Category Archives: ranting and raging

The Name On the Front

There is a timeworn adage in team-sports that may be familiar to many of you: It’s the name on the front of the jersey that matters, not the name on the back.

In other words, the objectives and achievements of the team must always take precedence over individual team-members’ accomplishments.  That is the only route to collective success.  No doubt, individual accomplishments do help the team to succeed, but individual glory is secondary to team triumph.

If you’re a sports fan, you may remember Sidney Crosby’s ‘golden goal’ in 2010, which won an Olympic gold medal for Team Canada in ice-hockey.  And you can be sure the joy on Crosby’s face as he celebrated with his rapturous teammates was not because he scored the goal; rather, it was because the team won that coveted prize.  Sid the Kid was and is a consummate team-player.

This lesson was drummed into my psyche from the time I first started playing team-games—hockey and baseball—around the age of ten, until I finished my last game nearing the age of sixty.  Given the vicissitudes of age as I complete my eighty-first trip around the sun, I don’t miss playing those games now, but I’m awfully glad I had the opportunity while yet I could.

Over all those years, I came to realize that the lesson implicit in that old adage might well apply to all of life.  In this country, for example, all of us wear a jersey with the same name on the front: CANADA.  Politically speaking, however, there is a plethora of different names on the back of those jerseys, as there is for any team: LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE, NDP, SPECIAL INTERESTS, LOBBYIST, and many more.  Ideally, given the name on the front, we would all be playing for the greater good of the team, pulling together to advance our collective best interests.

Alas, all too often, our elected representatives in Parliament push their selfish interests to the forefront.  They choose to heckle and yell, rather than listening to one another; to dismiss differing viewpoints out of hand, rather than trying to understand them; to criticize and condemn, rather than seeking compromise and consensus.  Question period—which is a made-to-order opportunity to seek honest answers and debate them sincerely in an effort to advance a common cause—has become a travesty that would shame an unruly class of six-year-olds.

During my working career, I learned and frequently made use of a valuable strategy for helping bring people to consensus.  On the assumption that agreement is impossible without understanding, I would assign a person (or group) to listen carefully as someone presented an idea.  Next, I would require that person (or group) to ‘play it back’ in their own words in such a fashion as to indicate they had grasped the concept.  If the original presenters agreed they had, we could safely go on to debate the merits of the idea, knowing no one harboured—unknowingly or deliberately—misconceptions about it.  The debate was thus based on a common set of understandings.

If the original presenters believed the listeners had missed the point, I would  have them present it again, and the process would repeat.  If nothing else, it forced people to listen to and focus on what they were saying to each other, rather than just waiting for a chance to refute what they thought they were hearing.

It’s no secret that our country—indeed the entire planet—is having to deal with a number of issues and concerns right now: among them are the prospect of another pandemic for which we are sorely unprepared; the re-emergence of fascism as a political force; a lack of affordable housing; economic and social inequities; famine and drought; the twin-scourges of racism and xenophobia; and the incessant wars being waged around the world.  And towering over and above all of these in scope and consequence, there looms the existential threat of climate change.

On planet Earth, the only home we have, there is but one team.  And the name on the front of that team’s jerseys is HUMANKIND.  But, just as with any other team, the names on the backs of those jerseys are different—in this case, the names of the political, cultural, economic entities we know as nation-states: CANADA, CHINA, EU, GERMANY, INDIA, JAPAN, RUSSIA, UK, and USA, to name but a few.  All but the first on this list might rightfully be deemed a superpower, which Britannica defines as “a state that cannot be ignored on the world stage and without whose cooperation no world problem can be solved.”

The biggest problem facing Team HUMANITY, however, is that these individual players are not cooperating to find solutions to the crises facing the planet.  Rather, they are in pursuit of individual accomplishment, usually to the detriment of each other, as if they are playing a zero-sum game in which, for every winner, there must be a loser.  In hockey terms, it’s as if twelve players are on the ice, each with a puck, firing it at random in every direction, with no concept of who the opposition might be, what team-play looks like, and what winning or losing is.

In the battles our planet is experiencing, there will definitely be a loser, but it won’t be the planet.  It will survive in some fashion or other, perhaps greatly changed from the sanctuary we have come to know, but still circling the sun.  It is we who will be the losers, Team HUMANITY, unless, collectively, the individual players stop paying attention to the names on the backs of their jerseys.

Will we prove able to do that?  I don’t know, of course, but I’m not optimistic.  I despair of the future, though I’ll surely not be around for a whole lot more of it.  As a species, we are as dysfunctional a team as ever I have seen, each of our players strutting and brandishing his own name on the back of his own jersey.

But here’s the one, indisputable thing—in life, as in team-sports, it’s the name on the front that matters.

‘Til It’s Gone

Since the turn of the century, my wife and I have been blessed to spend six months a year in Florida.  During that period, we’ve lived under four American presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

In that same timeframe in Canada, we’ve lived under four prime ministers—Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau.

In Florida, we’ve made dozens of friends over that period, both fellow-Canadians and Americans, most of them snowbirds like us.  Given the constraints of time and distance, and the vicissitudes of age, we no longer see many of them as often as once we did, alas; but we have never stopped considering them friends.

The majority, not all, are similar to us in the ideas we espouse, the values we cherish.  My wife and I consider ourselves socially progressive, left-leaning, but close to the centre—more Liberal than PC in Canadian political terms, more Democrat than GOP in the American context.  We instinctively distrust the fringe elements at both ends of the spectrum.

Some of our friends, though, are not so like-minded, being decidedly more right-of-centre than we.  With them we generally avoid politically-fraught conversations, preferring amity and camaraderie to confrontation and unpleasantness.  And it is indisputably true that all of them, regardless of viewpoint, are generous and kind in their dealings with us.

In the wider context, however—especially in the USA, but also in Canada to a lesser extent—we are currently witnessing an increasing divergence of opinion across social and political lines, accompanied by mistrust and hostility on both sides.  Socially, the divergence is epitomized by the divide between the privileged few at the top of the socio-economic ladder and the huddled masses near the bottom.  Politically, it is portrayed as the struggle between radical leftists (vilified by their foes as socialists) and ultra-right zealots (pilloried by their foes as fascists).

I must confess, my own political leanings are more socialist than fascist, more democratic than autocratic.

The struggle plays out across a large number of issues, a small sample of which includes: racism; LGBTQ2S+trans rights; reproductive rights; healthcare; voting rights; climate change; role and size of government; and religion.  It is the first and last on this list that I deem most problematic in both countries.

Racism is a persistent concern.  For many people in the USA, slavery is the unforgivable sin, the ineradicable stain on the national fabric, a transgression for which amends and restitution must be made.  For some, it is a part of history best left forgotten, as if all is right with the world—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.  With good will on both sides, however, these two groups could likely find common ground at some point. 

But for others, a minority but a vocal one in both countries, racism remains a part of their ethos to this day—a deliberate allegiance to the notion of white supremacy.  There is a great fear among such folk that they are being dispossessed of their rightful place, that their privilege is being taken from them.  And they decry immigration policies that, in their opinion, indiscriminately admit people of colour.

Many of these people—perhaps too many—turn to demagogues to promote their cause, and those demagogues shamelessly court them to advance their own objectives.

Religion is another major problem.  The separation of church and state, the partition between religious and civil authority, is a fundamental tenet in the governance of both the USA and Canada.  Whether founded as democratic republic or parliamentary democracy, neither nation was envisaged by its founders to be a theocracy, ruled (or unduly influenced) by religious leaders.

Iran is a theocracy, as are Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Vatican City.  But neither the USA nor Canada was intended to be one.

Yet today, in both countries, an ugly, religious fundamentalism has reared its head—a fundamentalism of a warped Christian persuasion, a fundamentalism, it must be said, distant from the teachings of the Christ regarding love, tolerance, repentance, forgiveness, and peace—all of which, mind you, are universal tenets found in the gospels of other major religions.   

This fundamentalism preaches adherence to a narrow interpretation of biblical scripture, and seems (at least to this man) unduly restrictive of the rights of women.  It is as if a pseudo-godly Godzilla has arisen to guide us to the Gilead foreseen by Margaret Atwood.  I see the movement as an obscene fundamentalism that, in the words of the poet William Butler Yeats, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I do not, of course, deny the freedom enjoyed by citizens of either country to freely practice their religions of choice, whether Christian or otherwise; I do, however, strongly decry all attempts by any group to foist their beliefs upon others for whom those beliefs do not apply.

And I do not for one moment believe that such religious fundamentalism should have any role at all in the governance of either of the countries in which I reside.  But whether or not that will come to pass depends upon us.

In 2016, in the American presidential election, a large number of voters declined to cast a ballot.  Whether that was through ignorance, through a belief their one vote would not make a difference, or because of a visceral, irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton, I do not know.  Perhaps all of the above.  But I do know what resulted from that election.  And I do fear what might happen again in 2024 if ignorance, apathy, and hatred govern people’s actions.

Likewise in Canada, I fear ignorance, a belief one vote will not make a difference, or a visceral, irrational hatred of our current PM will yield a similar, catastrophic result in 2025.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said in one of his speeches, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  It is up to each of us, I suppose, to determine what constitutes justice and where it might best be found, both socially and politically.  But whatever it is, and wherever it is, I believe it is forward, not backward; upward, not downward; toward the light, not into the darkness.

As Joni Mitchell famously sang, …don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone!

Who Counts?

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Like many of you, I suspect, I was raised by a mother generous in the love she gave, and wise in her ways.  My four siblings and I benefited greatly from her counsel, and agree to this day that she was right about almost everything.

Whenever I was angry with my brother or one of my sisters, for example, she would caution me, If you have nothing good to say, don’t say anything at all.

Many of our relatives in my mother’s large, extended family were gregarious, well-informed on most subjects, opinionated, and frequently argumentative, so holiday gatherings occasionally became loud and disputatious.  At such moments, my mother would advise me, Sometimes it’s better to say nothing, even if they might think you don’t understand, than to open your mouth and prove it.

Occasionally, I would arrive home from school with some juicy bit of gossip, and she would say, If your friends are talking about other people behind their backs, you can be sure they talk about you when you aren’t there.  And when I would nod as if I understood, she would add, It’s always best to stick up for people who aren’t there.

Decades later, I encountered that last advice again in a landmark book by Stephen Covey, who exhorted his readers: Defend those who are absent—one of my mantras to this day.

A good number of my mother’s admonitions were homespun, she having been raised by descendants of  Scots/Irish farming-stock who had emigrated to eastern Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century.  It’s a long road that has no turning, she would tell me when I’d recount a tale of woe, feeling sorry for myself.  If I’d had a quarrel with a schoolmate, she would say, The road to a friend’s house is never long.  Or if I was sad and blue when things weren’t going well, she’d tell me, When things are dark, try to be the light that someone else can turn on.

I think of my mother often these days, and I miss her wisdom.  I wonder what she’d have to say about this world we live in now, with all its strife and turmoil. 

No one in our family was ever subjugated by an invading people, exploited and dispossessed of our native land.  None of us has ever been despised and disenfranchised because of our nationality, our ethnicity, our skin-colour, our religious beliefs, our gender orientation, our political preferences, our wealth or lack of it, our age, or any perceived disability.  Throughout our lives, in fact, we have been among the privileged of the earth.

Such is not the case for the human species as a whole, however.  Worldwide, a huge number of people are victimized by war, famine, drought, disease, and genocide, some to the point of death.  And for many of those who survive, barely, there is scant relief offered by others of our species.

The product of a random, evolutionary progression over millennia, we human beings at our most primal level are forever a tribally-oriented species.  We seek to be with our own, and are suspicious of any who are different.  We are intelligent, yes, but also egocentric, selfish, aggressive, predatory, manipulative, superstitious, and too often unforgiving.  And because these character traits often override the intelligence factor, is it any wonder we currently find ourselves in such a mess?

Many of the several wars consuming the planet right now, for instance, are the result of clashes among opposing superstitious beliefs—what we sanctimoniously call religion—where each protagonist claims there is no god but our own.  And as if that doesn’t constitute folly enough, consider that many historic wars were waged by our predecessors who claimed allegiance to the same god, even as they prayed to that deity by different names. 

Such foolishness, when earthly power was truly the false god they all desired!

We humans have allowed ourselves—perhaps through a callous disregard for our collective well-being, or maybe due gross ignorance of the consequences we soon shall face—to approach a point of no return.  We seem not to realize that the civilization we profess to admire is but the thinnest of veneers, perched precariously atop the baser instincts of our species.

My mother used to say, The circle is not complete until everybody is inside.  We should always try to make the circle wider, so that everyone can come in.

Decades later, I chanced upon remarkably similar advice, this time in one of Michael Connelly’s crime-novels, spoken by one of his fictional characters, Harry Bosch:  Everybody counts, or nobody counts.

Would our current state of world-affairs be better, I wonder, if we humans could ever adopt that premise?  If we could set aside our preoccupation with the many issues differentiating and separating us, and instead take up the humanistic character-traits we share that might bring us together?

I mean, who counts?

No Longer There

The weekly prompt from my Florida writers’ group was: tell a story from the point of view of an inanimate object.  This is my offering—

I first espied your home millennia ago, long before your primitive, bi-pedal predecessors first walked upon your insignificant rock and thought to look up at me.  And you, the survivors of eons of mingling and melding with each other, can see me still, as I wend my way to you across billions of years from a source no longer there.

That source, my home—originally anonymous, a mere speck in the vast cosmic dust of the universe—would have been invisible to you, had it not finally flamed out and vanished into a massive black hole of anti-matter, succumbing to the irresistible, terrible pull of gravity.

But I, the sole survivor of that massive, thermonuclear firestorm, endured to bear witness to its existence.  A blast of energy and light radiating out from its core, I traverse the interstellar darkness at the speed of light, my destination unknown ad infinitum.

At some distant point in time-past, one of your forebears was the first to spot my leading edge.  From that creature’s vantage-point, I was but one of uncounted pinpoints of light in the night-time panoply overhead, each of which, like me, had begun its journey after a cataclysmic conflagration—very much like the one your own star will eventually experience.

Along the way, I was assigned a name by one of your ancestors—although I remain undistinguished in the infinite reaches of the cosmos, which is indifferent to the affairs and conceits of your species.  I am but one of billions upon billions of similar bursts of energy, light-sources too numerous even to catalogue, let alone adorn with a patronym.

I have seen you for some time with my leading edge, and if you look into the darkened sky, you will spot me there—a seemingly-static but ultimately-endless burst of light.  You and your entire species will be lost to the annals of time, of course, long before my trailing edge arrives in your vicinity—at which point I, too, will vanish from the view of living things, if any, that might be left on your rock to notice.

But, unlike your species, I will not perish.  My light, from leading to trailing edge, will speed on forever, relentlessly pursuing the far reaches of the ever-expanding universe, which knows no bounds.

Much like the person who named me to honour one of the fanciful gods your species has pretended to worship in order to satisfy the unanswerable questions you persist in asking, you fancy yourself at the centre of existence, the very master of all you perceive.  But you were nothing before my infinite journey even began, and you will be nothing again in the blink of a cosmic eye.

If my leading edge could speak to my trailing edge when it eventually reaches what is left of your earthly abode, it might ask, “What do you see?  Is anyone there?”

“Nothing!  I see nothing,” my trailing edge will answer.

To which my leading edge might reply, “I saw them when I first passed by—a self-absorbed species busily erecting their ant-hills and lauding their advances, even as they warred upon one another and suffocated their planet.”

“Well, there is no one now,” the trailing edge will observe uncaringly.  “If once life existed on this barren rock, it is no longer there.”

Pity, that.

By Their Works

It is said, by their works shall we know them.  And increasingly, we do.

They rise among us, predominantly—but by no means exclusively—white, male, overweight, bewhiskered, rural, racist, ostensibly-straight, conservative, angry, and occasionally violent.  They are frequently accompanied by others who don’t fit this profile exactly, but who express the same rage, the same fear, the same desire to take Canada back.

It’s unclear where they want to take us back to, but I suspect it might be back to the ‘50s—a decade most of them are too young to have lived through—a time when, in their fevered imaginations, men were men, women knew their place, children spoke only when spoken to, and nobody—including elected governments—told anybody else what to do.

Redneck heaven, to borrow a phrase.

According to the messages these folks spew unrelentingly on social media, marriage back then was between one man and one woman—born male and female, respectively.  Every child lived in a nuclear family.  Racialized and Indigenous people were not part of the established fabric, nor for the longest time were women, the poor, Jews, immigrants, or differently-abled people.

And it goes without saying, the LGBTQIA+ community was non-existent.

Previous decades have seen lots of protests in support of many causes—the ‘60s and ‘70s come to mind for this old-timer, but every era has known them.  Most of those were peaceful, yet often effective; some involved civil disobedience; still others degenerated into violence, with consequences visited upon those who violated the law.  The majority were mounted in the name of advancing more liberal, progressive movements—universal suffrage, socialized medicine, civil rights, end-the-war, the women’s-lib movement, and Indigenous reconciliation, to name but a few.

And that marks a major difference with today’s oft-inchoate protests, striving noisily to take us back to ‘the good old days’.  Today’s aggrieved zealots behave as if our country always belonged exclusively to them—more accurately, their predecessors—and not to everyone who inhabited it then, and does so to this day.

Populists, bigots, and white-supremacists have ever been part of Canada’s demographic, of course, and many of us, I suspect, knew some of them back in the day.  As a child born in the ‘40s, growing up in the ‘50s, I well remember the use of such loathsome slurs as kike, wop, dyke, fag, nigger, Paki, d-p, and others even more vile.  As I was part of the white middle-class, they were never used against me, but more than a few of my white schoolmates hurled them—perhaps unwittingly, parroting their elders, but hurtfully, nonetheless—at those on the receiving end.

Another difference between those long-ago times and today is the opportunity the bigots now have to spread their hateful rhetoric.  Social media, for all the benefit it has brought to much of society, has enabled the haters and ragers to amplify their message across the internet.  In their posts, we find no trace of the civility that once characterized public discourse, even among those whose political ideologies and points of view conflicted.

When did it start to be okay, I wonder, to ignore the fundamental tenets of good manners?  Of respect for other people?  Of common sense?  Perhaps it’s cantankerous of me to bewail their passing, or maybe I’m being overly pernickety in complaining about it.  After all, as I’ve previously written, some folks consider me an unrepentant curmudgeon.  Perchance, I am.  Still, was respectful consideration for others not always a hallmark of civilized behaviour? 

Today’s unruly mob weeps and wails loudly, profanely, about their loss of freedom, even as they enjoy the freedom to assemble and protest it.  To me, it’s as though they believe this coveted freedom means unfettered license to do whatever they wish, unencumbered by the rule of law.  Thus arises anarchy.

In Canada, citizens elect a federal Parliament every four years or so; then, with the ritual approval of the Governor-General, that Parliament chooses a government based on votes of confidence among elected members.  The Prime Minister is the elected leader of the party chosen by Parliament to govern.  Occasionally, one party wins a majority of seats in a given election, and thereby becomes the governing party by default.

For citizens either enamored of, or disappointed by, the actions of the PM and governing party, there is a means of re-electing or turfing the incumbents—the next election.  Responsible civil engagement and voting are the tools.  Increasingly, however, today’s fervid protesters crowding the nation’s public venues revert to intimidation, bullying, and threats of violence to overturn the will of the majority, to impose their values and beliefs on everyone.

If they win, democracy—imperfect though it may be—loses.

By their works, we shall know them.

The Sandbox

Over a period of years a long time ago, on my daily walks to and from work through a local community park, I used to watch groups of pre-schoolers playing in a very large sandbox.  I was always struck by their singular focus on the primitive sculptures and projects they were building.  Oblivious to events going on around them in the park, they directed all their energy towards the activities in the sandbox.

A few of the kids looked to be cooperating with each other, working diligently in pursuit of whatever objective they had settled on.  Their interactions were punctuated by short bursts of conversation, lots of smiles, and the occasional whoop of glee when something came to fruition.

Most of the others in the group played alone, apparently unconcerned with the endeavours of their companions—typical of that age and stage of development.  Quick flares of temper occasionally gushed forth, and angry exchanges, when one person’s endeavours somehow impinged upon another’s, but on the whole, the mass of children in the sandbox managed to coexist.

Their mothers—no fathers, alas—watched with a mix of pride and bemusement as their offspring played, secure and happy in the park.

As time passed, those children got older and left the sandbox, but they were replaced by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of similar youngsters, and the pattern remained the same.  And everyone in the sandbox was concerned only with what was happening within its confines, no one with the goings-on in the rest of the park.

I noticed changes in the park at large, however.  In the early years, it had been a sylvan haven for children and families—a place to gather with friends, to cool off under the trees on mid-summer weekends, to escape the pressures of the daily grind.  As time passed, though, I began to miss the family gatherings, as many of those parents, some of them working two jobs, were no longer able to come.  And at the same time, more and more older children began to frequent the area, not playing the sorts of games I was familiar with from my own childhood, but just hanging out.  Loud music could often be heard, smoke hung over many of the conclaves, and occasional fist-fights would erupt between different groups.  In time, the park became, not so much a family destination, as a place for the neighbourhood’s teenage kingpins to gather.

The children in the sandbox were affected by these changes, of course.  Now, they had to avoid issues with the older kids if they hoped to play their games.  But, for the most part, they were able to do that, and in their exuberance and innocence, they continued their childish pursuits, interacting with one another as their predecessors always had.  None of them cared that the de facto ownership of the park had been co-opted.

To be sure, it never became a dangerous place, one to be avoided.  I continued my daily walks with no fear, but I was aware of the changed dynamic, even if the sandbox urchins were not.

Today, long-since retired and no longer walking in that park, I think of it as an allegory of sorts to the present situation with our government.  When I watch Question Period, for example, whether federal or provincial, the elected denizens of Parliament focus so much of their energies and time on what seems to me nothing more than spurious activities, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare wrote.  As I watch and listen, I see again those pre-schoolers in their sandbox, engrossed in the small world they are occupying.

To be sure, legislation does get passed, much of it to the benefit of the country or province as a whole, even if never fully satisfying everybody.  And that’s good.  But I find it akin to the completion of those sandbox projects and sculptures that so pleased their creators—not insignificant, beneficial to their future growth and development, but accomplished only with such fuss and foofaraw as to be laughable.

A more serious situation, however, has developed outside the sandbox—the Parliament—in terms of who is really in control.  While elected officials busy themselves with their daily perambulations, much as those pre-schoolers did, private-sector interests are busy trying to take over the park, so to speak.  Be it wealthy, corporate entities, land-developers and real-estate companies, foreign-based media ownership, legal, banking, and financial firms, or myriad other lobbyist organizations, the environment around Parliament has undergone a radical change.

The ownership and culture of a local park are things to be gained or lost by the residents of the community in which it sits, according to their wishes and level of activism.  Depending upon how a community responds, their sandbox may be lost.

But the ownership and culture of our provincial and federal Parliaments are embedded in our constitutional rights—they belong to us, the citizens of this country.  Do we want to lose them?  Have we entrusted them to the finest possible stewards, our best and brightest?  Is there a fix for the encroaching, pernicious influence of the big-moneyed interests? What are we to make of foreign influence on our government?

More of us need to pay more attention to these questions, or all of us may end up losing our sandbox altogether.

Simple?

There are most likely no simple answers to the myriad questions our world faces today, nor simple solutions to the plethora of problems confronting us.

Think of such issues as: sanctity of life, including abortion, cloning, and assisted-death; religious liberty; traditional vs. non-traditional gender roles, and how they affect such institutions as marriage and parenting; education, which determines what and how young people learn about their history; human rights, especially for the millions of displaced persons worldwide; or our right to free speech, and whether or not it includes hate-speech, pornography, and incitements to violence.

Being a somewhat simple person, I do wonder if there is a basic reason that might account for the rising discord and rancor all around us.  Would it be too simplistic of me to attribute the cause of such trials and tribulations to one fundamental factor—namely, the reluctance of so many of us to abandon the comfortable past we long for, to embrace the changes that imbue the inexorable forward march of history?

I was born in North America shortly before the end of WWII, too early to be considered a baby-boomer, too late to be thought a part of the greatest generation.  I was raised from boyhood to adolescence during a period from the late-40s to the early-60s, a time when all the so-called truths seemed self-evident.  Either that, or no one took the time to question them.

Such broadly-accepted truths have been encapsulated in Moral Foundations Theory1, which postulates five ethical categories, each with its own set of prized qualities and traits.  These are:

  • purity-based morality, anchored in sanctity and piety;
  • authority-based morality, valuing duty, deference, and social order;
  • fairness-based morality, the flip-side of authority-based, embracing equality, impartiality, and tolerance;
  • in-group-based morality, founded on loyalty to family, community, and nation; and
  • harm-based morality, embracing care, compassion, and safety.

For the purpose of my search for a simple answer in this essay, let’s assume that these categories encompass the range of behavioural virtues we live by.  Scholarly examinations of the Google Books database have shown that morality in general was a much more frequently-discussed issue of concern at the dawn of the twentieth century than it was by 1980, although that trend has slowly reversed since.

The purity-based category followed almost the same trajectory during that interval, and there was a noticeable increase in individualism-based values that placed greater emphasis on me than on us, reducing the impact of collectivism-based values.

Authority-based morality declined during the first half of that same century, rebounded dramatically when the established order was threatened in the late 60s, then resumed its decline during the 70s before levelling off.

In-group-morality charted upward throughout the twentieth century as people tended to cluster in like-minded groups, a trend that continues to this day, and is exacerbated when people feel threatened or challenged by new ideologies and practices, or by outsiders.

Harm-based morality, sometimes labelled the ‘bleeding-heart’ syndrome, has risen steeply since the 80s as moderation and tolerance have become more pronounced in daily life and, in many areas, in political ideologies.

Alone among the five categories, fairness-based morality with its egalitarian emphasis, demonstrated no significant increase or decrease during the same time period.

In my simple terms, this would indicate that, despite a general shift of viewpoint from the collective to the individual (the me-firsters), society in general has moved from routinely accepting authority to challenging it, and by so doing, has come to view the notion of wrongness in terms of suffering, maltreatment, and deprivation. There is a greater acceptance of ‘others’ among the majority, a more rational, irreligious, and scientific approach to how we confront matters of right and wrong.

In short, an evolving approach to communal society and those who populate it is underway.

There is, however, a contrary narrative embracing what has been called re-moralisation, a wish to go back to what many think of as a golden age, the ‘good-old days’.  Elements of our communal society are becoming increasingly censorious and defensive, more outraged by the changes confronting them, which is evidenced by the growing polarisation of political debate that highlights their oft-excessive self-righteous approach.

In short, the liberalizing changes to society are jeopardizing the inherent values and beliefs such people hold dear.  Hearken to the call we hear from many of them—You shall not replace us!

Simply speaking, then, fear of change is the greatest impediment to finding solutions to our problems—solutions that will satisfy the moral foundations of all of us, at least to the greatest extent possible.

Alas, despite my reading and thinking on the subject, my simple brain has yet to come up with an idea that might work.  How do we convince and reassure change-resistant people that moving with the times does not require them to bend their moral codes.  After all, in a free society, we are all at liberty to choose what to believe.

We are not, of course, free to impose our choices on those who believe otherwise, but surely there is room for all of us to co-exist.

Simple?  No, but, let us hope, not impossible.

Tick-tock!

  1. Haslam, McGrath, & Wheeler, University of Melbourne, 2007

I Have Never

I am a straight, white, elderly, married man.  In all my years, I have never had a friend who is anti-Semitic.  I have never had a friend who is racist or homophobic.  Nor have I ever had a friend who is misogynistic or xenophobic.

In all my life, I have never had a friend who is regressive or punitive.  I have never had a friend who is a bully or cruel.  Nor have I ever had a friend who is narcissistic or egomaniacal.

From time to time, I’ve encountered people who exhibit some of these attributes, of course, but I’ve always and quickly exiled myself from their presence.  Except when I’ve had no recourse, I have steadfastly abjured their company.

Throughout my life, I have had friends who are religious—and from several faiths—or atheist, even agnostic.  I have had friends who espouse differing political sentiments than I, but never aggressively so.  I have had friends with points of view different from mine on such issues as pro-life/pro-choice, gender equity, capitalism/socialism, green energy, global warming, pandemic mitigations, famine, warfare/diplomacy, the likelihood of life eternal after death, and more besides.

I have even had friends who disagree with me about my lifelong support of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, for goodness sake!

But never have such disagreements interfered with our friendship because those I consider friends have at no time lowered themselves to crude, ignorant, or abusive rhetoric and behaviour in our discussions and encounters.  Nor have they ever resorted to violence to advance their views.

Rather, they have relied on logic, facts, and persuasion to win the day—as I have always tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to do.

That’s less easy today, though, because of a problem we face with our global society—the unprecedented proliferation of supposed facts presented across the wide range of media outlets available to us.  Some of these deliberately masquerade as the truth, which promotes confusion and conflict—forcing us to question what is information, what is misinformation, what is disinformation—and as a result, to begin to query our own values and principles.  Critical thinking skills have never been more crucial, it seems to me—and in many quarters, alas, more lacking.

Healthy skepticism has always been a positive thing, I think, a part of those very critical thinking skills.  But noxious skepticism, knowingly force-fed to a naïve public by pernicious purveyors of media in pursuit of their own, oft-malign agendas, has the effect of reducing the level of societal discourse to the lowest common denominator.  Loud, vituperative, violent acts against each other and our governing bodies are increasingly the result.

In any free society founded on the people’s faith that their government will act in the public interest, such discord cannot be good.  Because when the public loses faith in our civil institutions, those institutions will crumble from within.  And they will take down with them the very foundations upon which they have been built and thrived—citizens’ rights and responsibilities, the rule of law, equality of opportunity for all.

There is little doubt that, as a collective, we could do a better job of acknowledging our responsibilities (rather than just demanding our rights), and of ensuring equality of opportunity for the dispossessed and marginalized among us.  But lacklustre performance aside, the bedrock values are legitimate.

In recent times, unfortunately, I have seen people elected to public office— ostensibly to serve the citizenry—speak and behave in ways that are definitely anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, regressive, punitive, cruel, and narcissistic.  I have witnessed their acolytes and followers, to no one’s surprise, then ape them.  And they are all doing so—increasingly, it seems—in more extreme language and deed. 

Disturbingly, I no longer believe I can respectfully disagree with those folks about their points of view, as should be the norm in any democracy; instead, I fear I would be shouted down, verbally abused, perhaps physically attacked.

Such people are not my friends.  Nor, in my opinion, should they be yours.  We should be electing and supporting the very best from among us, not the opportunists, grifters, and self-seekers.  But to do that, we must bestir ourselves and, at the very least, engage in the process and cast our votes on election days.

Plato wrote, The heaviest penalty for refusing to engage…is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

I have never wanted that.

Will Wishing Make It So?

We humans have a boundless, perhaps fatal, propensity to gravitate towards, not reality, but what we wish reality to be.  Collectively, we opt to ignore what our senses and intuition are telling us in order to satisfy our desire for gratification and fulfilment.

A few years ago, I was on a golf vacation in Guatemala with family and friends.  We played the magnificent Fuego Maya Golf Course at La Reunion, situated on the side of a mountain near the colonial city of Antigua.  The course, located in Guatemala’s Ring of Fire, was surrounded by four volcanoes, the only active one at the time being El Fuego.

Each time we played the course, El Fuego was erupting—benignly, we wanted to think—and it provided a magnificent backdrop to our games as its smoky plume rose high in the blue sky, its gray streams of lava spilled slowly down its side.  At night, it was spectacular, and frighteningly so—tremendous, booming explosions of fiery sparks shooting skyward, the ground trembling under our feet, red ribbons of molten rock spewing sinuously from its yawning maw. 

Within weeks of our return home, El Fuego blew its stack in a major eruption, propelling ash nearly four miles into the sky across a sixty-mile span, completely destroying the magnificent Fuego Maya golf resort, burying it in a pyroclastic flow as once Pompeii and Herculaneum had been entombed.  The golf resort is gone forever.  Nearby villages were wiped from the face of the earth, countless people died or fled from the volcano’s fury.  And yet, when we were there, we had chosen to ignore the signs, believing they were simply part of nature’s show, mounted for our pleasure.

In a similar vein, people across the globe delude themselves into thinking their actions are benign—allowing the deliberate dumping of raw sewage into our oceans and waterways, for example, or toxic, chemical slurry from mining operations and munitions manufacturing.  Such actions are bringing our planet to the brink—and probably beyond—of a severe threat to our survival.  We ignore this at our peril.

Consider this list of issues currently facing humankind, and the potential calamities they may visit upon us: global warming, ozone layer depletion, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, water and air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, natural resource depletion, overpopulation, urban sprawl, inadequate public health response to once-and-future pandemics, generation and disposal of unsustainable waste, so-called artificial intelligence, and the rise of ultra-right-wing autocracy.   

Do you deny the existence of these?  Do you choose to turn a blind eye to them, not wishing to focus on anything but your own indulgence?  Perhaps you do not, but too many of us do.

Whether we ignore it or not, our mother-Earth is at an existential tipping-point, vulnerable to disasters and tragedies both now and in the future, a state of planetary emergency.  The planet itself, this lump of rock suspended in our galaxy, will survive in some form, of course.  The issue is whether we, as a species, will do so. Are we too ignorant? Or too arrogant?

Our first-world economy is nowhere near as healthy as reported by the media.  The poverty gap is not shrinking dramatically, regardless of what the numbers say.  In an increasingly-technological society, low-skill jobs are gone forever, so state-of-the-art education and innovative entrepreneurship are of utmost importance if the situation is ever to improve.  Are we investing in these?

Racism and bigotry are pervasive and, it sometimes seems, part of the human DNA; there is no quick fix for that, only generational change brought about by relentless pressure and, unfortunately, oft-violent protests.  Terrorism is part of our world, and (whether foreign or home-grown) unlikely to be eradicated any time soon; there are too many disenfranchised people in the world, with too many grievances, too much hatred, and too many weapons. 

The leaders of nations—elected or appointed, allies and foes alike—are not so much interested in international cooperation as in their own national aspirations, or their own political survival.  Large, multinational corporations are less concerned with the common good than with their own, often obscene, profits and dividends.  And it is they—not we, the people—who will continue to exert an overweening influence on the state of international relations.

We, the people, are all too often willing to be shunted to one side, caught up in our own pursuits, perhaps so overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the crises in front of us that we deliberately shut our eyes to their significance.  Once upon a time, many of us would pull the covers over our heads when the night-monsters invaded our bedrooms, wanting desperately to believe we would thus be kept safe from harm.  And back then, for the most part, we were.  But we were children then, and the time has come to set aside childish beliefs.

There are those who toil diligently on our behalf to face up to the crises facing us, of course, but they are too often scorned or left bereft of support.  And the deliberate and pernicious presentation of disinformation by malignant forces against people too naïve or unwilling to think critically works against the best efforts of the best among us to counter the threats.

So, we have a choice.  We can ignore our problems—just as I and my companions, in our arrogance, chose to ignore the threat from El Fuego. But unless we consciously choose to acknowledge and address these various issues seriously, to take action to support those who do so choose, we shall never solve them, never make them go away.  

Will wishing make it so?

I think not.

From This Moment On

Some folks worry about getting old.  And they bemoan the passage of time.

But once upon a very long time ago, nobody kept track of the years.  People in their nomadic, tribal clusters got up when the day dawned and went to sleep when it got dark.  They did it every day, over and over again, until, inevitably, they didn’t awaken from their final sleep.  Nobody ever worried about getting old; they just lived until they died, and the tribe moved on without them.

Even today in this wide world of ours, there are still countless numbers of people who don’t worry about aging.  They live in unforgiving climes where their every effort is bent toward eking out a subsistence-level existence.  Or they’re driven from their homes by ravaging armies—persecuted for their beliefs, their skin colour, their ethnic origins, and often enslaved by their captors.  They, too, live only until death frees them, far too burdened to worry about the realities associated with getting old.

Yet here are we, inured from such extreme conditions—secure, some of us, in our developed, civilized world, inundated by the availability of all the essentials and luxuries we might desire—and what do we do?  We worry about getting old.

Not all of us, of course.  Many young people appear to have the same nonchalant, carefree attitude I probably had at their age—back when immortality was a given.  The halcyon days of youth seemed destined to last forever.  Only old people were old. 

Others of us, the more elderly, have learned a sterner truth.  Youth lasts only until it’s over, only until our bodies begin to betray us.  The rosy morning of youth gives way, grudgingly, to a more austere noontime of life, and then, inexorably, to a deepening dusk we all are destined to enter. 

Some folks accept that truth more gracefully than others, some more stoically, some more fatalistically.

But some, of course, do not accept it at all.  In the words of the poet, they rage, rage against the dying of the light.  Nips and tucks; silicone, botox, collagen, and dye; enhancements and reductions; diets and purging; even exercise—all undertaken by men and women in a fruitless pursuit of everlasting youth.

Why is this so, I wonder, here in our world of plenitude?  Well, perhaps it’s because we have become obsessed with measuring time.  After all, time’s passing itself is neither our friend nor our enemy.  It’s just there, it’s always been there, and it will forever be there.  So, I’ve come to believe it’s the keeping track of time that plagues us, wreaking havoc on our youth, eventually forcing us to an acceptance of the stark reality that we are going to get old.  And we are going to die.

But remember, we are the first cohort of people since the dawn of time who has ever had the luxury of worrying about that.

From this moment on, perhaps we shouldn’t.