Worth the Fee to Read It

For the past fifteen months and a bit so much of Canadian politics has focused around Liberal leader Stéphane Dion. The NDP has clearly moved into a full-on press to squeeze the Liberals out by focusing their attacks on Dion, from the Commons to the by-election trail, with attention being paid to campaigning against Dion himself in Toronto Centre, as Jeff Jadras of “A BCer in Toronto” posted. The Conservative posture has been a resolute anti-Dion campaign, a shift from 2006’s anti-Liberal approach. Even Dion’s erstwhile partner, Elizabeth May of the Greens, has raised questions about Dion in the wake of his approach of Abstentia totalis. (The Bloc we can safely set aside: Stéphane Dion will never make their Christmas Card list. For Blockers, the Clarity Act is original sin redux.)

Add to this Jane Taber’s sideswipe over funds in this morning’s Globe & Mail — an article that immediately sent noted Dion supporter Jason Cherniak to the keyboard to illustrate Dion’s selflessness at fundraising for everyone other than himself — and the incessant jokes passed about Dion’s ability to make a decision and hold to it, about how Pâques est supérieure au principe, and the like and you really do have to wonder, sometimes, how he stands it all.

Well, whether through an election defeat (should his courage ever find its way to the House during a division with enough of his colleagues in tow or 19 October 2009 come in due course), through a Party revolt at their fall gathering, through a well-timed stab in the back by Ignatieff on one side and Rae on the other, or through his own decision to stop being everyone’s favourite punching bag, the day will come when Dion is gone. What might this mean for the country?

(Incidentally, I do think it fair to say that the odds on Stéphane Dion ever being able to become “Right Honourable” as a Liberal leader on the Government benches are so long as to be out of reach. Getting there from here — there is no fate more sure to seal a politician’s future as “the former” than to be the butt of continuing public ridicule [the Rt. Hon. C. Joseph Clark, PC, is the exception that proves the rule, and it took the complete and obvious misgovernance of Pierre Trudeau, coupled with Trudeau having run out the electoral clock to the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute, to create Clark's minority win], and Dion gets as much ridicule per day as Clark did in a week. He may salvage Official Opposition status; he will not bring the Liberals out on top.)

Well, for Liberals, of course, the prospect of a new leader means that, as with any party faced with the chance to put a fresh face forward, there is hope. The trouble — for the Liberals — with this is that it once again subordinates a much needed Liberal debate about what the party stands for, how it differs from the rest of the divided left, how it differs from Harper’s move of the Conservative Government into the soft centre of the Canadian political spectrum, how it would propose programmes in the face of the Harper Government’s stripping away of the hoard of spare cash and truckloads of replacement cash generated each year by intentional eleven-figure surpluses to the fire storm of leadership candidates competing for delegates, raising money for those campaigns, and yet another convention. Lots of coverage, yet, but the holes in that party that plague Dion’s tenure and reduce the Liberals to a group of screaming toddlers rather than (other than the accident of Dan McTeague with his private member’s approach to budget making) proponents of much of anything will still exist, and still need patching.

Make no mistake, this lack will continue to haunt the party. A party without a solid core tends to waffle all over the landscape, held hostage to the last person who’d never met a microphone, camera or reporter’s tape recorder they didn’t like. The lack of a solid core reduces the party’s appeal to historical labels and memories of yesteryear. The damage done to the Liberal brand through this lack, from the stay-in-power for no reason other than staying-in-power of the late Chrétien years (when multiple Red Books with the same promises exposed the lack of interest in ideas), to the everything’s-a-priority of the Martin years (when too many commitments made none of them worth anything), to the explicit failure to deal with policy in 2006 … 2007 … and into 2008 has left the vacuum at the heart of Gritland clear for all to see.

Canadians are, paradoxically, a deeply conservative people — not conservative in the party sense, but conservative in the sense that we don’t change easily. Much of the Liberal strength that remains has its source in this multi-generational source. But all things do eventually erode, and the underpinnings of Liberal strength began their erosion under Trudeau with his disdain for the party and its local needs. Mighty oaks look strong until the day they are toppled by a storm, when at last their hollow heart is exposed. Without an attempt to build new, solid wood, the Liberal tree is in danger of falling.

The second major change waiting in the wings is that the raison d’être of the Liberal party has always been about power and access to its fruits. This has led to its sources of funds (and their concentration, historically) and indeed to its past power to attract those of other persuasions to change parties and “come to where the action is”. But this sword also cuts both ways: when out of power, and when prospects for improvement are not there (what issue, pray tell, despite all the sound and fury of the great play staged in Ottawa, would rally hope the way fighting the FTA did for Turner’s Liberals in 1988, thus preserving the party through to 1993 and the resumption of power aided and abetted then and thereafter by the immolation of the Progressive Conservatives on the sword of regionalism) wouldn’t those simply seeking the fruits of power shift their attentions to those in power?

But the demise of Dion will also throw Harper’s Conservatives into disarray — the inclination of today’s party is to fight an enemy but to immediately demonise the next Liberal Leader will backfire, as none of the likely winning candidates are so obviously able to be picked on as Dion was, nor do they have the record as a Minister to start from. The NDP, too, would have to start all over again, for they have failed to say why someone should be a New Democrat; they merely say “don’t be a Liberal”. Dion’s departure will also give the Greens the opportunity to move away from their misguided link to Dion — which was highly personalised — and may, indeed, topple May in the process.

Canadians, therefore, are likely to see all their parties lose their way even further when Dion goes. The worst habits will be reinforced; the system will not be recovered. We, therefore, have not only been the losers by this disastrous period in Canadian politics; we will continue to pay the price for it for years to come.

We deserve better, but that would require the Conservatives to change their approach. Pit bulls seldom become friendly Labradors. We are living in a world of excess that will run its course: hubris through ate to nemesis.

We are not in the hands of the Fates, but the Furies, and Dion’s tenure threatens to set off a Götterdammerung for Canada.

I had a call yesterday asking me if I’d come and present a paper to honour my thesis supervisor’s life work in September (this event will be held at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto on Saturday, September 27, 2008, if you’ve an interest). The amazing thing about this (to me, at any rate) is that I am not actively academic, don’t regularly publish philosophical papers, and so on. I have accepted — Thomas Langan’s work deserves celebration, in my view — and will spend much of the next few months worrying away at a style of writing and presentation I haven’t made a part of my life for fifteen years.

But the request does raise the question “what does a business advisor with a strong technology background have to say about philosophy?”. This is not as strange as it might appear, although I have certainly met more than one philosophy professor in my time who has pooh-poohed the very idea that anyone who dresses in a suit and tie and goes to work in offices with others of that ilk would have anything much to contribute to the issues of that discipline. With that, I fundamentally disagree as much as I did when I was doing my B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. pre-thesis work in and around holding down a full-time office job, managing people and projects and generally burning the candle at both ends.

If philosophic positions hold water, they have applicability in the lives of so-called ordinary people doing ordinary, everyday things. Indeed, I think this is one of the acid tests one has to apply: what happens if you take this idea out into the world? Does it make sense to people without the specialised training in academic philosophy, who are unfamiliar with the technocratic lingo of the schools? Can they tie it to things they know and do, recognise it in situations they encounter, even “put it to work” in their own lives? If they can, then there’s something there worth working on further; if it lands with a resounding thud of disinterest and disuse, perhaps it is hair-splitting and distinction-making to no purpose.

One of the concepts Thomas Langan has put forward for the last quarter century (perhaps longer, but I know for certain he was teaching to it in 1983 as I was in the classroom) is the notion that there is an overlaid social structure on the societies, nations, cultures and civilisations of the world which he labelled the HTX (the “high-tech I don’t know what to call it”). It is not a culture in its own right, but rather poaches from some of the world’s cultures, and is best visualised as a nodal network of connections between people and locations. HTXians have little affinity for place, community or neighbourhood; their loyalties are to others who share their symbolic-analytic interests.

Tom always noted that I was one of these people, at home in and a part of the HTX (indeed, his book on the HTX, Surviving the Age of Virtual Reality was dedicated to me as an exemplar of someone living the experience directly) but also with one foot still in community. Perhaps that foot has atrophied somewhat in the eight years since Surviving was published; that will be one point of reflection to consider while thinking about my remarks for September’s conference. What’s more interesting is that the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has created an institute dedicated to the exploration of the very “spikiness” of the world that the HTX tried to describe, headed by Richard Florida, author of a number of books on the “Creative Class” and their clustering style.

Another idea, from Thomas Langan’s Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for Ecumenic Wisdom, that resonates with business leaders, Little League baseball coaches, Executive Directors of not-for-profits, and Deans of Medical Education (to pick but four) is the notion of the hypocrisy that infests institutions as they diverge from the principles of their founding tradition. Institutions thus are always in need of reform, even as one holds onto the tradition (indeed, the reform is to preserve the tradition). One need think only of politics in Canada, the deformation of Parliament, the focus on leaders at the expense of MPs, the parties’ faux democratic methods in candidate selection, etc. to see how the institutions have radically diverged to work almost antithetically to our tradition of responsible government, Crown-in-Parliament. Again, a possible point of departure for a reflection on the nature of our society, and its prospects, a topic that was and is near and dear to Thomas Langan’s heart.

But the final point of take-off may come from his master work, Being and Truth. I had the pleasure, two years ago (and will do this again in May and June this year) of leading a philosophers’ café composed of 9-12 year olds. The core chapter, “Kinds of Objects, Kinds of Truth”, was not made into a reading, but rather several of the examples (Langan’s approach is resolutely phenomenological: first go to the things themselves and see what they reveal) were talked about. The children involved were able to reason out what the things were “saying” without prompting, and come to moments of enlightenment for themselves that parallel the arguments Langan makes. Einstein is reputed to have once said that if he couldn’t explain his theory of relativity to a six year old, he didn’t really understand it himself. Seeing these children grasp the different between an object and what it symbolises, or the built-up construct we call “a nature”, or even the inter-relationship between different kinds of truths (not just a world with shades of grey, but indeed, a world with colour) shows how essential these arguments were, and how well linked together to build up a world-view, yet graspable by anyone without scholastic training. An “Einstein test” moment, indeed, and perhaps also a worthy starting point.

In any event, I have found myself today turning these over again and again in my mind, and although I have no intention to return to the campus for a fourth time to teach, or even to complete my abandoned doctoral programme, I am “on fire” with the thought of this event and this speech/paper.

Every so often, you are presented with a gift. When your next gift is presented to you, will you see it? Will you accept it (and the responsibilities it will entail)? Or will you let it go, and then wonder why life is passing you by?