Notes from the Floating World

The Wanderer

2011-11-26T05:48:00.000-05:00

When I got my PhD from Stanford University at the beginning of 1976, I had already started on a one-year job in Claremont Graduate School in California. The future seemed golden. It didn’t occur to me that it would be 1983 before I landed a tenure-track job. But that’s what happened.

I had a good PhD. My professors (Julius Moravcsik, John Perry, Dagfinn Føllesdal) were well-known and supportive. (I always felt well-treated at Stanford.) And I was publishing regularly (in such places as Phronesis, Noûs, and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy). Yet I spent eight years in one-year jobs. This had a lasting effect. 1975-1983 represents eight years without pension credit; it marks nearly a decade of low income, rented accommodation, no savings. It was a long period in which to deal with disappointment, anxiety, and resentment. But why was it that way?

I had several weaknesses that might have contributed to my failure to launch, career-wise.

1. I was in the wrong field. Most of my efforts were focussed on ancient philosophy, but basically I was not interested in historical research. My first degree was in science. My interest was in certain philosophical problems that also interested the ancients. I wasn't all that interested in getting the philology straight, or straightened out. Still: I did publish in the field. (I am still proud of three articles I published in those years; one is among the best I have ever managed.)

2. I was (and am) very bourgeois. My identity resides in a certain kind of risk-avoiding prudence, in doing things because they are done, an owlish earnestness about culture—in short, an attitude that makes many people think “Who does he think he is?” Relatively few people in the profession think of themselves as “coming from a family,” as I did, and this didn’t quite fit with the North American ethos of those days. It gave (and gives) me airs, I suppose. I was thought, with some justice, to be arrogant. And yet: I was quite sociable, and capable of both receiving and giving pleasure in society. It wasn’t as if I was friendless and unpopular.

3. I was (and am) brown. A South Asian Indian before it was chic to be so. (See photo!)

Which of these weaknesses predominated in my many failures to land a good job? Honestly, I don’t know. At one campus interview (at the University of Toronto, actually) I remember a very distinguished scholar asking me (in a rather prosecutorial tone) whether I had read Zabarella. This suggests a preoccupation with weakness 1—though my job talk had been a terrific success. Another time, somebody told me that I was “too good” for the job they were offering. This suggests weakness 2 was the problem. But an explicit concern with scholarship or character doesn’t rule out an implicit concern with “otherness”. (In fact, one of the main lessons we have learned about discrimination is that it gets deflected to other concerns.)

The question resurfaced at the front of my mind recently when somebody from the Canada Research Chairs secretariat called to interview me on my experience as a member of a visible minority. This kind of interview is meant to, and does, elicit opinions normally unvoiced. And voicing an opinion tends to disinhibit thought. Moreover, I had been sensitized by a Statistics Canada study that suggested that non-white professional immigrants take about eight years to catch up to their peers—exactly as long as I took, if you assume that getting a tenure-track job seven years after my PhD is “catching up.”

The interviewer didn’t express much apparent emotion one way or another, as one would expect from a professional. But she kept probing. Was there anything else I felt strange about? And, actually, there was--though it was rather superficial.

My main career priorities are (of course) to have a good job and have my papers published in visible places. By 1985, I was publishing well, and the University of Alberta had started bumping my salary up to reflect my years in the profession. The gap was closed by 1991 or so; I was a full professor by 1989. I owe the folks at Alberta a lot for doing me right. (Not to mention for hiring me in the first place.)

But there are things that never came my way: professional influence and honours. I never did get to sit on national committees or boards. I have only once sat on a national adjudication committee. This was in 2005 (i.e., thirty years in). On this occasion, I was repeatedly assigned as “second reader” on the committee to a much younger guy who wasn’t expert in most of the topics. This petty incident epitomizes my doubt. How could I be second chair to a mostly unpublished person on files in philosophy of biology and mind? (And isn’t it unhealthy to worry about rubbish like this?) It wasn’t until 2009 that I got invited to give my one and only keynote address; in Canada, I still never have been. These things are superficial. (Have I said that already?) And often tedious. But they lead to networking and influence and interdisciplinary connections. I wonder why I never had these opportunities.

I am fine now. (Is it my bourgeois pride that compels me to say so?) I feel privileged to teach in a great department, and to enjoy the friendship and respect of my colleagues. But it has always been this way: esteem up close and the hint of something else just over the horizon. And I still wonder a little: what do distant, nameless “selectors” think when they look at my photograph?

The City of Fashion . . .

2011-11-18T18:20:00.002-05:00

. . . is clearly London.

Why, they erect these quaint little red structures . . .

. . . just so models can advertise:

The only thing I don't understand is: what does 'TELEPHONE' mean?

UPDATE: My friend, Dennis Des Chene adds some archival material.

Direct Political Action in India

2011-08-29T13:41:00.000-04:00

India is experiencing direct political action. And not everybody is celebrating.

Back when Independence came, India had a relatively honest bureaucracy, so some say. But with Independence came the socialist planned state, and every commercial action needed a multitude of licences and permission. In a socialist state, public salaries were stagnant. The opportunities offered by the Licence Raj, and the neediness engendered by the levellers, led to increasing corruption. But the last two decades have eclipsed all that. Indian tycoons built huge fortunes off such opportunities as the sale of cell-phone rights. They have done so dishonestly.

I don’t know if that story is completely accurate, but India now has a bureaucracy and political class that are very corrupt by any standards. The 2G cell-phone scandal is said to have cost the Treasury $40 billion; the Commonwealth Games fiasco modernized the Capital—but at a cost in corruption that can only be guessed at.

This is where direct action comes in. Anna Hazare is an Indian who has been in the news lately. He proposed anti-corruption legislation to create the office of Lokpal, or Guardian of the People, with very broad powers to root out corruption. He has been fasting to protest its non-adoption. Yesterday, India’s Parliament passed a non-binding resolution endorsing Hazare’s main demands, and he broke his fast. “Today the Parliament is discussing the issues you have raised,” Hazare said, “It is the people’s parliament that is supreme.” It should be clear: Hazare’s phrase “the people’s parliament” does not mean Parliament. He is referring to the protest movement he started.

Hazare is a decorated retired soldier and a dynamic social worker. He introduced dramatic and very successful agricultural reform in his own village, and the results made him famous and influential. Disturbingly, though, there are reports that these reforms were achieved tyrannically. In a forthcoming book, the well-known journalist Mukul Sharma reports (in Ramachandra Guha’s summary) that “Liquor, tobacco, even cable TV were forbidden. Dalit families were compelled to adopt a vegetarian diet. Those who violated these rules—or orders—were tied to a post and flogged.” Local elections were not held; national campaigns were disallowed.

The mode of the anti-corruption campaign, and Hazare’s own predelictions, have caused many Indian intellectuals considerable anxiety. A few days ago, I posted links to Arundhati Roy writing in the Hindu, a left-wing newspaper, and to that newspaper’s own editorial on the subject (which notes that many of the provisions of the Lokpal bill are unconstitutional). Roy, who is a left-wing activist herself (and a Booker Prize winner for her novel, The God of Small Things) writes:

While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official.

Roy is not disturbed just by the content of the Lokpal proposal. She deplores the movement itself: “the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the overthrow of the Indian State.” Hazare does not care for India’s constitutional democracy: the last 64 years (since Independence) have been wasted, he has said.

Niraja Gopal Jayal, an eminent political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University, strikes a note that is, at least to my ear, less authentic and less urgent than Roy’s:

If we allow civil society (or any segment of it, however well-intentioned) to dictate the law to Parliament today, on what grounds do we deny the same privilege to others tomorrow — corporate lobbies, for example?

Surely this cannot be the main concern: it is possible to regulate corporate lobbies. Still Jayal’s concern, like Roy’s, is with power being exercised outside the normal constitutional channels. “The supreme irony is that to give in to the demands of [Anna Hazare] would be tantamount to opening the doors to legalising the very forms of influence on which Hazare is so generously staking his life,” she writes in the Indian Express.

It’s a peculiarly Indian conversation. Gandhian principles of civil pressure struggling against pride in indigenous institutions and protectiveness of their legitimacy. Unlike China, India doesn’t enforce anti-corruption laws by shooting those found guilty. Like China before said executions, the new economy has reinforced and accelerated a long decline in public morality. The issue that engages many Indian intellectuals is how to break the culture of corruption within the Constitution. Hazare accepts no such restrictions.

Perhaps we should allow a politician the last word. Here is Rahul Gandhi, speaking in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of Parliament:

Democracy is central to fighting corruption. Individuals . . . have galvanized people in the cause of freedom and development. However, individual dictates, no matter how well intentioned, must not weaken the democratic process. This process is often lengthy and lumbering. But it is so in order to be inclusive and fair.

(Cross-posted at New APPS.)

Nationalist Scoundrels

2011-08-15T14:53:00.000-04:00

I am viscerally opposed I am to Canadian nationalism--the protection of Canadian jobs against qualified non-Canadian applicants, and of Canadian culture on radio and TV. It is mostly a whiny way that Canadians claim entitlements that they don't deserve, and as such it reminds me of union featherbedding on a grand scale. But as a person of Indian origin, I am proud of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. This has led me to wonder when nationalism is morally permissible.

Nations are, I take it, groups of people historically united by culture, political organization, and language, and who constitute a significant majority in a geographical area. The majority criterion is important: Jews have shared culture, but they are not a nation, except in Israel.

Nationalism is an exclusionary ideology adopted by such a group. It aims to reserve political participation, economic opportunities, and cultural liberty for members of the group. Minority rights movements may ask for some of these things, but they are not nationalisms because they are not conducted by nations.

Is nationalism ever morally justified? Is it ever right to adopt an ideology that encourages the exclusion of people? Is it ever right for a majority to do so?

Well, it can be right when either it reacts to the colonial subjugation of a nation, or when it attempts to preserve the shared culture against an imminent threat. For example, Indian nationalism was morally justified during British rule. It isn’t justified any more, and has fortunately ceased to exist (I think) having been replaced by provincial nationalisms that have very little justification (though occasionally a modicum). Quebec nationalism was justified when the French language was under threat in North America. It is putrefying now (and enjoying it). There are many other examples of this sort.

On the other hand, there are many cases where nationalism is clearly unjustified or even preposterous. There is an English nation, but it has never been subjugated or threatened. It is debatable whether there is an American nation, but even if there is, the same applies. And in fact, there is no significant American nationalist movement in the sense just defined. (There is American patriotism, to an uncomfortable degree, and American militarism, ditto—but this is a different matter.) Aggressive nationalism is preposterous and can never be justified. The German nation was under threat in the 1930s, but how many brain cells does it take to see that this didn’t even begin to justify the annexation of Czechoslovakia or Poland?

Canadians are not a nation. There is no group of people historically united by culture, political organization, and language, and who constitute a significant majority in Canada. This is one reason why multiculturalism has worked here. In the US, multiculturalism is a vibrant cultural force, but members of non English-speaking cultures have to face a degree of intolerance. (In Australia, the nation is so ineluctably sexy that Chinese and Indians simply surrender with soft moans and shudders. This is the coming form of nationalism, but I won’t discuss it further here.) Canadians are more like Europeans than Americans in the tolerance dimension. In Europe, however, minority cultures bump up against nations. In Canada, there is tolerance, but no nation. These are great conditions for multiculturalism. (In Quebec, by the way, there is a nation, and multiculturalism has a harder ride.)

I ask the question about Canada in particular, but having asked it I wonder whether Canada is the only democratic country in the world that still harbours mainstream nationalism. There is a bit of it in Australia and in many European countries, but in these countries it is mostly a fringe movement. Every country tries to protect itself against levels of immigration that (in its view) would unduly stress its economy. But in which independent democracy other than Canada do polite centrists lament the incursions of qualified non-nationals?

Everybody knows the term CanCon here: it stands for Canadian Content, and it’s a phrase because radio stations and cable channels must carry a quota of it. This is appalling, and in my view it has a bad effect on the Canadian entertainment industry. Is there OzCon or DutchCon? (Actually, as I discovered, there are analogues: but somehow it doesn't feel as damaging to me.)

It’s all very puzzling. Back in the early sixties, George Grant wrote a barnburner called Lament for a Nation. This elegantly written but myopic book—I’ll write more about it in a future post—set the agenda for the then rising Canadian nationalist movement. The title was characteristically brilliant. Would it have stoked as much fury if it had been more accurately titled Lament for a Nation Unborn?

Why Not Here?

2011-08-10T16:40:00.000-04:00

The rioting in Britain isn't following a pattern that is easily explained by protest or reaction to oppression. You could have said something like that about London late last week. But yesterday, Tuesday, there was looting in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, etc. From BBC TV coverage in Birmingham (possibly taken from CCTV feeds) it appears that a few young people appear suddenly, attack shops, the word gets out, and then more people arrive, etc.

One explanation that has been offered is this: watching riots and looting in London, people in other cities decide that they too can have boxes full of merchandise. Some were apparently trying things on in H&M before running off with them. The riots "didn't seem to be politically motivated, nor did they have any sense of community or social solidarity," said an observer quoted by Zoe Williams in the Guardian; "We're not all gathering together for a cause, we're running down Foot Locker," said another. "Greed," "entitlement," and "consumerism" are the buzzwords today.

I don't know if this is what happened, but if it is, then why not here? I don't want to put ideas in anybody's head, but why can't people in Toronto (or any number of other cities) watch what's happening in England and decide that they too can have boxes of merchandise? If it's not about anything in particular, then why should it respect national boundaries? Should we worry about riots in Markham and North York (the banlieues of Toronto)?

Hysterical Nationalism on Canadian Campuses

2011-08-06T08:20:00.004-04:00

A while ago, Canada’s University Affairs (the official organ of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) published an article by two philosophers, Louis Groarke and Wayne Fenske, about an alleged bias in Canadian universities against PhDs from Canadian universities. It’s a bit late to notice a piece of this sort, but I found it a deeply depressing manifestation of aggressive Canadian nationalism, a nationalism that tries to exclude anything or anybody that originates outside the country’s boundaries.

Here is the authors’ summary of data from 15 major Canadian philosophy departments:

No of positions	Foreign PhD	Canadian PhD	Toronto PhD	Other Can. PhD
331	229	102	50	52
	69.2%	30.8%	15.1%	15.7%

They conclude: “Either major programs in Canada are discriminating, at least in some cases, against equally qualified candidates with Canadian PhDs; or, graduate programs in Canada are turning out inferior students who cannot compete with their counterparts with non-Canadian PhDs.” (The Toronto figures are disaggregated in order to show that this university does much better than others--or, as the authors say, "slightly better".)

It’s very hard to figure out how they arrived at this conclusion. Canada produces (far) fewer than 10% of the philosophy PhDs granted in North America; and God only knows what tiny proportion of PhDs in the world. How can 30% representation justify the conclusion that Canadian philosophy departments discriminate against Canadian PhDs? Moreover, as Eric Lewis, then placement officer in the McGill philosophy department, points out in a comment on Groarke and Fenske: “Their data is consistent with every single Canadian-produced PhD in philosophy finding a tenure track job in philosophy.” (“Has the elementary notion of a base-rate fallacy really been kept that close a secret?” asks Tim Kenyon.)

Of course, G&F evoked some wild-eyed paranoia in response. This is Canada, after all. One Maria Torres writes: “My field is mathematics. I can say that similar to the PhD in philosophy, the composition of most mathematics departments of Canadian universities consists of professors who obtained at least one degree (B Sc, M Sc or Ph D) from a non Canadian university. Some Canadian students are advised to obtain their Ph D in USA if they ever hope to get a tenure track position.” Wow! And hers is one of the milder comments on G&F.

The North American academic job market is a more or less open one. Canadian PhDs apply for jobs all over Canada and the US, not to mention the rest of the world. The authors make no effort to show that PhDs from Canadian universities are less successful at getting jobs than their counterparts in philosophy departments of comparable quality. As Robert Stainton wrote: “Placing Canadian doctoral programs alongside not Princeton or Harvard, but, say, Arizona State, University of Kansas or University of Nebraska, it is evident that graduates from analogous Canadian programs fare rather better.”

Remember this is not a complaint about non-Canadians being hired by Canadian universities. It is a complaint about Canadian PhDs not being hired. (To labour the point: some Canadians get their PhDs in other countries; some non-Canadians get their PhDs in Canada.) There is NO LAW that mandates any preference on this score. It is therefore illegal to prefer Canadian PhDs. (I assume that the only legal ground for discrimination is a legally mandated ground.)

Groarke and Fenske conclude this way:

Morality requires at the very least full disclosure. Potential students applying to Canadian PhD programs should be informed about the trends reported in this article. Students hoping for academic distinction or high-level employment should, it seems, be dissuaded from enrolling in Canadian programs. Any other approach would be intellectually dishonest.

I have no words. These are two philosophers. And this is the way they talk about morality.

(Cross-posted at NewAPPS: http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/08/letter-from-canada-hysterical-nationalism-unabated-on-campuses.html)

Browner than you, Pranab . . .

2011-06-07T18:08:00.000-04:00

Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, met with Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee of India in New Delhi on Tuesday.

The New York Times reports:

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde promised Tuesday to support emerging markets so wholeheartedly that a little part of her “would turn Indian” if she were elected head of the International Monetary Fund.

Another part of her had come awfully close in the tanning salon.

"Plating"

2011-05-07T14:32:00.000-04:00

As everyone knows, restaurants "plate" their food. The more you pay, the more they plate. But let's think about this a moment. At home, where portion sizes are not controlled, you serve from the stove, or from a dish. So home like food is best served by somebody dishing up, or by the eater him/herself, from a dish.

Indian food is quintessentially home food. The reason is simple. In India, there is still a lot of domestic help in middle class homes. Hence, preparation-intensive food is available at home. This is not to say you wouldn't go to a restaurant. But you would do it primarily because you want to eat a kind of cuisine that you wouldn't get in your own home. It's still home food.

Of course, this is all changing. Restaurant cuisine, with all its fancy techniques, is slowly making inroads in India. But leaving that to one side, restaurants in India are recreations of a home eating experience, and hence they do not plate food. They put it in dishes, which are brought to the table, and served--by a waiter, if the restaurant is old-fashioned and fancy, or by the diner. Of course, the same goes for most Indian places in Toronto.

That's why it was amusing when Susur Lee did a show on Restaurant Makeover about a ghastly place called Dhaba: Indian Excellence -- I wrote about it somewhere below -- and pronounced it superb. The only thing he wanted to teach the chef was plating. Given that Dhaba has no culinary pretensions above your average greasy Indian dive, Susur was barking up two wrong trees.

Put that aside. Yesterday, I went to Aravind, a new Kerala restaurant on the Danforth just west of Pape. I was excited to try Kerala food--see previous posts for my eulogistic treatments of Syrian Christian cooking. I was disappointed. Syrian Christian cooking is known for it complex clean flavours and its wonderful textures. At Aravind, all was muddy and mushy.

But here's the thing. Everything was plated. At the next table, a man ate crab biriyani that had been shaped like a drum. Lynne and I had relatively simple dishes. I had crab with kappa: kappa being mashed tapioca root, which is commonly served with hot fish curries. The correct way for to eat this would have been for me to put the crab next to the kappa and combined them in mouthfuls. But they had plated it so that the two were mingled beyond recognition. And they had put two (very good) southern paratthas on the plate under the kappa-crab mixture. A disaster!

I guess I'll have to wait a while before I can go to a restaurant that serves good Kerala food.

Springtime in Canada

2011-04-27T12:46:00.002-04:00

I must acknowledge a typo in my last entry. When I said that this was the most boring federal election in Canadian history, I really meant to write most interesting.

Ha, ha! But seriously: what a turn around there has been in the last couple of weeks! Suddenly the NDP, the quasi- demi- hemi-socialists have rocketed to nearly the top, and the electorate has woken up, going to advance polls in record numbers. (Remember that distant past day when Americans went to advance polls in record numbers to vote for Obama? The turnout was highish that election, and maybe we can take advance polls as in indication that it will be so in this election.)

So what's going to happen? Suppose the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the Bloc each lost twenty seats, and the NDP took all of them. (Impossible, but just suppose.) Then the NDP would have nearly one hundred seats, a lot more than the Liberals at 56, but the Conservatives would still have more than either. However, the Libs and NDP could almost form a government without the help of the Bloc. If Layton were PM, would Ignatieff be Foreign Minister? But who would be Finance Minister? A decimated Liberal Party couldn't claim that post, surely?

A game changer in Canadian politics?

The Election

2011-04-19T16:57:00.005-04:00

I’ve been out of the country a lot these last few weeks, and perhaps I am not catching the Weltgeist, but this feels to me like the most boring federal election in history. Is anybody really caught up in it? Politics in the US may be vicious and destructive, but here I find it hard to find anybody who wants to talk about the election. Is it because Canada is so well-governed that the outcome doesn’t really matter? Perhaps no issue really divides us. Could it be that the leaders are deliberately turning away from the issues? Or is it that our largely immigrant population has not yet caught on to Canadian electoral politics?

However that might be, Stephen Harper is running this election on competence. Which is odd, because you wouldn’t think that this is a winning strategy for somebody who leads one of the least competent governments in Canadian history. With a few exceptions, we have a Cabinet of dunces, extremists, and partisans. Lawrence Cannon is Foreign Minister and seems only peripherally to be conscious of the vast drop in Canada’s international prestige under his (and his predecessor, Maxime Bernier’s) watch.

(Bernier lost files by leaving them at the apartment of his girl-friend, a motor-cycle gang chick, shown above.) Peter MacKay, the Minister of Defence, is mostly known for his dashing love life—he made a pass at Condoleezza Rice on national TV, and was rewarded by being called “the nearest thing to eye-candy on the diplomatic circuit” by the New York Times.

Peter van Loan (International Trade) and John Baird (House Leader) are known for their slashing partisanship, Gary Goodyear (Minister of State for Science and Technology) questions evolution. And so it goes.

The Government itself is not known for its savvy. In the last couple of years, it got economists all over the world riled by eliminating a meaningful Census; it fumbled away Canada’s position as the leading supplier of medical isotopes; it lowered the Goods and Services Tax and eliminated Canada’s budgetary surplus just before that surplus was badly needed to bail us out of the fiscal crisis; it compounded this mistake by introducing Tax Free Savings Accounts; it has an anti-crime agenda when crime is on the decline; it couldn't get elected to the UN Security Council. Oh, and Harper says that this is not the time to discuss whether Canada will lend its support to reforming male primogeniture in England (as Canada must, if it's to change.) (The Government also seems homophobic, though in such a quiet way that one could be mistaken.) It’s hard to say what positive thing this Government has achieved in five years: governing with a minority, it is mostly concerned with politics. Competence? And yet, the campaign is working.

Conservatives (Blue) lead comfortably

It all points to 145 seats for the Conservatives, a little short of a majority.

Two Elites, Two Anti-Elites

2011-01-11T15:46:00.005-05:00

People talk a lot about elites these days. The Tea Party is supposed to be anti-elite, for instance, and it has created quite a stir. But not everybody means the same thing by the term.

Yes-answers to the following questions define one kind of elite:

1. Do you own more than one home?

2. Do you own a detached house with garden in town?

3. Is somebody paid to drive you to work (in a car)?

4. Do food and housing consume less than a quarter of your income?

5. Do you have tax shelters or deferred income?

Yes-answers to the following define another kind of elite:

1. Do you prefer live entertainment to TV?

2. Do you own an iPhone?

3. Do like restaurants that serve tiny portions for $30 each?

4. Do you dislike beer, except when it comes from a local microbrewery?

5. Do you like wine only when it’s from far away?

6. Do you prefer $7 bread that is hard to chew?

Let’s call the first the economic elite, and the second the lifestyle elite. It’s pretty clear that the two are not highly correlated. People who live in the ritzy areas in town may have some of the habits of the lifestyle elite, but not necessarily because they like the things in question; the lifestyle elite are certainly not all rich.

Now, it seems that all the fuss in the US is about the lifestyle elite. Here is David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise:

If you are in an elite based on brainpower, like today’s elite, you need to come up with the subtle signifiers that will display your own spiritual and intellectual identity—your qualifications for being in the elite in the first place. [For a marriage ceremony] You need invitations on handmade paper but with a traditional typeface. Selecting music, you need Patsy Cline songs mixed up with Mendelssohn. You need a 1950s gown, but done up so retro it has invisible quotation marks around it. You need a wedding cake designed to look like a baroque church. You need to exchange meaningful objects with each other, like a snowboard engraved with your favorite Schiller quotation or the childhood rubber ducky that used to cradle during the first dark days of your Supreme Court clerkship. . . self-actualization is what educated existence is all about.

Clearly Brooks is talking about the lifestyle elites, and it is clear he is umm. . . upset with them.

On the other hand, when Margaret Wente writes (in the Globe and Mail):

There’s another problem with the new über-elite (who are also mostly über-smart – you don’t get to run a zillion-dollar hedge fund if you’re dumb). The richer they get, the more out of touch. They only hang around with one another. They never ride the subway, and don’t know a single ordinary person, or even a semi-ordinary one. They’re also super-arrogant. They think they’ve got all the answers.

she is clearly thinking about the economic elite (though she is not upset by the wealth). The lifestyle elite tends to ride the subway.

Now here is a very strange thing about the current US mood. The kind of class rage that drove politics in Europe and parts of Asia in the middle of the last century is now redirected against the lifestyle elite. Well, there are certainly times when the lifestyle elite can be obnoxious--as when they talk about "fly-over states". But is there any other country in the world where, on the one hand, politicians are afraid to say they want to raise taxes on incomes over $250,000 per year because to say this would lose them votes among lower middle class voters, and even among the unemployed, while at the same time you find admired public displays of rage like Brooks’s—directed against . . . wedding invitations?

It’s possible that this is just confusion—that some clever people like Brooks and Sarah Palin have found a way to rechannel class resentment so that it reacts against middle class behaviour. I don’t think so though. I think Americans just don’t like certain kinds of behaviour. They are upset by people who drink lattes. (In Canada, some like to play Starbucks off against Tim Hortons -- but I don't know that a lot of votes have swung one way or another based on this.)

What’s is truly odd and inexplicable is this: how is it possible that something so ephemeral can become the engine of a potent political movement?

Jonathan Franzen can't write . . .

2010-12-21T22:32:00.006-05:00

. . . English.

Here's a sentence from Freedom:

"At home, after checking on the kids, she put on a sleeveless top and little cotton shorts and came after Walter in bed. This was very unusual of her, but thankfully not so unheard-of as to provoke comment and examination; and Walter needed no persuading to oblige her. It wasn't a big deal, just a little late-evening surprise, and yet in autobiographical retrospect it now looks almost like the high point of their life together."

Nice of her to come after Walter did, even if it was unusual. No need for examination though.

Two paragraphs down:

"A few weeks later, Dorothy collapsed at the dress store in Grand Rapids. Patty, sounding like her own mother, expressed concern to Walter about the hospital care she was getting, and was tragically vindicated when Dorothy went into multiple organ failure and died."

It's too bad that Patty's concern about her poor care is vindicated by the multiple organ failure of her mother in law. Vindication can strike pretty randomly, I guess. And this is the first we hear of Dorothy's failure and death.

Turn to any page in the book and you will find at least one sentence of stunning ugliness and and another of analgesic vapidity.

British Bank Teller Becomes Dean, is Reappointed, then Fired

2010-12-19T19:06:00.005-05:00

On Saturday, December 18^th, the Globe and Mail reported that “A bitter dispute at McMaster University’s business school . . . has led to the resignation of the school’s high-profile dean, former business executive Paul Bates.”

The Globe was not surprised or shocked by what was to me the most startling part of this story. A man without a university education was appointed Dean. According to Macleans (see below): "Bates reportedly got his start as a bank teller in Britain before moving to Canada in the early 1970s. He went on to head up four major brokerage firms and has sat on the boards of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Canadian Investment Dealers Association, and has served as a part-time commissioner in the Ontario Securities Commission." Before his appointment as Dean, Bates was CEO of Charles Schwab’s Canadian division and taught at the University of Toronto, where he was an adjunct professor, a designation often accorded people with valuable practical knowledge who are asked to teach university level courses.

Universities often contemplate appointing leaders from outside academia. They should not, and this story illustrates why. Universities do not operate like companies, nor should they. Their function is to produce and transmit knowledge. The production of knowledge is necessarily a wasteful endeavour – there are a thousand bad ideas for every good one, but you don’t know an idea is bad until somebody has put it forward and others have tested it. Very few companies can tolerate this kind of waste. Moreover, ideas are produced autonomously, not at the command of an executive -- there is an important area of operations, therefore, in which academics have no boss. This drives Deans crazy, especially Deans who are used to being captains of industry.

Business executives are rarely tolerant of administrative cultures other than their own (except sometimes the command structure of the military). They regularly excoriate the fact that there aren’t more business people in politics -- read Gwyn Morgan in the Globe for a good example of this -- ignoring the fact that the public accountability of politicians differentiates their endeavour from that of a bank or brokerage. Most business executives would similarly be appalled by the chaotic, highly individualistic, non-team-oriented, non-results-oriented culture of academia. Whether they are right or wrong is not something I want to debate on this occasion. The fact is that business executives are handicapped as academic leaders.

The handicap was pretty evident in Bates's case. The Globe says that, according to a review of the school commissioned by McMaster’s President, “Faculty members soon became “perplexed” about how decisions were made on important academic matters such as chairing tenure and promotion meetings, developing research policies and developing new graduate programs.” In fact, things were so bad that the the faculty association actually took a poll: 80% of the faculty responded, and 80% of those opposed Bates's reappointment. The university’s Board of Governors ignored them. Bates was reappointed for a second term in 2009.

As it turns out, there are indications that Paul Bates was not a great respecter of people even as a business leader. Macleans magazine reported on May 11^th 2010 that Bates was in the middle of an “ugly battle” with Schwab employees in 2002. According to Macleans:

“A 2002 Financial Post column headlined “Slick salesmanship masked discontent,” blamed Bates for the revolt at the discount brokerage—a dozen employees sent a letter to Charles Schwab’s head office warning that management of the Canadian arm was “no longer acting in the best interest of ourselves or our clients”—and suggested Bates should have been fired as a result (instead, he oversaw the sale of the brokerage firm to Scotiabank)."

Embarrassingly enough, the Financial Post report was later used as a textbook case-study of bad management. McMaster students would find photographs of their Dean in their text-books, cited as an example of poor personnel management.

At McMaster, Bates wanted to attract students with an interest in the “real world”, to treat these students as “customers”, and to remove academics from committee memberships, where (as somebody with his background might think) all they did was slow things down. These are telltale signs of a disconnect between the Dean and the entity he is administering. As Macleans observed: “while Bates’s pledge to treat students as “customers” sounds appealing on the surface, academics argue there’s an important distinction between training someone to do a job and providing them with an education.”

Macleans continued:

“One professor, who has been at McMaster for several decades, said it’s more than just a case of Bates and his private sector get-it-done attitude clashing with a bunch of cloistered academics. ‘It has a lot more to do with his conduct and him as a leader of an academic unit,’ he says. ‘Even after being around here for five years, he still doesn’t understand how an academic institution should be governed.’ The professor claimed that Bates appeared to recognize early on that he didn’t have the broad support of the faculty and quickly resorted to a system of rewarding those who were loyal to him—the report cites allegations that Bates attempted to influence tenure and promotion decisions—and marginalizing those who didn’t.”

And when five of six area chairs at the business school expressed disagreement with the Dean's plans for a new facility in Burlington Ontario, they were officially reprimanded by the Provost (presumably after a complaint by the Dean). Those of us who have spent their lives in academia know how this kind of behaviour clashes with the democratic ideals of the university. Though these ideals are often breached, the bully tactics of a large firm are hardly ever seen on campus. (Incidentally, the facility in Burlington is largely devoted to an executive MBA program, hardly a part of a university's core mission. It was hardly unpredictable that the faculty would oppose this diversion of focus. Praise for the project came from other sources: the execs who took MBAs there, for instance.)

It may be that the faculty at McMaster’s business school are an academically disreputable bunch, and that Bates is being demonized for their pre-existent incompetence and lack of cooperation. But taken as exculpation, this does not strike me as particularly convincing. It is certainly true that an outsider faces resistance when brought in to reform an organization. But aren’t business executives supposed to be good at navigating organizational difficulties of this type? This excuse shouldn’t ring true even to those who think that the “private sector get-it-done attitude” should displace academic waffling.

Here is a maxim that Boards of Governors, stuffed as they are with non-academics, are reluctant to take seriously, though they really should: anybody who has responsibility for academic programs should be a capable, if not a distinguished, academic.

The King's Speech

2010-12-18T21:50:00.003-05:00

Here's the scoop:

Guy appointed by god to do god's job has a speech defect. To make up for his/her lack of due diligence, god sends man to cure guy. Under man's tutelage, guy takes oath to serve god, and gives big speech committing his nation to god's care without making a fool of said god (whose faith he was defending, so win-win for god and guy).

That's about it. Colin Firth acted brilliantly as guy, Geoffrey Rush irritatingly as man, and Helena Bonham Carter cloyingly as guy's squeeze: lot's of slap and tickle there.

Thanks to Firth, the movie is extremely entertaining.

I have been thinking how this movie is a beautiful little exercise in propaganda. First, Guy's daughter, Lilibet, now 83, is remembered less for carrying on in guy's virtuous path, than for having really silly offspring. In the movie, her adorable mom and noble father burnish her pedigree. Attention shifts from silly son (also apparently appointed by god to defend his faith).

And not bad to revivify the story about guy's wicked elder brother (WEB). WEB is a bully, plus apparently he lost his mind when a not tremendously attractive chick lured him with tricks she learned in a brothel in Shanghai. (Guy himself, as well as WEB, learned them from a Parisienne prostitute named Flora, provided by "equerries" at Buck Pal. -- Shanghai/Paris which would drive a lustful young Englishman mad sooner? Those who say Paris: go see the movie.)

Secondly, we are reminded that this small island in Europe (that's England, not Corsica) that saved us from Hitler -- led by guy who gave aforementioned speech. Good eh?

England is in tough spot these days, and needs every little boost that its debt-ridden populace can get. Publicly funded films about the glory of the realm don't hurt. When the yobs get excited about Harry and Kate, not to mention the Olympics, the wounded economy may get a little tickle/stimulus. Good investment, guys.

Is There Supposed to be Something Wrong with Germany?

2010-11-25T19:48:00.000-05:00

In this morning's (25/11/10) Globe and Mail, Timothy Garton Ash has an argument that goes something like this:
1. Germany is very successful.
2. Ireland and others are not.
3. But Germany wants Ireland and others to stay in the eurozone.
So
Conclusion: Germany should make Ireland and others feel better by becoming less German. "The right balance may be: 70 per cent other euro zone countries become more 'German', 30 per cent Germany becomes less so."

This is of a piece with articles that I have been reading recently, which go something like this. Go to Turkey/Portugal/Britain. You'll find a lot of German goods on the shelves/on the roads/in the home. This is not good. Germany should stop it.

Can I say? -- I don't get it. Everybody in the world wants either a Mercedes Benz, or a BMW, or an Audi. (Oh ok: 90%. Some want a Maserati. But who exactly wants a Honda, really wants a Honda?) When they can't have one of those German brands, they'd rather settle for a Volkswagen than a Toyota. So what are the Germans supposed to do? Build in a few problems with the accelerator pedal? This seems to be Garton Ash's solution.

While I am on the topic, Germany illustrates to me why we all want more government. There's piles of government there. But there's prosperity, culture, and lots of public transit. And as far as I can tell, Angela Merkel doesn't keep showing up and telling you what to do. What do Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck think about this? That Germany should become 30% less civilized?

Memories of 1956

2010-11-21T14:34:00.001-05:00

To say that Hungarians are masters of memory is perhaps to risk cliché. But I couldn't help being moved at their genius for preservation.

Here is the extraordinary statue of Imre Nagy, the leader of the breakaway Hungarian government, executed by the Russians two years later:

He gazes at the Parliament Building.

Here is a flag that commemorates the one from which the rebels ripped the Soviet emblem:

It flies next to a symbolic grave of people killed there.

Finally, here's a more humorous one, of Istvan Szechenyi, who endowed the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and built the iconic Chain bridge in the centre of Budapest:

Two Classical Bridges

2010-11-21T13:23:00.004-05:00

I came across two bridges with significance derived from ancient Greece. The first is the Eisener Steg in Frankfurt, an old iron footbridge that crosses the Main river in central Frankfurt.

The inscription is from Homer's Odyssey: "to many foreigners on a wine-dark sea". No clear explanation of what that quotation is supposed to mean on this bridge.

And then there is this:

"This river I step in is not the river I stand in", an allusion to Heraclitus on a bridge that crosses the Don Valley on Queen Street East in Toronto. No more comprehensible -- and why the allusion, rather than the exact quote? -- but equally charming.

G20 protesters: Boxed in

2010-06-29T17:21:00.006-04:00

On Sunday morning, strolling past Toronto Police Headquarters (two minutes away from where I live), I struck up a conversation with a police constable. Why, I asked him, did the police not protect property during the G20 disturbances of the previous day? He replied, quite reasonably, that the police did not want to risk bodily harm to protect windows. They would have intervened if people had been at risk. Nobody was harmed, he pointed out, nor was anybody placed under that threat.

That sounded right. But it was an odd echo of something a rioter from the notorious "Black Block" told the Globe and Mail: "We're not violent," he said, "all we damaged was property -- not a single person was hurt." (That might sound a tad disingenuous: what would have happened if police had tried to arrest one of the rioters while he was smashing a window with a hammer? -- But let's not chase the thought down that hole.) Ironically, the scary rioter was making the same distinction as my charming constable acquaintance. Hurting property is different from hurting people. Morally different.

Here is another head-scratcher from that Sunday. A lot of people, including some suspected of carrying dangerous weapons, were milling around in the vicinity of Queen and Spadina. (See below.) Police suspected some of these people of carrying nasty items, such as Molotov cocktails. So they told everybody they had to go, unless detained. The crowd didn't disperse. So the police boxed the crowd in -- presumably, they wanted to hold the malfeasant types in until they were ready to be inspected without resisting. Problem is they held the whole crowd there for several hours in the pouring rain, until they could be inspected, and then detained or released. Many of the people in the box were peaceful and legitimate protesters; one was a freelancer working for the Guardian newspaper in London. (I really do not want to say that the Guardian's coverage of the Vancouver Olympics makes it ok to punch their journalists in the stomach -- but I confess the thought did cross my mind.)

Now, here's the question. Were those who were not charged illegally detained? Were their civil rights violated?

I don't know anything about the law. But here's what puzzles me. The police claim that the crowd was ordered to disperse. Suppose this is true. Then, supposing that the order was delivered audibly, clearly, and repeatedly, not dispersing puts you in risk of some coercive action. So on this scenario, some of the people in the box knowingly disobeyed an order given by peace officers. They could not find their way out of a place that they had been told to vacate. Look: if you wander into a place where there is a clearly posted Keep Out sign, you can't really complain. Maybe the person who put the sign there had no right to -- but surely the police do have a right to ask citizens not to interfere with their actions. (Hell, they do that every time I venture out onto an expressway in Toronto. There's always some "investigation" that lasts for hours and backs the Gardiner up forever.)

Let's stick with the scenario for a moment. Some of those people in the box claim that they didn't hear the order. They may not have heard it -- that it was given audibly doesn't imply that everybody heard it. Some may have been distracted; some may have been talking to their friends; some may have had other things on their minds. But this doesn't put them in the clear, legally speaking, as far as I know. If the order is properly given, not having heard it is not an excuse for disobeying. Nor does it cut the mustard to say, as some did say, that they were waiting for a bus. Once riot police tell you to clear out, the transit option disappears. Better to think of walking, or taking a taxi, or hiking up to Dundas to see if transit is running better up there. Inconvenient . . . but what else are you going to do?

Still sticking with the warning-was-given scenario, the best sense I can make of the just-hanging-around scenario is that, given the situation and its political implications, some people wanted to disobey the police. That's civil disobedience. I admire civil disobedience -- it's a much more lofty option than insisting that you have to catch the street car. Hey, I was brought up in India, and Gandhi is my hero. You are not going to catch me saying that peaceful civil disobedience is morally less-than-heroic.

But: and this was Gandhi's point -- watch the Ben Kingsley/Leslie Howard scene if you don't believe me -- that civil disobedience comes with the duty to suffer the duly administered legal penalty. If you break the law for a noble political end, then assuming you want to change the state not destroy it, you accept the penalty. What's this about civil rights being violated? You don't have a civil right to hang out at the corner of Queen and Spadina when a peace officer has told you to move on. Assuming, of course, that he has a right to do so. (If you think he doesn't have that right, then why not say so -- rather than all this "I didn't hear him" nonsense?)

OK, let's come off the scenario now. It hasn't yet been established that the police did clearly, loudly, and repeatedly enough make it clear that people had to disperse. I would think, though, that this is easily established. There must be film, right? The guy/gal who took the photo above probably could tell you, if s/he was contacted and asked nicely. If they just boxed people in without giving them a chance to leave, and kept them there for hours in the pouring rain, and didn't give them anything to eat or a private place to relieve themselves -- well, that is a crime. How would you like to be treated that way?

Canada's "Founding" Peoples

2010-06-27T16:06:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, retired Supreme Court Justice John Major released his final report on the aftermath of the Air India crash of more than twenty years ago. That crash was the result of a bomb. The Major report itemized the Keystone Cop procedures within Canadian intelligence services and the RCMP that led them to ignore clear warnings of an attempted bombing that very weekend, the destructive squabbles between these two agencies that led to failed prosecutions, and other disgusting breaches of basic competence in the security services that are supposed to protect us.

An interesting sidelight of the report was Justice Major's bewilderment that after the crash Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, called the Indian Prime Minister to commiserate with him about India's loss. Bewildering because by far the larger portion of the people who died in the crash were Canadian citizens and residents. One commentator said, in a silly and unfeeling, but nonetheless revealing, exaggeration: "All that India lost was a plane." Native-born white Canadians tended for a couple of decades to treat the Air India crash as if it were an incident that happened in a foreign country (other than England).

I have been seething about this, and doubtless this explains why I was irritated afresh by the plaque that the City of Toronto placed under the imposing equestrian statue of King Edward VII in Queen's Park.

It reads:

"Originally standing in Edward Park, Delhi, India, this statue was erected on the present site through the generous subscriptions of the citizens of this area.

"This gift to the City of Toronto was made possible by the Government of India and the former Canadian High Commissioner to India, His Excellency, The Right Honourable Roland Michener CC, CD, Governor General of Canada, and brought to the City through the personal generosity of Henry R. Jackman CC." William Dennison, Mayor.

The plaque does not say who made the gift, for it equates the role of the Government of India (GOI) with that of Michener. In fact, the story is that the statue had been relegated to a graveyard for imperial statues in Delhi, and Michener begged it for Toronto from GOI. Then Henry Jackman paid for the transportation, and local citizens for its erection in Queen's Park.

In her disgustingly arrogant memoir, Michener's daughter tells the story, but expresses no gratitude at all, complaining instead of the delays in transferring the edifice which she attributes to Babu bureaucracy. She writes as if the thing were her property, tied up by some backward Customs poo-bah.

The plaque gives the impression that the local citizens of Toronto are to be thanked ahead of the actual donors -- the people of India. The latter are never acknowledged, much less thanked.

A small matter, yes: but indicative of the respect that immigrants and non-English foreigners used to receive in Canada and in Toronto.