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One month on the middle of May
Apr. 20th, 2008 11:52 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 17. High today: 22.
The warm season is here. Everyone blew the forecast for the last several days--the forecast going into the week was for one warm day on Wednesday, followed by the cold front that dropped Regina from 28 on Monday to 8 on Tuesday. But an area of high pressure unexpectedly materialized around New York state, blocked the cold front from ever getting here, kept pumping warm air into Ontario, and by a chain reaction allowed winter to set back up across Alberta and Saskatchewan. What's amazing about it is that, in the age of multiple computer models, you basically never see blown forecasts like that anymore (although the conventional wisdom will, no doubt, forever have it that The Weatherman Is Always Wrong).
What I said, the last time I was saying stuff, about wondering whether I do enough to have anything to say was supposed to lead into talking about going to see Howard Adelman that day. Howard Adelman (who is red-linked in Wikipedia, in the entry for Rochdale College; I'm thinking I might get around to doing something about that) was giving the first annual Howard Adelman Lecture at York's Centre for Refugee Studies, of which he was one of the founders (maybe the founder). Although I was only around him for a year, Adelman has almost certainly been my biggest intellectual influence--though the "intellectual" qualifier risks understating the case. There is what he taught me about Hegel and the bible, which has informed my understanding of all kinds of things. (I've just recently come to realize how Adelman prepared the ground for my reception of Strauss, variously in his esoteric readings of Hegel, in his ongoing argument that reason doesn't move politics, and in his Platonic interpretation of American politics as a contest between a party of appetite and a party of virtue, which has broken down as the pursuit of appetite became a virtue). But there is also the example of his life: it seems that if there's anything that it occurs to him he ought to do, he does it. In addition to being an academic, he has travelled the world to investigate refugee and genocide situations, and for the last ten years he has had a weekly TV show. (It's called Israel Today; it's one of the local Christian channel's CRTC-mandated bits of multicultural programming. It's extremely interesting. It's on as I write; he's interviewing someone about pewter bas-reliefs of biblical scenes.) He is staggeringly busy. I actually think about everything he does from time to time when I start to wonder how I'll ever find the time to do anything else when I'm teaching more than one course. And I think about a long e-mail he sent me once about American Beauty, stoicism, and epicureanism--for some reason, after a talk of his I'd gone to, I sent him an e-mail about the dope-dealer kid being a stoic, and he had replied about why the kid was actually an epicurean: I think about the fact that he took the time to send a student this long e-mail about a film and philosophy, when he had so much else to do. I think about that when my students write e-mails to me.
The thing about Adelman is that it seems that if it occurs to him that something ought to be done, he does it. He told a story at the Adelman Lecture last week about how, in the '80s, Canada was accepting refugees from southern Sri Lanka, but not from the north--but people were coming from the north, claiming that their lives were in danger. So Adelman went there, to see what was going on, and found that a war was going on in the north, and reported it, and so Canada started accepting refugees from the north. But what started Adelman's involvement in refugee issues were the Vietnamese "Boat People", and it was a story he told last week about this that I wanted to put down here. I don't know how this came about, but it came to pass that a rabbi, a priest, and I don't know who else met at Adelman's house to draft a letter to encourage the Canadian government to accept more Vietnamese refugees. Somehow, some bureaucrats from Immigration found out about this meeting, and showed up at his door. They told Adelman's group that they had been looking for groups of people to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, but hadn't been able to find anyone willing to do it except the Mennonites and the Dutch Reformed Church. So Adelman's group agreed to sponsor some refugees. Now, the story is this: a grad student of Adelman's happened to be at the meeting, because he wanted to talk to Adelman about his thesis. Unbeknownst to Adelman, the student was a stringer for the Globe, and the student filed a report on the meeting. In the following weeks, Adelman did 155 interviews for newspapers, and he says not one of the news stories reported that the bureaucrats had come to him; every one of them spun the story so that the government was being prodded into action by citizen activism, when actually citizens had been prodded into action by activist bureaucrats, whose efforts had mostly met with apathy.
(There's a CBC radio interview with Adelman here. Being on dial-up, though, I'm getting five seconds on, five seconds off. But the bit where the interviewer asks Adelman what he can do to help, and Adelman asks him where he lives, is priceless: this is what Adelman does; he takes you seriously, no matter who you are, and he assumes that every theoretical possibility is an actual possibility. And now I see that the York propaganda site has a blurb in its archive here, which doesn't reverse the citizen-government roles.)
It turns out that Charles Taylor's review of Lear's book is online here. (The New Criterion hatchet-job is here.) I see that in the online version, the reference does say "The Corrosion of Character" and not "The Conservative Character". Anyway, I finished reading Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character last night, after reading several reviews of Sennett's new book, linked off bookforum.com, yesterday. The Corrosion of Character is a short and meandering read. Sennett teaches sociology; the book ranges through philosophy--ancient, modern, and postmodern--and literature. I wish it would have said more about the idea of character and why it's important, but I get the impression from the reviews of the new book that all his books are one long project, so each one may inevitably seem incomplete. There are about four stories (which, he says at the outset, are somewhat fictionalized, which is worrying from time to time) he keeps coming back to in the book. One is about the son of an Italian immigrant Sennett had interviewed in, I guess, the '70s or so. Sennett contrasts the steady career-orientation of the father with the episodic work-life of the son, and suggests that the father's life was objectively worse but the son is, in many ways, and maybe overall, unhappier with his life. Another is about the owner of Sennett's favourite pub in New York, who goes off in middle age to work for a marketing company. Theoretically, the marketing company wants her accumulated expertise about how people drink, but actually everyone in marketing wants to re-make the world and isn't interested in people's experience of the world as it has been. Another story is about a group of IBM programmers who were laid off in the great downsizing of the early '90s. That story is all about their coming to terms with the fact that they can no longer think of their lives in career terms, which involves their being forced to give up on being invested in involvement with their communities and associated values like loyalty. (The book begins with a discussion of the etymology of "career".) The most compelling story is about a bakery in Boston, which Sennett says he has studied over a couple of generations. When he first studied the bakery, its workers were all Greek immigrants. Their work was hard, messy and hot manual labour, making bread by hand. They felt oppressed by their work, by their bosses, and by Boston society at large, but they felt a cameraderie with each other. When Sennett returns to the bakery in the '90s, its operation is entirely automated. The workers don't make bread anymore; they work the machines that make the bread. Often the machines malfunction and wreck the bread. Sometimes the machines break down, and the bakery is idled while they wait for the technicians to come in. What makes the story compelling is that while the Greek bakers found their work oppressive, they identified with it. The new workers also find their work oppressive, because they don't understand it and it's always going wrong (though, apparently, it's going right often enough and fast enough that it's still more efficient economically than it was formerly), and they don't identify with it at all; they don't think of themselves as having any future in baking; they assume that they'll be doing something else as soon as they can find something else to do, though they don't generally know what that will be.
The main theme of this book is that the nature of contemporary capitalism has us always starting over. I was thinking about this in relation to Marx's fantasy in The German Ideology that, when communism does away with division of labour, we'll be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle after dinner, and criticize in the evening. "The new capitalism"--already when I was in highschool we were hearing about how we would all have seven different careers--makes Marx's fantasy real but in a perverse way. What's perverse about it is highlighted by the alienation of the bakery workers. For Marx, alienation and division of labour go together. Marx says that the essential division of labour, and the source of alienation in capitalism, is the division between intellectual and physical labour. Human beings create themselves and come to know themselves through their work. (This is an idea that I came to from Hegel, through Adelman. Marx thinks, or at least is thought to think, that his materialism turns Hegel upside-down, but, thanks to Adelman, I see Marx as emphasizing the materialist moments in Hegel.) Work actualizes human potential: the idea of the thing is potential; the thing made is actual. When labour is divided and there are bosses whose job is to direct the material labour of others, the labour of the individual no longer actualizes the potential of that individual but the potential of some other person or people. (Here Marxism can be seen to have a much more profound individualism than liberalism does.) Alienated from the things you work on, you're alienated from yourself. Putting that together with Sennett's book, we could say that building your own self requires a single, freely chosen, career of work. (Sennett says that he's a disappointed socialist; I don't think he mentions Marx in this book. He appears to be less of an individualist, less concerned with building your own self--he is indeed more of a conservative, it appears.)
So many other things floating around ... here's one, because the moment will pass otherwise: I would bet any money that today's game between the Red Wings and the Predators was the first game in the history of the NHL if not of any kind of hockey played anywhere in which there was exactly one goal on shots taken from each of the offensive zone, the neutral zone (bad bounce), and the defensive zone (empty net). There's also an excellent chance that this game had the highest average distance of scoring shots in any NHL game ever; the average scoring shot was taken from about centre ice. (It's possible that there have been games where a team needed a win and not a tie, pulled its goalie with the score 0-0, and the only scoring shot of the game was an empty-netter from the defensive zone.)
Here's another: the Star's lead story sometime last week was about a group urging the government of Ontario to commit to reducing poverty by 25% in five years, as the British government did some time ago. Funny thing about "poverty" in Canada: by "poverty", people generally mean "below Statistics Canada's 'low-income cut-off'" (LICO), but StatsCan is very careful never to refer to the LICO as a "poverty line". The history of adjustments to the LICO is very interesting. The LICO is a certain percentage of household income spent on food, shelter, and clothing. When it was created in 1968, it was pegged at 70%. According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, StatsCan pegged it there because they determined (using data for 1959) that the average household spent about 50% of its income on essentials, and they decided to peg the LICO at average + 20%. In each of 1973, 1980, 1986, and 1992, StatsCan adjusted the LICO downward, as the average household expenditure on essentials declined. But they haven't adjusted it since 1992, when it was set at 54.7% (as the average household expenditure on essentials was 34.7%). I don't know why not, but it appears that something very interesting, and which might be embarrassing, would happen if it was adjusted again today: the LICO would probably be set below what the average was when the LICO was created (i.e., the average household in 1959 would be considered "low-income" by the new standard).
Anyway, the Star article noted that the LICO for a single person (in Toronto or Ontario or whatever) is currently supposed to be $17 000 and change. Two things strike me about this. First, I have only once in my life had an annual income higher than that (and while I am not actually single, I am officially. Of course, for most of my adult life, I've been a student (though my income has been much lower since I've stopped being a student than it was for the last eight years I was a student). I don't know how students are accounted for in poverty accountancy). And, of course, I am very much not poor. (Point being that income is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring how well-off people are.) Second, if you want to reduce poverty by 25% in five years, the easiest way to do it would be to gather the 25% of people below the LICO with the highest incomes, and cut them cheques for the difference between their incomes and the LICO. (Point being that catchy things like 25-in-5 can make for asinine policy.)
In case you're wondering, I do wonder whether I'm annoying you by taking up so much space on your friends page.
The warm season is here. Everyone blew the forecast for the last several days--the forecast going into the week was for one warm day on Wednesday, followed by the cold front that dropped Regina from 28 on Monday to 8 on Tuesday. But an area of high pressure unexpectedly materialized around New York state, blocked the cold front from ever getting here, kept pumping warm air into Ontario, and by a chain reaction allowed winter to set back up across Alberta and Saskatchewan. What's amazing about it is that, in the age of multiple computer models, you basically never see blown forecasts like that anymore (although the conventional wisdom will, no doubt, forever have it that The Weatherman Is Always Wrong).
What I said, the last time I was saying stuff, about wondering whether I do enough to have anything to say was supposed to lead into talking about going to see Howard Adelman that day. Howard Adelman (who is red-linked in Wikipedia, in the entry for Rochdale College; I'm thinking I might get around to doing something about that) was giving the first annual Howard Adelman Lecture at York's Centre for Refugee Studies, of which he was one of the founders (maybe the founder). Although I was only around him for a year, Adelman has almost certainly been my biggest intellectual influence--though the "intellectual" qualifier risks understating the case. There is what he taught me about Hegel and the bible, which has informed my understanding of all kinds of things. (I've just recently come to realize how Adelman prepared the ground for my reception of Strauss, variously in his esoteric readings of Hegel, in his ongoing argument that reason doesn't move politics, and in his Platonic interpretation of American politics as a contest between a party of appetite and a party of virtue, which has broken down as the pursuit of appetite became a virtue). But there is also the example of his life: it seems that if there's anything that it occurs to him he ought to do, he does it. In addition to being an academic, he has travelled the world to investigate refugee and genocide situations, and for the last ten years he has had a weekly TV show. (It's called Israel Today; it's one of the local Christian channel's CRTC-mandated bits of multicultural programming. It's extremely interesting. It's on as I write; he's interviewing someone about pewter bas-reliefs of biblical scenes.) He is staggeringly busy. I actually think about everything he does from time to time when I start to wonder how I'll ever find the time to do anything else when I'm teaching more than one course. And I think about a long e-mail he sent me once about American Beauty, stoicism, and epicureanism--for some reason, after a talk of his I'd gone to, I sent him an e-mail about the dope-dealer kid being a stoic, and he had replied about why the kid was actually an epicurean: I think about the fact that he took the time to send a student this long e-mail about a film and philosophy, when he had so much else to do. I think about that when my students write e-mails to me.
The thing about Adelman is that it seems that if it occurs to him that something ought to be done, he does it. He told a story at the Adelman Lecture last week about how, in the '80s, Canada was accepting refugees from southern Sri Lanka, but not from the north--but people were coming from the north, claiming that their lives were in danger. So Adelman went there, to see what was going on, and found that a war was going on in the north, and reported it, and so Canada started accepting refugees from the north. But what started Adelman's involvement in refugee issues were the Vietnamese "Boat People", and it was a story he told last week about this that I wanted to put down here. I don't know how this came about, but it came to pass that a rabbi, a priest, and I don't know who else met at Adelman's house to draft a letter to encourage the Canadian government to accept more Vietnamese refugees. Somehow, some bureaucrats from Immigration found out about this meeting, and showed up at his door. They told Adelman's group that they had been looking for groups of people to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, but hadn't been able to find anyone willing to do it except the Mennonites and the Dutch Reformed Church. So Adelman's group agreed to sponsor some refugees. Now, the story is this: a grad student of Adelman's happened to be at the meeting, because he wanted to talk to Adelman about his thesis. Unbeknownst to Adelman, the student was a stringer for the Globe, and the student filed a report on the meeting. In the following weeks, Adelman did 155 interviews for newspapers, and he says not one of the news stories reported that the bureaucrats had come to him; every one of them spun the story so that the government was being prodded into action by citizen activism, when actually citizens had been prodded into action by activist bureaucrats, whose efforts had mostly met with apathy.
(There's a CBC radio interview with Adelman here. Being on dial-up, though, I'm getting five seconds on, five seconds off. But the bit where the interviewer asks Adelman what he can do to help, and Adelman asks him where he lives, is priceless: this is what Adelman does; he takes you seriously, no matter who you are, and he assumes that every theoretical possibility is an actual possibility. And now I see that the York propaganda site has a blurb in its archive here, which doesn't reverse the citizen-government roles.)
It turns out that Charles Taylor's review of Lear's book is online here. (The New Criterion hatchet-job is here.) I see that in the online version, the reference does say "The Corrosion of Character" and not "The Conservative Character". Anyway, I finished reading Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character last night, after reading several reviews of Sennett's new book, linked off bookforum.com, yesterday. The Corrosion of Character is a short and meandering read. Sennett teaches sociology; the book ranges through philosophy--ancient, modern, and postmodern--and literature. I wish it would have said more about the idea of character and why it's important, but I get the impression from the reviews of the new book that all his books are one long project, so each one may inevitably seem incomplete. There are about four stories (which, he says at the outset, are somewhat fictionalized, which is worrying from time to time) he keeps coming back to in the book. One is about the son of an Italian immigrant Sennett had interviewed in, I guess, the '70s or so. Sennett contrasts the steady career-orientation of the father with the episodic work-life of the son, and suggests that the father's life was objectively worse but the son is, in many ways, and maybe overall, unhappier with his life. Another is about the owner of Sennett's favourite pub in New York, who goes off in middle age to work for a marketing company. Theoretically, the marketing company wants her accumulated expertise about how people drink, but actually everyone in marketing wants to re-make the world and isn't interested in people's experience of the world as it has been. Another story is about a group of IBM programmers who were laid off in the great downsizing of the early '90s. That story is all about their coming to terms with the fact that they can no longer think of their lives in career terms, which involves their being forced to give up on being invested in involvement with their communities and associated values like loyalty. (The book begins with a discussion of the etymology of "career".) The most compelling story is about a bakery in Boston, which Sennett says he has studied over a couple of generations. When he first studied the bakery, its workers were all Greek immigrants. Their work was hard, messy and hot manual labour, making bread by hand. They felt oppressed by their work, by their bosses, and by Boston society at large, but they felt a cameraderie with each other. When Sennett returns to the bakery in the '90s, its operation is entirely automated. The workers don't make bread anymore; they work the machines that make the bread. Often the machines malfunction and wreck the bread. Sometimes the machines break down, and the bakery is idled while they wait for the technicians to come in. What makes the story compelling is that while the Greek bakers found their work oppressive, they identified with it. The new workers also find their work oppressive, because they don't understand it and it's always going wrong (though, apparently, it's going right often enough and fast enough that it's still more efficient economically than it was formerly), and they don't identify with it at all; they don't think of themselves as having any future in baking; they assume that they'll be doing something else as soon as they can find something else to do, though they don't generally know what that will be.
The main theme of this book is that the nature of contemporary capitalism has us always starting over. I was thinking about this in relation to Marx's fantasy in The German Ideology that, when communism does away with division of labour, we'll be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle after dinner, and criticize in the evening. "The new capitalism"--already when I was in highschool we were hearing about how we would all have seven different careers--makes Marx's fantasy real but in a perverse way. What's perverse about it is highlighted by the alienation of the bakery workers. For Marx, alienation and division of labour go together. Marx says that the essential division of labour, and the source of alienation in capitalism, is the division between intellectual and physical labour. Human beings create themselves and come to know themselves through their work. (This is an idea that I came to from Hegel, through Adelman. Marx thinks, or at least is thought to think, that his materialism turns Hegel upside-down, but, thanks to Adelman, I see Marx as emphasizing the materialist moments in Hegel.) Work actualizes human potential: the idea of the thing is potential; the thing made is actual. When labour is divided and there are bosses whose job is to direct the material labour of others, the labour of the individual no longer actualizes the potential of that individual but the potential of some other person or people. (Here Marxism can be seen to have a much more profound individualism than liberalism does.) Alienated from the things you work on, you're alienated from yourself. Putting that together with Sennett's book, we could say that building your own self requires a single, freely chosen, career of work. (Sennett says that he's a disappointed socialist; I don't think he mentions Marx in this book. He appears to be less of an individualist, less concerned with building your own self--he is indeed more of a conservative, it appears.)
So many other things floating around ... here's one, because the moment will pass otherwise: I would bet any money that today's game between the Red Wings and the Predators was the first game in the history of the NHL if not of any kind of hockey played anywhere in which there was exactly one goal on shots taken from each of the offensive zone, the neutral zone (bad bounce), and the defensive zone (empty net). There's also an excellent chance that this game had the highest average distance of scoring shots in any NHL game ever; the average scoring shot was taken from about centre ice. (It's possible that there have been games where a team needed a win and not a tie, pulled its goalie with the score 0-0, and the only scoring shot of the game was an empty-netter from the defensive zone.)
Here's another: the Star's lead story sometime last week was about a group urging the government of Ontario to commit to reducing poverty by 25% in five years, as the British government did some time ago. Funny thing about "poverty" in Canada: by "poverty", people generally mean "below Statistics Canada's 'low-income cut-off'" (LICO), but StatsCan is very careful never to refer to the LICO as a "poverty line". The history of adjustments to the LICO is very interesting. The LICO is a certain percentage of household income spent on food, shelter, and clothing. When it was created in 1968, it was pegged at 70%. According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, StatsCan pegged it there because they determined (using data for 1959) that the average household spent about 50% of its income on essentials, and they decided to peg the LICO at average + 20%. In each of 1973, 1980, 1986, and 1992, StatsCan adjusted the LICO downward, as the average household expenditure on essentials declined. But they haven't adjusted it since 1992, when it was set at 54.7% (as the average household expenditure on essentials was 34.7%). I don't know why not, but it appears that something very interesting, and which might be embarrassing, would happen if it was adjusted again today: the LICO would probably be set below what the average was when the LICO was created (i.e., the average household in 1959 would be considered "low-income" by the new standard).
Anyway, the Star article noted that the LICO for a single person (in Toronto or Ontario or whatever) is currently supposed to be $17 000 and change. Two things strike me about this. First, I have only once in my life had an annual income higher than that (and while I am not actually single, I am officially. Of course, for most of my adult life, I've been a student (though my income has been much lower since I've stopped being a student than it was for the last eight years I was a student). I don't know how students are accounted for in poverty accountancy). And, of course, I am very much not poor. (Point being that income is an extremely blunt instrument for measuring how well-off people are.) Second, if you want to reduce poverty by 25% in five years, the easiest way to do it would be to gather the 25% of people below the LICO with the highest incomes, and cut them cheques for the difference between their incomes and the LICO. (Point being that catchy things like 25-in-5 can make for asinine policy.)
In case you're wondering, I do wonder whether I'm annoying you by taking up so much space on your friends page.
