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In August 2015 the weather was mostly cool at the cottage and in Toronto – and rather pleasant. My August was notable for the reading of a large book and a thin book that were both unremarkable. It was memorable for struggling to write articles – especially the one about addressing the causes of world refugee flows that remains incomplete. But I’ll write about the unremarkable election first. The Harper Conservative government hit the election hustling at the beginning of August with its party financial coffers well-filled and public memories of the recent July mail-out of sizable family childcare cheques. There was really nothing grabbing about the 3 party platforms – the affordable universal daycare of the NDP running into that big cheque family benefit handout from the Conservatives. (The handouts are deceitful because they go hand in hand with a cutting of the previous income tax benefit so the true value of the handout is of trivial value for many.) The Liberal tax boost on the very wealthy to benefit the Middle Class is sensible but not earth-shaking. The more recent Liberal promise of investing in infrastructure and tolerating a deficit so as to boost the economy got public notice. All leaders did plausibly at the first all leaders gathering. There seems to be resonance with the notion that Canada needs a new government. In this context, the Harper government seems to aim to keep the other two major parties evenly balanced so it can come through the middle and cling to power with a minority government. So the campaign lumbers on towards the anticipated launch of the well-funded Conservative attack ads in the final weeks and days. Scant few bits of my agenda have appeared. I want governments to deal with getting off the fossil fuels that are heating the atmosphere, but this has had no serious discussion –although the NDP cap and trade proposal is a start. I like explicit references to getting serious about more wind and solar and hydroelectric power and I hear little. Ever since Small is Beautiful I thought corporate payments to executives greater than 7 times that of the lowest paid employee was hard to justify. Why not surtax the corporation that pays an excess of 7 times above the average pay cheque to a CEO on the excess? I think an annual tax on wealth, as Piketty suggests, as well as an estate tax on death should be considered. I’m still waiting for a Constitution that allows the members of the Federation called Canada to appoint chief justices, and a Constitution that requires the Supreme Court to ensure the rights of individuals – the rights that are promised in the international rights treaties Canada has ratified. I like the Truth and Reconciliation proposals from the Aboriginal Peoples’ consultations process. Lacking debate on most of these, my concerns, I have to say this is an unremarkable election so far as August goes. My reading in August was also unremarkable: one huge book and one thin one. Mel Hurtig’s The Arrogant Autocrat: Stephen Harper’s Takeover of Canada is a good thin book. It covers a select few of the many significant changes in former practices and the many cuts to Canadian agencies by the Harper government – a government that had 39% of the vote and that has paid scant respect to the other 61% of the population in ramming through a vicious partisan agenda. Hurtig argues the democratic system is broken and favours alternatives that allow more proportional representation. He discusses Harper’s “war on the scientists”; the use of the Canada Revenue Agency “tax police” to selectively harass progressive agencies and foundations; “datacide” – the dropping of collecting data that can allow social conditions to be determined; the neglect of the poor and vulnerable like children in poverty according to UNICEF; the plight of the Aboriginal Peoples; increasing income disparity (close to my beef about Small is Beautiful and limits to executive salary levels); mismanagement of the economy shown by things like Canada’s loss of competitiveness in the OECD and such as the selling off of Canadian companies to foreigners. Hurtig ends his book hoping the two opposition parties will do everything they can to prevent one more day of Harper power – including a coalition government if necessary. He resonates well with lefties like me, but it remains a somewhat unremarkable little book. My big book of the month was Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, Penguin Books, 2012 (paperback). I needed to read this because I was writing about conflicts producing huge numbers of refugees and displaced persons in 2014. (After reading the book and thinking, I surmise that conflict deaths are down because in 2014 civilians are able to run somewhere and become refugees or displaced people with international humanitarian support. Mass exile is progress compared with mass killings.) Pinker’s book starts out from some rather controversial new thinking that conflicts have been falling in number and intensity through human history. Most of the book then uses the interest in this controversy as a basis for using psychology and history lessons to explain it. After an opening chapter that makes the point that Western society has come from a world where violence of various kinds like drawing and quartering or public hanging or wife beating was the norm (Foreign Country), Pinker begins Chapter 2 (The Pacification Process) with its first socio-psychological lesson about the “leviathan.” This basically says takeover by a great power limits parochial conflicts whether Pax Romana or Pax Britannica or Pax Sovietica. The Civilizing Process, Chapter 3, taking place in Europe between the early 1300s and 1800 is shown as having a continuous fall in homicide in UK cities over these years as knights were tamed, the king’s justice moved in and the growing national leviathan – the powerful king - was complemented by “gentle trade.” The rationale provides a plausible explanation for what happened. Chapter 4 argues that the Age of Enlightenment with all its foibles increased sensibilities to sympathizing with suffering, developed rational arguments for its reduction and invented human rights. The 18th Century ended with the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights and Citizen. At this Century’s end the millennia with routine human sacrifice, killing of witches and torture for entertainment were a forgotten human past. Pinker argues that the growth in real incomes and literacy in Europe and book production in the 1800s made a climate conducive to empathy. And there was thinking (Kant) and writing (Swift) reasoning peace and mocking war. There is no doubt in the coincidence of events, but I’m not sure this is an explanation. The Chapter on the Long Peace is concerned about wars involving great powers. Pinker introduces some statistical arguments about probabilities of war and nuclear war, explores whether WWII was the biggest war and generally suggests peace could go on among large European, North American and Asian powers. However, my own writing is about conflicts producing refugees and displaced persons, which are occurring in increasing numbers since 2000. These conflicts seem to rage on as if in a European medieval era. Roving gangs of armed children or young men rape and pillage at will in the Central African Republic. I moved on to the next chapter hoping for answers. Indeed Chapter 6 on the New Peace does look into other conflicts in Africa and Asia: 1. wars between militias, guerillas and paramilitaries; 2. Mass killing of ethnic or political groups; 3. terrorism. Pinker argues all three of these types are declining in number and intensity. Inter alia he notes the important role of international pressure and international peacekeepers, but he concedes the data only includes battle-related deaths and the data is not collected for non-state conflicts – as in 2013 in the Central African Republic. Pinker further admits there are deaths that are an indirect result of the conflict, but he argues that several guestimates are inflated. He rightly points out that the deaths from a few roving gangs are fewer than the deaths from conflicts involving a State and its military. Genocide is down. Although deaths by government were huge, they were totalitarian governments. Predictors are: non-democratic government; non-trading government and: exclusionary ideology like Marxism or fundamental Islam. Terrorism has a long history, it brings an inflated level of fear and deflated level of real harm and it is a tactic of weak against strong. Pinker argues terrorism self-destructs. It is hard to reconcile this with organized international groups that are “terrorist” in quality – like Al-Sebab, Taliban, Islamic State. Moreover, these groups include a religious dimension that historically has fuelled and worsened the scale of conflicts and genocides. Chapter 7 reviews the impact on former oppressive behaviour of the rights revolutions – the US race revolution and the general move towards equal rights for minorities including blacks and Hispanics in the US, women’s rights and the intensified prohibition of rape and battering, children’s rights and reducing infanticide and child beatings, gay rights and the de-criminalizing of homosexuality and reduction in gay bashing, and even animal rights. While this chapter impacted homicides, it spoke more of individuals in a society and less about wars and related armed conflicts. The last two chapters examined how psychological experiments show the negative (demons) and positive (angels) at play in the human psyche. While Pinker manages to show how the demons and angels could play out to cause the diminution of forms of violence that he reports, it falls short of a convincing explanation. I’m left with an unsatisfied feeling at the end. I liked to learn about the various downward trends in violence. But somehow the book reminded me of several other books like Guns, Germs, and Steel that seemed to be reminding me that the West is great, showing how it got to be great and suggesting there is no reason it shouldn’t remain that way. I guess my reaction fits with some normal psychological response proven by students in their Western psychology class experiments. Anyway, I’m hoping September brings something more remarkable.
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