Reading list for next year?

Much more substantial than my own collection of good posts for the past year is Phil Paine's annotated list of books that inspired him this year. There is no point in duplicating his post; instead I will just include one fairly long excerpt and hope that you will look for the rest at his website. 

… what does this have to do with rebel­lions in Canada? Well, the failed rebel­lions had a trans­form­ing impact on two young men who were both ardent demo­c­ra­tic reform­ers, Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine in Lower Canada, and Robert Bald­win in Upper Canada. Both men had come to the con­clu­sion that the rebel­lions led by fire­brands like Louis-Joseph Pap­ineau and William Lyon Macken­zie, which they had ini­tially sup­ported, had been more destruc­tive than pro­duc­tive of reform, and that a more ratio­nal strat­egy was required. Lafontaine still had faith in the demands made by the Patri­otes in the rebel­lion: demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment by uni­ver­sal male suf­frage, with prop­erty qual­i­fi­ca­tions abol­ished; equal­ity of Eng­lish and French as legal and gov­ern­ing lan­guages; trial by jury in all crim­i­nal and most civil cases; abo­li­tion of the death penalty for all crimes except first degree mur­der; equal rights for all abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples “the same as any other cit­i­zen”; guar­an­tees of free­dom of speech and the press; free­dom of reli­gion and total sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State; abo­li­tion of seigneural tenure and rem­nant “feu­dal” prac­tices; a free mar­ket in land; pub­lic edu­ca­tion. It should be noted that these demands, made in 1837, went much fur­ther in the direc­tion of mod­ern democ­racy than any­thing con­tem­plated else­where. But the rebel­lions had only brought about a tri­umphant Con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion, with mas­sive abuses of civil rights.

In 1841, the two colonies were con­sol­i­dated, after this was urged by the inves­ti­gat­ing emis­sary from Britain, Lord Durham. There would be an elected assem­bly for the new “United Canada”, but the inten­tion was to dilute the power of the French-speaking major­ity in Lower Canada, with a long-term goal of “assim­i­lat­ing” French Cana­di­ans into obliv­ion. While there were some con­sti­tional gains, the assem­bly hav­ing more power on money bills than before, there were obvi­ous losses. Lower Canada had actu­ally rejoiced in a degree of women’s suf­frage: women who met the prop­erty qual­i­fi­ca­tions had the vote, and these qual­i­fi­ca­tions were low enough that they applied to a sub­stan­tial num­ber of women. There was, in fact, noth­ing like it in any other place in the world. In one con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ment I ran across, it is casu­ally men­tioned to a vis­i­tor that “in our coun­try, women are the polit­i­cal equals of men.” This female suf­frage would be abol­ished by the new United Canada. In Upper Canada, the auto­cratic power of the Fam­ily Com­pact was strength­ened, and reform stymied. Lafontaine and Bald­win, both ardent democ­rats, looked upon the ash-heap left by the rebel­lions and tried to think out a strat­egy to bring the reform move­ment back to life.

 At this point, Lafontaine gave a speech in his home rid­ing of Ter­re­bonne, where he was run­ning for the new par­lia­ment. He told the crowd that the best strat­egy was not to boy­cott the new regime, as many advo­cated, but to embrace it, use all the polit­i­cal power they could muster, and win reforms step by step. Foil the plans to assim­i­late French Canada by becom­ing the colony’s most adept par­lia­men­tar­i­ans. Win through grit and deter­mi­na­tion what the rebels had failed to win with arms. Lafontaine would eas­ily have been elected to his rid­ing, but Con­ser­v­a­tive hooli­gans, beat­ing and intim­i­dat­ing vot­ers, kept him out of office.

News of these events reached Robert Bald­win in Upper Canada. The young man, whose equally young wife had just died of ill­ness, had with­drawn into a twi­light of grief. His father, also a life-long reformer, told him he must find a new strat­egy for reform, and pur­sue it, or wal­low use­lessly in self-pity. He sug­gested that Lafontaine’s speech held the key. The elder Bald­win resigned from his seat in the Assem­bly, forc­ing a bi-election in the rid­ing of New­mar­ket. Robert Bald­win wrote to Lafontaine, invit­ing him to come to Upper Canada and run as a Reform can­di­date in New­mar­ket. This was the first step in what turned out to be a life-long col­lab­o­ra­tion and inti­mate friend­ship. Bald­win was even­tu­ally to learn French, and send his daugh­ters to be edu­cated in Lower Cana­dian schools. Lafontaine, unwill­ingly child­less, lived with the Bald­wins in New­mar­ket and came to think of them as fam­ily. …
 Bald­win and Lafontaine are far more impor­tant char­ac­ters than Cana­dian his­tory books would indi­cate. In their writ­ings and cor­re­spon­dence, you see the emer­gence of a set of ideas that were unprece­dented. Cana­dian his­to­ri­ans are mostly inter­ested in the fact that their activism even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of the Cana­dian Con­fed­er­a­tion in 1867, but do not notice the pro­found orig­i­nal­ity of their polit­i­cal think­ing. At the time, most polit­i­cal reform and rad­i­cal­ism was built on the premises of roman­tic nation­al­ism. It was taken for granted that the nation was the nat­ural unit of pol­i­tics, and even where polit­i­cal move­ments envi­sioned demo­c­ra­tic gov­er­nance, this was seen as sec­ondary to the mys­ti­cism of the nation as a col­lec­tive agency. The “nation” embod­ied bio­log­i­cal descent, and required “unity” — con­for­mity of lan­guage, faith, and cus­tom. No Euro­pean intel­lec­tual of the period, that I can find, val­ued diver­sity or felt that it was a good thing to com­bine dif­fer­ent lan­guages, faiths, or eth­nic­i­ties into the same polity. It was seen as a defect that might have to be tol­er­ated, but not as some­thing of pos­i­tive value. Pro­mot­ers of empires con­sid­ered diver­sity the weak­ness of their realms. Pro­mot­ers of national inde­pen­dence envi­sioned their “lib­er­ated” states as cul­tur­ally uni­form units. Lafontaine and Bald­win had come to the oppo­site con­clu­sion, putting them into a dif­fer­ent cat­e­gory from other reform­ers of the era. They explic­itly advo­cated a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-religious state, held together by a com­mit­ment to share a polit­i­cal com­mu­nity with­out con­for­mity. In their view, democ­racy and the rule of law formed an abstact frame­work of val­ues that could allow free­dom to pros­per with­out need­ing any of the tra­di­tional defin­ing fea­tures of nation­hood. As they saw it, and stated explic­itly, this diver­sity con­sti­tuted a strength, not a weak­ness, just as they had found in their per­sonal friend­ship. But this was not some­thing that any sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of intel­lec­tu­als were advo­cat­ing. … 

Europe would go on to more extreme and dis­as­trous man­i­fes­ta­tions of Uni­for­mi­tar­i­an­ism. The colo­nial empires of Britain, France, Spain, Por­tu­gal and Ger­many left no doubt that there was to be noth­ing equal about the eth­nic­i­ties, lan­guages and cus­toms within them. The United States strug­gled with a schiz­o­phrenic her­itage, the implied val­ues of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion in con­stant con­flict with the urge to cre­ate a uni­for­mi­tar­ian state, immi­grants under con­stant pres­sure to “melt” into con­for­mity. But in Canada, the ideas of Bald­win and Lafontaine became the main­stream shap­ing the country’s des­tiny. Con­fed­er­a­tion in 1867 was clearly founded on them. … When inter­viewed while wel­com­ing Syr­ian refugees to Canada, a few weeks ago, Prime Min­is­ter Justin Trudeau pretty much stated them as if they were obvi­ous. But they are by no means obvi­ous to most of the world, or there would be no refugees to wel­come. So read­ing Lafontaine and Bald­win, see­ing these ideas being born, was emo­tion­ally, as well as intel­lec­tu­ally satisfying.

Image: Lafontaine and Baldwin

  

A love-letter to Canada

Phil Paine's great mountain adventure. This post is mainly for archival purposes. See the illustrated version at Phil's blog. . If you are on Facebook, see Filip Marek's pictures.

What fol­lows here took place dur­ing the sec­ond week of Sep­tem­ber. It was planned a long time ahead. A quar­ter cen­tury of friend­ship between myself and Filip Marek would be cel­e­brated with an adventure.

We both love moun­tains. The Cana­dian Rock­ies has some of the finest, and most of them have not been gelded by roads, habi­ta­tions and ski resorts. A lot of them are as wild as they were when their first human explor­ers came upon them pur­su­ing mam­moths down the “ice-free cor­ri­dor” or per­haps fil­tered in from the Pacific coast. But the choice of des­ti­na­tion had to be a com­pro­mise between the cost and time of access and the degree of wilder­ness. I had only one week free, and Filip could spare not much more.

I chose Mt. Assini­boine, a hand­some 3,618m peak in the south-central Rock­ies, in BC but close to the Alberta bound­ary. The area around it is well pro­tected. No roads are allowed in the 4,000ha region around it. Access is lim­ited to hik­ing in or out on foot, or heli­copter. There are a lim­ited num­ber of camp­ing places, and envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion is strict. All sup­plies must be car­ried in, and noth­ing, not even a gum rap­per, should be left behind. This area is in turn sur­rounded on all sides by larger national and provin­cial parks with less strin­gent pro­tec­tion, but still kept wild. The Kanasaskis Range, pro­tect­ing its east­ern flank, puts it into a dif­fer­ent world from the ski resorts and tourist trail of Banff and Jasper. From the Alberta side, it’s rather like The Wall in Game of Thrones.

Our plan was to meet at a hos­tel in Cal­gary, then take a bus the next day to Can­more, Alberta, a ski and rid­ing resort in the Bow Val­ley. We overnighted there, which gave us an evening to explore the town, climb­ing up to some hoodoos that over­looked the town, and amus­ing our­selves look­ing at the absurd abun­dance of wild rab­bits hop­ping around the town. Almost as numer­ous were Ford 550 cab trucks. The local library was equipped with a climb­ing wall — not some­thing you expect in a library in Toronto. Its exten­sive local his­tory col­lec­tion revealed that Can­more was orig­i­nally a coal min­ing town, first set­tled by dour-looking immi­grant Finns of such prodi­geous fer­til­ity that they would have inspired the envy of the rab­bits. The present pop­u­la­tion is the usual multi-racial, multi-lingual Cana­dian mix­ture, with a notice­able pres­ence of local Black­foot, Sarcee, and Cree.

In Can­more, we faced the first strate­gic uncer­tainty in our plans. To reach Mt. Assini­boine, we would hike 28km from the trail­head, going over Assini­boine Pass to a small log cabin near Lake Magog, where we would stay for three nights. This entry hike was sup­posed to take between seven and ten hours. Overnight­ing on the trail was not encour­aged, since it’s griz­zly coun­try. So we would have to start rea­son­ably early. But to get to the trail­head at Mt. Shark, we needed to go through the nar­row pass between Mt. Run­dle and Ha Ling Peak, then fol­low a 40km gravel road. There is no pub­lic trans­porta­tion along this road, so we had no choice but to get up early and hope that we could hitch-hike to the trail­head and get there with a suf­fi­cient win­dow of day­light. For­tu­nately, we got a ride within half an hour, with a charm­ing woman who knew the moun­tains and trails.

The sec­ond uncer­tainty was our phys­i­cal con­di­tion. Both of us had leg injuries. I had an as-yet unhealed stress frac­ture in my left leg, that was still occa­sion­ally painful, and Filip has some kind of ongo­ing plan­tar prob­lem. Filip is a big, mus­cu­lar guy, much more ath­letic than I am. I’m a pudgy lit­tle guy, nobody’s visual image of an out­doors­man. Though I have a long his­tory of out­door activ­i­ties, in recent years I’ve been pretty urban. My last hike on this scale — a long uphill grind in the moun­tains of Tran­syl­va­nia in 2007 — left me par­a­lyzed with exhaus­tion, unable to walk the last klik to my goal. A short hike up Mont du Lac des Cygnes in Que­bec, last spring, was easy enough, but didn’t indi­cate any great degree of spry­ness. Frankly, I had no idea if I would be able to do this. It’s cus­tom­ary for peo­ple to heli­copter in to the moun­tain, then hike out over the pass, mak­ing most of the trip down­hill. I had pur­posely arranged things in reverse, so that the test of our met­tle would be at the start. The 28km hike would be uphill most of the way, start­ing with a 65m descent to the Upper Spray River, then a 650m rise to Assini­boine Pass.

Another uncer­tainty was the weather, always a gam­ble in the Rock­ies. We hiked under a grey, over­cast sky. We were both resigned to the pos­si­bil­ity that rain­storms or even snow­fall might sig­nif­i­cantly reduce both vis­i­bil­ity and com­fort. In fact, the woman who gave us the ride had informed us that Lake Magog’s alpine val­ley was snow­bound that morn­ing, but was expected to melt off by the time we got there. While there was a gen­eral pre­dic­tion of clear­ing weather in the next few days, moun­tains tend to chop up such pre­dic­tions into micro-weather, with large vari­a­tions between dif­fer­ent enclaves.

As it turned out, the cool, grey weather was a bless­ing. The upward trek was not nearly as dif­fi­culty as I had feared, and we made rapid progress with­out work­ing up a sweat. After only a few hours, we came upon a bull-moose. This was some­what unusual, as moose are noc­tur­nal. I have had a lot expe­ri­ence with this charm­ingly stu­pid ani­mal. This one was a young male, with a rack of antlers raw red from either fight­ing or scratch­ing. I wasn’t sure if it was rut­ting sea­son here, but I knew it was so back in Ontario. Moose can be dan­ger­ous, if you get too close to them, espe­cially rut­ting males, and we had turned a cor­ner that brought us quite close to him. But he looked at us with bored dis­dain and walked away. This was to be our only encounter with a large ani­mal. We had pur­chased a can of bear spray in Cal­gary, since it is more or less required, because there are numer­ous griz­zlies in the area. How­ever, grizzly-human encoun­ters are rare. Usu­ally, they hear the noise of humans from far off, or smell them in the air and avoid them. We met two par­ties of peo­ple mak­ing the more pop­u­lar down­ward trip. At approx­i­mately the half-way point, the val­ley we fol­lowed climbed out of the for­est and opened up into alpine meadow, hemmed in by spec­tac­u­lar cliffs. Only the last por­tion, where the trail had become muddy and nar­row, and the climb over Assini­boine pass, rather steep, bro­ken up, and still snowy, was any sort of challenge.

We made it to the cabin in good time. The snow had mostly melted, but Mt. Assini­boine was still invis­i­ble, hid­den behind a mist of clouds. We were tired, but not exhausted. There was already a fire in the stove, and we met our cabin mates. We could not have been luck­ier. They were a charm­ing fam­ily of Métis back­ground: a hus­band and wife, a teenage daugh­ter by an ear­lier mar­riage, and a dig­ni­fied elderly aunt. The hus­band had once been a ranger at Assini­boine, and knew the place by heart. Two sons were with them, but were tent­ing in the bush, rather than stay­ing in the cabin. They all had the quiet, soft-spoken calm and con­fi­dence that would make them an ide­al­ized sam­ple of exem­plo familia canaden­sis. I had expected to share the cabin with the inevitable Aus­tralians on walk­a­bout, or some noisy macho types. This fam­ily was a bless­ing to us, mak­ing the whole expe­ri­ence sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than expected.

The fol­low­ing day was still over­cast, and Mt. Assini­boine still remained hid­den. The Lakes around the moun­tain are charm­ingly named: Gog, Magog, Og, Sun­burst, Cerulean, Mar­vel, Glo­ria and Ter­rapin. Each is strik­ingly dif­fer­ent in appear­ance. Given the weather, we decided to spend the next day walk­ing the mostly level and unde­mand­ing trail to Og Lake, which turned out to be slightly creepy-looking and des­o­late, sur­rounded by bare rock and a wide beach of peb­bles. By the time we returned to the cabin, my leg was act­ing up. I passed on a sec­ond hike, and spent time relax­ing around the camp, while Filip headed up to Won­der Pass. He returned just as it was get­ting dark. He had actu­ally crossed the pass and was able to look down at Mar­vel, Glo­ria and Ter­rapin lakes, but Mt. Assini­boine remained shrouded in cloud. We bunked down for the evening. I had wor­ried that my chronic snor­ing would be a social prob­lem, but it turned out that every­body snored. In the mid­dle of the night, I woke and went out to pee. The sky had cleared and stars come out. The North­ern Lights were shin­ing. Not a spec­tac­u­lar dis­play, with multi-coloured cur­tains, but at least a vivid glow and flicker. I told Filip about it, and he went out for a look, then the young girl came out as well.

The next day was clear and sunny. Mt. Assini­boine emerged fully and grandly. With it’s Matterhon-like shape, it dom­i­nates every­thing. The ice-bound pyra­mi­dal peak, even in a clear sky, leaves a smoke-like white plume of ice par­ti­cles as the wind swirls past it. That’s why it’s named Assini­boine. The Assini­boine are a plains tribe who never lived any­where near it. But George Daw­son, Canada’s emi­nent 19th cen­tury geol­o­gist and explorer (author of Geol­ogy and Resources of the Region in the Vicin­ity of the 49th par­al­lel from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Moun­tains, with Lists of Plants and Ani­mals Col­lected, and Notes on the Fos­sils from the Kil­ladeer Bad­lands) thought it resem­bled an Assini­boine teepee with smoke emerg­ing from it’s top.

. This was our big day. The weather was per­fect. Sunny, but never too hot. The air was as clear as crys­tal. All around were spec­tac­u­lar moun­tains, cliffs, gorges, forests, glac­i­ers, lakes, rocky wastes, moun­tain mead­ows, bogs, rivers, and giant boul­ders that might have been tossed by the gods play­ing mar­bles. But Assini­boine loomed over them all, like a mother sur­rounded by her chil­dren. First, we walked around lake Magog to the foot of the great boul­der field that descends from the glac­i­ers. Filip took a dip in the frigid lake, while I more ratio­nally soaked up the sun in the moun­tain mead­ows, men­tally play­ing Mahler’s fifth sym­phony in my head. I tested out the boul­der field, but deter­mined that it was far too unsta­ble and crevace-filled to safely spend much time on. One boul­der was about the size of a small house and looked like it had been lobbed to its place by a giant cat­a­pult. Every few min­utes you could hear some­thing falling off the moun­tain, the noise echo­ing on the sur­face of the lake. The area was so beau­ti­ful, it was dif­fi­cult to force our­selves to move on, but we found and fol­lowed the trail that would take us around the north­ern flank of the moun­tain and past Sun­burst Peak to a chain of three lakes, Sun­burst, Cerulean and Eliz­a­beth. Each of these lakes has a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter. Cerulean nes­tles against the gigan­tic, jagged wall of Sun­burst Peak. This wall looks like a huge moun­tain, loom­ing over the lake splen­didly, but it is actu­ally noth­ing more than an out­ly­ing arm of Assini­boine, dwarfed by the later. Eliz­a­beth Lake is named after Eliz­a­beth von Rum­mel, a Bavar­ian aris­to­crat whose fam­ily was dis­pos­sessed and impov­er­ished by the out­break of World War I, and fled to Canada to work as ranch hands. Eliz­a­beth grew up to be the “Baroness of the Rock­ies”, an expert moun­taineer and nat­u­ral­ist, utterly devoted to Assini­boine. We found her cabin, hardly any big­ger than the one we were sleep­ing in, where she lived until her death in 1980.

Again, my leg started act­ing up, and I rested while Filip climbed a ridge that gave a view of Nestor Peak and some more val­leys to the north and west. Filip pointed out that my ten­dency to take a faster pace prob­a­bly brought on the pain. Usu­ally, I pulled ahead of him on the trail while he kept to a slower pace, but in the end, he was often able to climb where I couldn’t. But forc­ing myself to slow down was dif­fi­cult. After see­ing the three lakes, we started up the switch­back trail that led to high ridges called the Niblet, the Nublet, and the Nub. By this time, our beauty-experiencing cir­cuits were over­loaded, but every time we climbed higher and the for­est momen­tary opened up for a view, there was another jolt of it. Finally, we came to this:

This is what we had been seek­ing, and we had found it. A place that would express, not only our friend­ship, but the best things within us. When you are at such a place, you real­ize the insipid­ness of most human pre­ten­sions to wis­dom. The silli­ness of orga­nized reli­gion and ide­olo­gies, and the pathetic, child­ish squab­bles and squalid obses­sions that we find our­selves enslaved to, all become noth­ing in the cold, pure air around these hun­dred thou­sand cathe­drals of nature. When some fatu­ous ass claims to be able to know all about God’s com­mand­ments, or the infal­li­ble Mar­ket, or the pre­des­ti­na­tion of the Dialec­tic, or what­ever else the march­ing morons are ped­dling this week or next, I will always have this scene in my head to keep me sane and unswindled.

Tired, but happy, we made our way down to the cabin. After another night’s rest, we climbed up again to the Nublet. Filip made a try at the higher van­tage of the Nub, but gave up. We came back in time to pack up and ready for the heli­copter. The pilot took us up, but took a less direct path in order to search for a hiker reported injured some­where. Some­times we seemed to be mak­ing close approaches to peaks and ridges. From above we could see range after range of moun­tains, into the infi­nite dis­tance, for this was a great ocean of moun­tains, into which you could throw a dozen Switzer­lands and lose them. We had seen but a tiny, insignif­i­cant cor­ner of it. And that was too big for us to grasp, too beau­ti­ful to find words for.

I am pro­foundly grate­ful that I was born, grew up, and live in this coun­try, which has given me a wealth of beauty and a feel­ing of free­dom that not even ver­min like Prime Min­is­ter Harper can take away from me. Filip’s Face­book page has bet­ter pho­tographs. He has a bet­ter cam­era and is a bet­ter photographer.

Phil Paine on Twain's Mysterious Stranger

Excerpts:

The story is set in the year 1490, in a fic­tional Aus­trian vil­lage (Essendorf [= “Ass Town”]). The nar­ra­tor is a sixteen-year-old vil­lage boy named August Feld­ner, an appren­tice in a print-shop. Twain, who was him­self a printer’s appren­tice in Han­ni­bal, Mis­souri when he was the same age as August, fills the nar­ra­tive with the arcana of the print­ing trade. The print shop’s mas­ter is a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter, but there are sev­eral vil­lains: the master’s shrewish and schem­ing wife, a fraud­u­lent magician-alchemist, and a per­se­cut­ing priest. The appren­tices, among whom August counts for lit­tle, are a mixed bag of char­ac­ters, but all are obsessed with the perquisites and peck­ing order of the trade. Twain takes every occa­sion to demon­strate the super­sti­tious and cred­u­lous men­tal­ity of the time, using his well-honed satir­i­cal style. But he also evokes the inno­cence of child­hood and the hum­ble plea­sures or vil­lage life. Twain began writ­ing this ver­sion while he was stay­ing in a small Swiss vil­lage, which he likened to Han­ni­bal in his diary. Into this fic­tional com­mu­nity there sud­denly arrives a mys­te­ri­ous stranger, a boy appar­ently of August’s age, bedrag­gled, seek­ing food and shel­ter, for which he offers to work. When asked his name, he gives it as “Num­ber 44, New Series 864,962.” Twain dwells on the boy’s bewitch­ing beauty. Befriend­ing August, and tak­ing him into his con­fi­dence, he reveals him­self as an “angel”, in fact a rel­a­tive of Satan him­self (Satan, of course, being the rebel angel), and exist­ing out­side of space and time. He com­mu­ni­cates tele­phath­i­cally with August, teaches him how to make him­self invis­i­ble, brings him arti­cles from the future, and whisks him to moun­tain tops and China in an instant. They travel to the past. He also shows August humanity’s hor­rors, includ­ing the burn­ing alive of a “witch”, the tragic lives of the poor, and the grim results of alter­nate time-lines of his­tory. He seems utterly obliv­i­ous to August’s notions of pro­pri­ety, piety, and ethics. When No.44’s dili­gence earns him a posi­tion as appren­tice, the other appren­tices go on strike in resent­ment, sab­o­tag­ing an urgent print­ing job. No.44 con­jures up an army of dopple­gangers who do the work, and there is a comic bat­tle in which each char­ac­ter fights his own dupli­cate. Finally, No.44 is burnt as a witch, only to reap­pear to August and explain to him that:

“Noth­ing exists; all is a dream. God — man — the world, — the sun, the moon, the wilder­ness of stars: a dream, all a dream, they have no exis­tence. Noth­ing exists save empty space — and you!”… “And you are not you — you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no exis­tence, I am but a dream — your dream, crea­ture of your imag­i­na­tion. In a moment you will have real­ized this, then you will ban­ish me from your visions and I shall dis­solve into the noth­ing­ness out of which you made me….”

It’s no won­der that Twain con­sid­ered the book unpub­lish­able. And it’s not sur­pris­ing that it was writ­ten in the shadow of tragedy. Of the three daugh­ters that Twain doted on, one died of menin­gi­tis in 1896, at the age of twenty-four, another drowned in a bath­tub in 1909. Ear­lier, his only son had died of dipthe­ria when but a tod­dler. Olivia, his wife of thirty-four years, to whom he was utterly devoted, died after a pro­tracted ill­ness while they were in Italy. Twain had plenty of rea­son to be bit­ter. This strange novel embod­ies, in one way or another, all of his life-long obses­sions, from his fas­ci­na­tion with child­hood, and with the Mid­dle Ages, to his par­ing of dual char­ac­ters, one “nor­mal” and the other a kind of pagan spirit — Tom and Huck mutated into August and #44. His hatred of injus­tice and reli­gious hypocrisy are in there in spades. But most of all, the novel dwells on the puz­zle of suf­fer­ing and the multi-faceted nature of con­scious­ness. All Twain’s doubts and tor­ments are resolved in a bizarre kind of meta­phys­i­cal solip­sism.

In the same year that the recov­ered text reached gen­eral pub­li­ca­tion, a small film pro­duc­tion com­pany made a rea­son­ably faith­ful cin­e­matic ver­sion of the story. This is one of the odd­est “fam­ily films” (for it was mar­keted as such) ever made. No.44’s final speech, blas­phe­mous by any Chris­t­ian stan­dards, is in the film, which would nowa­days make it non grata in the U.S., even though it prob­a­bly voices the dis­en­chant­ment of many mod­ern Amer­i­cans. It was filmed in Aus­tria. Pro­duc­tion val­ues were low-end, but ade­quate. August was played by Chris Make­peace, a Cana­dian child actor who had briefly been suc­cess­ful in the com­edy Meat­balls. No.44 was played by Lance Ker­win, a hard-working juve­nile tele­vi­sion actor.

Phil Paine reissues his "Meditations on Democracy."

My friend Phil Paine deserves some kind of designation as a great Canadian eccentric

The only thing preventing this is that the country is full of them.

But really, this is inaccurate. Phil is a truly original thinker, the most original I have ever met. He and I have sometimes worked together, with him coming up with the unexpected insights and me reorganizing them into a form acceptable to normal intellectuals and scholars. What I have done with Phil may be some of my most important work.

A few days ago I went over to his blog at PhilPaine.com and found that Phil
had reorganized it to feature its most important content, his Meditations on Democracy.

Go have a look. 

Phil Paine reflects on Iceland and democracy, 1

An excerpt:

But, to begin with, I’ll call up the mem­ory of my ear­li­est expe­ri­ence of democracy.

When I was a small child, in North­ern Ontario, there was a game played by the local chil­dren. It was a com­pli­cated ver­sion of “hide-and-go-seek”. Two teams of chil­dren would form up, one of which would leave a cen­tral gath­er­ing point on a com­pli­cated trail, and select a hid­ing place, leav­ing team mem­bers at strate­gic points, also hid­den. One of their num­ber would then return to the cen­tral point, meet­ing up with the other team. He or she (while the game mostly appealed to boys, girls were not excluded) would then draw a map on the ground, hon­estly rep­re­sent­ing the hiders’ route to their points of con­ceal­ment, but omit­ting the cru­cial infor­ma­tion of com­pass direc­tion. With this par­tial infor­ma­tion, the other team would set out in search, under the direc­tion of a leader. The the leader of the hid­ing team would accom­pany the search­ing team. He or she would shout out coded words and phrases, which had been agreed upon by his or her team mates. These would con­vey infor­ma­tion such as “the searchers are near but headed away from you” or “they are search­ing too far to the south of you”, etc. Some of the sig­nals were mean­ing­less, meant to mis­lead or con­fuse the searchers. The search­ing team also made use of coded sig­nals to co-ordinate their search. One sig­nal, how­ever, was cru­cial, as it would trig­ger a mad scram­ble to reach the map and erase it. This was com­pli­cated by the abil­ity of any scout to tag another, mak­ing him “freeze” on the spot, and the abil­ity of any other scout to “unfreeze” the frozen ones. Nei­ther team knew who was leader of the other team, since each had been selected after they had sep­a­rated. Each team made use of var­i­ous ruses, with scouts and lead­ers act­ing in var­i­ous ways to con­fuse their oppo­site num­bers.


It was an amaz­ingly com­plex game for small chil­dren to play. I don’t know if it is still played. Later, as an adult, inves­ti­ga­tion led me to con­clude that the game was of Native Cana­dian ori­gin. This came as no sur­prise to me, as its ele­ments are par­tic­u­larly suited to the Cana­dian phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment and to its Native cul­tural envi­ron­ment. The hunt­ing and track­ing ele­ment, and the reliance on grasp­ing the “high view” of a land­scape are both significant.

But what is rel­e­vant here is that the game was as much a train­ing for democ­racy as it was for hunt­ing and track­ing. Each stage of the game was char­ac­ter­ized by a for­mal elec­toral process. Each team leader was elected by major­ity vote in each cycle of the game, and no leader could serve more than one con­sec­u­tive “term”. Nom­i­na­tion and vot­ing were car­ried out by spe­cific pro­ce­dures which, in later life, as a his­to­rian, I found doc­u­mented among Native and Métis peo­ples in the Cana­dian north. It was to no team’s advan­tage to keep choos­ing the same peo­ple for the same tasks — the pat­tern would soon be use­ful to the oppo­si­tion. But at the same time, a com­pe­tent or expe­ri­enced per­son was the opti­mal choice. Wildly com­pet­i­tive as the game was, it was also char­ac­ter­ized by a con­sis­tent demand for fair­ness and equity. It is sig­nif­i­cant that nobody doubted that the map drawn in the ground would be an hon­est representation. 

I grew up with this game as part of my men­tal fur­ni­ture, and it came as a sur­prise to me when I found whole pop­u­la­tions of peo­ple who had no child­hood expe­ri­ence with any kind of demo­c­ra­tic com­po­nent. Their child­hoods, I came to real­ize, were dom­i­nated by the expe­ri­ence of tyranny: par­ents lay­ing down the law at home; teach­ers lay­ing down the law in school; bul­lies lay­ing down the law every­where else. It is no won­der that many peo­ple have great dif­fi­culty deal­ing with the con­cept of democ­racy. It is no won­der that many peo­ple today can­not imag­ine democ­racy as any­thing more than some incom­pre­hen­si­ble riga­ma­role pre­ced­ing the appoint­ment of a tyrant, who will then tell them what to do.

More on Phil's blog and more to come.

Image:  the old meeting site  of  Iceland's thing.

Phil Paine: The Conservative Love Affair with Communism and How It Is Destroying Us

A grim view of the present and the future, all that much grimmer for the news that the international effort to subvert free elections has come to Canada.

More from Phil Paine on intelligent protest

More from Phil on the limitations of current forms of activism.  An excerpt:

Protests within a func­tion­ing democ­racy are fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent from  [the fall of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring]. The pro­tes­tors face no sig­nif­i­cant dan­ger. This is not to say that we should turn a blind eye to cops vio­lat­ing civil rights, strong-arming peace­ful demon­stra­tors, or the kind of trea­so­nous fraud per­pe­trated by the author­i­ties that occurred dur­ing the G-20 sum­mit in Toronto. All those respon­si­ble for these crimes against my coun­try should be pun­ished severely for them, though I know that they never will be. But there is a world of dif­fer­ence between a brief stay in a local lock-up and a court appear­ance, and fac­ing a fir­ing squad or ten years dig­ging rocks with your bare hands in a mine. Pro­test­ers in Canada do not face dan­ger great enough to clas­sify their actions as exam­ples of great courage. I’m not imply­ing that they shouldn’t engage in protest. Protest is urgently needed. But it is not help­ful or hon­est to mis­rep­re­sent its nature. 

What moti­vates real protest in a democ­racy is not phys­i­cal courage, but civic virtue....This is why I do not feel any glad­ness when pro­fes­sional pseudo-revolutionaries, con­ven­tional ide­o­log­i­cal “anar­chists” or “rad­i­cals” par­tic­i­pate in such protests, or attempt to take them over. They are there pre­cisely to val­i­date the “good guy” image of the author­i­ties, and to tor­pedo the moral legit­i­macy of the protest. They per­form exactly the same debas­ing func­tion that Islamic Fun­da­men­tal­ist groups have done for the Arab Spring. 

Within a demo­c­ra­tic polity, one finds protests occur­ring all the time, pre­cisely because a free soci­ety should be open to them, and should encour­age them. But such protests dif­fer greatly in their qual­ity. Some protests tell us lit­tle more than that some­body is angry about some­thing. Since another, equally large or influ­en­tial group may be equally angry about an oppo­site state of affairs, this sel­dom has any influ­ence on either opin­ion or pol­icy. More sophis­ti­cated protest aims at influ­enc­ing pub­lic opin­ion, by 1) mak­ing clear what is wrong about some pub­lic pol­icy; 2) putting for­ward a dif­fer­ent, pre­sum­ably bet­ter pol­icy; and 3) con­vinc­ing a broad pub­lic of the wis­dom of act­ing to this end. In a democ­racy, effec­tive protest should merely be the ini­tial step in a process cul­mi­nat­ing in real polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion and action. This action must, to be gen­uinely effec­tive, trans­late into peo­ple mark­ing x’s on bal­lots in the end. If it is merely a rit­ual, an amuse­ment, or a way of blow­ing off steam, it is not progressive.

Read the rest. 

What is it about Toronto, anyway?

Or Ontario? Or Canada?

Phil  Paine recently wrote an essay on the theme, "Nobody [today] is likely to laud Toronto as the exemplar of anything."

 I bumped into a business traveller, recently, from the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh.  After discussing Andhra, he asked me, perplexed, why the urban infrastructure in Toronto was so backward.  I could only be embarrassed.  How could I tell him that there were no Hubbards, Harrises, or Hastingses around, and if there were, they would never be permitted to do anything. 

 He concludes by pointing directly at Toronto's mayor.  And he's quite right to do so.  Except...

He actually won the election (though by making assertions and promises that he must have known were untrue).  No one claims that the vote was rigged.  Nor is he the first of his kind.

This short-circuits the obvious question, which is where do the creepy leaders we all too  often get stuck with come from? and replaces it with the question, where do the people who elect them come from?  Canada has  many virtues, some large, some small, but it also has within its collective soul a big lump of small-minded, uncharitable hatefulness.  Don't believe in a collective Canadian soul?  You may be right.  Then where do all the people come from who do not value the Canadian virtues that I so admire?  The people who, for a small instance,  use the comment section of Globe and Mail to unendingly complain that Pierre Trudeau wrecked the country?  I am not an admirer of Trudeau, actually, but this is ludicrous.  The whole nearly 40 years I've lived in this country, it's been wrecked?  What are the values held by such people?  What process produces them?

Anyway, Phil's essay reminds us that we can do better, and have.  Take a look.

Image:  No one would build this today.

Dumb stuff

Phil Paine on the flaws in the "Occupy" movement:

All that said, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the “Occupy” movement.  When social media made if possible for a broad range of people to make their disatisfaction known, it had a salutory effect.  If that technology had been used to draw people to specific places, where they could engage in some surprising and dramatic symbolic activity, then equally quickly disappear, leaving the authorities to wonder what would happen next, and the public eager to understand what it was all about, then it would have had even more impact.  But, instead, things instantly reverted to the accepted formulae.  Camping out on the protest site for some undetermined time is just plain dumb.  Now, of course, it’s the old-school, old-fart habitual protesters back in control, and those people don’t have the slightest interest in changing anything.  There is no group of people more stuck in the past, more hide-bound with orthodoxy, and more ill-suited for intelligent protest

More here.

Phil Paine visits Knossos, at last

His reflections after fulfilling a life-long dream:

I have my owned pref­er­ences about inter­pret­ing Knos­sos, but until now they’ve been based on pho­tographs, writ­ten descrip­tions, and site plans. These second-hand things give lit­tle feel­ing for the three-dimensional real­ity. It was only after exam­in­ing every cor­ner of the real site that I could con­fi­den­tially feel con­firmed in my own inter­pre­ta­tions. I am con­vinced that the “palace” of Knos­sos was no palace. The Minoan state of Knos­sos may or may not have had kings, but if they did, this com­plex was not an expres­sion of it. It is noth­ing like the royal palaces of Mesopotamia.

The most dis­cussed part of the com­plex is the Cen­tral Plaza, which Evans visu­al­ized as a palace court­yard, and the venue for the bull-leaping por­trayed in Minoan art. The plaza seems sin­gu­larly imprac­ti­cal for such an activ­ity, but it is not impos­si­ble. What­ever cer­e­monies were per­formed there, it seems to me unlikely that they were pri­mar­ily for the enter­tain­ment of a king, queen and court. Com­mu­nal feast­ing seems more likely. Per­haps the bull-leaping was done else­where, and the bull brought to the plaza for sac­ri­fice. Large quan­ti­ties of cups have been found, to del­i­cate for nor­mal use, and there are other signs of large-scale cooking.

The most impor­tant alter­na­tive expla­na­tion of the pri­mary pur­pose of the com­plex has been that it might have been a monas­tic com­plex. There are strik­ing analo­gies in its lay­out to monas­tic com­plexes in Tibet (which also focus on a rec­tan­gu­lar plaza), or the medieval Euro­pean monas­ter­ies (which also had exten­sive stor­age and work­shop facil­i­ties). I think this is closer to the truth, but I would take the argu­ment a step fur­ther. At one point, I turned to Filip and said: “This is an Agora.”
Every­thing about the place says “Agora” to me. In my mind’s eye, I can see a mar­ket place (gr. agora), spring­ing up between two or small sacred places that have turned into sanc­tu­ar­ies and places of pil­grim­age. These grad­u­ally evolved into shrines served by priest­esses, and even­tu­ally into a com­plex of monas­tic insti­tu­tions, but always main­tain­ing the cen­tral open space for a mix­ture of com­mer­cial, rit­ual, judi­cial, and polit­i­cal use. There is no one over­whelm­ing sacred place, as with a Cathe­dral or a Mesopotamian tem­ple. There is no one cen­tral audi­ence hall where a king could over­awe his sub­jects. The struc­ture which Evans imag­ined to be a royal throne room is com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate for such use. It’s a small room, with a small chair set against the longest wall, at floor level. The “throne” faces a nar­row space partly filled with some kind of offer­ing bowl. Nobody ever built throne rooms like that. The aes­thet­ics is over­whelm­ingly inti­mate and reli­gious, not monar­chi­cal. No king who could com­mand the impres­sive resources of so wealthy a state would be con­tent with such a dinky lit­tle room, in which he could impress no one. All over the com­plex, there are no murals con­vey­ing kingly power and author­ity, noth­ing say­ing “look on this, ye mighty, and despair.” There are only pic­tures of flow­ers, chil­dren play­ing games, dol­phins leap­ing in the sea, farm­ers har­vest­ing their crops, ath­letes, ele­gant ladies, pets, and so on. The archi­tec­tural fea­ture are every­where con­sis­tent with domes­tic, com­mer­cial, and small-scale reli­gions uses.
At some points in time, the whole com­plex seems to have been con­sol­i­dated or rebuilt by a uni­form plan, but that is quite pos­si­ble in a non-monarchical con­text. The Agora of Athens under­went such a process under demo­c­ra­tic rule.

Which brings us to the intrigu­ing pos­si­bil­ity that Knos­sos, and the other Minoan cities such as Malia, Phaestos, and Gortyn might have been republics of some kind. Of course, no proof exists for such a hypoth­e­sis, but no proof exists for Evan’s roy­al­ist inter­pre­ta­tion, or sub­se­quent priestly the­o­ries. The level of evi­dence sim­ply does not per­mit any cer­tain­ties. Only the pos­si­bil­ity of deci­pher­ing the Lin­ear A or the hiero­glyphic texts holds any hope for that. But I think that a repub­li­can inter­pre­ta­tion has been resisted by archae­ol­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans under the influ­ence of dubi­ous assump­tions about lin­ear social evolution.

The emer­gence of repub­li­can state insti­tu­tions in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies was partly inspired and harked back to Medieval and Renais­sance republics, though the con­ti­nu­ity between them was slim stuff, and largely depen­dent on folk­loric insti­tu­tions below the state level. The Medieval republics sim­i­larly harked back to the Clas­si­cal republics of Greece and Rome, though again the con­ti­nu­ity was ephemeral. It may be that the Democ­racy that emerged in the Greek polis of the fourth cen­tury BC was itself hark­ing back to remote prece­dents in the Bronze Age.

Before com­ing here, I had no clear notion of the broader phys­i­cal set­ting of Knos­sos. The “palace” was sur­rounded by a large (by Bronze Age stan­dards) city, of which we know very lit­tle. There were some large out­ly­ing struc­ture, and prob­a­bly a net­work of vil­lages sub­servient to, or inte­grated with the city. There were roads which led directly to the cen­tral plaza — another fea­ture that sug­gests an Agora. It’s only when you stand in them that you grasp that they were as tech­ni­cally advanced as any­thing the Romans built. The plaza is aligned with the region’s most dra­matic look­ing moun­tain peak. It is in a val­ley of fab­u­lous agri­cul­tural poten­tial. The sur­round­ing hills are ter­raced, and from what I gather the ter­races, con­stantly rebuilt, were there in Minoan times. This val­ley in turn was part of a sys­tem of broad, fer­tile val­leys and plains that dis­sects the island of Crete, with other major Minoan sites scat­tered in it. This area is extra­or­di­nar­ily beau­ti­ful. The Neolithic agri­cul­tural “pack­age” of domes­tic ani­mals and crops would have sup­ported a very high stan­dard of liv­ing, and com­bined with fish­ing and sea trade would have made life very sweet by ancient stan­dards. The murals don’t seem to lie.

We returned to Irak­lion and vis­ited its Archae­o­log­i­cal Museum. This was almost as great a plea­sure as Knos­sos itself. It con­tains most of the famous arti­facts unearthed at Knos­sos. It’s only when you see them in real life that you can fully appre­ci­ate them. Some are of great beauty. Some are just delight­ful, like the toy or model house, which is so detailed and obvi­ously intended to be real­is­tic that we can con­fi­dently pic­ture what Minoan houses actu­ally looked like. The famous murals are there. You can imag­ine my delight at being pho­tographed in front of the “Prince of the Lilies” mural that adorned my web­site for years.

Image:  the mural.

More on China -- "Too early to say"

Phil Paine forwards me this post from Delanceyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - the Chinese have often been invoked as having a longer-term perspective on history compared to the West, and to buttress this view, the story is often repeated of Premier Zhou Enlai's response when asked to discuss the impact of the French Revolution. His answer? "Too early to say":

"The impact of the French Revolution? 'Too early to say.'

"Thus did Zhou Enlai - in responding to questions in the early 1970s about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier - buttress China's reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

"The former premier's answer has become a frequently deployed cliché, used as evidence of the sage Chinese ability to think long-term - in contrast to impatient westerners.

"The trouble is that Zhou was not referring to the 1789 storming of the Bastille in a discussion with Richard Nixon during the late US president's pioneering China visit. Zhou's answer related to events only three years earlier - the 1968 students' riots in Paris, according to Nixon's interpreter at the time.

Phil says:

I'm often amazed at the way even serious journalists and historians abandon all critical faculties when talking about China, and think in cliches, vague images, and old sayings and quotations.  Imagine the same guys analysing the Netherlands in terms of wooden shoes and windmills and taking sayings like "dutch treat" or "Dutch courage" as if they were profound. Or concluding that they can predict American foreign policy by watching old episodes of The Lucy Show.

Image:  1968

A timely meditation on democracy

Phil Paine wrote a provocative "Seventh Meditation on Democracy" during the last federal election in Canada.  For this one, I'm reposting this excerpt (or you can read the whole thing here):

A few days ago, I was in the sub­way, and I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion about our cur­rent national elec­tion. Two boys who, from their appear­ance, could have been no fur­ther along in school than grade nine or ten, were dis­cussing the tele­vised debates between the lead­ers of the five major polit­i­cal par­ties. What struck me, as I lis­tened in, was that the dis­cus­sion was cogent and intel­li­gent. One of the boys, who seemed the youngest, was par­tic­u­larly artic­u­late, and his opin­ions were not the sim­ple par­rot­ing of some adult he had heard, or the pur­suit of a party line. In fact, his analy­sis of the debate showed keener obser­va­tion and judg­ment than that of the pro­fes­sional com­men­ta­tors who dis­sected the debate after the broad­cast.

Now, I’m sure that these were excep­tional kids. It’s unlikely that there are many in their age group who share their inter­ests and skills. But it’s a sign that there is some­thing going on, under the sur­face of our soci­ety, that you would never guess by watch­ing tele­vi­sion or read­ing a news­pa­per. I grew up in a fam­ily where national and provin­cial pol­i­tics were argued at the din­ner table with gusto, and I have a clear mem­ory of the issues in an elec­tion held when I was ten years old. That was prob­a­bly an excep­tional envi­ron­ment. But I did not have access to the wealth of infor­ma­tion now avail­able on the inter­net. No amount of clev­er­ness is very use­ful if you have poor infor­ma­tion, so my capac­ity to ana­lyze was lim­ited. I doubt that I could have matched the sophis­ti­ca­tion demon­strated by the kids in the sub­way. Many peo­ple, of any age, are still prey to the tra­di­tional tools of obfus­ca­tion, button-pushing and appeals to prej­u­dice that politi­cians have suc­cess­fully deployed for cen­turies. How­ever, if some­one is fairly sharp, and raised with the infor­ma­tion tools now avail­able, they have a good chance of see­ing through these strat­a­gems. So you can expect there to start appear­ing a layer of young peo­ple who are rel­a­tively immune to the kind of silly-ass cam­paign­ing that our cur­rent gov­ern­ment relies upon. It will be very inter­est­ing to see what hap­pens when that layer of peo­ple, who were born with the inter­net, grows up and walks into the poll-booth. They will be dis­plac­ing a gen­er­a­tion that grew up with the much more pas­sive and homo­ge­neous medium of television.

One of the results may be that the elec­torate does some grow­ing up in a psy­cho­log­i­cal, as well as a phys­i­cal sense. One of the chief points that I’ve tried to put across in my “med­i­ta­tions on democ­racy” is that the core con­cept of democ­racy is self-respect. Self-respect is man­i­fested, in a healthy mind, by a will­ing­ness to take on the respon­si­bil­i­ties of an adult when one becomes an adult. The prin­ci­pal respon­si­bil­ity that an adult has is to gov­ern them­self. A child is born help­less, and must at first be con­trolled and guided by par­ents, in order to sur­vive at all. But, as the child grows older, the car­ing par­ent relin­quishes one aspect of con­trol after another, until adult­hood is reached, and the child becomes autonomous and self-governing. That is com­mon sense, under­stood by most peo­ple on the indi­vid­ual level. How­ever, on the level of col­lec­tive action, on the level of soci­ety, that com­mon sense les­son is rarely understood.

When peo­ple dis­cussing pol­i­tics talk about “lead­er­ship”, you know that they are encased in a prim­i­tive, pre-logical, and infan­tile state of mind. Peo­ple who seek lead­ers are sim­ply not grown up, and peo­ple who advance the claim of Lead­er­ship are attempt­ing to keep adults in a state of per­pet­ual child­hood. If to be an adult means to gov­ern one­self, then no adult should be seek­ing a “leader”. The pur­pose of democ­racy is not to “select a leader”. It is to select poli­cies. The mech­a­nism of democ­racy is not intended to choose some­one to gov­ern the peo­ple, but for the peo­ple to gov­ern them­selves. In ratio­nal demo­c­ra­tic thought, office hold­ers are not “lead­ers”, they are ser­vants. The pur­pose of an elec­tion is to 1) choose a pol­icy of admin­is­tra­tion and an over­all plan, 2) assign peo­ple to the rel­e­vant tasks, and 3) make sure they do what they are told to do. “Lead­er­ship” does not come into it. Vot­ers are not sup­posed to be “led”, they are sup­posed to be in charge. The last per­son I want to see hold pub­lic office is some strut­ting alpha-ape who claims the right to tell me what to do. If I see some­one run­ning for office who is flaunt­ing dom­i­nance sig­nals, claim­ing to have “vision” and telling me I need “lead­er­ship”, then my healthy, sane, adult response is to want to see such an ass­hole slapped down, hum­bled, and kicked out of pub­lic life. I want to see them replaced with some com­pe­tent per­son who will faith­fully carry out the instruc­tions they are given by the peo­ple. I am an adult, and a free man, so any­one who dares to claim to be my “leader” earns noth­ing but my con­tempt. My fun­da­men­tal her­itage as a Cana­dian is that the only legit­i­mate leader of me is me.

Cana­di­ans are sup­posed to know this. We are not some back­ward tribe of sav­ages danc­ing around a golden calf and wait­ing for a crack­pot Mes­siah to tell us what to do. We are sup­posed to be grown up enough not to be impressed by a tai­lored suit, a jut­ting jaw, or a man­u­fac­tured pub­lic­ity image. The polit­i­cal sys­tem we have built, slowly and pru­dently, out of dis­parate tra­di­tional sources — England’s slowly evolved par­lia­ment, New England’s town meet­ings, native Cana­dian coun­cils, the long fight for uni­ver­sal fran­chise, notions of auton­omy, indi­vid­ual rights, social equal­ity, and self-rule — should not be per­mit­ted to lapse into some kind of mys­ti­cal monar­chy, after all our strug­gles. That is pre­cisely why, in our sys­tem, the prime min­is­ter is not the head of state, and his or her gov­ern­ment can be called to account at any time, or dis­solved by a vote of no-confidence. In fact, the pres­ence of a prime min­is­ter is a mere super­sti­tious holdover, an arti­fact of prim­i­tive hier­ar­chi­cal thought that is fun­da­men­tally incom­pat­i­ble with democracy.

The only valid func­tion of a prime min­is­ter in our sys­tem is to “form a gov­ern­ment”, i.e. to select a cab­i­net and over­see the admin­is­tra­tion of what­ever laws the assem­bled par­lia­ment chooses to pass. Oth­er­wise, he is merely a min­is­ter like any other, elected to rep­re­sent his local rid­ing. It is the assem­bled mem­bers of par­lia­ment who are sup­posed to be mak­ing deci­sions, not the prime min­is­ter. A par­lia­ment can func­tion bet­ter with­out the office, and if we man­age to evolve our sys­tem fur­ther, it will even­tu­ally be abolished.

Peo­ple con­sis­tently con­fuse (because they have been encour­aged to con­fuse) a polit­i­cal party with gov­ern­ment. But a party is merely a pri­vate asso­ci­a­tion of cit­i­zens, some hold­ing office and some not, that sup­pos­edly shares some par­tic­u­lar opin­ions about pol­icy. Mem­bers of par­lia­ment may choose to belong to a polit­i­cal party, but their role in par­lia­ment is to pro­pose, debate, and vote on leg­is­la­tion for the well­be­ing of the coun­try, as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of their con­stituents. They are not sup­posed to be cogs or func­tionar­ies of what­ever party they belong to, and they are sup­posed to be answer­able to the elec­torate, not to their party lead­er­ship. The fact that Stephen Harper, the cur­rent prime min­is­ter, is the leader of his party (a pri­vate orga­ni­za­tion) should never be con­fused with the fact that he has been instructed by the Head of State, Michaëlle Jean, to select a cab­i­net and carry out pub­lic administration.

But what, in this sys­tem, actu­ally neces­si­tates there being a prime min­is­ter?

The Secret History of Democracy is out!

I have heard from one of the editors that the book The Secret History of Democracy is out.  I have an article in it:  "Republics and Quasi-Democratic Institutions in Ancient India."  Phil Paine has one, too, on Metis institutions on the Canadian praries: "The Hunters who Owned Themselves."

The publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, has a promotional web page with links to the full table of contents, a sample chapter, and other supporting materials.

More good reading from Phil Paine: "identity," slavery, and genocide

The misuse of identity:

...I tend to get most on my high horse when I feel that some stu­pid or wicked notion is being smug­gled into our sub­con­scious by a turn of phrase or an implied definition.

This is exactly the case with the cur­rently accepted use of the word iden­tity. You see this word used all the time, and phrases like “iden­tity pol­i­tics” are assumed to have an eas­ily rec­og­niz­able mean­ing. I’ve just been read­ing a spate of archae­o­log­i­cal papers which rou­tinely refer to “iden­tity” inter­change­ably with eth­nic­ity. These papers, from a vari­ety of aca­d­e­mics, con­stantly repeat phrases like “nego­ti­at­ing their iden­tity” — inane jar­gon which the field has bor­rowed from soci­ol­ogy, and which is now firmly entrenched. Archae­ol­ogy is impov­er­ished by this kind of rub­bish, and drifts away from sci­en­tific rigour.

When some­one casu­ally refers to reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, or to eth­nic­ity, or nation­al­ity, or gen­der, as being their “iden­tity,” there is an implicit assump­tion that mem­ber­ship in large, for­mally defined or orga­nized groups of peo­ple is the essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic of an “identity.”

Now, I find this a pro­foundly wrong, and extremely offen­sive assump­tion. Your iden­tity, as far as I’m con­cerned, and as I’ve believed through­out my life, is that which makes you uniquely your­self. My “iden­tity” is com­posed of those things which refer to me and only me, expe­ri­ences that occured to me alone, pas­sions and ambi­tions that are mine, pri­vate sym­bols that only I under­stand, inner expe­ri­ences that belong only to me. These unique, indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics form, all together, my Iden­tity. No char­ac­ter­is­tic that I share with some arbi­trary group of other human beings, or that is demanded of me by some col­lec­tive mush, or imposed on me by some pro­claimed Author­ity, can con­sti­tute my iden­tity. Cer­tainly no group that I am merely asso­ci­ated with by acci­dent of birth can ever be my iden­tity. I find the idea that any­one would con­sider their iden­tity to be, say, Nor­we­gianess, or their skin colour, a pro­foundly dis­gust­ing notion. It is to aban­don indi­vid­u­al­ity entirely, to crush and erase iden­tity, not to describe it.

This is a par­tic­u­larly creepy kind of creep­ing col­lec­tivism. The mean­ing of the word iden­tity has been dis­torted, per­verted, inverted. I don’t believe such things are ran­dom acci­dents. There are always pow­er­ful forces that seek to oblit­er­ate respect for, and recog­ni­tion of, the indi­vid­ual human being. If you can pur­suade peo­ple that their “iden­tity” is noth­ing more than their mem­ber­ship in a col­lec­tive blob, that there is noth­ing specif­i­cally notable or sig­nif­i­cant about them­selves, then half the work of enslave­ment has been accom­plished.

Amartya Sen has made a similar point in a recent book Identity and Violence, but his point was that reducing people to a single group identity led not just to enslavement, but genocide.

Similarly, this, from Chimamanda Adichie:



Update: Guy Halsall, anxious to elbow his way into this august company of great minds, recommends that anyone interested in this topic read his book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376 - 568, especially chapters 2 and 14; I would add that you might also want to be interested in barbarian migrations and "the fall of the Roman Empire." Seriously, though, I read Guy's book last month and it is quite fine, and the theme of multiple identities (as opposed to singular, essentialist ones) is surely there. This is not quite what Phil was talking about, but it is interesting and advances the historical debate on the "transformation" of Rome.

Phil Paine on Walter Scott

I've been known to talk up Walter Scott. Phil does it better.

The Secret History of Democracy -- coming in February 2011

A year or so ago, two Australian scholars, Benjamin Isakhan and Stephen Stockwell, approached me to contribute an article on ancient Indian democracy to a book called the Secret History of Democracy. I jumped at the chance. Now they have just written me and other contributors to tell us that the book will out from Palgrave in February of next year. The book is now listed at Amazon.uk, where is described thus:

The Secret History of Democracy explores the intriguing thesis that there is a lot more democracy in human history than historians generally admit, and presents some surprising evidence for this case. The idea that democracy could have a 'secret' history might at first seem strange. Indeed, the history of democracy has become so standardized, is so familiar and appears so complete that it is hard to believe it could hold any secrets. The central argument of this book is that there is much more to the history of democracy than this foreshortened genealogy admits. There is a whole 'secret' history, too big, complex and insufficiently 'Western' in character to be included in the standard narrative. Against the assertion that new democracies have no democratic heritage, the contributors to this volume establish that democracy was developing in the Middle East, India and China before classical Athens, clung on during the 'Dark Ages' in Islam, Iceland and Venice, was often part of tribal life in Africa, North America and Australia and is developing today in unexpected ways through grassroots activism. This book is a timely collection of essays that make a substantial contribution to the emerging debate about the history of democracy and set the tone for future discussion and research.

I have written about this subject before, so faithful readers  will find few surprises in my article. (I am, however, overjoyed to have it in print in such a collection.) But I will point out that something quite new by Phil Paine on Métis institutions will be in the book, too, and this you haven't seen.

Back online

The week of Canadian Thanksgiving, Nipissing University has  no classes. I was off-line for most of the time, and I've been pretty busy since the normal schedule resumed. As a reward for those of you who came back to see how I was, I am going to be posting some material that came in recently.

Of particular interest to me were Phil Paine's reports on his trip to Orkney. He was thinking that his life had become too ordinary recently, so he went someplace interesting and eccentric. here is a sample of why you should read his trip journal (starting here):

I had been warned that the Orkney dialect was “dif­fi­cult,” but it is per­fectly com­pre­hen­si­ble to any Cana­dian, and extremely pleas­ing to the ear. The into­na­tion pat­tern, in par­tic­u­lar, reminds me of Cana­dian speech in the Atlantic Provinces. Though the con­so­nants are dif­fer­ent, its vowel and diph­thong s only a short shift away. The “Cana­dian ris­ing” that Amer­i­cans find so amus­ing is taken a step fur­ther. Sim­i­larly, the Orca­dian pitch pat­tern is only slightly dif­fer­ent from what you would hear in Canada’s north­ern­most regions. Except for some pecu­liar­i­ties of vocab­u­lary, I never had any dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing Orca­di­ans, while I often had to work a bit to under­stand peo­ple in Glas­gow, and many of the dialects of Eng­land are prac­ti­cally Mar­t­ian to me. Some­times, the announce­ments in the Lon­don Under­ground were com­plete gib­ber­ish. But when I eaves­dropped on the con­ver­sa­tion of two elderly Orkney farm­ers, whose speech was obvi­ously unvar­nished Orca­dian, it was no chal­lenge. Orca­di­ans are soft-spoken, spar­ing in their words, and not rapid speak­ers. They are not arm wavers or fin­ger point­ers. Even teenagers stag­ger­ing out of the pubs are not keen on shouting.

The old Orca­dian dialect is not, of course, the only form of Eng­lish spo­ken here. There is much pres­sure from schools and media to replace it with Stan­dard Scots. The pres­ence of sev­eral thou­sand new­com­ers from all over the British Isles also influ­ences speech, as does Orca­di­ans trav­el­ling to other places and return­ing home. Many of the new­com­ers believe the dialect rep­re­sents back­ward­ness and stu­pid­ity. Some native Orca­di­ans have absorbed this atti­tude, and either tone it down for out­siders, or aban­don it all­to­gether in favour of what they feel is more pres­ti­geous speech.

Lots more where that came from, including some very good pictures.

Orkney

Phil Paine is in (one of) Canada's mother countries:   Orkney.  He's seeing stuff like this:

Original mind at work

Anyone can burn a book, or threaten to.  How many can write stuff this good?

A kind review from Phil Paine

Phil has written a short review of my book Deeds of Arms. I reprint it here largely because it contains one beautiful passage I wish I'd written, and which I will want to refer to in the future:

(Steven Muhlberger) Deeds of Arms ― Formal Combats in the Late Fourteenth Century

Steve has outdone himself with this parvum opus. It's an exemplary work of focused history, with everything there in the right quantities and proportions. Medieval western Europe was a military society in which tournaments --- group or single combat done by rules and for the display of prowess --- had a profound significance, affecting far more than their immediate participants. Success in deeds of arms could bring more mere celebrity. In a society where aristocracy justified itself itself primarily by courage in battle, it was the key to upward mobility and power. Learning how this kind of combat nullo interveniente odio (without rancor) was done and celebrated gives us insight into how medieval society worked. The Middle Ages, especially its upper reaches of power, smelled of blood, sweat, dung and horses. This book is a fine antidote to those that retrofit the era with a kind of abstract geopolitical aura, something like an EU Barosso Comission report delivered by board members unaccountably wearing hose and plate armor. Those who have only a passing interest in chivalry or deeds of arms will find this book refreshingly compact, clear and informative. Those with a deeper interest will not find it wanting in depth of scholarship and understanding.