in jets and helicopters provided to politicians by prominent business leaders. In fact, I don't mean corruption of politicians at all, although crooks in office do cause major problems. I mean a much more serious problem: the corruption of the voters and, by extension, the political process.


Commentators have long derided political promises as bribing voters with heir own money, but the purposes of legitimate political debate include the best use of resources. The process gets corrupted when politicians promise someone else will pay. One example of this we all know: the slogan "make the rich pay", an aspiration often stated but seldom realized. Calls to tax the rich frequently give rise not to better services but rather to increasingly convoluted tax avoidance schemes. Governments have had much greater luck extracting money from people accused of crimes. Conservative governments in the eighties, motivated to reward their friends with deep tax cuts and to punish those they disdained, invented a series of creative and mischievous government financing tools, from the outright forfeiture of assets to fine surcharges.

Donald Trump's promise to force the Mexican government to pay for a massive public works project on the southern border of the US has a precedent: Ronald Reagan's government sent Oliver North on an unconstitutional fund-raising tour through the palaces of depots to obtain funding for the "contra" mercenary terrorists the US Congress had explicitly refused to support. Mr. Trump has extended this idea in two ways: proposing a major infrastructure program employing hundreds of thousands of Americans, and planning to take the money by some form of coercion rather than beg for it.

Hands in all colours

A couple of days ago on Patheos, Connor Wood wrote about the role the urban versus rural, working class versus managerial or creative class divides had in elevating Donald Trump to the White House. He wrote:

There are tens of millions of people in this country who are not symbol-manipulators for a living. They work with tangible things: gears, spark plugs, two-by-fours, PVC pipes. They can’t just talk their ways out of mistakes and errors in judgment, the way finance professionals or academic prognosticators can. If you screw up cutting drywall, there is no hiding it.

Another modest proposal

By Guilhermeduartegarcia CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Almost exactly ten years have passed since Brian Ashton lamented the decision by the Canadian government to decline to submit a bid for Expo 2015 on Toronto's behalf. Today we s another flurry of efforts to promote a bid for the 2025 international exhibition. As before, press reports focus on the political and business leaders supporting the idea of a bid, with sometimes a quick note of the potential costs and the number of jobs "created". The reports don't address the environmental sustainability of the fair or of the changes to urban structure required for the fair.

From error to error

A concerned student at University of Missouri
Photo by Mark Schierbecker (Own work)
via Wikimedia commons CC BY-SA 4.0 

Rod Dreher recently posted a web log entry in which he noted that the University of Missouri has fallen on some hard times. He attributes that to what he calls "craven appeasement" by the university of the protests that broke out at the university last fall. Mr. Dreher notably repeats the word "appeasement" twice and "cowardice" once, but does not allude to right or wrong, either in the ethical or the practical sense. He attacks the university, in other words, simply for an abstraction: abdicating authority.

The original charge of appeasement had a moral basis: the conviction, horrifyingly proved correct by subsequent events, of the wickedness of Hitler and the Nazi regime. At least in the case of the Munich agreement, the betrayal of the Czechoslovakian democracy compounded the immorality of appeasing Hitler. Whatever your opinion of the University of Missouri administrators, they did not commit anything like appeasement in this sense. If anything, the record of offences weighs against the powers that be of Missouri: whatever their faults, the student protesters do not carry the moral weight of one of the most inhumane slave economies on record, or of a terror state designed to keep African Americans "in their place". Nor did the protesters invent the carceral culture that has millions of Americans locked up for ideology and profit. Indeed, their protests against this plunder represent a genuine hope for renewing the American project.

Cultural appropriation and the millennial environment

The recent protest at Yale University over issues of cultural appropriation and Halloween have received support, analysis and condemnation. Responses opposing the protestors run the gamut from thoughtful concern about free speech to indignant clucking.

Much of the thoughtful criticism focuses on the supposed "intolerance" of the protesters, asking what happened to the legendary free speech protests of the 1960s. Some of the writers objecting to these protests seem to think objections to racial caricature, at Halloween or any other time, represent a new low in public support for free speech. That would probably come as a shock to the Nuremberg tribunal, who found the vicious anti-semitic caricatures of Der Sturmer had helped fuel the hatred that drove the Nazi persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jewish population. The court sentenced the publisher of Der Sturmer to death for crimes against humanity. Free speech has always had limits, and most Western countries acknowledge that in a society that aims at tolerance and diversity, incitement to hate lie falls outside these limits.

To understand why student complaints about the use of cultures in Halloween often seem to focus on practices that do not seem hateful, it helps to understand the environment the millenial generation has grown up in. The Internet has shifted the context in which today's students experience restrictions on speech. The power of the Internet has made the actual repression of information and opinion very difficult, except for extremely authoritarian governments willing to endure considerable self-inflicted harm. Students today have never lived in a world where censorship of ideas can plausibly come from an American civil servant or a judge. Instead, they have spent their lives in the world of the DMCA, where expressions get blocked not by laws but by licenses, not by bureaucrats but by lawyers, not by state power but by private claims of ownership over ideas. The controversy over cultural appropriation in Halloween costumes involves not free expression but property.

Connor Friedersdrorf quotes the offending email by Erika Christakis: "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious... a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" That looks to me like a naive and nostalgic view. In Halloween celebrations of the 1960s and 1970s, parents whipped up costumes for their children, Halloween decorations were made at home, and students pulled sheets of their beds for toga parties. Some parents still make costumes for their children, but Halloween today is a multi-million dollar business. Stores pop up in major cities in September and October, selling multitudes of ready to wear costumes. These costumes come with design copyrights, trademarks, even business method patents. The only people who do not get to make claim on this revenue stream are the people who created and maintain the living culture that gives many of these costumes their meaning. Cultural appropriation is not kids being transgressive; it is yet another an example of big business using the powerless as raw material to make a buck. Moreover, it is one means of turning that many things appropriated from the powerless into cash that individual students can choose not to participate in.  The email from Erika Christakis advised students offended by a costume "...if you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended. Talk to each other." That misses part of the point. Costumes are big business. By the time a student puts on an offensive costume, the exploiters have rung up another sale.

NDP and deficits

Writing in the Progressive Economics Forum, Louis-Phillippe Rochon denounces Thomas Mulcair's stated intention to avoid running a deficit. He pronounces himself shocked, shocked that Mr. Mulcair would ever suggest that deficits and debt make it impossible for governments to do good things for those they govern. He writes:

But in embracing balanced budgets, Mulcair has also endorsed all the right-wing rhetoric and lies that come with it. On the campaign trail, Mulcair has said in response to Trudeau’s promise of infrastructure spending, “I am tired of watching governments put that debt on the backs of future generations.” Later, he said “Mr. Trudeau seems to have the same approach as Mr. Harper – they both want to live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself … There’s a reason why we want to be good public administrators with balanced budgets, because if we’re not, then we’re not going to be able to have the types of programs that we all believe in going into the future.”

Historically, running a deficit without a just tax structure simply creates more debt, which rich people and corporations buy because poor people can't afford to; this requires governments to pay interest, which the poor pay for and which rich people and corporations collect. We have also reason to believe that citizens pay more attention to what governments spend  their money on when they have to actually hand it over as taxes, rather than watch the numbers add up on a debt clock on the web. Experience over the last five decades doesn't do much to support borrowing money as a means of building a durably just society. Infrastructure projects, public benefits, and economic stimulus without a strong, just and sustainable base of fair taxes can end up in the sorry mess the Greeks find themselves in, or the wildly irresponsible bank bailouts the Americans and others engaged in at the outset of this decade. Above all, I see no way to build a just society on injustice,whether you borrow money to do it or not.

And that, rather than the nicer points of public finance, explains why I, unlike Dr. Rochon, plan to give Mr. Mulcair and the NDP as much support as I can. Unlike Justin Trudeau's Liberals, the NDP voted against Bill C-51; unlike the Liberals, the NDP has promised to repeal it as soon as they get into power. And that matters, because C-51, effectively declares open season on First nation communities trying to protect their culture, land and rights. If, as they have said they will, the Liberals retain any part of a law that makes it easy to trample the rights of people Canada already has a shameful history of abusing, they will run a moral deficit far worse than any numbers in a financial ledger, and they might as well build their infrastructure projects on sand.

...a different appropriation

Consider this thought experiment.

In front of you you is a large blue button. You have only to push it, and technologies for efficient energy production, large scale urban agriculture, and efficient recycling and recapture of metals and materials will appear on a mass, commercial scale. Fibre production will come from massive and energy efficient grow-ops. Recycling will replace mining, and the agriculture that feeds the cities will be relocated to high-rise, high efficiency urban hydroponic farms, and fossil fuel extraction will end. With little to no industrialization pressure, indigenous cultures, and indeed anyone willing to live simply off the land will have the majority of the planet's surface to themselves. The First nations of the Western Hemisphere, for the first time since Columbian contact, will have an opportunity for real freedom.

There's a but.

If you push that button, the patents for all this technology will be owned by Exxon, Haliburton, GE, GM, IBM, Microsoft, Monsanto, and Nestle. Indigenous people will be free and outside this system, but the rest of us, those who want IPads and Internet, gaming, and Facebook will end up more deeply entwined than ever in neo-liberal corporatist culture. With the new technology, this culture and its owners would be more successful and more powerful than ever before.

The blue button aims to separate our commitment to specific matters of justice from our sense of what the world we want to live in looks like. If we push my imaginary blue button, it would end the oppression and dispossession of  the people of the land here in the Western Hemisphere, and many of us are committed to doing just that. That it would also cement the prosperity and the power of people many of us hate and fear is at most a secondary matter. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: if I could free oppressed First Nations by eliminating neo-liberal culture, I would do it. If I could free oppressed First Nations by not changing the neo-liberal culture at all, I would do that. If I could fee oppressed First Nations by eliminating some aspects of neo-liberal culture and leaving others the same, I would do that.

Many of us deplore the appropriation of the cultural artifacts of oppressed peoples by mainstream culture, ranging from actual religious symbols to gestures, but observing the dialogue on the Left today I have to wonder how many of us engage in a more subtle appropriation: using the urgency of the struggle for First nations rights, the struggle for the dignity and safety of the African communities in North America to promote our own vision for the future of society. If we work and fight for a world where Black lives matter, or First nations are masters of their own fates, what happens to neo-liberal culture in the process only matters to the extent that neo-liberal principles actually affect the lives and dignity of the people we ally with. Insist on freedom and justice first, and we will see what happens to the Nestles and Monsantos of the world.

On solidarity

Forget Charlie Hebdo for a moment. Start somewhere else. Consider a little community in Colombia, Las Pavas. The people of Las Pavas have a small cooperative agrarian community. Their lifestyle apparently suits them. Unfortunately, their land has attracted the attention of an international company that wants to extract palm oil. The people of Las Pavas are trying to say no to the exploitation of their land, and to the corrupt and violent processes by which an international company has attempted to take it from them.

If bullets can answer words, the people of Las Pavas, and with them a hundred other communities: indigenous people, the poor, or even simply people who choose peace, have no chance whatever.  The greed of the neoliberal order and the obsessions of the consumer culture will answer words with bullets without a single thought if they can get away with it.In fact, none of us have any realistic possibility of resisting the violence of our culture with violence. We organize, we protest, we speak, we persuade, and we cannot do any of these things effectively if a bullets can answer words.

That explains why je suis Charlie, and why je suis Charlie matters so much.

Not everyone agrees: some of the most quoted pushback has come from Jacob Canfield of the Hooded Utilitarian. Mr. Canfield makes the point that free speech does not free Charlie Hebdo from criticism. His criticism focuses on the way he considers the editors Charlie Hebdo failed to navigate the distinctions between the places in the world, such as Europe, where some Muslims suffer oppression, and the places some Muslims oppress others. Whatever the merits of that argument, it does not change the reality that two men with Kalashnikovs attacked a satirical magazine and killed eight journalists and cartoonists, as well as police officers protecting the offices. In a wholesale and brutal fashion, the gunmen answered words with bullets. A brief look at the firepower available to those governments committed to the neo-liberal politics and economics makes it extremely clear that the poor and powerless in the world will suffer most if the murders at Charlie Hebdo go unanswered.

Gambling on inequality

In today's Toronto Star, Royson James offers a good analysis of the declining prospects for a casino in Toronto. Some casino promoters have tried to entice the Toronto City Council, and the electorate, to assent to a casino by offering increased hosting fees; the Ontario government has now told us Toronto will get no better deal than any other municipality.

Whatever promoters offer, we should ask ourselves what additional value casino gambling will bring to the city. Toronto already creates major entertainment value: we have several world class theatre centers in this city, we host tryouts for Broadway on a regular basis, and most pop star tours stop here. Our festivals, such as Caribana, already draw an audience from across the region, as far away as Detroit. Establishing Toronto as an alternative to Las Vegas as a venue for the kind of entertainment Vegas provides, assuming we want to, would mean overcoming stiff competition for a limited market.

Do we want to compete? A casino doesn't actually produce anything. For every person who experiences the thrill of winning, more than one other person has to experience the let-down of losing. And the more communities compete to host casinos, the more people fall into casino gambling who can't afford it. Casinos sell the image of glamorous jet-setters enjoying spectacles and gambling their excess cash. At their best, casino resorts like Las Vegas cater to solidly middle class individuals who do enjoy some spectacular shows and who generally gamble what they can afford to lose. But as casinos proliferate, they increasingly need to attract the desperate: people who hope to stretch a pay cheque or a pension, and problem gamblers looking for the rush of risking more than they can bear to lose.

A recently popular graphic illustrates the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth in the United States today. I believe that broadly speaking, it makes sense that when money moves without creating value, inequality tends to rise. That happens because the individuals able to make claims on money in motion, from lawyers to investors to executives to politicians tend to have money, and power, and to compensate themselves well. And when money in motion doesn't create value, the economic pie gets no larger, so that as money flows to the top, the resources at the bottom get smaller. Perhaps we can in some small part hold this trend back by taking a hard and skeptical look at to the promises of casino promoters.

Nowhere man

The Atlantic Magazine staff writer Connor Friedersdorf has a post up on Ezra Klein's discussion of Paul Ryan's budget proposal. As a Canadian who nether pays taxes to, nor does business with, the United States government, the outcome of this argument doesn't affect me, but the ideas about politics and political discussion do interest me.
Connor Friedersdorf argues that despite Ezra Klein's claims to base his analysis on pure data, he has, in fact, a political position. Further, he and by extension other writers need to make their ideological assumptions and biases clear, so the reader can evaluate the assumptions underlying the facts they choose to present. Mr. Friedersdorf cites one claim Ezra Klein makes: that Paul Ryan bases his budget choices on the belief that American federal involvement in the social safety net "strangles" or "muscles out" state, local, and community initiatives. He cites a long passage from The Economist which includes this:

Don't expensive federal guarantees make community and family charity both less necessary and less affordable? Hasn't the increasingly intense and comprehensive regulation of the health-care sector made free markets in insurance and medical services basically illegal? I'm not so sure it's unusual to think so.

As someone who grew up in and still lives in the kind of community that does supports its members, I reject this premise. In my neighbourhood, in Toronto, one of the homes of Canadian single-payer health care (and very glad to have it), I and my neighbours for a number of years have held a block party and yard sale in which proceeds have gone towards supplemental care for a child with cerebral palsy. Access to world class medical facilities does not diminish community solidarity. To the extent that government policies have caused community programs to shrink over the past forty years, aid to the dispossessed and guarantees of basic services have played a minor role.

I grew up on the water, spending a part of my teenage years as a watchkeeper on the sail training ship St Lawrence II. A group of local Kingston businessmen built this ship for the youth of the community, and in so doing created a spectacularly successful program. In a sense, when conservatives speak glowingly of community programs, they refer to success stories like this. But community programs like the Brigantine rely on local businesses deeply invested in the community, and with the resources to back up that commitment with cash. In a series of policies that began before the Second World War and accelerated dramatically after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, North American governments have fostered the growth of massive enterprises that have no ties to any particular community. Today, local business that exist have their margins squeezed by competition with Walmart and other big box discounters. Governments have indeed fostered the growth of these large scale businesses, and in the process, in the name of efficiency, have disconnected communities from their economic support. That, in my experience, has had more to do with the ability of communities to support their members than federal entitlements.

Ruins in Detroit

In a sense, this, too illustrates the weakness of an analysis that claims to have a basis in pure data: it ignores not the ultimately sterile matter of political or ideological affiliations, but both the richness of knowledge and the passion that springs from the lived experience that numbers do not capture. In the worst of the plague years, some political leaders wished the communities affected by HIV would simply disappear. The searing account by Garance Franke-Ruta allows us to understand the passion with which communities afflicted with HIV not only survived but broke through their oppression. No table of numbers will ever bring home this lesson. In the same way, to understand the absurdity of the assumption that gutting government support for basic human needs will cause communities to magically rally to fill the gaps takes experience of the way communities really work. Imagination helps, too. Consider the actual condition of too many American cities: does anyone really believe the poorest American communities have the resources to create great social programs if the national government would only leave them alone?

[edited March 17]

Subways

I usually agree with Royson James, the Toronto Star urban affairs columnist, but I think his column on subways versus surface light rail transit has a logical flaw. He writes that he, unlike Rob Ford, will agree to pay for the subways that mayor wants Toronto to build. He indicates that Mayor Ford thinks the public will not agree to pay for the subways.

I agree with that part. It seems to me that Mr. Ford and his supporters have the approach to subway building that many teenagers have to household budgets: they want subways the way a fifteen year old wants the cool new cell phone. The parents have a credit card, so why can't they have it now? Mr. Royson, by contrast, takes an adult approach: if everyone gets a new phone, we can't afford a sixty inch plasma TV this year, so which do we want most? That puts him well ahead of the simplistic argument that we should have subways simply because people want them, regardless of expense, but I would argue he doesn't go far enough. Unlike families, cities operate in an environment of existential competition. If your son doesn't like his phone or the TV or the car, he can't usually go to live with the family next door. But cities do have to attract, and keep, businesses and the talented work force businesses require. Those businesses and people have alternatives, so the city has to provide good facilities at an acceptable cost. If a city fails at that task, its residents can face a bleak economic decline.

A city council contemplating a major capital investment such as a subway line needs to do more than simply agree to pay for it. They also have to do the work of planning, to make sure the money they spend buys services that enough people will use to justify the expense. Otherwise, the city tax base ends up saddled with debts for unused infrastructure, which means residents and businesses pay more taxes for the services they do use. This in turn creates an incentive for businesses and workers to locate elsewhere, leaving a declining commercial and residential base to carry the debt. This explains why, in urban transportation as most other things, those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Against this hard economic logic, claiming the people want subways, or even that current Toronto residents will agree to pay taxes in order to get subways simply does not suffice.

Who, me?

(via Daily dish) In an attack on David Frum following his departure from the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray writes:

AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom.

Let's follow the implications of that. Any group of people have the right to come together and call themselves scholars, to title themselves an institute. But the American Enterprise Institute does more. It pays salaries. It offers a health insurance plan. To do that, it has to participate in the economic world. In short, its participants have to offer something the world wants to buy. Think tanks, like editorial pages, make their money by producing opinions. That constrains them to to produce the opinions and research donors will buy. The market has the final word, which means that whatever their institutional culture told them, the members of the American Enterprise Institute do not have, did not have, and logically could not have "total intellectual freedom".

Nobody has defended those strictures at a more fundamental level than Charles Murray; he has specifically argued that having to rely on a menial job, if necessary, to provide for dependents does the soul good. If we apply Charles Murray's rules to American Enterprise Scholars, we should reject on principle the idea of anyone having a sanctuary in which they can produce whatever they please and have a guarantee the market will accept it. If you write, you have two choices: write things some market will accept, or else write for nothing. The management AEI appears to have given David Frum exactly that choice. I would expect Charles Murray to say, approvingly, that so they should.

Instead, he gets very angry indeed with the idea that anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute responded to the choices of the people who pay the bills. He does not call this making the kind of compromise that gives meaning to life, embracing hard realities in order to live life well. Instead, he refers to Frum's allegations as an attack on "the core of the Institute’s integrity". As I read his arguments, it appears the idea that economic rules which he passionately defends apply to people like himself makes Charles Murray incandescent with rage. He has disavowed his former friendship with David Frum on that basis. But what does that say about conservative principles, and the devotion to the free market avowed by conservative scholars?

What took you so long....

...and have you really shown up?

Leah Sandals and Toronto Star reporter Murray Whyte describe the emergence of a new collective that calls themselves the "Creative Class Struggle". This group focuses on the flaws in the theory of the creative class, and the person of Richard Florida. I strongly support the first focus, but I have serious reservations about the second.

My reservations about making a particular university professor the focus of this enquiry involves two objections, one major and the other minor. The focus on a single faculty member concerns me, partly because I dislike a focus on one person on general principle, and partly because some the kinds of objections raised to Professor Florida's presence, his inadequate teaching load and his unconscionable salary, reminds me of other conversations in other places, part of a larger conversation that has gone around and around academia forever. Also, I do not believe Professor Florida represents a symptom of the problems in our society, or that any conceivable social change will dislodge him. Men and women gifted at expressing and affirming the hopes of their societies have prospered under every system known in history. From the praise singer of ancient culture to the Bards of pre-Christian Europe to theoreticians who found their place in the Soviet Nomenklatura, I cannot think of a society in which writers and thinkers have not both prospered and provoked rivalries.

But the greatest problem with the focus on Professor Florida lies with the way this focus distorts his relationship to our city. Richard Florida did not come to Toronto to make it in the image of his ideas; he came because the city already expresses his ideas, and has done so for some time. I would argue that if we want to make a serious try at addressing the influence of Dr. Florida's ideas, we have to address the way our city expresses them. And we'll know we have done the job right if it makes us very uncomfortable.

To start with the obvious, well before Richard Florida came to Toronto, our current mayor, David Miller, called the industrial waterfront a "wasteland", and declared that the skilled workers, the pilots, aircraft mechanics and others who work at Toronto Island (City Centre) Airport should have no place there. The group most vociferous in their demands destroy the airport, Community Air, once made the connection between their demands and their vision of a waterfront reserved for the "creative class" explicit, claiming that failing to destroy the airport would imperil the waterfront's "potential as a major tourist, recreational, cultural, knowledge worker, and residential area serving the entire Greater Toronto Area.... Film makers, outdoor entertainment venues, restaurants, boaters and other recreational users, condo developers, and high tech businesses would all begin to flee..." (emphasis mine)

If we push industry and transportation away from the waterfront, where will they go? The city has a vision for that, too; for some time, transportation planners have prepared a special train to take passengers to Pearson International Airport from downtown. So does anyone live near Pearson? It happens that many more people live right near Pearson International Airport and its flight paths than live on the downtown waterfront. It also happens (surprise) that the people living in the neighbourhoods near (in some cases directly adjacent to) Pearson have, on average, about exactly half the household income of the people living in the downtown waterfront.

This process got rolling long before Professor Florida ever arrived on the scene. He came because a large part of this city's official ideology suited him perfectly. When it comes to the ideology of the creative class, and the issues of privilege (at all levels), disenfranchisement (for a long time, some waterfront advocates refused to acknowledge that the people of Malton even existed, insisting that Pearson Airport had a large buffer zone) and equity in public policy.

But that raises a problem: many prominent leftists in this city actively participated in the efforts to socially cleanse the waterfront in favour of "clean" high tech, creative-class industries. If we want to truly address the ideas that Dr. Florida puts forward, we will have to look hard at why he found such a congenial home here, and that look will not necessarily feel comfortable or pleasant. If you truly want to take on these issues, then I very much look forward to exploring them with you. If you just want to scapegoat one successful academic, someone else will eventually come along and ask us to think about what about us attracted this individual.

The self-destruct button

Hilzoy, of Obsidian Wings, gets the essential paradox in the spectacle of investment bankers who lost trillions of dollars feverishly defending their bonuses:

If I were an investment banker making millions of dollars a year, I would be trying to convince the people around me to simply take the hit for a couple of years, the better to preserve our ability to go on raking it in in the future.

This raises the obvious question: why don't they do that? Whether you look on this as a matter of mass psychology, a matter of pure supply and demand, or a simple matter of justice, it doesn't matter. Employees who put their company in what amounts to government receivership can hardly claim to have "earned" large bonuses or even high salaries. The collapse of most of the investment banks on Wall Street means that many more traders need jobs than institutions need traders, so the logic of supply and demand argues for a pay cut. And the men and women of Wall Street made their money out-thinking the market; surely they can grasp the current public mood. So why do something that goes against their education, values, and experience?

A serious challenge to any idea will naturally tend to set up a particular dynamic among those who strongly believe in that idea: a tension between the impulse to allow our ideas to evolve, and a fear that compromise with an opposition will unravel them. Several factors can increase the rigidity with which partisans of an idea hold it: the perception that those who defend an idea derive personal advantage from it, or the perception of a connection between ideas that mean compromising one idea would lead to the compromise of other cherished ideas. Consider, for example, this story. I will credit the Vatican and the Brazilian Bishops with enough intelligence and compassion not to actively want a nine-year-old child to carry twins to term. I can only explain this judgement as an expression of fear, the fear that if the church gives any ground at all relating to abortion, they will lose all authority relating to reproductive rights and morality.

Yet nothing destroys an idea as quickly as rigidity. Rigidity confesses weakness. Strong ideas can withstand challenges. Strong ideas can survive compromise. When upholding the implications of an idea leads to harmful results, we generally insist on compromise rather than accept the harm, and good ideas can survive those compromises. We can take children away from parents who abuse them without compromising the ideal of parenthood. We can arrest corrupt politicians without compromising democracy. If the Vatican we cannot accept the actions of doctors who saved the life of a victim of child rape without having the whole edifice of their teaching on reproductive ethics crumble, then perhaps they should think about the apparent fragility of the ideas they teach.If bankers cannot cut their salaries for a few years to save their institutions and the credibility of the financial system, then parhaps they, and we, should reconsider the whole structure of economic inequity in our society.