Just Think About It! (selections)
Have you noticed the way the weather is being reported?
Have you noticed the way the weather is being reported lately?
Commentators refer to “extreme storms” — making them sound all exciting and daring, like “extreme sports”.
One opens with “this week’s wildest weather” as if we’re on a fun safari.
Another asks “Will any records be broken?” suggesting that, like athletic competitions, breaking a record will be a good thing.
And on a popular weather network website, the “photo of the day” shows a huge iceberg afloat, testament to the alarming melt of the polar ice,1and the caption reads, unbelievably, “Anyone else see a face in the iceberg?”
They’ve turned the death of our planet into entertainment.
And then there’s all that pseudo-scientific detail! The rain is going to be caused by water droplets, that’s droplets of H2O, in the air that will succumb to gravity, under normal conditions, and eventually reach us, possibly at 6:20 or maybe 6:21.
Thing is, all that drama and detail distracts us from what’s really going on with the weather. Notice the obsession with proximate causes? Is it because if they addressed the real causes, those remote causes like eating meat and using fossil fuels, they’d have to address blame? (Maybe that’s why they’re referring to “acts of weather”. Not, like, acts of humanity.) (And certainly not, anymore, acts of someone’s god.)
And, have you noticed the increase in climate change disaster movies? Right, yeah, let’s get everyone comfortable with the idea. The idea that survival is possible. All we need is a hero.
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1 “Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was desert. … The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great feat of imagination. … Whilst snow-covered ice reflects more than 80% of the sun’s heat, the darker ocean absorbs up to 95% of solar radiation. Once sea ice begins to melt, in other words, the process becomes self-reinforcing. More ocean surface is revealed, absorbing solar heat, raising temperatures and making it unlikelier that ice will re-form next winter. The disappearance of 720,000 square kilometres of supposedly permanent ice in a single year testifies to the rapidity of planetary change. … Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero. http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm
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I Don’t Have a Conscience
While I was very pleased, way back in 1997, to see the introduction of Bill C-272 regarding the use of taxes for military purposes, I was not at all pleased with its title: The Conscientious Objection Act. I object to paying for a lot of weaponry, but I don’t have a conscience.
Phrases such as “Follow your conscience” and “Do what your conscience tells you” suggest that one’s conscience is a fixed sort of thing, an unchanging absolute. Indeed, it often sounds like one’s conscience is innate, something we’re born with. And something quite separate from us, a sort of homunculus, or at least an ‘inner voice’ (the voice of God?). Chomsky may have proven that there are innate structures of language in the human brain, but to date, to my knowledge, no one has proven there are, in the human brain, innate moral principles. Nor, despite a dictionary definition of conscience as “the moral sense of right and wrong”, has such a sixth (?) sense been established.
On the contrary, our ‘conscience’ is acquired: it is the collection of moral principles, or more accurately, since the acquisition occurs before we have the cognitive competence to handle principles, it is the collection of moral habits, that have been inculcated during childhood. So our conscience is dependent on our parents’ moral principles, or, more likely, habits, and to some extent on the principles manifested by our community, our society. Our conscience amounts to nothing more than a moral reflex. We say “Examine your conscience”, but we do not intend a critical examination; rather, we mean a simple examination of discovery. We never say “Develop your conscience”’ or, God forbid, “Reconsider your conscience”.
And yet surely that’s what our attitude toward moral principles should be: moral principles should not be inherited by indoctrination, but developed and maintained by careful, rational thought. I propose therefore that we replace the word ‘conscience’ with ‘ethics’. ‘Ethics’ refers not to one’s sensebut to one’s system (hopefully it’s a system, a coherent collection) of moral principles. Bill C-272 should be called “The Ethical Objection Act” — for all of us who object, on ethical grounds, to the use of taxes for the military.
Now many people may be reluctant to replace ‘conscience’ with ‘ethics’ because, well, whose ethics? But that’s exactly the question that must be asked. And it should be asked of conscience as well. I suspect there’s a rather naive presumption of homogeneity with respect to conscience: when someone advises you to follow your conscience, my guess is that the person assumes you will choose to do the right thing, which is the same right thing he or she would do. But what if my conscience tells me to torture? What is the response to that — ‘Your conscience must be wrong’? Until we ask whose ethics, we’re avoiding the issue, skating on the thin ice of individual relativism, the very weakest of ethical systems: X is right because I think it’s right (I followed my conscience). It’s circular and most unhelpful: Why do you think it’s right? How do you come to that thought? That is, what makes you think it’s right? (Where did you get your conscience from?)
The fear, of course, is that the question has no answer, that we will set ourselves adrift on a sea of cultural relativism. Not true: we’re capable of making anchors. We must confront the fact that we decide what’s right and wrong, and surely deciding consciously is better than deciding unconsciously. Surely it is better to identify and compare, to critique, to evaluate, to choose our moral principles. And then to act, and lobby, according to those principles, instead of merely according to our ‘conscience’.
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Appropriation or Imagination?
Two poems of mine have been published in a journal dedicated to “the Black experience”. An audio piece of mine has been aired on First Nations radio programs. I am neither Black nor a member of any First Nation. Had this been known, I suspect some might have accused me of cultural appropriation.
It’s an interesting idea, but as a reincarnation of the autobiographical school of writing — according to which one must have actually experienced what one is writing about — it is also a poor idea.
Taken to its logical extreme, any poem about a child must have been written by a child. Well no, one could say, you were at one time a child, so that’s okay. Hm. So memory is okay but imagination is not? I suggest that often the one is as accurate as the other.
But perhaps accuracy is not the point. Perhaps it’s a matter of “I can speak for myself, thank you” — a reaction against previous patronizing attitudes to the contrary. And if that’s the case, if you can speak for yourself, then by all means do so. But that shouldn’t stop me from also doing so if I want to. And if the editor or publisher selects only and always my speaking, then take that up with the editor or publisher, not the writer. Let’s be inclusive rather than reactionarily exclusive.
Further, there is a difference between speaking for and speaking about. Speaking for does entail the suggestion of advocacy — patronizing if unrequested, and possibly unnecessary. Speaking about entails no such suggestion. And actually, there’s a third option, the one that I thought I was doing — speaking with.
Think, for a moment, of all the literature that would not exist if writers had to limit themselves to what they have personally experienced. Entire genres would disappear: science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, probably most adventure and mystery too. Oh, and romance.
Also, to be consistent, this perspective should extend to non-fiction writing as well. So there goes most of the news — most stories are not first-hand accounts. But at least, you’ll say, the third person accounts remain third person — there is no saying ‘I’ when you really mean ‘he/she’. True. And this is one important difference between fiction and non-fiction — the leap of the imagination, the projection of oneself into the other.
But let’s not pretend for even one second that news reports are bereft of this very same imagination. If they were, they’d have to be written in a purely phenomenological fashion, bereft of all ascriptions of emotion, for starters. To say ‘the demonstrators were angry’ instead of ‘the demonstrators were shouting’ is as much a leap of imagination — unless the reporter spoke to the demonstrators (all of them) and they said they were angry. (Even then, strict accuracy requires you to report ‘they said they were angry’ rather than ‘they were angry’.) To merely assume anger on the basis of their behaviour is to project, to imagine, to fictionalize. Chances are, you’re quite correct, they were angry. If you know about human behaviour and if you know about the context, you can probably come up with a very accurate story without actually experiencing it yourself. The same goes for the fiction writer. (But then again, I suspect accuracy is not the issue.)
Furthermore, the ‘no appropriation’ perspective doesn’t seem to recognize that there are people whose awareness doesn’t go very deep. They live in and for the moment, they are not reflective, they are not analytic. Or they may be all that but just not very articulate. And there are others whose research is thorough, whose imagination is rich, and who are articulate to boot. Which is why Brian Moore can write a better novel about a woman with PMS than a woman who has it but doesn’t even know it. And which is why I can write a better poem about being Black or a First Nations person than some Blacks or First Nations people can. In short, one’s imagination can exceed another’s awareness.
But it’s not really ‘just’ imagination, it’s informed imagination — it’s empathy. So not only does the ‘no appropriation’ perspective discourage imagination, it discourages empathy. But surely to limit ourselves to ourselves is sad. And dangerous.
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“I killed you. Killed you too. Got you.”
In the Library.
So I was working in my local public library the other day — well, tryingto work. I was distracted by the kid on the computer next to me who was playing a computer game. My first point. Is it appropriate for kids to be allowed to play computer games on the computers in public libraries? I suggest that libraries are repositories of knowledge that people peruse to borrow or access on-site. Given that, playing computer games should not occur in a public library. Libraries aren’t entertainment centers.1 Yes, perusing and accessing knowledge can be fun. But that doesn’t mean that that which is fun is necessarily perusing or accessing knowledge.
Furthermore, the kid was continuously commenting, not in a particularly loud voice, but certainly loud enough for me, sitting next to him, to hear. My second point. Goes along with the intense irritation I experienced while in the university library a few weeks ago, unable to search the stacks for what I was seeking (books containing arguments) because someone in one of the nearby carrels was talking on her cellphone. Not an emergency conversation, mind you, but a mundane hi-yeah-so-like-whatever one. Given that libraries are repositories of knowledge that one either peruses to borrow or accesses on site — both of which often require mental effort, requiring concentration, which is inhibited by the distraction of talking aloud — both the kid’s running commentary and the cellphone conversation should not have occurred.
Further still, the kid’s comments were “I killed you. Killed you too. Got you. Killed you.” and so on. Not only distracting, but disturbing. My third point? Given that the library is indeed a public library, and not withstanding what I’ve said elsewhere, I think there may be grounds for censorship — could that be considered “hate speech” or “disturbing the peace”? It’s bad enough that the kids’ parents are irresponsibly unaware of the damage being done to their kids, not to mention to the rest of us, by allowing such activity (it desensitizes the kid to death, and it forms an association between killing and fun/entertainment), but there is no excuse for public librarians to be so unaware. And, given the public status (and funding) of the library, they have grounds for acting on their awareness.
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1 But what about all that fiction? Okay, but isn’t it generally ‘serious literature’ — fiction that has, presumably, insight — knowledge — about the human condition? Actually, no. Don’t a lot of libraries have an extensive collection of genre lit (westerns, romances, mysteries … )? So maybe they are (also) entertainment centres, indoor parks, if you will. But then where or where is the quiet place? Are there no quiet public spaces left??
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