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cincinnatus_c
1. Being a demonstrably non-decent person is (currently) not an insurmountable or even particularly large liability as far as having electoral success in large advanced democracies is concerned, and may be (currently) in some respects, in some measure, in some places, an asset. "Decent", obviously, is a nebulous term. For me it brings to mind the ancient Greek idea of the kaloi kagathoi,[1] those who are fine and good, which used to be commonly translated as "gentlemen", which blurs into hoi epieikes, which sometimes gets translated as "decent people" (who Socrates says in the Republic are motivated to rule, if they are motivated to rule at all, by fear of being ruled by someone worse than they are--and I see now is a description of Jesus in Paul that gets made a big deal of) but literally means "the seemly" (as "eikos" = likeness, as in icon) where "seemly" has the literal sense of seeming: hoi epieikes are literally people who seem like ... something. (Or, then again, maybe they're people other people would do well to be like? Are they models of something, or models for something? Or both? Hum.) Anyway, the opposite of the kaloi kagathoi would be hoi polloi, the many, "the people". As Socrates says in the Crito, hoi polloi are fickle and their political inclinations change on a whim, so they are not necessarily politically opposed to the kaloi kagathoi. But the characterization of the kaloi kagathoi as hoi epieikes in the literal meaning of hoi epieikes may be instructive: hoi polloi are susceptible to cynicism about the true nature of the kaloi kagathoi, and may come to suspect that the kaloi kagathoi are not what they seem to be. They may even come to suspect, as, in the Republic, Glaucon has come to suspect, and Thrasymachus seems to convince himself he actually believes, that no one is what the supposed kaloi kagathoi seem to be. The supposed kaloi kagathoi then are not only guilty of the same vices as everyone else, but are further guilty of pretending not to be. The people who are, relatively, truly virtuous, then, are the people who don't hide their viciousness.
2. As with Donald Trump, you need to be careful not to make too much of this: Doug Ford's becoming premier is even more of a fluke than Donald Trump's becoming president (and as with Donald Trump more people voted against him than for him). It required a scandal that suddenly brought down the party leader four months before the election and a voting system for the party leadership that produced exactly the kind of result it was supposed to have been designed to prevent: the candidate who won both the most votes and the most ridings lost on points. If Patrick Brown or Christine Elliott were the Conservative premier-designate today, the world in Ontario would feel very different. Whatever it means about people in Ontario that so many of them are OK with Doug Ford being their premier, the fact is that not even most Conservatives who voted for the party leadership wanted Doug Ford to be their leader.
3. Part of what it is to be a good person is to want to be a good person and to try to be a good person, which means to want to be better and to try to be better. Good people are always in some respects trying to be better than they are, trying to enact ideals that they are failing to enact currently. This means there is always some distance between some of the stated beliefs of good people and how they act. This means that good people are always vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and phoniness, and actually always are in some respects hypocrites.
4. "Political correctness", in cases where this term refers to actually hypocritical or phony speech acts, may be a matter of tribalistic pronunciation of shibboleths. But it may also be motivated by not wanting to hurt, upset, offend, or annoy other people--even in cases where the person making the "politically correct" speech acts does so less than completely sincerely: I might go along with the language you want to use even though I think that language is ridiculous because I believe that more harm than good would result from not doing so. It can be reasonable to think that there are situations in which hurting, upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is justifiable. It can be reasonable to think that there are situations in which avoiding hurting upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is motivated by cowardice. But hurting, upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is, generally, not good, and decent people generally want to avoid doing it.
5. One thing overt populists like Donald Trump and Doug Ford do represent is resentment against government by expertise. I don't think "populist" was a word people used about Stephen Harper's Conservatives, but the Reform Party of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper was an overtly populist reaction against the more conventionally elitist conservatism of the Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservatives, and one of the most noteworthy aspects of the governing style of the Harper governments was their antagonism toward expertise and the measures they undertook to control the work of scientists employed by the government and its agencies. There's something kind of quaintly (not to say perversely) "Foucauldian" about this: Foucault says (forty some odd years ago) that we have yet to cut off the head of the king in political theory because we think that state sovereignty is still where the action is, when actually our lives are primarily governed by apparatuses of knowledge. Anti-expertise populism of the Trump-Ford-Harper varieties is an attempt to put the head of the king back on in the actual world, so that people's lives will be governed by the particular concrete desires and wills of some set of human beings rather than by abstract reason.
6. The Doug Ford Conservatives have promised to eliminate the cap-and-trade program that currently exists in Ontario, which they claim will reduce the price of gasoline by 4.3 cents per litre, and also cut the provincial gasoline tax by 5.7 cents per litre so that the price of gas will go down ten cents per litre. They have claimed that they will fight the mandate from the federal government to the provinces to institute carbon-pricing schemes or else have one imposed on them. They say they will repeal the Green Energy Act, which supports the development of renewable energy sources, and cancel renewable energy projects that have not begun construction. (Funnily enough, there are a lot of environmentally inclined folks in this part of the world for whom this will not have come soon enough, as forests of wind turbines have sprung up along bird migration corridors on Lake Ontario.) They say they will make unspecified investments in unspecified emissions-reduction technologies--but on the whole one of the more significant carbon-emitting jurisdictions in the world has just elected a government that not only plans to do nothing in particular new to curb emissions, but plans to eliminate the main mechanisms by which the provincial government has so far tried to curb emissions, and in fact plans to enact the opposite of a carbon tax by reducing the gas tax.
7. What difference can that actually make, though? On one hand, there is this, which struck me yesterday as I was thinking about Tesla and the future of automobiles: Justin Trudeau has said that Canada will not be leaving any of its oil in the ground. (Whether or not he actually fully believes that, though, who knows.) That means that as far as Justin Trudeau is concerned, Canada is going to see to the combustion of as much combustible carbon as it possibly can. (Well, maybe not of whatever coal is still left in the ground in Nova Scotia--some combustible carbon has more powerful political friends than others.) And if that is so, then the federal government's mandating of carbon-pricing schemes is just a farce. If we're going to be burning all the carbon we possibly can sooner or later anyway, then if we don't want to just pour all that carbon into the atmosphere, we had better focus on carbon-sequestration technologies. On the other hand, the future of electric cars is apparently coming, and its coming is going to be determined by economics (though maybe also by legislation in Europe, but we'll see how that actually plays out--so far it's so far off and so vague that I'd guess European leaders are hoping the problem will resolve itself before they have to actually act on their current commitments).[2] As Howard Adelman has noted, Texas is a renewable energy powerhouse, and its Republican governments have nothing to do with that. As disconcerting as it is when governments are openly uninterested in or even antagonistic toward the development of renewable-energy-based economies, whether or not they develop is not likely going to have much to do with what governments do. We can fiddle with carbon emissions by having things like carbon taxes or not (and the fact is that things like the workings of OPEC and the possibility of war with Iran have far more impact on the price of gasoline and the economics of the Alberta tar sands than any possible carbon pricing scheme would), but sea changes in technology may make that fiddling irrelevant, and without sea changes in technology the fiddling may be inconsequential anyway.
8. Pretty much entirely unrelated to Doug Ford but related to the above: a couple of months ago I read a report on a talk given locally about managing woodlots, which argued that woodlots are only effective as carbon sinks if the wood is regularly harvested and made into lumber. Trees that are left to age become less efficient at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if they aren't harvested for lumber they will end up either rotting or burning, either of which will release all of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Wood used for building and furniture, on the other hand, can last in carbon-storing form for centuries. Of course, if you think this through, you realize that in the very long run, the only way for trees to not eventually release all their carbon back into the atmosphere is to cut them down and fire them into space, although if you assume that people will stop digging up combustible materials and burning them then we could just cut trees down and bury them very deep in the ground. This is a pretty fantastic illustration of why I am leery of climate change's becoming the be-all and end-all of "environmentalism".
[1] Kaloi kagathoi seems like it ought to take the definite article "hoi", but searching for "hoi kaloi kagathoi" seems to turn up only something written by a single possible crackpot.
[2] And then, rather than or in addition to being prevented practically from working on your own car by how complicated cars have become, you will probably be prevented legally from doing so because a lot of what makes your car go is controlled intellectual property--in the future, you'll take your car to a hacker (well, you'll allow a hacker to remotely access your car) instead of a mechanic.
Currently at Havelock: 15.1. High today: 27.3.
2. As with Donald Trump, you need to be careful not to make too much of this: Doug Ford's becoming premier is even more of a fluke than Donald Trump's becoming president (and as with Donald Trump more people voted against him than for him). It required a scandal that suddenly brought down the party leader four months before the election and a voting system for the party leadership that produced exactly the kind of result it was supposed to have been designed to prevent: the candidate who won both the most votes and the most ridings lost on points. If Patrick Brown or Christine Elliott were the Conservative premier-designate today, the world in Ontario would feel very different. Whatever it means about people in Ontario that so many of them are OK with Doug Ford being their premier, the fact is that not even most Conservatives who voted for the party leadership wanted Doug Ford to be their leader.
3. Part of what it is to be a good person is to want to be a good person and to try to be a good person, which means to want to be better and to try to be better. Good people are always in some respects trying to be better than they are, trying to enact ideals that they are failing to enact currently. This means there is always some distance between some of the stated beliefs of good people and how they act. This means that good people are always vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and phoniness, and actually always are in some respects hypocrites.
4. "Political correctness", in cases where this term refers to actually hypocritical or phony speech acts, may be a matter of tribalistic pronunciation of shibboleths. But it may also be motivated by not wanting to hurt, upset, offend, or annoy other people--even in cases where the person making the "politically correct" speech acts does so less than completely sincerely: I might go along with the language you want to use even though I think that language is ridiculous because I believe that more harm than good would result from not doing so. It can be reasonable to think that there are situations in which hurting, upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is justifiable. It can be reasonable to think that there are situations in which avoiding hurting upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is motivated by cowardice. But hurting, upsetting, offending, or annoying other people is, generally, not good, and decent people generally want to avoid doing it.
5. One thing overt populists like Donald Trump and Doug Ford do represent is resentment against government by expertise. I don't think "populist" was a word people used about Stephen Harper's Conservatives, but the Reform Party of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper was an overtly populist reaction against the more conventionally elitist conservatism of the Brian Mulroney Progressive Conservatives, and one of the most noteworthy aspects of the governing style of the Harper governments was their antagonism toward expertise and the measures they undertook to control the work of scientists employed by the government and its agencies. There's something kind of quaintly (not to say perversely) "Foucauldian" about this: Foucault says (forty some odd years ago) that we have yet to cut off the head of the king in political theory because we think that state sovereignty is still where the action is, when actually our lives are primarily governed by apparatuses of knowledge. Anti-expertise populism of the Trump-Ford-Harper varieties is an attempt to put the head of the king back on in the actual world, so that people's lives will be governed by the particular concrete desires and wills of some set of human beings rather than by abstract reason.
6. The Doug Ford Conservatives have promised to eliminate the cap-and-trade program that currently exists in Ontario, which they claim will reduce the price of gasoline by 4.3 cents per litre, and also cut the provincial gasoline tax by 5.7 cents per litre so that the price of gas will go down ten cents per litre. They have claimed that they will fight the mandate from the federal government to the provinces to institute carbon-pricing schemes or else have one imposed on them. They say they will repeal the Green Energy Act, which supports the development of renewable energy sources, and cancel renewable energy projects that have not begun construction. (Funnily enough, there are a lot of environmentally inclined folks in this part of the world for whom this will not have come soon enough, as forests of wind turbines have sprung up along bird migration corridors on Lake Ontario.) They say they will make unspecified investments in unspecified emissions-reduction technologies--but on the whole one of the more significant carbon-emitting jurisdictions in the world has just elected a government that not only plans to do nothing in particular new to curb emissions, but plans to eliminate the main mechanisms by which the provincial government has so far tried to curb emissions, and in fact plans to enact the opposite of a carbon tax by reducing the gas tax.
7. What difference can that actually make, though? On one hand, there is this, which struck me yesterday as I was thinking about Tesla and the future of automobiles: Justin Trudeau has said that Canada will not be leaving any of its oil in the ground. (Whether or not he actually fully believes that, though, who knows.) That means that as far as Justin Trudeau is concerned, Canada is going to see to the combustion of as much combustible carbon as it possibly can. (Well, maybe not of whatever coal is still left in the ground in Nova Scotia--some combustible carbon has more powerful political friends than others.) And if that is so, then the federal government's mandating of carbon-pricing schemes is just a farce. If we're going to be burning all the carbon we possibly can sooner or later anyway, then if we don't want to just pour all that carbon into the atmosphere, we had better focus on carbon-sequestration technologies. On the other hand, the future of electric cars is apparently coming, and its coming is going to be determined by economics (though maybe also by legislation in Europe, but we'll see how that actually plays out--so far it's so far off and so vague that I'd guess European leaders are hoping the problem will resolve itself before they have to actually act on their current commitments).[2] As Howard Adelman has noted, Texas is a renewable energy powerhouse, and its Republican governments have nothing to do with that. As disconcerting as it is when governments are openly uninterested in or even antagonistic toward the development of renewable-energy-based economies, whether or not they develop is not likely going to have much to do with what governments do. We can fiddle with carbon emissions by having things like carbon taxes or not (and the fact is that things like the workings of OPEC and the possibility of war with Iran have far more impact on the price of gasoline and the economics of the Alberta tar sands than any possible carbon pricing scheme would), but sea changes in technology may make that fiddling irrelevant, and without sea changes in technology the fiddling may be inconsequential anyway.
8. Pretty much entirely unrelated to Doug Ford but related to the above: a couple of months ago I read a report on a talk given locally about managing woodlots, which argued that woodlots are only effective as carbon sinks if the wood is regularly harvested and made into lumber. Trees that are left to age become less efficient at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if they aren't harvested for lumber they will end up either rotting or burning, either of which will release all of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Wood used for building and furniture, on the other hand, can last in carbon-storing form for centuries. Of course, if you think this through, you realize that in the very long run, the only way for trees to not eventually release all their carbon back into the atmosphere is to cut them down and fire them into space, although if you assume that people will stop digging up combustible materials and burning them then we could just cut trees down and bury them very deep in the ground. This is a pretty fantastic illustration of why I am leery of climate change's becoming the be-all and end-all of "environmentalism".
[1] Kaloi kagathoi seems like it ought to take the definite article "hoi", but searching for "hoi kaloi kagathoi" seems to turn up only something written by a single possible crackpot.
[2] And then, rather than or in addition to being prevented practically from working on your own car by how complicated cars have become, you will probably be prevented legally from doing so because a lot of what makes your car go is controlled intellectual property--in the future, you'll take your car to a hacker (well, you'll allow a hacker to remotely access your car) instead of a mechanic.
Currently at Havelock: 15.1. High today: 27.3.
