Emotions (II) Illusion vs. Wisdom

Western post-enlightenment culture provides us with poor guidance for understanding the place of emotion in our lives. We steer between two extremes: the Cartesian exaltation of linear thought, which rejects emotion as a distraction, and the dregs of nineteenth century romanticism, which leads us to see emotion as a source of free wisdom. I believe both these attitudes badly miss the truth: our emotions do indeed provide us with an important path to wisdom, but it doesn't come free. It takes more than just listening.

The best theory I have ever read about the origins and uses of what we call emotion comes from Rupert Ross's book Dancing with a Ghost, which talks about the complex and subtle pattern matching our minds perform. Ross writes of his early work as a fishing guide, when he learned to match the subtle sign of weather, season and temperature with his knowledge from past experiences. In his description of the process, Ross notes the step by step methods we more often associate with "reasoning", and the Cartesian methods for discovering information simply do not have the speed necessary to deal with life in the wilderness. But that speed comes at a cost: where we can step back through a line of reasoning to discover where we made an error, the kind of non-linear process Ross speaks of does not permit that. We can choose to trust what we feel, or not. For the First Nations people who live on the land, the environment provides continual instruction. Those of us who live in a constructed media environment do not experience the immediate truth of the physical world. We receive too many messages manipulated, or invented outright, mainly for the purpose of manipulating us. In other words, we take in a lot of garbage. And as the old computer saying goes, when garbage goes in, garbage comes out.

If the old romantic idea of simply trusting our feelings ever made sense, our current media environment, stuffed with lying political rhetoric, deceitful advertising, and subtle manipulations of every kind makes that impossible today. At the very least, if we hope to gain wisdom from our emotional reactions, we need to check them both against what we know about the world, and against other things we remember feeling.

Emotion (I) Attunement and Entitlement

Please note: this post discusses the work of Hugo Schwyzer


One of Hugo Schwyzer's recent posts defended womens' use of the word "creep" as a necessary and appropriate assertion of boundaries. He writes:

At the heart of the "anti-creep shaming campaign" is a concerted effort to discourage women from relying on their instincts to protect themselves from harm... [the word creep] forces men to reflect carefully about how they make women feel.

Predictably, Hugo's detractors reacted to his comments with outrage, but they did not appear to address the deepest irony in Hugo's comments directly. Because, in fact, the instincts behind the word creep lie at the very center of what Hugo describes as his power: his claim to have a gift for emotional attunement. As he puts it in one of his posts on the subject:

I was a “student of my mother’s emotions.”...  I did become very, very good at taking her emotional temperature.

In a followup, he wrote:

At six I had become acutely aware of my mother’s feelings; twenty years later, I was a chronic seducer because I imagined I was “so good” at “reading” women well. 

By his own account, during his life as a "chronic seducer" and drug abuser, he behaved in very dangerous ways: dangerous to himself, and even more to women around him. When he his addiction led him to complete despair, he attempted suicide, and by his own account tried to make it murder-suicide, deciding that a woman who had come to him for help had reached such a hopeless state that they both needed to die together. If I had to make a case against the proposition that the "instinct" that leads women to label men "creeps" keeps them safe, I would produce Hugo's own story as the first piece of evidence.

Hugo does not appear to have given up his sense that his ability at emotional attunement has in some sense entitled him to the attention he could persuade women to grant him. In an interview with Clarisse Thorne, at Role Reboot, he said this:

I do understand why some men who have found it difficult to meet women are angered by what I’ve shared. When I write about my destructive past, even in passing, some guys hear me saying something like “You shouldn’t even get a chance to try the naughty things I spent so many years doing before I came to my right mind.” That’s true for anyone who shares a story of redemption.

In the end, though, no one is “owed” sex. Other people do not have a moral obligation to get naked with you. And what bugs me most is that the envy, if that’s what it is, is so often tinged with a sense of entitlement.

I don't envy Hugo's life. But I find his use of the word entitlement in the above quote interesting. Despite his acknowledgement of the destructive nature of so many of his actions toward women, he never admits that if indeed he has an unusual ability at emotional attunement, he severely abused his gift.

In other words, it seems that he believes that the "instinct" that leads women to label men "creeps" provides a critical defence for women, he has, or thinks he has, a private back door around that defence. Despite his acknowledged history of dangerous behaviour, he has expressed no sense that he ought not to have that back door, or at least he should never have used it.

RMS Titanic, April 15 1912.

All things are lawful for the pure

In one of several comments on the death of Andrew Breitbart, Rod Dreher writes:

Breitbart was an exceptionally effective practitioner of a poisonous form of polemics that are as widespread on the left as on the right. Of course one of the defining characteristics of this dark art is the genuine conviction that when They do it, they’re evil, but when We do it, we are justified because We Are Good And They Are Evil, And Anyway, They Started It.

As an observer of internet controversy, I know too many examples of the double standard Dreher talks about here. I recently criticized the personal denunciation pages set up to attack the blogger Hugo Schwyzer, and got the same response:

The fact that detestable people can and do employ them does not make them into a priori “abuses” which are supposedly off limits for legitimate protest.

This would work as long as we could agree on the identity of the "detertable" and the "legitimate", but, of course, if we agree on that, we would not disagree on anything else.

From the personal to the global, these distinctions have infested political rhetoric for some time, as Rational Wiki notes:

U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s which drew a distinction between "authoritarian" dictatorships and "totalitarian" dictatorships, saying one was less bad than the other and the U.S. could morally work with "authoritarian" dictatorships as allies (such as the military dictatorships in Latin America) but had a moral obligation to oppose "totalitarian" dictatorships (such as the Soviet Union).

This naturally raises the question: why do people accept these distinctions? Where do they come from? I suspect that the conviction that "our" goodness justifies "our" worst acts, while "their" evil makes even "their" best acts suspect has two origins: the legal doctrine of intent, and the religious emotions connected to the idea of purity. Our legal traditions allow us to hold people responsible for the things they intend to do. This doctrine underlies the legal defence of insanity, on the grounds that someone in the grip of a delusion did not intend to commit a crime. It also gets used to excuse dubious behaviour: driving drunk, even when it results in a death, almost always draws a lighter sentence than other forms of homicide, on the assumption that drunks do not intend to kill.

Our habit of looking at the things people do in light of our assumptions about why they do them collides with another habit of mind many of us have, or at least carry traces of: the sense that rightness, in a factual or moral sense, carries a sense of purity, of heightened ethics, with it. When we embrace an idea with emotional excitement and believe ourselves in the right with the Creator, or with History, or Reason, or with any force we regard as transcendent, we can easily feel in ourselves an emotional satisfaction, a comfort, a complete sense of rightness. Combine that sense of rightness with the belief that the ethics of an act depend the motives for it, and you have ripe conditions for the emergence of the dangerous conviction that all things are lawful for the pure. In the context of a political or personal conflict, this creates the profoundly perverse implication: because the pure may achieve their results by impure means, the questionable morality of a "pure" person's actions can actually confirm them in their belief in their own personal purity. The logic goes that they could not do what they have done, or get away with it, without pure hearts. And, of course, the less ethical our behaviour, the more we want to find an excuse for it.

Ultimately, the argument that we did the right thing because we did it for what we consider a good end is a dud, and a harmful dud argument at that.

Subways and suburbs

When I read comments posted by defenders of the suburban dream, I usually find some variant on space mentioned. A large back yard, a big house, a quiet street, room to breathe: these define the allure of the suburban experience. And real estate developers have used these talking points to sell suburban tracts since before the explosion of suburbia and the attendant highway building that followed the Second World War.

Subway construction requires dense development and predictable travel patterns. Subways require tens of thousands of workers leaving small houses or apartments, or parking their cars at suburban parking centers, and taking the trains to work in dense commercial or industrial centers. If subways require density, and suburbs require open space, then the suburbs, by their very nature, should not have a subway, right?

Well, at least according to Rob Ford, wrong. I do not know whether or not Mayor Ford wants to build a subway just to keep transit out of the way of private cars, or whether he agrees with Joe Warmington, the Sun columnist who seem to think that building subways to Scarboro shows we consder the people who live there important. Mr. Ford's stated position holds that we can build a subway with private money, and that if the city builds the line, the dense development will magically appear. I have one question for the people who believe this: why do you want dense development appear in a place so many people found attractive precisely because of its open space?

Darwin day

Alternet reports that today, Sunday Feruary 12 marks the 203rd birthday of Charles Darwin and asks how we plan to celebrate. I gave some thought to Charles Darwin and the nature of evolution as a learning system. In a talk at Knowledge Technologies in 2002, Uche Ogbuji said humans have as much information in our brains as we have in our DNA. Keeping knowledge in our brains gives us an advantage, because for DNA to update itself with new information, the individual organism has to reproduce and die. I took this knowledge with me into First Nations justice work, and I had the opportunity to learn from First Nations people about the intimate connections between all things in the world. As they taught me, I remembered the world of abstract language-based knowledge, and I took another tentative step forward. I came to understand that the knowledge encoded into our DNA does not simply reflect us: it also reflects our environment. No one species evolves in isolation, rather and entire ecosystem evolves, moving forward and producing information about how to fit together. Our DNA and the living processes that refine it do not produce individuals or even individual species: they produce ecosystems.

What I encountered as the bleeding edge of European science, the intersection between cognitive theory and evolution, the First Nations people I worked with understood as traditions they had loved and reverenced from time immemorial. So on the 203rd anniversary of Charles Darwin, I conclude thus: like Columbus, Darwin sailed to far places and brought back information his contemporaries and successors used both for good and for ill. But can we truly call either man a discoverer for walking on ground lightly trod by others for thousands of years?

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.

Bicycle trails

(via I Bike TO) This evening, the civil servants charged with planning bicycle transportation will hold an open house at Northern District Library. They plan to present a proposal to fill the gaps in the city's bicycle network with trails. In many respects, I welcome this proposal. I have just a few questions: the civil servants and politicians charged with designing these facilities describe them with the word "multi-use". Does the city plan to provide genuine multi-use trails with a clearly delineated bicycle component,  or will they simply go with a "shared" facility, which throws the burden of keeping traffic separated on the users, and which often creates conflict and even endangers users. When I go to the open house this evening, I have no doubt I will find out.

A trail defined as multi-use mixes pedestrians and cyclists. The West Toronto rail path, one of the best examples of such a trail, actually functions as more of a linear park than a simple trail; it offers benches and grassy areas, and the cyclists passing by mingle with the dog walkers, joggers, and children playing. The civility that distinguishes Toronto at its best often makes this mix work, but does not eliminate the inherent problem with the design. Bicycles travel too fast to mix safely with pedestrians. An cyclist can easily move about three times as fast as the average pedestrian; the average urban motorist only moves about twice as fast as a cyclist. As events last summer tragically proved, collisions between cyclists and pedestrians can have tragic results.

The designers of the Martin Goodman Trail on the waterfront tried to solve this problem by dividing parts of the trail into pedestrian and bicycle pathways. This works quite well on some parts of the trail, less well on others. How well this separation works depends on both the effectiveness of trail marks and signs, and on the willingness of trail users to cooperate. Ideally, a trail divided for bicycle and pedestrian use would separate the paths in much the same way as road designs separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Such a design would reflect sound engineering principles, by making the safe choices the easiest and most obvious, but would also affirm the status of bicycle paths, routes and lanes as transportation corridors, like roads and subway lines, rather than recreational facilities. Cyclists ride to get to destinations. We have places to get to, and like other users of the city transportation networks, we have time pressures and deadlines to meet. If the bicycle facilities the city provides do not permit us to ride fast enough in safety. we can always use the roads, but that eliminates the safety advantages the city has attempted to provide by building the trails.

Disappointment

Feluccas on the Nile
source: CIA World Factbook

Goldblog recently linked an article by Eric Trager regretting the recent trajectory of the Egyptian uprising. He regrets that

...a befuddled Obama administration has failed to do anything to stop the coming disaster.

Considering the billions of dollars in aid the United States poured into Mubarak's Egypt, I have to wonder what more Eric Trager or anyone else thinks the Obama Administration could have done. President Obama, after all, represented a country which had enabled the abuses of the Egyptian government under Mubarak for thirty years. Americans had to expect the voices of their government would not carry a lot of weight when the dictatorship crumbled.

Mr Trager makes his perception of the extent of the "disaster" clear:

...their photogenic faces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.
But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were... an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.
Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her.

 In his desire for "a more democratic and friendly Egypt", Mr. Trager joins a long line of writers on American foreign policy who misunderstand the consequences of American policies at a basic level. Rightly or wrongly, American policy in Western Asia conflicts at a basic level with the hopes and priorities of millions of people who live there. In many countries in the region, the more the government follows the popular will, the less it will support American policies.

The article concludes on a gloomy note:

ONE YEAR after Egypt’s heroic revolt, Washington has no heroes in Cairo, only headaches.... a year after the ebullience of Tahrir, an alliance between military autocrats and radical theocrats is viewed, sadly, as a best-case scenario. 

Slaves exposed for sale
source: Library of Congress Collection

 Whether or not you agree with Eric Trager's assessments here, some perspective might help. American independence served to extend slavery for at least a generation, and led to increasing and increasingly brutal encroachment into territories of North American aboriginal peoples. If Americans, despite all the bad consequences of American independence, claim the founding of their country as a step forward for human freedom, on what basis do they denounce the Egyptians for the ways they have used their new-found freedom?

Observing a web controversy...

In December, I posted about Hugo Schwyzer's resignation from the Good Men Project. At that time I said I saw his resignation as an act of integrity; I still believe that. I also mentioned, in passing, that his self-exposure made me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable for two reasons: he has exposed other people while talking about his own history, particularly in the details he posted about his second marriage, and he has discussed past conduct he now rightly considers highly unethical. He has written about violating his trust as a professor with "consensual" sexual relationships with students, and last year he revealed that when he hit bottom as an addict he tried to kill both himself and a girlfriend. After Clarisse Thorn interviewed him for the web site Feministe via an interview by the controversy blew up into three posts (here, here and here), generating over a thousand comments. The discussion has echoed around web logs since.
A great many people have good reasons to feel anger at Hugo.  But as the discussion has developed, an increasing amount of the rhetoric has come to address Hugo's whole personality and presence, rather than his actions. The discussion started with an important issue of principle: should a man with Hugo's past have a role teaching feminism, or the kind of visible leadership role he played when he spoke at the "slutwalk" in LA, or indeed a role of any kind in the feminist movement? A good number of people have answered this with very clear, and very angry "no". As happens to often on the internet, the rhetoric and the combativeness have escalated: Hugo has collected men and women partisans who have made  outrageous comments about his critics, and put up a series of crude "sock puppet" comments on Feministe. Hugo himself has failed to make any moves to reconcile with the racialized women web-loggers he has offended. His critics, on the other hand, have escalated their rhetoric, from demands that Hugo withdraw from feminist organising and teaching to "let’s make sure to get Hugo where it hurts." [*], "We really despise Hugo Schwyzer. That's basically it. " [*] and "like that isn't exactly what hugo does - posts a picture of his supposedly handsome smug face all over everything to distract people." [*]

It seems clear that some feminist spaces that welcomed or tolerated Hugo won't welcome or tolerate him any longer, at least for the forseeable future. But I have to wonder how much Hugo really minds that. If you read his web log, which I have from time to time, he clearly lays considerable emphasis on moving on and not turning back. He quotes a poem called "Men at forty" fairly often on the subject. If he has concluded, at some level, that the time had come for him to move on from his stance as a feminist supporter or "male feminist", he has some compelling reasons. For one thing, teaching history, with or without a womens' studies or gender studies component, at a small community college does not carry the economic certainty it used to. A revolution in education led by online providers has jeopardized the future of entry-level colleges such as Hugo's employer. Moving away from feminism, and indeed moving away from college teaching, lets him avoid the coming dislocations and look for something else.

Consider his current pattern of highly provocative self-exposure shown by his posting articles on Jezebel and the Good Men Project (before he left it), as well as the post on his second marriage and, of course, the posts on his unethical behaviour. That  may simply mean he's shown bad judgment; certainly I think he's made some very bad choices in the past. But it may also mean partly that he has chosen, whether consciously or not, to close a door behind him. Ironically, this whole discussion may have opened another door for him: as the discussion of Maia's article at Alas shows, a substantial addiction/recovery community views matters such as Hugo's conduct in a very different light than the people at Feministe and associated web logs do. By denouncing him in such public and at times in such an extravagant way, Hugo's strongest detractors may have given him a boost with a new audience.

One good movie

In my case, I picked The Descendants. The movie had good reviews, I really like most of the actors. And the subject interests me: as I understand it, ultimately, the movie deals with the fallout from colonialism. In this case, colonialism meant the American missionaries who brought God and the Stars and Stripes to Hawaii, and whose children and grandchildren stayed and did very well for themselves. I had heard a little about this story, and I would have liked to see a movie about it.

But I did not. I haven't gone to see The Descendants. I almost certainly won't go. I may well not even rent the DVD.

I did not see this movie because I wanted to see it. I refuse go on buying cultural products from the bankers who finance films, and the artists who make them, even as those bankers and some of the artists undermine the freedom of the Internet that I depend on. So I picked one film and stayed away from it.

The Internet matters to me. It matters as a symbol of a new way of doing things, and as proof we can do things in a new way. It matters as an engine of commerce, and an engine of change. It matters as a repository of a vast array of beautiful, wonderful, brilliant, strange art and science and knowledge. It matters because this storehouse offers everyone on this planet, from the wealthiest to the most humble, access to the heritage of knowledge and beauty that belongs to every person as their birthright. For eons through our history, great men and women made art, and discoveries and innovations, and only a few people had access to their work. The Internet has changed that. I do not want to see this tool damaged or destroyed at the behest of the minority that make a living, often a very very good living, performing and promoting and selling the arts.

Rob Ford: My New Year Wish List

I like Rob Ford, as a person, quite apart from his performance as mayor. I did not vote for him, and in fact I worked fairly hard for his principal competitor. But on a personal level, I like him, and I respect his philosophy of government as a servant, a philosophy expressed in his constituency work, work that even some of his harshest detractors grudgingly admire. That bears remembering as we look back on the past year, with its mixed record of some success for Rob and his brother, some failure, and a touch of outright farce.

A little less than three years from now, the voters will have an opportunity to pass judgment on Rob Ford's work as mayor. I expect we will pass a fair judgment, and I also suspect that if things do not change, we will decide that someone else would do a better job as mayor. Whatever we choose in the end, I want Toronto to have the best mayor we can have, not just a suitable butt for the sneers of the Toronto Star.

So here we have the top four requests from me to Rob Ford:

Modesty and ambition

Hugo Schwyzer, a writer and teacher from California, recently resigned from the web site "Good Men Project". He gave as his reason a conflict between his support of  liberal feminism and what he perceived as a growing hostility to feminist ideas in the project. In particular, he cited the refusal of the site to publish a comment he had written on a specific dispute between the site founder and a number of women.

While I believe Hugo has told the truth about the specific reason he left the "Good Men Project", I perceive an underlying problem in his relationship with the project. Hugo has never hesitated to reveal himself on the Internet: I find his courage admirable even when the extent of his extroversion leaves me uncomfortable. He has frequently written of his belief in twelve step culture, with its emphasis on taking things one day at a time, sometimes on simply doing one right thing at a time. I respect Hugo's embrace of ethical modesty, particularly when it restrains the grand gestures that his writing suggests come naturally to him.

Since I can think of few ambitions more sweeping than an attempt to define the "good" for the three and a half billion men and boys on this planet, it seems to me, in hindsight, that Hugo's attraction to this project would  clash with a more modest ambition. In the event, Hugo made the right choice in leaving the Good Men Project to protect his integrity.

I believe that we underestimate the value of modesty. Looking at the collective achievements of our civilization, we forget too easily what small steps led us to our current position, how far we have to go. We find it too easy to avoid considering the tenuous nature of our position, or even the possibility we seriously overrate what we have accomplished. When choosing between integrity and ambition, even the ambition to achieve on behalf of other people, it makes sense to choose integrity.

A for idea, D- for execution

As an idea, you can't argue with it: cyclists shouldn't kill pedestrians. Moreover, cycling culture should take the obligation not to kill pedestrians very seriously indeed, and jurisdictions, from the city to the province, with responsibility for traffic safety should frame a comprehensive strategy to ensure the cyclists who do not understand our shared responsibilities get the message.

So how did the recent Globe and Mail editorial, which tried to make these simple points, do such a bad job? The answer partly lies in the atrocious phrasing the editorial claims cyclists should "know our place". And if we don't, do y'all have a rope, a tree and a bunch of good ole boys to teach us? Some phrases just bring up too many bad memories, and editorial writers should leave such phrases out of their tool boxes. Whoever wrote this particular editorial then added pomposity to their list of rhetorical blunders by writing this: "We do not occupy a planet where cyclist safety trumps all else." I get it: cyclists don't have a right to risk other people's lives to stay safe ourselves.

But this editorial does more than just break most of the rules of effective writing. It asserts a double standard and dares the reader to ignore it. Because anyone who spent much of last year in a conscious state has probably noticed quite a few very public decisions that paid no heed to the safety of cyclists. Fear of traffic doesn't cut it as an excuse for cycling on sidewalks. I don't cycle on sidewalks, and I ride my share of fast roads and heavy traffic. But consider the decision that Michael Bryant's fears absolutely justified all of his actions the night of his fatal encounter with Darcy Alan Sheppard, or the decision to tear out downtown bike lanes so a few residents of Moore Park can get downtown a few seconds faster, not to mention the frequent failure to file dangerous driving charges in many cases where pedestrians or cyclists get killed. I can't help getting the feeling that maybe my fears don't matter, but other people seem to think their fears, and even their resentments, do matter.

I know where I belong when on my bicycle: the bike lane or else somewhere between a meter and a meter and a half from the kerb in a lane wide enough to share in safety, secondary position (the right-hand tire track) in a lane too narrow to share, and primary position (lane center) in a lane to narrow to share where cars cannot pass safely. I ought not to cycle on the sidewalk, and I don't. But in a wider sense, I do not have a "place" any different from anyone else because I option a healthy, non-polluting option for some of my travels. I have exactly the same rights and obligations as anyone else, however I move around. And that sums up the underlying for the failure of the Globe editorial to make what should have been a simple point. Everyone, however we travel, has a moral responsibility to avoid harming other people, and the law should hold us all to account. But that raises a troubling reality: in many if not most cases where errant drivers have killed off cyclists, pedestrians, or even other drivers, the law has failed to apply the standard the Globe's writer proposes for those who bicycle on the sidewalk. Choosing not to deal with this basic contradiction, the writer of this editorial blends some very inappropriate rhetoric with pomposity to produce a very bad editorial.

I consider that sad, because I consider the underlying proposition valid. Indeed, I have seldom if ever seen the truth dressed up as such nonsense.

(Cross posted at I Bike TO; thanks to Yvonne Bambrick for pointing out the editorial)

The ends and means of culture wars

The current battle over library funding marks a skirmish line in a culture war. A culture war develops when people who hold a series of attitudes, often incoherently,  perceive themselves as a group and develop strong feelings of solidarity combined with hostility to others who hold competing attitudes. In Toronto, the culture war lines we all acknowledge include the Gay Pride parade and Mayor Ford's refusal to attend, bicycle lanes, and libraries. Less acknowledged but very real conflicts revolve around the word industrial, and the corresponding attitudes to the presence of actual industry in Toronto, and to existing industrial sites.

Because culture wars tend to involve incoherent clusters of beliefs, lines in culture wars can shift abruptly and without warning, propelled by the whims of popular culture and commercial media. I have written elsewhere of the growing acceptance of Toronto City Centre Airport and the corresponding collapse of the movement against it. In 2003, people calling for the closure of the airport belonged to a juggernaut that handed the mayor's chair to David Miller; a few years later, Toronto Life referred to them as a group of "aging hippies".

I hope I have conveyed my own belief that drawing lines in a conflict of cultures only damages the integrity of everyone's position, and even worse, makes compromise into a dirty word, coherent thinking about policy more difficult, and generally sabotages the process of effective self government. When a substantial number of people  choose to validate themselves by joining or supporting arbitrarily defined factions, the ability of everyone to participate in effective self government will suffer. Over the next while, I hope to produce a series of posts on how to avoid and diffuse cultural conflicts.

The persistence of (disputes over) memory

I remember the wars of the past and the war we have chosen to fight today  in Afghanistan. I remember the wars that came before that. I remember how one war frequently leads to another, the compromises made for peace in one generation leading to the failure of peace in the next. What aware person with a mind and conscience can forget?

I remember all year long. Every time I participate in the political process, I remember that people have put their lives on the line for my right to do so, and whether or not I believe their sacrifice produced my freedom, I know they thought it would, and I remember and honour their willingness to make it. I remember the men and women who endured the wars, who went to fight and gave up their youth and the soundness of their bodies and the peace of their minds, and I honour the choice they made to do that for all of us, even if I don't agree with the specific cause they fought in.

And at the same time, I face the paradox that confronts everyone who remembers and honours those who fought for their country. As Jimmy Carter rightly said, the necessity of a particular war does not make war any less of an evil. In 1939, Canada and Britain may have had no choice but to fight, and the young men of this country who flocked to the colours then have my full measure of gratitude. But they would not have had to go if Hitler had not persuaded young Germans to flock to the colours of blood and night. Good people only have to fight for good causes because very bad people can deceive others into fighting for monstrously bad ones. Does our memory, our gratitude to the men and women who died depend on our opinion of their cause? If so, should the Germans relegate their World War II veterans to a past they feel nothing but shame for? If not, then what do we really celebrate about the men and women who went to war, and should we temper our gratitude to them with an awareness of the terrible ease with which very bad people can make evil use of the noble impulse to sacrifice?

Changes in technology have forever changed the nature of war, and the way we remember wars, warriors, and soldiers has not changed to keep up with it. We know, as an abstract truth, that the hope and expectation that most of the generations of the past entered wars with, the hope of a final victory, we can no longer expect. As Gwynne Dyer put it, if a nation with a nuclear option ever started to lose a war in a final way, then it would resort to its nuclear arsenal and everyone would end up dead. Europe would lie in ruins before the Russians ever again marched through Berlin, or the Germans marched through Paris. But that has to change the way we look at war; if war, the carnage and sacrifice on the battlefield, can no longer shape history, then what does? And how do we celebrate everyone that makes our history and passed on a heritage of freedom?

All these questions turn around one other hard truth: peace and freedom have never come without a cost. War, as our  parents and grandparents knew it, has come to an end, and our survival depends of recognizing and accepting that. But the end of war does not mean an end to sacrifice. Brave men and women will still need to put their lives on the line for things that matter. More and more of those men and women will never wear a government uniform, but they will fully deserve our thanks and remembrance. How, when, and where we choose to remember will remain a point of contention for some time. Canadian, British and American merchant sailors in the Atlantic convoys suffered together with their naval counterparts and made sacrifices that undoubtedly made as much of a contribution to winning the war as any military person, yet they did not receive official recognition and veteran status until over 40 years after the end of the war. Even today, the day specifically set aside in Canada to remember the sacrifices of merchant sailors, September 3, does not get the public attention that November 11 has.

Maybe at some future Remembrance Day ceremony we will see peacemakers and peacekeepers, those who struggled for justice and those who fought for their nation standing shoulder to shoulder with all people whose valour and endurance made our world possible. Someday, the world may remember Americans such as Ernest Evans, Jean Donovan and Tom Fox, Canadians like Smokey Smith, and Norman Bethune together as brave men and women who gave their lives for justice and a better future for everyone, without making distinctions of uniform, rank, or status. But that day has not come yet.

Today a trademark, that most mundane, commercial, and, oddly, civilian of issues muddies the waters. Since 1948, the Royal Canadian Legion has had control of the poppy trademark granted to them by a special act of Parliament. Since at least the 1980s, they have engaged in legal scuffles with people who have attitudes to war and memory different from their own.Obviously, I disagree with the Legion here; I find the use of trademark law in an attempt to shut down political speech you disagree with highly inappropriate, and I consider it even more inappropriate to try to couple our willingness to remember and honour those who died in wars past to a particular view of war and peacemaking today. That view, that soldiers created our freedom and that only soldiers guard it, will fade into history with the time when wars could end in unambiguous victory, The soldiers who come home from Afghanistan will come home to praise and celebration, but they will almost certainly leave behind a country in turmoil and a still active Taliban. Freedom from the intolerance the Taliban and other extreme religious movements exemplify will not come from military action. To remember and honour the soldiers who gave their lives so we and others might have a better future, we will, in the long run, have to accept this and incorporate it in our way of remembering.

Canonization of Brother André, October 17, 2010

My mother, Elena MacDuffee, told us the following story. As a young woman (in the late 1940s or early 1950s) she and her cousin visited the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal. Before entering the building, they strolled in the garden, where they met an elderly gentleman. He told them that he loved to come there every day, to sit in the garden and chat with the visitors.

The two young women said goodbye to the old man, and then entered the Oratory. A display about Brother André and his life caught their eye. And there was a picture of the very man they had just met—brother André, who had died years before, in 1937.

A not-so-scary ghost story in honour of All Saints’ Day.

Privilege (I): Transcending politics

Many of us wish out politicians and commentators could transcend petty disputes about their ideas. Recently, several columnists did transcend their politics, and I learned to think carefully about what I wished for.

After the prosecutor assigned to Michael Bryant's case concluded he had no hope of convicting Mr. Bryant (a reasonable legal conclusion), a number of commentators, including a fair share of conservatives, hailed the decision as not only a legal victory for Mr. Bryant but a moral vindication.

I will have more to say about the question of whether the dismissal of the charges against Michael Bryant adds up to vindication in any but a legal sense; for now, I propose to focus on what the conservatives who expressed relief and satisfaction at the dismissal of charges against Mr. Bryant did not mention: his politics. Before his encounter with Mr. Sheppard, Mr. Bryant had served in the provincial legislature, first in opposition and then as attorney general, where he regularly promoted government as an wise caretaker of public health and safety. He did not just want to control guns, he wanted to control realistic toy guns. He banned pit bulls and dogs that looked like pit bulls. Ironically, he called for draconian enforcement against hazardous drivers, extending police powers to suspend licenses and impound cars without the bother of a trial. In short, he promoted and extended the nanny state in the service of a liberal government. His measures catered to the supposed anxieties of the "soccer mom" voting demographic.

Yet after his fatal encounter with a private sector contract worker, I read no conservative comments about the irony of Mr. Bryant's past stances in light of his predicament. Bryant's middle class status, his polish and accomplishments made him someone they could identify with, even if he had used those advantages in the service of causes most conservatives oppose on principle. They gave Mr. Sheppard no credit for keeping going and refusing to give up on his life after suffering insults and assaults starting from his childhood, and indeed from before his birth.

Our society carries on and awards unjust privilege in this quiet way, often as much by what we ignore as by what we proclaim, by what we do not say as much as by what we do.

Peaches Princess Johnson

I planned to write a post about having a dog in the fight against cancer. My daughter's beloved pug, Peaches, found herself in the fight of her life against canine lymphoma, a very aggressive cancer. We went into the fight right along with her. I planned to say that as long as he body and spirit could keep up the fight, we would fight right along with her.

But today at noon the cancer won. Peaches's joyful spirit never faltered, and our love for her never wavered, but we both ran out of time. We took her to the vet yesterday because the chemo-therapy made her throw up. Today we found her listless and unable to eat; at noon she went into convulsions, and before we could reach the vet she died in my daughter's arms.

We feel so sad that our dog has died, for ourselves and the things we won't get to do with her, and for her and the things she won't get to do with us. We will never forget her; we will miss her joyful brave spirit, and we will do our best to honour the gifts she brought to us.


Peaches Princess Johnson, Feb 29 2008 - Aug 30 2010. We said goodbye too soon.

Radio (3) How to Switch the Station so you Teenager Won't Notice.

If you have ever travelled in a car with a teenager, and become tired of listening to noisy and/or incredibly misogynist music, especially the song where the boy meets the girl in the club and, well, he doesn't want to be disrespectful...but he just has to say that her rear end is [...], then you will appreciate this method of radio sabotage.

This method works only if:

1) you are in the front seat and the teenager is in the back seat;
2) you have push-button radio;
3) the teenager has a friend (or a DS gaming system) with them, making them less vigilant about radio tampering; and
4) you want to switch seamlessly from the noisy rock/hip-hop station to an easy rock/light favourites station (you can't switch to classical music, or to CBC Radio 1, or to the Radio Netherlands Africa Report: it would be too noticeable).

Here's what you do, in 4 easy steps.

1) Wait for a commercial. While your teenager is busy chatting with their friend, etc., slowly reduce the radio volume, bit by bit.
2) When the volume gets down to a whisper, push the button for your favourite easy rock/light favourites station
3) very gradually increase the volume on the light station.
4) enjoy several miles of mildly pleasant music together (perhaps Michael Buble or the Black-Eyed Peas) until the teenager finally wises up and calls out "Hey! That's not my music!"

Radio (2) The Radio Gods

I spend quite a bit of time driving through the western suburbs of Toronto, often taking our dog Peaches to the vet. While listening to the radio, I compose short essays in my mind--mostly about the radio. Every night this week I am contributing a little "radio" essay.

I have a theory that there are radio gods, who govern when we will get to hear our favourite songs on the radio. To please the gods, we must treat them properly. To cruise rapidly through the dial is not the way. For one thing, you will have to hear a lot of sub-par hip hop, gushing contest winners, Celine Dion songs, suggestive pizza ads, and--worst--the celebrity news as delivered by Ryan Seacrest.

Besides, do you really want to hear only the second half of your favourite song? I didn't think so.

So this is what you do. Push the up arrow to a new station. If you hear an advertisement or someone talking, move on to the next station. If it is a song, take a few seconds to recognize the song, and then decide how much you like it on a scale of 1 to 10. If you give a rating of 5 or less, move on.

If you rate the song at 6 or more, stay put. Most radio stations play a consistent style of music. This means there is a good chance you will also like the next few songs. And because you have found a congenial station, there is an excellent chance that, after 3 or 4 songs (and maybe a pizza ad or two) the radio gods will bless you and you will get to enjoy "Brown Eyed Girl" all the way through.

AM radio

There is a station that we get in Toronto, Oldies 1150 (CKOC) out of Hamilton. It's one of the few oldies stations on the dial, so I have it programmed in as one of the 18 push-button options on my car radio. It and the all-news 680 (which I listen to mainly for traffic) are the only AM stations I have chosen to program in.

It's always an odd thing, when I happen to push this button, how the quality of sound is so different than the FM stations. The scratchy sound is like the grainy picture on an old TV with only aerial reception. The (lack of) sound quality, even more than the particular songs, really takes me back to my adolescence, when I listened to the radio on a sturdy battery-operated radio (it even accompanied me during my bath) and sometimes on a tiny avocado-green set that fit into my palm.

Back then, we didn't care much about the sound quality as much as the songs. I got excited the first time a disc jockey (on CKFH) played a request for me--it was 1971 and he played "Brand New Key" by Melanie. I spent most of the 1970s obsessed with the Beatles (yes, I know, I was a decade late, but better late than never). Mostly I listened to then on a portable record player that spun at 39 RPM instead of 33 1/3 (I had timed it). As the songs were speeded up, I always seemed to be getting up to change the record.

Listening to the few surviving AM music stations today, there is an odd time-warp about suddenly being surrounded by the sound texture of my childhood. It's as if I suddenly had a delicious whiff of my mum's "Green Pepper Delight" or plunged my nose into my dad's tin of Revelation tobacco.

A note on clothing...

The people who criticize what some cyclists wear seem to have issues with spandex, complicated by the way cyclists sometimes wear bright colours. I can't think of a better answer than to tell those afflicted with it to keep their minds on driving rather than fashion criticism. Cyclists who wear bright coloured spandex do so for two severely practical reasons: it cuts down on wind resistance, and therefore on the work they have to do, and it helps other road users see them. Winning fashion awards from passing motorists doesn't figure into it-- for any of us. Motorists who think that should worry us should grow up; we have more important things to worry about, and so do they.

On having a sick pet

Our dog Peaches fell ill over a month ago. She's lost weight, suffered from frequent vomiting and persistent intestinal upset. Several visits to our vet and to the emergency clinic have failed to resolve the problem, and the vet now tells us she either has a long term condition we can manage, or else a cancer that will kill her in at most two years.

When I think of her joyfully leaping off the deck into the yard, or leaping back up into the kitchen, or singing as we filled her dog dish and burying her dear face in it the moment we put it down, I feel as though my face and chest have turned to lead-- lead with a great ache behind it. The thought of losing our dog, and losing her so young hurts. The thought of her losing her life, a life she enjoys, hurts more.

I don't have much of any control over all this, but I can at least choose this: to learn from the joyful wholeheartedness of Peaches's life. If I put some of that into my work, then let her live a long and full life, or let her barely get beyond a puppy, that happy spirit will not have disappeared from the world.

And so I choose to face what the next weeks or months or (I hope) years bring us in that spirit. Not that I would have chosen this; I'd rather have my dog with me, joyful and healthy, forever. But time doesn't grant us many victories, and those we can eke out come from joy and learning. I'll do the best I can and take the best I can get.

G20 and the police

A great many people have already written about the events of the G20 weekend in Toronto. I participated in the First Nations protest the Thursday before the meeting, a protest which went off without any major problems, largely because the First Nations organizers requested, and expected, peaceful conduct from everyone.

But most protests in the city happened that way, and even the most aggressive demonstrations neither got near the leaders' meetings, nor caused any serious injuries, nor caused a serious amount of property damage. The G20 ended with two or three police cars destroyed and a lot of broken glass; plenty of sports events, and even some rowdy weekends in cottage country, end up with more damage than that.

By any standard, we now have an impressive number of accounts that indicate the police overstepped their bounds, and the police have responded with  evidence of the protesters' evil intentions which, to put it mildly, fails to convince.

At this point, I can only add one comment to this. We have a legal system in Canada, a legal system that includes the police and courts. As Rupert Ross, the Crown Attorney who wrote Dancing with a Ghost and Returning to the Teachings points out, a lot of First Nations people remain far from convinced we have a justice system. A good many poor people, social activists, and others, likewise, have very little faith that we have a justice system. Incidents like this merely reduce that faith. A loss of faith in the legal system has consequences, and those consequences tend to compound. The fewer people believe they can get justice from the system, the fewer use it or cooperate with it. Fewer people call the police, report crimes, or come forward as witnesses.

It may comfort a few people to claim that, as one poster to the CBC wrote (go to page 21 from the start of the comments):

You'll go crying, "Mommy, mommy the bad man took my money and hurt me. Help Police!" I just hope they treat you the same as everyone else and help you out when you need it most. You will take their help as if it was your God given right and then you will whine and complain about the shameful police again once they've helped you.

I can tell you from personal experience that not everyone does that. Nor should this surprise us. The argument that if something bad happens to us, we will go to the police no matter how we feel about them simply goes in a circle: you don't trust the legal system, but if something bad happens, you will. The proponents of this view never explain why we would pick the worst moments of our lives to turn to people we do not trust. I suspect they have no real answer, outside of a comforting daydream scenario. In reality, distrust of the legal system exists and has consequences. Some communities sum up their arguments for refusing to cooperate with the system in slogans like "Stop Snitching". But distrust of the legal system does not merely affect struggling and impoverished communities. It affects everyone.

End the impunity. See what happens.

Jim Kenzie, among others, has claimed that, for no reason he cares to make explicit, Canadians will not stop driving cars and drivers will not change. I think he and people who think like him underestimate the intelligence and decency of the driving public. I think drivers would do the behave much better if the law and the culture around us sent a clear message about the right way to drive. Specifically, I think insisting drivers will never treat other road users respectfully makes it much less likely they will. Whatever the reason, this country suffers from a road death rate that makes it very likely that over a normal lifetime you will lose a family member or friend to a traffic crash. I have a modest proposal to change things.

End the impunity.

Recently, the courts convicted a driver for having a car illegally modified for street racing in a way that defeats important safety features, driving that car at a reckless speed, and causing a death. Having reached all those conclusions, the court sentenced the driver to one year in jail. This would not bother me as much as it does, if similarly reckless behaviour with firearms attracted a similar sentence. Someone who deliberately disconnected the smoke alarms in a house, or permitted someone else to, then behaved recklessly with matches and inflammables would face a charge of manslaughter, if not murder, should their behaviour kill someone.

With the series of judicial and police decisions over the past year, it seems hard to deny that dangerous drivers in this culture can expect a presumption of good faith and a leniency that few others can. If you pull the trigger, the courts assume you meant to shoot. If you strike the match, the courts assume you meant to burn. If you defeat the safety measures in your car, drive recklessly, and kill someone, the courts appear to assume that you meant to arive at your destination will everyone aboard well and hearty. This has reached a point where it amounts to impunity for drivers.

Let's end the impunity. Let's do whatever it takes to ensure the courts cannot presume good faith in the face of evidence of reckless conduct on the roads and tampering with safety features. If judges in this province regularly treat homicidal recklessness with motor vehicles as much less culpable than recklessness with guns or fire, then maybe the law should require minimum sentences. Maybe, then, drivers would treat the responsibility inherent in operating a vehicle capable of causing serious harm with more respect. If not, then at least offenders will receive proportionate punishment, whether they use a bumper or a bullet to kill.

These days, they come for the dictionary first...

Joe at Biking Toronto wants to ditch the word cyclist, and at first sight he seems to have a good argument. Goodness knows, with both the friends and enemies of cycling engaged in a demented race to pile more and more baggage onto this poor two syllable word, it should make sense to just chuck it and start over. Look at all of the attempts to define a cyclist: someone who wants to save the planet but won't bother to stop at traffic lights, an impoverished elitist, an altruistic member of a self-interested minority. Can we save this word? Do we want to save this word?

Speaking for myself, yes I do want to save the word cyclist. I want to cut the straps and let all the baggage fall off, but I want to keep the word. A cyclist can vote BQ, Conservative, Liberal , NDP, or Rhinoceros. A cyclist can obey all the laws with great care, or can proceed through the world making up his or her own laws. A cyclist can believe in capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other economic system; in representative democracy or absolute monarchy. A cyclist can love the planet, hate it, or believe it doesn't matter because the world will end next Tuesday. Only one thing makes a cyclist: the use of human-powered, wheeled transportation. Anyone who has used a bike reasonably recently can call themselves a cyclist.

The word "cyclist" describes those of us who ride bicycles with an elegance and brevity that the words "people who happen to ride bicycles" will never achieve; but I have two more basic reasons for not wanting to give up the word.

First, to the noisy minority that shows up in newspaper and blog comments after every story involving cyclists and whips themselves into a froth (and they do constitute a minority), the problem has nothing to do with words. I do not know what many of those people really object to, but they focus their venom on human-powered vehicles and those who ride them. Just as advocates for people with cognitive impairments gave up the word idiot, imbecile and retarded when these words each evolved from a medical diagnosis into a schoolyard taunt, if we start calling ourselves people who happen to ride bicycles, we'll start to read abuse directed against PWHTRBs. These days, before they come for the communists or the trade unionists, they come for the dictionary. Let us not kid ourselves: the ultimate target has nothing to do with the words we use, or even the actual technology that moves us. They want our freedom.

This brings me to my second point. Some years ago, on a visit to the ancient seaport of Marseilles, I encountered a young street tough who asked me for money. When I had none to give him, he snarled "Juif". What should I have told him? The truth? Je ne suis pas un Juif would hardly have sounded dignified. In the end, I had no good (verbal) answer for him and just treated his comment as a stink in the air, not worth acknowledging. The point for us: when someone attacks us, it may seem to make sense to separate ourselves from the kind of people we think our accusers must really dislike. But that kind of denial preserves neither our dignity nor our rights. If we propose to drop the word cyclist as a way to distance ourselves from those dirty lawbreaking anarchists, we might as well forget it and preserve our dignity.Maybe I see myself as better than cyclists who ride badly, arrogantly or confrontationally; maybe I don't. But to many of our opponents, just riding a bike makes me just the same as all the cyclists they criticize. Maybe we need to debunk their stereotypes, but we sure shouldn't surrender to them.

A thumb in the eye for a courtesy...

View Windermere Route in a larger map

When returning from the waterfront to Bloor West, I frequently take Windermere Avenue; it provides an easier and safer ride. Recently at the intersection of Bloor and Windermere, I had yet another experience of the factors which make for friction between motorists and cyclists. The Windermere/Bloor intersection has two northbound lanes: a right/through lane and a left turn lane. I reached the intersection on a red light, the first in line. I noticed the driver behind me wanted to turn right on the red, and the traffic conditions would allow him to do so safely, so I moved to the left to let him through. He made his turn safely and waved his thanks. Then the next car in line moved up and when the light turned, the driver went straight through the intersection on my left. That didn't cause me any great problem, since only one car went through the intersection that way. But If a whole line of cars had decided to pass me on my left, particularly if I also had cars going southbound, I might have found myself in a very uncomfortable position as a result of my courtesy to the driver turning right. I don't blame the driver who passed on my left; in Ontario, we don't train drivers to look out for cyclists.

The moral? The next time you see a cyclist and think that person could let you go ahead but won't, don't take it personally. Look at the situation from the cyclist's point of view. They may have no trouble letting you through safely, but they can't predict what the car behind you will do. Keep in mind also that the cyclist in front of you can probably do nothing to get you home sooner; if we let you through, or you pass us (safely, please) we'll probably see you at the next red light. Also, where you have crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags, we have a half millimetre of cotton or spandex. The other moral? If you want to speed up your actual travel time, well, get a bicycle. But if you have a load you have to move by motor vehicle, and you want to get through the city quickly, behave courteously to vulnerable road users, and encourage other motorists to do the same. For every driver who blows through a crosswalk, some pedestrian will push the button and wait for the lane to come to a complete stop. If you want crosswalks to work better, watch for the lights and obey them. If you want cyclists to offer you little courtesies, then make sure we don't find ourselves in dangerous situations when we do. If I move left to let a motorist make a right on red, that does not give you permission to pass me going straight. I try to treat other road users with respect and I expect respect in return, and respect and tolerance have to start with the people behind the wheels of the two-tonne steel bombs.

Too much fun in the rain forest...

A new cafe has opened on Annette Street called "Good Neighbours". Their lattes add a whole new layer of meaning to the phrase "guilty pleasure", and the decor of the place mixes contemporary art with traditional touches in a pleasing way.

When I lived in the United States and visited Toronto regularly, I always noticed the vibrant diversity of Toronto's business community. In all but the very largest American cities, the tried and true, the franchises with nationally known names, tend to dominate the landscape. Here in Toronto, a hundred thousand flowers have bloomed. Not for the first time, I feel the business climate resembles nothing so much as a rain forest, in the vibrancy of its diversity and its sheer sensuality.

In Toronto, we celebrate creativity with festivals: Luminato in the spring, Nuit Blanche in the fall. But we seldom seem to take the opportunity to celebrate the creativity all around us, in the simple act of opening a new cafe, or a store, or a restaurant. But when we honour creativity only in the official artists, we close our eyes to a wonderful bloom in forn of us every day.

...and a bad argument against cyclists

Jason Henderson wrote an alternet article making the reasonable enough point that driving cars creates a demand for oil, the demand creates the impetus to drill, the drilling leads to disasters such as the one currently in the Gulf og Mexico. He proposes, as a solution, that we should accept driving as an activity fundamentally at odds with the environment and the values that progressive people hold. His prescription: don't drive. Not even a "green" car such as a Prius.

The comments attracted a set of fascinating defences of the car and denunciations of bicycle culture. One idea stands out: we shouldn't cycle, because "bohemian" cyclists oppress the "true" working class. Consider the following:

I see "progressives" like Jason Henderson every day. People who ride their bicycles inside highly electrified cities benefiting from wealth and privilege that made high education possible, while others in the vast service industry grew and shipped their food, made and shipped their clothing, maintained the day-to-day infrastructure working long hours for pennies and built the gigantic buildings required for a privileged few to have sufficient free time to pursue being "progressive" by cycling to a university.

It would take too much time to unpack all of this for one post, so I will focus on the central fallacy here: the assumption that bohemians in general, and perhaps cyclists in particular, partake of some privilege that renders them (us) at odds with some vague notion of an "authentic" working class. That, in turn, depends on a single (false) argument: that cycling necessarily requires so much time that only those people with both flexible and undemanding work schedules can manage to use a bicycle for practical purposes. I know from experience that at least in an urban centre, where most people now live, bicycles provide a more efficient way to get around. Whether from an economic, resource, or time perspective, the bicycle simply works better in the city than the car does.

Cycling requires organization and a measure of physical fitness. It does not require a "bohemian" or academic work schedule. Those people who want to suggest they drive in order to express solidarity with working people will have to think up a better excuse.

A challenge to the cycling community....

In my opinion, the best challenge to cyclists seldom gets made. The best possible argument against the cycling community would go like this: you (we) have the potential to achieve genuine excellence in the way you (we) travel, so why don't you (we) do that? The answer, of course, would go like this: we do come much closer to complete excellence than motorists allow. But we still make to many excuses for our own and each others' mistakes. We still settle for a lower standard than we could potentially achieve.

Too often, we can't find a good way to say to the world that we exist, we have an unquestioned right to the roads, and at the same time to say to one another that we fall short too often. We have the potential for genuine excellence: we can make our journey through the world a positive thing for our bodies, our minds, for the world around us. Motorists can never do that, or as with cyclists (most of us) who also drive cars, I need to say that when we drive, we can never do that. Behind the wheel of a car, we can only seek to limit the damage we do. But on a bicycle, we can grow our bodies, calm our minds, and travel peacefully and lightly in the world.

So why do we so often accept all the anger and frustration of the motorist, and return it to them with a little interest of our own? Why do even those of us most gifted with privilege, most able to forgive, sometimes cycle with a chip on our shoulders? Why foster a cycling culture that ratchets up the impulse to confront, to accuse, to respond to the violence motorists do, to themselves, to us, to the world, with anger and accusation? Can we find a better way?

A thumb on the scale

Over the weekend, someone put up a poignant protest at the courts: a white bicycle protesting the lack of justice for cyclists in Ontario courts. While I agree that Canadian courts have, in recent years, treated cyclists appallingly, I would go much farther than this. It seems to me that in virtually all cases where anyone, whether cyclist, pedestrian, or motorist has fallen victim to homicidally bad driving or roadside violence, someone, somehow, has put an obliging thumb on the blind lady's scales in favour of the errant motorist. Two young men kill a taxi driver by speeding on a downtown Toronto street at an estimated 30 to 90 km/h over the speed limit. They plead guilty of dangerous driving causing death, an offence which carries a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. They get a sentence of one year under house arrest, followed by an 11 pm to 6 am curfew, which their parents can override by giving them a note. Toronto drivers kill fourteen people un a little over three weeks, including one woman who runs a red light, kills a woman and very nearly kills the infant in a stroller. The police lay only provincial driving charges. An ex-politician tries to shake a cyclist off his car, battering him to death, and a prosecutor sees no prospect of conviction. A driver in Quebec hits a group of cyclists from behind, killing three; the police have yet to lay charges. A homicidally reckless, possibly drunk driver hits a car with his cement truck in Calgary. He kills five people, including three children, and virtually wipes out a family. The court awards a sentence of eight years, of which the defendant will serve five and a half. While heavier than most sentences for driving-related offences, this falls far short of the life sentences usually imposed for homicide, particularly in cases of multiple homicides with violence.

Not all of these cases represent the same level of leniency, and you could argue that in some of these cases, the courts have simply served justice based on the facts. But I challenge anyone to look at the overall record and maintain that the same trail of mayhem committed with guns or knives would elicit a similar response from the police and courts. The evidence that the legal system in this country treats the same harm very differently when delivered through a motor vehicle seems overwhelming, and it also appears equally clear that in too many cases, air bags, seat-belts and crumple zones do much less to mitigate the harm done by recklessness than car companies would like us to believe.

Some councillors and others have taken to whining that Toronto has embarked on a "war on the car". It seems clear to me that homicidally reckless drivers have long ago declared war on all of us: pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists. So far, dangerous driving has killed more North Americans than al Qaeda and the Islamist movement, the Communist party (all communist parties), the government of Hideki Tojo, and the national socialist german worker's party. Combined. Maybe the time has come to stop mourning our dead, and instead to do something serious about the deaths.

...a long time coming

Jeffery Goldberg ascribes the recent events in regard to Gaza aid flotilla to military and short-term political incompetence. I think that does the Israeli politicians and generals a disservice. As long as Israeli forces maintain the Gaza blockade, by all accounts a popular policy in Israel and a very unpopular one elsewhere, people willing to risk death can make Israel look bad. The Gaza relief ships simply have to keep steaming toward port to compel the Israeli military to either abandon the blockade, or to use force and risk subsequent casualties.

Rather than blaming the Israeli Defence Force, it helps more to ask how the Israeli government got their tails in this particular crack. It seems to me that Israel blockaded Gaza in despair, because they had run out of options. Having beaten the corrupt Fatah party in the election of 2006, Hamas had a earned, by the normal rules that govern these matters, a right to govern. But governing the Palestinians meant working with the Israeli government, and the Israelis could find no way to work with people dedicated to their destruction. Here, I believe, two quite understandable impulses in Jewish life collided with disastrous results.

The first impulse, which for convenience I will refer to as the ADL impulse in honour of the Anti-defamation League, holds that the Jewish community cannot ignore or condone hostility. The second impulse, which I call the IDF impulse in honour of Israel's defence forces, says that the Jewish community can never afford to rely on goodwill alone, because enemies can overpower even the most sincere of friends. Both impulses make sense, given Jewish history, but they lead to fatally contradictory policies. If you have power, you can dictate to your enemies what they can and cannot do without having you punish them for it, but you can't try to force them to like you. A policy based on the IDF impulse would have ignored Hamas rhetoric, but punished any government led by Hamas for hostile actions against Israel. A policy based on the ADL impulse would have deplored the hostility to Israel shown by Hamas, but not used force in response to it. In fact, it appears the impulses collided, and Israel refused to recognize the results of the election both because of the past terrorism by Hamas and also because of the ongoing hostility of Hamas to Israel.

If Fatah had taken control of Gaza by force, then Israel could have released the blockade. But since Hamas won the election and the subsequent power struggle in Gaza, I can see few good options for the Israeli government short of a more general settlement with the Palestinians. In the meantime, blaming the situation on Israeli commandos, or even on the planning staff of the Israeli Defense force, strikes me as a less than useful simplification.

Semantics and car dependency

Cyclists who set out to argue with opponents of bicycle lanes and other facilities for cyclists have a problem: our opponents tend to speak a different language, to a different purpose, than we do. Many cyclists who argue for bicycle facilities also drive, but many motorists who argue against us do not cycle. That means many of our opponents have little if any experience choosing their transportation mode. To go any medium distance (one to a hundred kilometres), to them, means to drive a car. They know, in a sense, that they could cycle, but someone who has not cycled for transportation in their adult life has no actual experience of actually weighing the two transportation modes and choosing the one best for the purpose.

In practice, this often means that when cycling activists speak of the problem of car dependency, our opponents often answer us by talking about the advantages of "auto-mobility". I can't speak for other cyclists, but I do know about the advantages of the automobile. When I have a computer CPU, or other heavy gear, or a bunch of kids to schlep, I use a car. When I have just myself and something I can fit in panniers, I generally use a bike. But for someone who has never biked as an adult, in their practical experience cars mean mobility (and vice versa). The different experiences of cyclists and motorists cause us to speak a different language, and I believe it helps to both discuss the question of what purposes the private car will prove useful for, and to affirm the importance of choice in modes of transportation.

Safe in traffic: no one way

In his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi,Mark Twain writes of setting out as an apprentice to a Mississippi river pilot and expecting to learn the river, and finding out that instead, he had to do something harder: learn to read the river.

Working out the correct lane position for riding a bicycle likewise requires reading the street. The linked video (above) from the League of American Bicyclists, and even more the associated discussion, contain many claims about "the" correct lane position, one commenter going so far as to argue that a study from the UK establishes the correct lane position for bikes, worldwide. To his credit, the researcher concerned say he makes no such claim.

I would argue that no one rule works for lane positioning, even in a given city. In Toronto, the situation changes all the time. A ride on Queen Street at 1400 (2pm) on a week day, with parking in place, takes place in a very different cycling environment from a ride at 1700, with the parked vehicle removed (we hope) and large numbers of commuters filling the street. At any given moment, the cues that predict motorist behaviour, from the sound of engines to the configuration of their vehicles, allows a cyclist to decide when it makes sense to pass, and when it does not, how far into the lane to ride to keep the drivers passing at a safe distance, when to ride in the kerb lane and when not to.

It takes much less time and effort to learn to read the street than Mark Twain needed to learn to read the Mississippi, but it does take some effort and attention. Precisely because novice cyclists need time to learn the skills of reading traffic, bicycle lanes make sense: they allow new cyclists to observe traffic from a cyclist's eye view and a protected position on the road. But neither bike lanes nor any single technique offers a solution to bicycle safety: that comes primarily from education and enforcement directed at motorists, the operators of the really dangerous vehicles. The best safety measures cyclists can take for ourselves depend on observation and learning.

Oops..

Last night, turning onto Bloor, I rode past two people at the corner waiting to cross the street when the light changed, and failed to see the person behind them, walking the other way. She started to cross the street, I saw her to late and braked, but not in time to avoid her. We bumped into each other, not hard, and neither of us lost our balance. I apologized, she assured me the collision had not hurt her, and we went our separate ways.

Two observations:

1. As I do more cycling, I have to stay sharp, and not just look out for vehicles.
2. An apology and a willingness to admit when I make a mistake go a long way to resolving tense situations.

Number two man

In the field of candiates for mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford now polls in the number two spot among decided voters. Since only about half the voters have made up their minds so far, it doesn't do to take these polls without a large grain of salt, but his performance should definitely wake up those who snickered that a man with his body mass index and antediluvian ideas shouldn't even think of running for mayor. It doesn't do to underestimate Rob Ford.

It doesn't do because behind the well-known personality, Rob Ford has a coherent, consistent theory of government. All the public positions I have seen him take point to a belief in a minimally intrusive government, service oriented and responsive at the local level. Thus, for example, he supports or at least tolerates bike lanes in the downtown and inner suburbs, where people manifestly want them. If he has changed his previously expressed opinion about urban cycling, that would mean he has changed his opinion in light of voter sentiment; a rare attribute in a politician. I have no reason to doubt his commitment to service oriented government, either. Any time I have had cause to contact him, I have received a reply the same day.

So what kind of mayor would Rob Ford make? He would do some things well. He would clear bureaucracy out of the way of local initiatives in public parks, particularly self-funded ones. He might well set new standards for responsiveness in Toronto's government. On the minus side, Rob Ford's belief in minimal government would mean that without either a regional authority or a public-private partnership to get the work done, he wouldn't expand the TTC. Transit City would stay on hold. Mr. Ford's reliance on local initiatives and opinion in policy making makes coordinating city-wide initiatives difficult, if not impossible. Mr. Ford's record in council also makes it difficult to see how he will put together the majorities he will need to govern effectively. And some of his ideas, like trying to bring back Julian Fantino as Toronto's police chief, simply don't make sense.

The time has come, in fact it has long passed, for those who do not want to see Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto, as well as those of us who simply think someone else could lead the city better, to stop trying to make Rob Ford into a joke. The audience has stopped laughing. We have to engage seriously with Mr. Ford and his ideas, and present better ones.