if it ain’t broke…

Well, I was trying to write about the mainstream media handling of the revelations of Minister Freeland’s family past and those nefarious Russians, and I find I have to unwind a bit. The layers of irony are so deep I get paralyzed. I want to do it justice so I am going to set that one aside for now.

Instead, I went to read Dale Smith’s blog Routine Proceedings. Mr. Smith is a parliamentary press gallery journalist and he writes short insightful posts about the nuts-and-bolts workings of the government in Ottawa. I wanted to get his take on the Freeland vs. Russia issue.  While there, I learned that he has just published a book, The Unbroken Machine.  The theme of The Unbroken Machine is that our Westminster Parliamentary system of governance is good as is, and it is a lack of understanding by the average Canadian that makes our government seem broken. Don’t reform it!  If we behave differently, then it will behave better.

On the one hand, I agree; educating youngsters in the workings of Parliament is very valuable. We would be better governed if we understood our system better. The events of December 2008 would not have unfolded as they had if the Canadian public were better educated about our governing traditions. And I would say that Mr. Smith probably understands our system considerably better than I do. The book is probably also a response, and challenge, to the Fair Vote Canada electoral reform campaign for proportional representation, a cause readers of this site will know I don’t support. I will certainly be reading the book (and probably blogging about it).

On the other hand, the whole 2008 fiasco just flagged the profoundly undemocratic nature of the Westminster Parliamentary system and especially its Canadian variety. I really believe all the stuff on the 7 pages on this website! All the blah-blah theory, as one of my readers once kindly put it, is solid. So, I am keen to take on a well-thought defense of our current system, a system I find democratically indefensible. I will certainly be reading Dale Smith’s book (and probably blogging about it).

cheers,

DB

 

 

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zen liberalism

Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.

Zen saying

Continuing with what I started in the previous post, to connect the two themes of biology and democracy; the 1970’s were seminal. Back then, liberalism was the dominant western philosophy. The wild eccentricities of the 60’s were receding into the past; science seemed ascendant. In southeast Asia, and in the US, the madness of the Vietnam war raged on. But back then people thought it madness, said publicly that war was morally wrong. It was an American war, and Canadians and Europeans were stridently proud not to be part of it. In the US, the Civil Rights, Feminism, and the Peace Movement were in full gear. Everyone watched M*A*S*H and All in the Family on TV. We used to openly laugh at socially conservative people. We wrote them off as dinosaurs, unable to adapt, doomed to extinction.

And this open, progressive, free society was what distinguished us fundamentally from our military adversaries with their closed, regressive, controlled societies, what made us the good guys in our manichaean struggle. The threat of nuclear war hung over us, and truly no one knew what to do about that, but somehow the immediacy of that horror was being rolled back. For one thing, we started playing hockey with Soviet teams. They were really good, but we were sometimes a little better. (Again, a group effort thing.) And Russian crowds cheered the best Canadian players and after a while Canadian crowds cheered the best Russian players. It was still scary to think about the unthinkable, but somehow, those tensions were easing and if both sides kept humanizing each other, rather than demonizing each other, maybe things would keep getting better. We seemed to be on a good path.

Well, somehow we wandered far off that path. Before the Soviet Union collapsed, western liberalism was in full retreat and conservatism was the dominant philosophy. It was our hard line conservatives that broke the Soviets, exhausting the Evil Empire in Afghanistan. True, destabilizing Afghanistan was the initiative of a fairly liberal US administration, but President Carter couldn’t even win a second term, and it was his successor, the deeply conservative President Reagan, who reaped the credit for saving the world when the wall came down. Today, it is liberalism that is openly mocked, and rightly so. The once compelling ideologies upon which liberalism was built have devolved into disturbing parodies. Scientific research now serves the marketing needs of its funders, feminism is now misandry, egalitarianism is now identity politics, and politeness, which once served as a framework for civil discourse, is now the paralysis of political correctness. It is not that liberalism has nothing to offer humanity. It is not that there are no good people on all those fronts still doing good work, for there are. It is that liberalism is in retreat, has lost society’s high ground, and its practitioners are disparate and desperate, clinging to straws.

Here’s a theory. I think this happened because liberalism could not learn from ethology in the 1970’s. Science was showing us a side of humanity that was dark. And liberalism could not embrace that dark side. Liberalism would not adapt in the 70’s, and today we witness the consequences of that failure. Well, the horse has left; let’s close the barn door now. Prejudice, xenophobia, bigotry, these are not evil. There; I said it.

Xenophobia is part of our heritage. It goes a long long way back. Rats are xenophobic, geese are xenophobic, howler monkeys are xenophobic, wolves are xenophobic. If a rat from one colony happens upon a group of rats from a neighbouring colony, the rat gang members, driven to fury, will tear that lone rat to bits. Xenophobia is a widely distributed behaviour throughout the natural world. A liberal infers that therefore nature is bad. But ethologists would point out that xenophobia is a behaviour that enhances survival, that xenophobia is part of the human package that got us where we are today. In prehistoric times, xenophobia kept us in geographically isolated tribes. So, we did not clump together and over-hunt one area and then all starve. We did not over-pollute one area with our refuse and then die of illness. When plague did strike, it could not carry far because each tribe kept physically apart from others. Plague would not even be the right word; the consequences of a serious communicable disease would be tragic for one tribe only, but not for the adversaries on the other side of the hill. Xenophobia is part of what makes rats and us so successful. And just as surely as a person feels pain or hunger or joy, they can feel xenophobia. That was the lesson ethologists revealed, and liberals rejected.

Now, let us be fair. I am not a rat, you are not a rat, and none of my other readers are rats. We are all super primates in this discussion. And, not to disparage our equally successful fellow travelers, but we super primates have far more complex behaviours, far more choices, than rats have. There’s not much to be gained for ratkind, or for an atypical rat, were that rat to try bucking xenophobic behaviour. But there were huge advantages for human kind, and for a prehistoric human, were that human to not be xenophobic. See those folks over there? They do some things differently, and better, than we do here. Their food smells great. They have stuff over there that we don’t have here, and I could trade them for some stuff we have here that they don’t have. And, the girls over there are not strange looking; they are exotic! These are not murine (ratly) considerations; they are very human considerations. Our behavioural suite includes xenophobia with a significant smattering of xenophilia. Most humans feel genuine uneasiness around ‘others’. Some humans, just as genuinely, do not. Throughout prehistory most of us stayed in our tribes, and strangers were our demons, and a few of us wandered off in search of cool stuff, fine dining, and exciting new sexual encounters. And I am pretty sure that this is what’s still driving us super primates today.

Liberalism lost its dominance because it could not make a place for the majority of humans in its ideology. How’s that for a serious flaw? If you happened to fall on the xenophobe side of our biological divide, liberalism demanded you feel ashamed. That you cared for your kids and your parents, that you worked conscientiously for your livelihood, that you were a good neighbour and good friend to those who looked and sounded like you, that you were kind to animals, all of that counted for naught; in the liberal universe you were condemned to hide your true feelings or face social rejection and live in shame. Yes, there have been gas chambers, lynchings, residential schools. From a liberal perspective, extremes of xenophobia needed to be reigned in. So, taking a page from old-time religion, xenophobia got defined as evil and everyone was advised to repress themselves when they felt it. Easy for a xenophile. But a relentless blanket of shame was not a policy destined to keep all the well-intentioned xenophobes on side over the long term. Sometime early in the 1980’s a critical mass of people just decided they didn’t need to be ashamed of themselves anymore. Can anyone blame them?

So, liberalism today faces a big problem. It is rejected by a now self-confident majority. Despised as elitist by people who really know how to hold a grudge, it circles the drain of history, a cluster of gross mockeries of the principled ideals for which it once stood. What is liberalism to do? Because, you know, in itself, it’s not really a problem that liberals are not socially dominant anymore. We can all get over that. It’s even poetic justice because it’s where liberals tried to put conservatives. No, the real problem is that xenophobes, now in charge, can’t lead us on a path of survival. In the conservative universe ‘might makes right’ is the only conceivable path. That means eventual environmental collapse and nuclear war. The only way forward for us all, to keep living healthy primate lives in a functioning biosphere, is some new robust intellectual structure, with accompanying societal behaviour standards, that can serve the animal ‘all humanity’. It will be conceived by xenophiles, because only xenophile minds can conceive something like that. Call it zen liberalism. It’s a vision that encompasses what we once had and that also has a place of respect, and healthy restraint, for our xenophobe brethren. Maybe democracy is part of that new vision. Maybe.

ethologue

I met my wife-to-be at the end of the last century. One of the things about her I found inspiring was that she is a poet. She encouraged me to try my hand at her craft.
“Just write about something important to you.” she told me, and the poem of the previous post was the result of that long ago effort. She eventually married me anyways.

I’d like to tie up the whole biology and evolution theme of these recent posts with the democracy theme of the website pages. I better start by saying I was an adolescent of the 70’s. It will seem incredible to my younger readers, and this observation is likely strongly coloured by my own level of understanding, but  back then science seemed ascendant. In 1969 we had walked upon the moon. (Well, two of us had, but it was seen as a group effort.) Computers were not yet commonplace, but it was clear they would play bigger roles in our lives in the near future. Revelations of warm-blooded dinosaurs and ancient hominids were popularizing evolution, and organized religion seemed helpless to stem the tide.

A particular branch of study was becoming popular thanks to the Austrian author and naturalist, Konrad Lorenz. He wrote two classics,  King Solomon’s Ring in 1949 and On Aggression in 1963. He had an interesting past, and I’d like to take that up in a later post, but for this discussion, his works inspired a great number of intellectuals in ethology. This cool word has, of course, a Greek root. Ethology can be translated as the study of character. That’s not quite the whole of it though. The paradigm chain goes something like this:  An elephant does not behave like a mouse, and a mouse does not behave like an elephant, and both are better off for that. Same with cats and dogs, or crows and magpies. The behaviour of any successful creature is deeply tied to its physical form. But the forces of evolution give the successful creature its form. And so those same evolutionary forces also shape the animal’s behaviour. And people are animals.

As a teen I read Dr. Carl Sagan‘s Dragons of Eden when it was first published in 1977, and I learned about the oniony structure of the human brain: the central reptilian part, wrapped in the mammalian part, wrapped again in the primate part, the last blanket grown huge in our own, human, case. But, for me, I really didn’t fully grasp the implications until, a decade later, I read The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris. This book, written in 1967, popularized the paradigm that our present day-to-day behaviour is locked into us by our turbulent evolutionary past. So, when I felt shy, horny, frustrated, ashamed, angry, jealous, or lonely, as I often did, that was because I was built following nature’s blueprint for creatures like me. Those feelings were to guide me, not define me. It was a personal liberation.

But enough about me in the 80’s; let’s go back in the 70’s. The Naked Ape crossed some social taboos, most famously tying the shape of a lady’s breasts and buttocks to the uniquely human enjoyment of front-to-front sex. (Read the book!) The controversial proposal inspired challenges, the best by Elaine Morgan in her terrific book, The Descent of Woman, published in 1972. Morgan made the strong case for an aquatic phase in human evolution that was not captured in the fossil record (because it was aquatic). While she chided Morris for his breast/buttock theory, her work did not take away from the Naked Ape’s thesis. The ideas in the two works are not mutually exclusive, and both stand as solid, though not definitive, interpretations of the fossil record at the time.

The most gifted writer on this topic was Robert Ardrey. He was a playwright who became fascinated with evolution, and turned his keen insight on human behaviour and his considerable literary talent to a Nature of Man tetralogy, African Genesis, The Territorial Imperative, The Social Contract, and The Hunting Hypothesis. Meanwhile, out in the African rocks, Richard Leakey was following in the footsteps of his famous paleoanthropologist parents, Dr. Louis and Mary Leakey; (a career that, as a younger man, he had sought, with some vigour, to avoid). He wrote Origins in 1977. A decade earlier, Louis and Mary had sponsored three young women who each became famous for their field work with primates, drawing insights into human behaviour by studying our less naked relatives.  In the 1970’s Jane Goodall wrote about her observations of Chimp behaviour in My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees, and In the Shadow of Man. Dian Fossey worked with mountain gorillas. She was not famous as an author until Gorillas in the Mist was published in 1983, but she was well known from National Geographic programs in the 1970’s, and she was in the news for her outspoken conservationism, for her condemnation of the poaching industry, and her strong stand against the way primates are treated in zoos. The youngest of the three primatologists was Birutė Galdikas, who went to Indonesia to studied orangutans, a task thought impossible at the time. She started her field work in 1971 and wrote a popular cover story for National Geographic in 1975. She was and remains an advocate for environmental issues and ecological preservation of wild habitat, especially in Indonesia.

Now, I will wind this post up by saying this is by no means a complete list of literary ethologists, and I encourage you to search further afield. Also, many  good studies in ethology have been done since the 70’s too. One I’ll recommend to you is Richard Leaky’s later work Origins Reconsidered. He explores some very interesting ethological models, even speculating on the nature of the human soul! But the one point I want to leave you with in this post is that in the 70’s there were a lot of general readers in North America and Europe getting a lot of exposure to ethology, in that liberal age.