Category: Liege & Lief

On Thursday (October 13) the Wpg Free Press published an article called “Intellectuals, The Empty Drums of Scholarship” on the editorial page, in a section called View from the West. The author was Barry Cooper, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, and managing director of Calgary office of the Fraser Institute. He writes a regular column for the Calgary Herald. This article was probably a reprint his column in the Herald on October 5, published as “Ignatieff’s Vanity”. It is an attack on Michael Ignatieff
Cooper’s criticism of Ignatieff is that he is a liberal, and his concern is that Ignatieff is rumoured to be considering entering Canadian politics as a Liberal. Ignatieff has had tremendous media experience and he has a background and presence that would put him on a par with Pierre Trudeau as a formidable candidate. Cooper tries to dismiss Ignatieff as a mere intellectual dilettante. He also criticizes Ignatieff’s willingness as a liberal, to use power to implement an agenda that Cooper, as a conservative, finds to be utopian, inherently oppressive and potentially totalitarian.

Continue reading “Red-neck Eschatology”

The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil’s Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.
The original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.
I mentioned John Ralston Saul’s Doubter’s Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.

This essay – The Anti-Semitic Disease – by historian Paul Johnson, published in Commentary is certainly interesting. It has some good information about the history of anti-semitism in the West and in the Arab World, but it takes an odd spin.

Continue reading “Essay on Anti-Semitism”

An essay – Gone Fishing – by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.
The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish’s ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish’s relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.
Some of Fish’s ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader’s response to the story depends on the reader’s way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.
Fish’s suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons – rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.

Theodore Dalrymple’s essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession’s ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.
His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient’s capacity, and not on whether the patient’s decisions correspond to a psychiatrist’s assessment of what is a patient’s best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.
His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault’s argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments – bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn’t help to identify or answer Foucault’s critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.

Last Sunday (June 26) I was listening to CBC One’s Sunday morning (radio) show, and I heard the lovely sound of Dutch accents, the accents of my stubborn parents, who shaped my contrarian tendencies. The Dutch accents belonged to interviewees in a documentary about the social conflicts that propelled the murderers of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. There was more about Van Gogh, less about Fortuyn. Both had been critical of the way that immigrant communities – specifically immigrants from Morocco and Turkey – were relating to Dutch society. Neither was a conventional white European racist. Both were modernists, opposed to immigrants on secular questions. While Fortuyn is often described as a right-wing populist, he was a libertarian and his conflicts with Muslim immigrants were initially personal. He was gay, and he criticized the homophobia of the Moroccan imam Khalil el-Moumni. Van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn, as well as the immigrant feminist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both questioned the cultural values of Muslim fundamentalists, and Dutch immigration and social policy. Their central argument was that fundamentalists were exploiting Dutch tolerance to create a hostile and intolerant subculture.

Continue reading “Pluralism, Dutch-Style”

There is a review of Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled “Bottlenecks”. It’s a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn’t singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond’s research and the analysis, up to a point.

Continue reading “Nature-Worship or Science?”