Willowing Skywardly by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

State and provincial governments have been willing to hand over control of regulatory functions in exchange for assurances that pro-fessional standards will not only not be sacrificed but will also be enhanced. State and provincial governments make quid pro quo arrangements with the teaching profession, such that in exchange for granting teachers control of their profession, teachers accept from the outset additional regulatory controls, which they must ap-ply to themselves.

This quid pro quo arrangement is well documented in the case of proposals made public by the Ontario Royal Commission on Learn-

Peter McMillan 117 ing in February 1995. The commission's recommendation that a College of Teachers be established to govern the teaching profes-sion was accompanied by a list of additional regulatory demands: a second year of post-graduate year of pre-service training consisting of an internship; a licensing examination; and mandatory re-certification every five years based upon professional development. One of the conditions of the creation of the College of Teachers will presumably be teacher acquiescence to the government's agenda for 'teacher professionalization.'

Not only does the Ontario government benefit from a self-governing teacher college that submits to the government's agenda for pro-fessionalizing teachers, but the government also reduces its payroll and operating costs. Positions in teacher education within govern-ment can be eliminated as can all other non-personnel costs. While the savings are far from large enough to balance the current pro-vincial deficit of $10 billion, when these savings are added to those resulting from other privatization moves from all government minis-tries, they do become significant.

The Education Quality and Accountability Office is one more exam-ple of the trend towards privatization in Ontario. This agency will be patterned after the New Zealand Qualifications Authority whose creation was driven by 'market-oriented' ideology, including the need to improve New Zealand student scores on international tests so that OECD rankings could offer authoritative testimony to both the New Zealand and the international business communities that the New Zealand workforce is willing and able to meet the demands of 21 st century employers. The OECD, that is, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is a 'club' for 'first world' countries, and the reports prepared by the OECD are to its member countries what the Nielson ratings are to television programs.

 

118 Willowing Skywardly Teacher Competency

Competency- or performance-based standards for measuring teacher quality have been developed or are being developed across the world. The U.S. may arguably be the leader in this field, particularly in terms of the amount of energy and money that are going into this reform. But England and Australia have also adopted competency assessments as a quality control procedure for the teaching profession.

In England, the Teacher Training Agency was created by the 1994 Education Act to replace the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. The Teacher Training Agency is separate from, but reports to, the Department for Education. It is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization or what in England is called a 'quango.' The Teacher Training Agency accredits and pro-vides funding for all initial teacher training programs in England, both university initial teacher training programs and school-centred initial teacher training programs.

The Department for Education has developed performance- or out-come-based criteria which the Teacher Training Agency uses to accredit initial teacher training programs and to test for teacher competency. These criteria are equally applicable to university and school-centred initial teacher training programs. There are 27 sepa-rate competencies that secondary school teacher trainees must demonstrate before they can receive Quality Teacher Status — the government's stamp of approval that entitles the bearer to teach in the publicly-funded school system. There is a slightly longer list of competencies which primary school teacher trainees are expected to have 'demonstrated' before they can receive government ap-proval to teach. These competency standards are similar to national and State performance- or outcome-based standards for

 

Peter McMillan 119 teacher education that have been and continue to be developed in the U.S. and in Canada.

Although performance- or outcome-based teacher assessment does not pre-date alternative teacher certification routes, it does serve the need to legitimize any such route that does not lead through the university system. The 'licensed teacher' scheme is such a route. In England the 1989 licensure requirements were re-laxed to permit candidates who have completed at least two years of post-secondary studies to enter the teaching profession, pro-vided they complete a special two-year on-the-job training program, designed and administered by the employing school or the Local Education Authority.

The 'licensed teacher' scheme, which allows candidates with some university training to obtain Quality Teacher Status, has for obvious reasons been unpopular with the universities. Nevertheless, the overriding rationale that led to the creation of the 'licensed teacher' scheme was economic — England had a shortage of teachers in the 1980s. Academic expectations were forced to take a back-seat to teacher supply and demand.

In concluding this section, there are two points to keep in mind with respect to performance- or outcome-based teacher assessment. First, if teacher certification requirements in the future are strictly performance- or outcome-based, then the current teacher certifica-tion requirement of an undergraduate university degree may become obsolete. This also would mean that all teacher training would rely on a practical rather than theoretical or balanced founda-tion. Second, alternative certification routes are designed to increase the potential pool of qualified teachers, and if an oversup-ply of teachers is the result, then competition will exert a downward pressure on teachers' salaries and benefits.

 

120 Willowing Skywardly Education for the Economy

Education has become increasingly thought of as a means by which countries can enhance their global competitiveness. There is growing concern in the Australian university community about the government's capitulation to human capital theory and New Right politics. Human capital theory has been around for several dec-ades, and in a nutshell it maintains that education is an investment in worker productivity, which produces benefits both for the individ-ual in terms of higher income and for society in terms of greater output.

In order to demonstrate the economic commitment of government education policy, I have prepared a series of quotes from published Ontario Government documents.

The first quote is from a report prepared by George Radwanski for the Ministry of Treasury and Economics in 1986 entitled the Ontario Study of the Service Sector,

To compete effectively in a new knowledge-intensive

global economy that relies primarily on human capital, ex-

cellence in educating our work force is our single most

important strategic weapon. Education is as vitally funda-

mental an element of public infrastructure in the new

knowledge-based economy as roads, railways, ports and

power sources were in the previous [economy].

The next quote is from a 1987 report also prepared by George Radwanski, this time on behalf of the Ministry of Education. The re-port's title is the Ontario Study of the Relevance of Education, and the Issue of Dropouts. In a section entitled 'Education and the Economy,' Radwanski states that

 

Peter McMillan 121

Education has long been recognized as an important con-

tributor to economic growth, of course — but now it has

become the paramount ingredient for competitive success

in the world economy.

The third quote is from a 1988 three-volume publication by the Premier's Council of Ontario, entitled Competing in the New Global Economy. In a chapter entitled 'Investing in People,' the authors state that

Developing a strong, dynamic human resource base is a

precondition to achieving and sustaining economic

growth.... One of the key competitive challenges Ontario

faces is developing our most fundamental natural re-

source: the minds and skills of our workers.

While education and training are often seen as social pro-

grams, they are really investments in our economic

future.... [P]eople expenditures are an essential comple-

ment to investments in facilities and equipment: both

increase output and productivity.

The next quote comes from An Industrial Policy Framework for On-tario a 1992 publication of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Technology. The context of the industrial policy framework is the increasingly competitive and interdependent world economy, within which Ontario, a fairly small economy, is competing with multina-tional corporations and regional trading blocs. Part of the Socialist Government's industrial strategy included the development of hu-man capital. The report states that

Ontario's future economic success depends upon its ability

to compete through an educated, motivated and highly

skilled workforce. Efforts to increase skill levels must be

linked to social policies that promote equitable participation

and fairness ... [because] poverty has long-term economic 122 Willowing Skywardly

costs. Structural unemployment can erode the quality of

the labour force within a single generation.

The message from these quotes is clear. Education is subservient to the productive interests of society. And the productive interests of society are controlled from the private sector. The following quote suggests how not only the curriculum but also teacher educa-tion are targets of private sector influence. The quote, taken from a 1992 article that appears in the British Journal of Education for Teaching, states that:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that current

attacks on teacher education spring essentially from igno-

rance of the nature of teaching. It is becoming increasingly

difficult not to believe that some aspects of teaching are

only too well understood by politicians and their academic

retainers. What they understand well enough is the poten-

tially liberatory effects of effective teaching. They are

haunted by the spectre of a truly professional teaching

force committed to enhancing their pupils' ability to under-

stand, interpret and to change the world.

Teachers and students, it seems, are not meant to think — they are meant to serve economic forces.

Conclusion

Despite my uninterrupted criticism of 'market-oriented' education reform, I concede that the surface rationale behind these reforms is very appealing. The appeal lies in the fact that government educa-tion bureaucracies are by no means democratic nor are they necessarily responsive to the needs of the public. If competition among numerous education providers, and here I am thinking about school-based management and school choice, can offer more democratic control over and more equitable responsiveness

Peter McMillan 123 from the providers, then perhaps not all 'market-oriented' education reform ought to be immediately tossed aside for ideological rea-sons.

However, you have just heard that the role of the state in education remains as strong as ever. Recall that the so-called 'residual' pow-ers of the New Zealand Ministry of Education include control over the curriculum, teacher training and education funding, arguably the most important functions in an education system. Furthermore, if school-based management and school choice lead to widespread corporate ownership of schools, by organizations such as Educa-tion Alternative, Inc. and Public Strategies Group, then there is the danger that competition for greater profits will lead to concentra-tions of market share. In other words, the 'leanest and meanest' corporations may end up controlling entire school districts — a situation where monopoly power again controls the education sys-tem, only this time the stakes are profits. Finally, you have also heard the voice of government proclaiming its allegiance to eco-nomic growth and promising to prepare appropriately schooled human capital for the labour force of the new global economy. For these reasons, and in spite of the superficial appeal of 'consumer democracy,' I feel comfortable in stating that 'market-oriented' edu-cation reform still does not have the best interests of the students at heart.

References

(A collection of papers on teacher education in Europe & Canada), European Journal of Teacher Education, 17(nos.1/2), 1994, 53-118.

Alarcao, Isabel. National Examinations in Teacher Education in Papua New Guinea: Some International Observations. Journal of Education for Teaching, 17(1), 1991, 29-49.

124 Willowing Skywardly Barlow, Maude. Class Warfare: The Assault on Canada's Schools. Speech given at the 'In the Public Interest Conference,' March 4, 1995 in Vancouver, British Columbia, sponsored by the British Co-lumbia Teachers' Federation.

Beyer, Landon. Teacher Education and the Politics of Schooling. Education Research and Perspectives, 20(1), 1993.

Codd, John et al. Education and the Role of the State: Devolution and Control Post-Picot. In Hugh Lauder and Cathy Wylie (eds.). Towards Successful Schooling. London: Falmer Press, 1990. Crump, Stephen and Walker, Jim. Choice, Diversity and the Role of Government in Education. Paper presented at the Annual Confer-ence of the Australian Association for Research in Australia, Newcastle, New South Wales, November 27 - December 1, 1994.

Dale, Roger and Ozga, Jenny. Two Hemispheres—Both 'New Right?': 1980s Education Reform in New Zealand and England and Wales. In Bob Lingard, John Knight and Paige Porter (eds.). Schooling Reform in Hard Times. London: Falmer Press, 1993.

Deer, Christine E. et al. Politics of Teacher Education in New South Wales, Australia. Education Research and Perspectives, 20(1), 1993.

Evans, John and Davies, Brian. Power to the People? The Great Education Reform Act and Tomorrow's Schools: A Critical and Comparative Perspective. In Hugh Lauder and Cathy Wylie (eds.). Towards Successful Schooling. London: Falmer Press, 1990.

Lauder, Hugh et al. Citizens or Consumers? The Politics of Educa-tional Reform: An Introduction. In Hugh Lauder and Cathy Wylie (eds.). Towards Successful Schooling. London: Falmer Press, 1990.

Peter McMillan 125 McKersie, William S. Philanthropy's Paradox: Chicago School Re-form. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15(2), 1993.

New Zealand Ministry of Education. New Zealand Schools 1993: A Report on the Compulsory Schools Sector in New Zealand. Wel-lington: Ministry of Education, 1994.

Ramsay, Peter D.K. Picot—Vision and Reality in New Zealand Schools: An Insider's View. In Bob Lingard, John Knight and Paige Porter (eds.). Schooling Reform in Hard Times. London: Falmer Press, 1993.

Robertson, Heather-Jane. The Role of Public Education in a De-mocratic Society. Speech given at the 'In the Public Interest Conference,' March 4, 1995 in Vancouver, British Columbia, spon-sored by the British Columbia Teachers' Federation.

Scane, Joyce. What the Literature Tells Us about School-Based Management in Selected Jurisdictions: Implications for Ontario. Background paper for the Royal Commission on Learning, 1993.

Webber, Charles F. Educational Change in Alberta, Canada: An Analysis of Recent Events. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 3(12), 1995.

Wylie, Cathy. School-Site Management: Some Lessons From New Zealand. Paper given at the annual AERA meeting, 18-22 April 1995, San Francisco.

__________

*Paper given at the Connecticut Education Association conference, Au-gust 1995.

 

126 Willowing Skywardly After Truth and Falsehood (October 1996)

Introduction

'After Truth and Falsehood' should be understood in two important senses. First, 'after' refers to the fact that Nietzsche is responsible for having destroyed the foundations of absolute truth. Having chal-lenged and defeated Western metaphysics by exposing the spuriousness of its claim to absolute knowledge and truth, Nietzsche does not rest. His next self-assigned task is to replace what he has destroyed. Therefore, the title should also be under-stood to refer to Nietzsche's search for new truths, including the criteria for determining the distinction between what is true and what is false.

Nietzsche's writings have been given very different interpretations — about this, there is no controversy. Some, such as the Nazis, have claimed the heritage of their ideas from Nietzsche in order to justify their domination over their 'inferiors.' More recently, Nietzsche's significance has been found to be in his contributions to the postmodern reaction against established views and beliefs. That Nietzsche has been read, on the one hand, as an advocate of racial supremacy, and on the other hand, as an anti-establishment rebel supports the contention of those who maintain that the Nietzschean text is not fixed but continues to live and change through its influence upon and interpretation by the reader. From Nietzsche's writings, one can construct different, and even contrary, views or perspectives of reality, and whether any of these views would correspond to Nietzsche's own self-understanding is impos-sible to say. Nevertheless, finding a perspective that is at least consistent with Nietzsche's thought and method, as expressed in his principal writings, is not only possible but also necessary for the development of the thesis of this essay.

 

Peter McMillan 127 In this essay, Nietzsche's thought will be described from a particular perspective, one which is not inconsistent with Nietzsche's writings and which is furthermore legitimated by Nietzsche's principle that truth is relative to a perspective. While the perspective informing this essay asserts itself as true, it does not claim to present the only true account of Nietzsche, nor does it insist on having fully compre-hended the wide range of Nietzsche's thought. It incorporates what has become the traditional view of Nietzsche in his familiar roles as anti-foundationalist, critic and rebel, but more importantly it shows Nietzsche as a truth-seeker, one who seeks after something in which to believe and for something which can be completely and finally understood and known.

This essay develops the two different meanings suggested by the title, 'After Truth and Falsehood.' First, Nietzsche is described as an anti-metaphysician, as a challenger of established truths and beliefs and as a destroyer of certainty and authority. Second, the genealogical method that Nietzsche uses to bring down the entire Western system of philosophy is presented. Third, Nietzsche is por-trayed as a truth-seeker, that is, as one who although doubting the existence of universal and absolute truth nevertheless proceeds, even through his nihilistic and anti-establishment stages, as if such truth does exist and can be found with enough perseverance and honesty. Finally, having found the truth that he sought, Nietzsche is viewed as the creator of new values and truths, thereby closing the circle which began with Nietzsche's having been depicted as an iconoclast. The thesis of this essay is that it is impossible to under-stand Nietzsche's anti-metaphysical position without recognizing that he was, from the beginning, on a quest for a truer account of truth and that everything from his assault on Western metaphysics through his revaluation of values may be interpreted as consistent with his search for Truth.

 

128 Willowing Skywardly Nietzsche's Challenge—sounding out the idols

Nietzsche's philosophy with all of its richness, subtleties, contradic-tions and fictions is an attempt to step outside the tradition of Western metaphysical rationalism and to evaluate the product of its thought. One of the important currents running through Nietzsche's thought is a rejection and dismissal of the absolutist pretensions of Reason. For Nietzsche, Reason is just another variant of the hu-man compulsion to dominate—religion and morality being other variants against which Nietzsche also deals decisive critiques. Against the traditional metaphysical position that the human mind can discover, through the faculty of Reason, those truths that exist universally and timelessly, Nietzsche mines and tunnels through the foundations of truth, destabilizing and undermining the very structure upon which these absolute truths rest.

For Nietzsche, there are no truths, whether ethical or epistemic, whose certainty is unconditional and beyond doubt. All truths re-quire justification, and Nietzsche sets out to show that truths are the products of human invention and that their justification is contingent upon the results of their application. Justification is just another way of assigning values, and values are assigned according to human needs. Truths, then, are human constructions designed to promote and enhance human life. They are not true for all time, nor are they true for all human beings, not to mention other life forms. The fol-lowing thought experiment metaphorically depicts the finitude and meagreness of human knowledge:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that

universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar

systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts in-

vented knowing. That was the most arrogant and

mendacious minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless, it

was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths,

Peter McMillan 129

the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had

to die.1

Nietzsche wrote these lines in 1873 before Zarathustra, Gay Sci-ence and the notes which were later compiled and published posthumously as Will to Power. In these later works Nietzsche pre-sents an affirmation of life emerging from the despair and doubt of nihilism. But in this essay, Nietzsche has neither reached the depths of nihilistic despair nor the heights of amor fati. The God's eye view of the extraterrestrial is an omniscient perspective of a re-ality that is unknowable to the 'clever beasts' but exists nonetheless. Although Nietzsche expresses his disdain and con-tempt for the pretensions of human understanding, he seems not to have yet lost faith in the existence of universal Truth. However, until he has fully experienced nihilism and has completely destroyed the old tables of true and false, of good and evil, he is neither ready to affirm life nor is he prepared to set out in discovery of Truth.

Nietzsche believed that truths are not discovered but that they are created to protect and promote the values and interests of those who make them. There are no truths 'out there' to be had. The standard against which truths are measured is not the 'real world' nor is it some principle of rationality. Truths and falsehoods are what they are because someone has placed these values upon them. The true and the false are nothing more than names for the good and the bad. Reason does not determine truth. It simply ar-gues for what increases the will to power and against what decreases the will to power. The will to power is Nietzsche's meta-physical principle that reduces human activity to an instinct, not just

 

1 Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,' trans., Daniel

Breazeale in Philosophy and Truth: Selections From Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979) 79.

130 Willowing Skywardly for self-preservation, but to resist, to overcome and to expropriate. It is the will to power whose interests are served by Truth, and it is Reason that provides the justification for these truths. Thus, the will to power informs Reason with the destructive capacity to under-mine Western metaphysics and compels Reason to construct a better perspective in which appearance is reality and in which per-spectival truth is all that exists.

According to Nietzsche's perspectivism, there are no absolute truths, there is no permanent reality, and there are no facts. Where human knowledge is concerned, Nietzsche rejects all certainty. "The most strongly believed a priori 'truths' are for me—provisional assumptions"2 All is flux, as Heraclitus had said more than 2000 years earlier. What really exist are only interpretations, and these interpretations are human creations. The essence of reality cannot be adequately expressed by static universal categories, because the world has "become infinite for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpreta-tions."3 Knowledge remains possible, but what passes for knowledge "is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings."4 That rational thought is nothing more than interpretation is the ultimate statement of the impossibility of fathoming the unfathomable.

Nietzsche's Method in Making the Challenge

Second, the genealogical method is the means by which Nietzsche discovers and uncovers the 'human nature' of knowledge, truth and

 

2 Nietzsche, The Will to Power 273.

3 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 336.

4 Nietzsche, The Will to Power 267.

Peter McMillan 131 morality. Instead of resorting to supernatural explanations of human values, beliefs and practices, Nietzsche traces the genealogy of human truths using a combination of historical and sociological analyses. Nietzsche's genealogy is an historical investigation into the origins of human truths. The methodology of genealogical analysis presumes the conditional nature of all things human whether material, cognitive or affective. "Everything human de-serves to be viewed ironically so far as its origin is concerned" 5

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced noth-

ing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and

helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or in-

herited these had better luck in their struggle for

themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of

faith, which were continually inherited, until they became

almost part of the basic endowment of the species. 6

Nietzsche sets out to uncover and exhibit the empirical conditions which give rise to the majestic structures of human morality and knowledge. His genealogy traces the historical development of hu-man truths backwards through the generations until its complete ancestral line is discovered and brought to light. From the outset, Nietzsche is committed to a skeptical program, but not such a radi-cal form of skepticism as would withhold judgment, evaluation and action, for his is a philosophy of action. The 'truthfulness' of moral and philosophical claims is suspect, and the genealogical method is the means that Nietzsche chooses to demonstrate his skeptical conclusion.

 

5 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, trans., R.J.

Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 120.

6 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 169.

132 Willowing Skywardly In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche declares good and evil to be human conventions, not absolute and eternal principles, and thereby provides himself passage 'beyond good and evil.' "We sail right over morality, we crush, we destroy perhaps the remains of our own morality by daring to make our voyage there...."7 If what are considered to be good and what are to be regarded evil are only so considered and regarded according to the interests of hu-man beings living in a certain place in a certain time and under cer-certain conditions, then moralities are human artifacts, intellectual and spiritual artifacts, created by finite human beings, and these moralities are no more universal and timeless than are the more mundane social practices that are unique to different peoples in dif-ferent cultures in different times.

The weapons with which Nietzsche wages war on Western thought and values are those he finds ready-to-hand within the tradition, namely the genealogical method, and after having destroyed the old value system, he is free to create, no longer bound by the de-mands and constraints of the system which he has brought down. Nietzsche is free to ignore the laws of logical consistency, devel-opment and completeness, because he has repealed these laws. He is at liberty to maintain a double standard, one for destruction and one for creation. He has undermined the very system whose criteria would expose, challenge and threaten his own project, and with no competing valuing systems, his is unassailable. His method demonstrates in practice his metaphysical principle of the will to power.

Nietzsche demonstrates through the genealogical critique, itself grounded in reason, that the foundations of truth are 'human, all too human.' "The question of values is more fundamental than the

 

7 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 31.

Peter McMillan 133 question of certainty: the latter becomes serious only by presuppos-ing that the value question has already been answered." 8 In the in-introduction to his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche declares that

we need a critique of moral values, the value of these val-

ues themselves must first be called in question — and for

that there is needed a knowledge of the condition and cir-

cumstances in which they grow, under which they evolved

and changed (morality as consequence, as symptom, as

mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but

also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as re-

straint, as poison), a knowledge of a kind that has never

yet existed or even been desired.9

Even Nietzsche's new morality is subject to the scrutiny and valua-tion from another perspective—this, a consequence of Nietzsche's perspectival account of truth and his experimental position. "I favor any skepsis to which I may reply: 'Let us try it!'"10 Nietzsche seems to be cognizant of the fact his own truths have no more privileged immunity from scrutiny than do the truths which he himself sets out to undermine. For Nietzsche all truths reveal an anthropocentric bias, even his own—the genealogy.

Nietzsche intended to search and examine the historical record in order to learn what were the socio-biological conditions from which our moral and philosophical systems developed. Nietzsche's gene-alogies are histories which attempt to uncover the empirical, as opposed to the transcendental, conditions from which current prac-

 

8 Nietzsche, The Will to Power 322.

9 Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans., Walter

Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967) 20.

10 Nietzsche, The Gay Science 115.

134 Willowing Skywardly tices, thought and morality have emerged. Nietzsche maintains that what are commonly regarded as truths are found by genealogy to be rooted in adaptive behaviour in the human past and not to be indubitable first principles that have only to be apprehended.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, me-

tonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of

human relations which have been poetically and rhetori-

cally intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which,

after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical,

and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten

are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn

out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which

have lost their embossing and are now considered as

metal and no longer as coins. 11

Nietzsche describes and explains the creation, domination, preser-vation and enhancement of truths in terms of power. Truths are established, not in accordance with the 'true method' of Reason but through conflict, for the 'true method' of Reason is a fiction concealing the valuation and struggle for pre-eminence that estab-lishes the truth of the 'true method' of Reason. Power creates, conquers, maintains and defends kingdoms of truth, and the history of truth is the history of violence.

For Nietzsche truths are historically and culturally conditioned. They reflect definite and finite perspectives. Over time, they may acquire the status of unchallenged truth. Usefulness, usage and custom are responsible for the truths that we have inherited.

That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with

 

11 Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense' 84.

Peter McMillan 135 one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic be-ing, and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past—as treasure: for the value of our humanity depends upon it.12

Working backwards through the family tree of Truth, what

one finds is that truths have been accepted as expedients,

honoured for their utility, legitimized over time as their an-

cestry has become a distant memory and raised to

metaphysical status by the power of Reason. "Every tradi-

tion now continually grows more venerable the farther

away its origin lies and the more this origin is forgotten; the

respect paid to it increases from generation to generation,

the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and

reverence."13

A morality, a mode of living tried and proved by long ex-

perience and testing, at length enters consciousness as a

law, as dominating— And therewith the entire group of re-

lated values and states enters into it: it becomes

venerable, unassailable, holy, true; it is part of its devel-

opment that its origin should be forgotten.14

And so a new aristocratic family of truths is founded. New truths supersede and discredit old truths according to their ability to pre-serve and promote life. Those truths which promote life over the longest periods of history become accepted as unshakeable. Truth is not discovered by Reason, but on the contrary, it is enthroned by the non-rational Will to Power. Only later is Truth wrapped in the

 

12 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 20.

13 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 51-52.

14 Nietzsche, The Will to Power 277-78.

136 Willowing Skywardly royal garb of Reason. But in the beginning, these truths had to dis-place other truths, truths which had hitherto been faithfully ac-accepted. Truth systems are not exchanged on the basis of rational evaluation of the competing truths. As Nietzsche says, "The so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appro-priate and conquer."15

Nietzsche's Quest—Truth

A third important theme in Nietzsche's writings is the search for truth. Zarathustra and the 'subterranean man' are Nietzschean characters whose search for truth leads them away from humanity, into the mountains and down into the bowels of the earth, respec-tively. In each case, Nietzsche returns, in the persons of Zarathustra and the subterranean man, to the human fold to deliver his message, which incidentally he also does as an author.

These metaphorical 'truth seekers' are Nietzsche viewed through the eyes or from the perspective of Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche's self-portrayal as wandering prophet and excavator of 'old, useless structures' leaves no doubt that he understood himself to be on a quest for truth. [cf. seafaring analogies] In the preface of Daybreak, Nietzsche introduces himself as the 'subterranean man' and tells what he was doing in the depths.

I descended into the depths, I tunnelled into the founda-

tions, I commenced an investigation and digging out of an

ancient faith, one upon which we philosophers have for a

couple of millennia been accustomed to build as if upon

the firmest of all foundations—and have continued to do so

even though every building hitherto erected on them has

 

15 Nietzsche, The Will to Power 227.

Peter McMillan 137

fallen down: I commenced to undermine our faith in moral-

ity.16

This description of one who returns to humanity with 'truth' in hand bears a striking resemblance to Plato's allegory of the cave in which the prisoner who returns from the surface, having seen and be-come accustomed to the 'light of truth,' returns to his fellow prisoners in the cave with stories of his discoveries of a 'truer' real-ity above, on the surface. Nietzsche's selection of self-ascriptive metaphors such as the 'subterranean man,' Zarathustra and the Wanderer suggests that he considers himself to be a Prometheus figure, whose quest is to seek out 'truth' and to bring it back to his fellow mortals.

Nietzsche provides a non-rational basis for truth, and it is the ge-nealogical method that Nietzsche uses to establish this 'truth.' But how does Nietzsche justify his methodological choice? Does Nietzsche 'know' that truth is a 'useful fiction' in advance, or is this something that he comes to know only after he has applied his ge-nealogical method of inquiry?

Nietzsche does appear to make a distinction between truths and Truths, the former being historically and culturally-contextualized, and the latter being absolute, eternal and universal. Related to this differentiation of truth into absolute and contingent truths is Nietzsche's employment of Reason to deflate Reason. Nietzsche has been criticized for the arbitrary and contradictory way in which his inquiry proceeds. However, Nietzsche himself seemed to be aware of this tension in his revaluation when he asks the reader rhetorically

 

16 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak, trans., R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982) preface §2.

138 Willowing Skywardly

what do you know, what could you know, of how much

cunning in self-preservation, how much reason and higher

safeguarding, is contained in such self-deception—or of

how much falsity I shall require if I am to continue to permit

myself the luxury of my truthfulness?17

Nietzsche as Lawgiver

Nietzsche, not content to rest in nihilistic or skeptical oblivion, de-velops a positive philosophy, a philosophy of the future in which perspectivism and the revaluation of values are central.

'The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Val-

ues'—in this formulation a countermovement finds

expression, regarding both principle and task; a movement

that in some future will take the place of this perfect nihil-

ism—but presupposes it, logically and psychologically, and

certainly can come only after and out of it.... [N]ihilism

represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great val-

ues and ideals—because we must experience nihilism

before we can find out what value these 'values' really

had.— We require, sometime, new values.18

Nietzsche's genealogy of truth prepares the way for his revaluation of values. Nietzsche having asserted truth to be value-laden and perspectival, he proceeds to elaborate the new values, from his perspective, and to substitute new truths for the old truths. The truths that he establishes include those which he has been using all along to debunk out-dated truths. His position is internally consis-tent, because his new truths not only explain how both the old and

 

17 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human p6.

18 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, trans., Walter Kaufman and

R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967) 3-4.

Peter McMillan 139 the new truths emerged but also how it came to pass that a new regime of truth replaced the old.

The will to power, through the conflict of perspectives, seems to an-ticipate its own discovery as the ultimate principle of reality. The criterion of truth is an increase in the will to power, and the will to power is all that there is. Will to power is primary, and Reason is secondary. Reason serves the will to power and is informed by the will to power. Reason may build or destroy, but in either case, it is the will to power acting through Reason.

Nietzsche's will to power may be interpreted as an instance of re-ductionist metaphysics in which life is reduced to its lowest common denominator — the will to power, a metaphysical entity. Not only does the will to power remind one of the Western meta-physics under attack by Nietzsche, but also the object of the will to power, 'the life-preserving, life-enhancing,' is reminiscent of the Platonic form of the 'Good.' However, the will to power may also be read as a metaphor for the flux of reality, since Nietzsche's will to power is the principle of becoming. Given the rhetorical nature of Nietzsche's writings, the will to power as metaphor may be a legiti-mate interpretation of Nietzsche's will to power as entity. The will to power may be described one of the 'useful fictions' that Nietzsche uses to express himself beyond the limits of language and thought.

Nietzsche's principle of the will to power presupposes that what maintains and enhances life is good; and although the particulars may vary from one perspective to the next, the form of goodness is absolute and universal. Nietzsche opposes Plato and the meta-physical tradition of absolute truths and maintains that truths are relative to a perspective, a human perspective. If all perspectives are relatively equal, then the question of commensurability among perspectives arises for Nietzsche's perspectivism and his doctrine of will to power. But Nietzsche's 'anti-metaphysics,' his genealogy,

140 Willowing Skywardly depends upon the principle of the will to power which, if taken liter-ally, is the ultimate ontological reduction. If this is the case, then the will to power is a 'meta-perspective' and not just another perspec-tive, and the will to power is the arbiter among perspectives, that is, it is the 'meta-principle.'

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, trans., Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967). (1901, rev. 1906, posthumously published)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, trans., Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974). (1882, Book V §§343-383 added in 1887)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans., Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967). (1887)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil, trans., Walter Kauf-man (New York: Random House, 1966). (1886)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak, trans., R.J. Hollingdale (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). (1881)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History and Life' in Untimely Meditations, trans., R.J. Hollingdale (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). (1874)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human, trans., R.J. Holling-dale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). (1878; V II: Assorted Opinions and Maxims 1879 and The Wanderer and His Shadow 1880)

 

Peter McMillan 141 Nietzsche, Friedrich. 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,' trans., Daniel Breazeale in Philosophy and Truth: Selections From Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979). (1873)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans., R.J. Holling-dale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1961). (1885)

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, trans., R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1968). (1889)

 

142 Willowing Skywardly Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (March 2002)

According to the economist Frank Knight, co-founder of the Chi-cago School of Economics, uncertainty is the chief cause of the difference between profits under actual and perfect competition. His famous exposition of his thesis was published in 1921 as Risk, Un-certainty and Profit. Uncertainty engenders, the fundamental difference between the theory of perfect competition and competi-tion manifest in actually-existing capitalist societies:

 Where, uncertainty and risk are distinguished—risk being

measurable (actuarial) expectation and uncertainty being

unmeasurable (stochastic) expectation.

 Where, perfect competition is a theoretical and necessar-

ily abstract model intended to organize economic theory

in order to describe economic facts but which deviates

from reality considerably and in proportion to the level of

abstraction.

 Where, perfect competition represents a scientific ab-

straction focused on economic relationships (exchange,

production and distribution) to the exclusion of social re-

lationships and thus devoid of moral/ethical values.

Knight acknowledges the model's lack of other-

mindedness, but also seems to regard the system as a

product of human nature—skeptical about whether a bet-

ter system, encompassing a broader range of human

interests, e.g., material, social and environmental, could

be dialectically evolved.

 Where, perfect competition not only does not exist in the

real world but in fact tends towards its opposite—

monopoly.

Knight argues that the difference between perfect competition and actual competition is attributable to uncertainty—risk being irrele-

Peter McMillan 143 vant since 'insurance' can be acquired and change or absence of change being irrelevant as an independent cause, since change can be pattern-like and non-change can generate inaccurate ex-pectations. So, uncertainty is the key in that it alone accounts for the divergence between expectations and reality.

Through his brief digression into the theory of knowledge, Knight distinguishes three types of probabilistic reasoning regarding cer-tainty and uncertainty:

1. a priori probability— mathematical, e.g., dice

2. statistical probability—inductive, e.g., sampling

3. estimated probability—not subject to measurability

Knight argues that 'estimated probabilistic' reasoning is what is lacking in economic theory, and he goes on to state that forward-looking expectations (with inherent uncertainty) does in fact direct most human conduct—this being contrary to the 'scientific view' that human conduct is guided by measurable probabilistic reasoning. Inherent uncertainty may be due to the indeterminate and/or unde-termined nature of the future—the former relating to the nature of the future and the latter relating to the nature of human knowledge.

There are several methods used by human beings when dealing with uncertainty, all intended to increase knowledge and extend control:

1. consolidation—insurance, business combinations and

producer-directed activity (Supply precedes Demand be-

cause risks of producing are mitigated by the potential

market of many buyers, and because the risks of an indi-

vidual in contracting in advance of production are

comparatively less mitigated.)

2. specialization—speculation, niche marketing, etc.

144 Willowing Skywardly

3. diffusion—distribution of risks, e.g., limited liability; re-

lated to consolidation and specialization.

Essentially the above represent the transference of risk to others willing, able and prepared to assume risk with a price attached to the transfer.

According to Knight, the ubiquitous nature of uncertainty is a condi-tion for the existence of information as one of the principal commodities of the actual economic organization. This is particu-larly relevant to what we describe nowadays as the 'knowledge economy.'

For Knight, the essence of free enterprise is the combining of deci-sion-making authority and responsibility/accountability, i.e., risk (uncertainty-bearing) and responsible control cannot be separated. Knight argues that in the corporate system of governance risk and responsibility are not separated; however, they are considerably diffused through the corporate organization from the Board of Di-rectors to the C-level executives, who in turn delegate risk and control to their subordinates. Supporting the centralized decision making is the fact that as a class, entrepreneurs are also motivated by non-monetary factors, e.g., power, independence, challenge, etc. Presumably, similar motivations apply to the hierarchy of man-agers as well in that monetary compensation is augmented by non-financial benefits like power, privilege, status, etc.

Knight provides a description and explanation of actual competition vis-à-vis the model of perfect competition and argues that uncer-tainty (as opposed to risk) is the principal condition that gives rise to the differences. His is not necessarily a justification of actual com-petition, but neither is it a critique in the vein that the Keynesian Joan Robinson, in her Depression-era Economics of Imperfect Competition, challenged the notion of perfect competition in existing

Peter McMillan 145 capitalist economies. Knight's uncertainty thesis provides the basis for a 'causal' link in explaining the tendency of a free enterprise sys-tem to move away from the model of perfect competition and towards monopolistic organization—an outcome indicative of mar-ket failure. However, Knight, unlike Robinson, does not repudiate free markets for their 'failures.' It is nevertheless of interest that Knight recognizes the value of non-economic factors, e.g., human living conditions and social relations. In other words, the free enter-prise system is not adequate to express the full range of human interests and values—not an expected conclusion from the Chicago School, although there are apparently profound differences be-tween the first Chicago School and the later, and more familiar, Chicago School of Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas. A final inter-esting thought from Knight is that while much human effort is committed to managing uncertainty, uncertainty is not something that the human race can do without, since to do so would reduce human beings to machines or automata. Obviously, a delicate bal-ance between certainty and freedom is required—absolute certainty would reduce humanity to automatons and absolute freedom would remove our ability to function within society.

 

146 Willowing Skywardly Resurrecting Rosa (May 2004)

Killed (murdered (assassinated)) by the German army in 1919, Rosa Luxemburg left behind a revolutionary legacy that has out-lasted the German Empire against which she fought and the Russian Revolution for which she fought.1 Four score and five years after her death, European communism has failed, and capi-talism appears to have conquered the world, having merged public and private sectors into a hybrid state-sponsored capitalism. How-ever, a different moment, sometime in the future, may be as different from 2004 as the world of 2004 is different from the world of 1949, the beginning of the 40-year Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. and their respective allies. Nevertheless, for the time being, international socialism remains dormant, and international capitalism, in the form of capitalist-driven globalization, appears tri-umphant—a sort of end of history … or so it seems.

In the current climate of exaggerated optimism and reckless con-formity with the logic of business and economics, international socialism appears more dead than dormant. While this may be true, there may still be value in resurrecting Rosa Luxemburg, i.e., re-visiting her legacy, for which, by the way, she would undoubtedly refuse intellectual property rights. In this essay, four of Luxemburg’s works have been selected2, each addressing an important issue from early 20th century revolutionary socialism but no less applica-ble to anti-establishment and nonconformist resistance in the early 21st century. First, from ‘What is Economics?,’ completed while Luxemburg was in prison during World War I, is the issue of intel-lectual integrity in the political domain. Second, from ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1900) is the issue of incremental versus radical change. Third, from the ‘Junius Pamphlet’ (1915), is the issue of conflicting causes. Fourth, from ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918) is the issue of whether the ends can justify the means.

 

Peter McMillan 147 In the essay ‘What is Economics?,’ Luxemburg argues that econo-mists are the intellectual defenders of the capitalist revolution against the feudal and mercantilist systems of the past and against the socialist, communist and anarchist threats of the future. All revolutions change the political and economic balance of power, and all revolutions therefore require an intellectual defense of both the change and the new status quo. This defense is best provided by a class of intellectuals who stand to benefit from the revolution-ary change (a foreshadowing of the ‘new class’ literature of dissent, e.g., Milovan Djilas’ New Class). In the case of the revolution that swept away feudalism and ushered in capitalism, classical econo-mists, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and early neoclassical economists, like Alfred Marshall, were influential in describing, ex-plaining and rationalizing the Industrial Revolution. The universal theme emerging from Luxemburg’s critique is that knowledge serves power … which suggests that a socialist revolution would also require its own intellectual class. What Luxemburg could not see is that ‘actually existing socialism' would create and reward its own intelligentsia … contradicting its own universal egalitarian prin-ciples.

In ‘Reform or Revolution,’ Luxemburg takes on the issue of whether socialism should be advanced by incremental reform measures or by revolutionary means. Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist, and she was, therefore, extremely critical of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the leader among socialist parties, for choosing self-interested trade unionism and timid parliamentarian-ism. In particular, she was critical of Eduard Bernstein’s defeatist reformism according to which collective wage bargaining and par-liamentary elections were judged to be the only realistic means by which socialists could win concessions from a capitalist system that appeared immanently adaptable and in no imminent danger of col-lapse. For Luxemburg, these isolated and short-term victories threatened to fragment the universal character of international so-

148 Willowing Skywardly cialism. As if following Luxemburg’s script, nearly a century later, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, is pur-suing structural reforms usually associated with conservative political parties, such as Reagan’s Republican Party or Thatcher’s Conservative Party, intended to reverse some of the trade union privileges and social programs of the past. The universal theme emerging with respect to ‘Reform or Revolution’ is that socialism, like any social movement, is not invulnerable to powerful, self-serving interests, which themselves may betray the movement over time. It is yet another of the ironies of international socialism that Luxemburg’s real-life alternative to the SPD, the Bolsheviks and their successors, proved even less egalitarian than the trade union-dominated SPD.

In the ‘Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democ-racy,' Luxemburg severely rebukes the SPD for rallying to the support of the German imperialist war effort and betraying the cause of international socialism, i.e., the common cause of workers against bourgeois capitalists. At issue was whether nationalism or the cause of international socialism was the more important cause commanding the loyalty of German workers and the SPD. Writing from prison in 1915, Luxemburg accurately assessed two of the principal causes of the 1st World War: first, the increasing conflicts among European nations for foreign markets, and second, the rigid interlocking alliance system that amplified regional disputes. It was particularly galling for Luxemburg that the SPD’s support for the war was based on an illusory sense of national unity and an equally illusory fear of external aggression. What was clear to Luxemburg and a minority of other SPD members who split to form the Spart-acus League (and ultimately the German Communist Party) was that the SPD had switched alliances, from the international society of workers to the German bourgeois capitalists. The universal theme, not Luxemburg’s theme, extracted from the ‘Junius Pam-phlet,’ is that alliances (e.g., international socialism, German

Peter McMillan 149 nationalism or other common causes and social groupings) reflect the instinct to band together to protect, and even expand, interests and that all alliances are therefore temporary. Luxemburg would likely have argued that international socialism transcended all other causes; however, the history of ‘actually existing socialism' in the 20th century suggests otherwise.

In ‘The Russian Revolution,' Luxemburg criticizes the hesitancy of Karl Kautsky and SPD as well as the Russian Mensheviks. In justi-fying the excesses of the Bolsheviks, she points to their necessity in view of the betrayal of the Russian Revolution by the interna-tional socialist movement in addition to the obvious and expected antagonism of German imperialism and the resistance of counter-revolutionary bourgeois forces. Notwithstanding her recognition of the context of the Bolshevik's departure from the socialist revolu-tionary path, she proceeds, at length, to criticize Lenin and the Bolsheviks regarding agrarian reform, nationalist self-determination, suspension of democracy and civil rights, use of terror and concen-tration of political power. In each of these cases, the Bolsheviks adopted means that were inconsistent with the goals of interna-tional socialism. Her prescient critique of the Bolshevik’s dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship by an elitist minority, exposed and challenged what was to become a permanent and fundamental internal contradiction of the Russian Revolution and Soviet system. While Luxemburg ultimately pardoned Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their abuses, she nonetheless strongly cautioned them to return to the use of revolutionary means that are consistent with the revolutionary ends of international socialism. The universal theme extracted from ‘The Russian Revolution’ is that when the ends are allowed to justify the means, the means may transform the ends.

International socialism may be dead or just dormant, but in any event, it is not active in any sense that threatens global capitalism.

150 Willowing Skywardly Since Luxemburg was one of international socialism’s most dedi-cated and articulate defenders, it might seem that her legacy is useless. However, upon resurrecting Rosa, it should be clear that her legacy remains alive and relevant insofar as it is part of the lar-ger tradition of revolutionary/radical dissent. The issues culled from her selected writings were definitely of a specific time and place in history. Nevertheless, there is universality to these issues, which ensures the continuing relevance of Luxemburg’s thought. Cer-tainly, these issues and her contributions to them are relevant to modern phenomena of technocratic tyranny (specialization, exper-tise and the democratic deficit), trickle-down economics (the political economy of the wealthy and powerful interest groups), local bias (the priority of national interests over international concerns) and demanding financial expectations (the ends of private wealth accumulation as justification of the means).

1 It is ironic that had German soldiers not ended Luxemburg’s life during the German government crackdown on the post-war com-munist revolt that either Lenin or Stalin would have done so in one of the many purges that characterized the Bolshevik consolidation of power.

2 All of the works referenced in this essay are from Rosa Luxem-burg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970).

 

Peter McMillan 151 Missionary, Mercenary, Migrant (July 2005)

I was a missionary—a Protestant, evangelical Christian who was in possession of truth, afterlife security and the oppressive burden to recruit others. As if in a reverse road-to-Damascus experience, I rejected entirely and with finality the naive arrogance, powermon-gering hubris and self-serving mendacity of this all-too-human, imperialistic cult.

I became a mercenary—an information technology consultant, who was really just cannon fodder in globalization's war on waste, ineffi-ciency and high fixed costs. Standardized outcomes, repeatable processes, management by bullets and vertical loyalty designed, packaged, marketed and implemented to rationalize economic costs reduced everything to the lowest common economic denomi-nator. I rejected the life of a corporate mercenary only after a prolonged and agonizing introspection as if in a Western version of 'Darkness at Noon.'

I am now a migrant—a temporary unskilled labour input in manu-facturing. As low wage, just-in-time, undifferentiated labour, I am part of the neoclassical economists' ideal flexible labour force. We are highly mechanized to perform endless routine operations with minimal variance, and we are easily controlled for quality and easily replaced. I am resigned to accept that the life of a migrant is slightly more bearable than that of either a missionary or a mercenary.

* * *

In the idle world of professional philosophy (a world to which I once delusionally aspired), reality is often only experienced imagina-tively. Take for instance, Thomas Nagel's 1974 article 'What Is It Like to be a Bat?,' in which the philosopher considers the distinction between objective and subjective knowledge. Imagining being a bat

152 Willowing Skywardly is a thought experiment in which Nagel asks whether it is possible to get into the head of a bat without literally being inside the head of the bat (i.e., being the bat). The bat, in the thought experiment, is of course a placeholder for another human being. The conclusion be-ing that imagining being someone else is not altogether unlike imagining oneself to be a bat. It is impossible, unless one becomes the bat. Without the impressive decoration of technical philosophi-cal jargon, this seems pretty commonplace. Perhaps it is, but then again, sometimes like the speculative philosopher, one has to meet reality head on as if walking absent-mindedly full square into a tele-phone pole.

Now, imagine being a missionary, a mercenary or a migrant. For now, just stick with the mental image of a migrant, moving from one temporary job to another, jumping on the first pickup that isn't al-ready filled to overflowing with temporary hands. Imagine being this migrant (the neoclassical economists' vision of workers in a perfect world), who has no contractual rights; no guaranteed wages, bene-fits or duration of employment; and no protections against arbitrary dismissal, hence no real labour law protections at all. Then add to this image that of an industrial migrant, who moves from factory to factory, making widgets of all shapes, sizes and colours in accor-dance with the local customs and beliefs—all of which are variations on the one true production ideology of minimum cost, maximum efficiency, mechanized labour and mass product uniform-ity. What would it be like to be this 'bat?' As one of these 'bats,' I can fill out the picture somewhat; however, having been both a 'non-bat' as well as a 'bat,' I would add that to really know what it's like being a 'bat,' you have to become one. And for those who may be comfortably situated in their respective missionary or mercenary stages, it would do them some good to live (not visit) on the other side for awhile. The change in perspective is profound.

 

Peter McMillan 153 On Pope Benedict XVI's Truth and Tolerance (October 2005)

Truth and Tolerance is a collection of essays on Christian beliefs (truth) and world religions/philosophies (tolerance) that were written during the 1990s (with the exception of the first essay) by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who is now Pope Benedict XVI. The book's title should be interpreted with an emphasis on the catholic (universal) truth of Christianity and its all-knowing and generous acceptance of inferior/incomplete views, not unlike Hegel's Spirit looking back over its own development and progression through its prior incomplete and contradictory stages.

The essays of primary interest for this article are from the second half of the collection whose focus is religion and truth. These es-says are 'The New Questions That Arose in the Nineties: The Position of Faith and Theology Today,' 'Reflections Prompted by the Encyclical Fides et Ratio' and 'Freedom and Truth.' The com-mon theme throughout is the defense of Christian absolutes, truth and certainty against cultural relativism and alternative religions (Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam), philosophical skepticism (Kantian phenomenalism and scientific positivism) and the politicization of spiritual governance (mass democracy and liberation theology). Cultural relativists deny Christianity's absolutist claims as the arro-gant pretensions of xenophobes and religious imperialists. Philosophical skeptics deny the possibility of human access to uni-versal (catholic) Christian truths. Democrats challenge the autocratic, hierarchical approach to God and demand a share of religious power—a sort of religious self-determination. Liberation theology, a variant of democratic pragmatism, demands an asser-tive metaspiritual role for the Church in addressing political and economic inequalities. As defender of Church doctrine, formerly Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger maintained the correctness of Christianity's truth claims against those who attempted to weaken and destroy Christianity

154 Willowing Skywardly with their modern and postmodern intellectual, moral, cultural and political arguments. Incidentally, Cardinal Ratzinger regards the fall of communism as a decisive rejection and failure of liberation the-ology's this-worldly aspirations and conversely a decisive victory for Church doctrine.

Cardinal Ratzinger's arguments are reminiscent of those portrayed in Dostoevsky's dual between truth and freedom in the dream scene from The Brothers Karamazov where Jesus returns to earth in 16th century Spain only to be imprisoned and interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor. Cardinal Ratzinger's view, not unlike that of the Grand Inquisitor, is that we are not free to choose truth and that freedom is therefore constrained by truth. Truth is from God and exists independently of human reason and willing and is therefore not available in the wide range of choices described by contempo-rary relativist theories. Truth provides the order, the structure, the organization which holds back and ultimately tames chaos. Free-dom in the extreme is anarchic and empty, e.g., Sartrian 'nothingness,' and can only be tolerated when under control. The apparent oppressiveness of truth is based on the misperception that freedom is sacrificed to truth when in fact it is the existence of truth that makes freedom possible.

The conflict between truth and freedom is as old as human social history insofar as some sort of social contract seems to provide the cohesive force for communities so that some part of the 'unlimited' freedom of the individual is exchanged for the order and security provided by the group. This social contract view compares favoura-bly with Cardinal Ratzinger's belief that freedom in the abstract is meaningless unless it is protected by the order and value that only truth can provide. Following the social contract metaphor, truth makes freedom possible ... and this is in sharp contrast to Dosto-evky's Grand Inquisitor metaphor according to which the sophistry

 

Peter McMillan 155 of the self-aggrandizing Church, under the banner of truth, enslaves and thus denies freedom.

Cardinal Ratzinger brings to the surface the tension between the acknowledged limits of reason and the accessibility of truth through faith. While the skepticism of Kant may be interpreted as frank ad-mission of human ignorance with respect to realm of the metaphysical, Cardinal Ratzinger suggests that skepticism really serves the interests of extreme human arrogance inasmuch as what is originally only ruled out of bounds eventually becomes of only marginal interest. In other words, relegating metaphysics to the uncertain and unknown—beyond even the fringe of human under-standing—effectively dismisses metaphysics from human knowledge altogether. So much then for the age-old metaphysical questions about God, the afterlife, spirit, humankind's place in the universe, etc.—all questions which admittedly have generated end-less and often bloody disputes but all of which have given humanity a perspective that is less anthropocentrically narrow-minded and conceited than that of philosophical positivism, which, with its prac-tical and technological bias, has sanctioned the industrial and post-industrial age's obsession with the technical mastery of nature and human behaviour.

Also apparent in the arguments of Cardinal Ratzinger is the tension between mediated and direct revelation (revealed truth), i.e., truth mediated by the Roman Catholic Church or truth dispersed among masses. Is truth a human construct, and if not, then do human hands corrupt truth when bringing it back to earth? How can one group of people know that they are being guided by truth from God as opposed to truth from a powerful group of their fellow men? Re-turning to Dostoevsky and the metaphor of the Grand Inquisitor, Jesus, the indisputable source of truth, was suppressed by the Church, and the truth that he instantiated was rejected in favour of an earthly parody and corruption of God's truth. In other words, ac-

156 Willowing Skywardly cording to Dostoevsky, for all of the Church's defense of the truth of Christianity, what in reality was being defended was a human insti-tution mediating as the power between God and man.

In Cardinal Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance, there is an absolute and knowable truth, and freedom is made possible by truth's exis-tence. Tolerance is the attitude of truth towards freedom and the humanity's attempts to discover truth. Instead of truth being op-posed to freedom, truth creates the world of possibilities without which, to paraphrase Kant, freedom is blind, meaningless and an-archic. Truth provides the order, the value and the meaning to an otherwise disorderly, valueless and meaningless freedom. Toler-ance is truth's magnanimous recognition and acceptance of the intrinsically incomplete and finite efforts of humanity seeking God.

References

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph. Truth and Tolerance (2004).

 

Peter McMillan 157 This Democracy 'Not for Export' (April 2006)

The New York Times

Front Page

April 15, 2006

For Immigrants and Business, Rift on Protests

By MONICA DAVEY

In Bonita Springs, Fla., 10 restaurant workers were fired this week after

skipping their shifts to attend a rally against legislation in Congress

cracking down on illegal immigrants. In Tyler, Tex., 22 welders lost their

jobs making parts for air-conditioners after missing work for a similar

demonstration in that city.

And so it went for employees of an asbestos removal firm in Indianapo-

lis, a restaurant in Milwaukee, a meatpacking company in Detroit, a

factory in Bellwood, Ill.

In the last month, as hundreds of thousands of people around the

country have held demonstrations pressing for legal status and citizen-

ship for illegal immigrants, companies, particularly those that employ

large numbers of immigrants, have found themselves wrestling with dif-

ficult and uncharted terrain....

When hundreds of workers were fired for taking part in protests against pending legislation in Congress that would crack down on illegal aliens in the U.S., they learned a harsh lesson in civics.

It's one thing to believe that government will generally respect con-stitutionally protected civil liberties, in this case the First Amendment's guarantees regarding freedom of speech and free-dom of assembly.

However, it's an altogether different matter to expect business owners and management to allow the world of politics and democ-ratic expression to interfere with production. For many owners and managers who expect a kind of feudal loyalty in return for employ-ment, the right to vote is thought to be enough democracy. Protest 158 Willowing Skywardly and dissent are thought to represent the harmfulness of too much democracy, since they express criticism and dissatisfaction with the 'best of all possible worlds' and contradict the superficial optimism that drives markets ever higher, until ….

It's got to be difficult for outsiders (i.e., new immigrants) to wrap their heads around the notion that in a democratic society there can be such radically different worlds—one where individualism is re-spected and protected and another beyond the constitutional archives, where the logic of business sorts out what fits and what doesn't.

Needless to say, the form of democracy that is being marketed worldwide should be clearly marked 'For Export Only' so as not to get confused with the actually existing democracy in the U.S. (or here in Canada for that matter).

 

Peter McMillan 159 Why Don't People Like Bush? (April 2006)

Is it because he's stupid? Well, would you say that's the exception or the rule for people in authority?

Is it because he seems to want to be a dictator (or at least king)? Well, is that common or uncommon among those in power?

Is it because he's hypocritical? Well, is hypocrisy really so rarely seen among those who rule?

Maybe the reason why Bush is disliked is that he has become a stand-in punching bag for all of the abusive authority that we feel we can't rebel against in our everyday lives for fear of serious and swift retribution.

Well ... so what if Bush is a lightning rod for all sorts of anti-authoritarian sentiment? Should we step in to defend him against our pent-up anti-authoritarian rage?

Nah!

First of all, there is the ever so remote chance that he can be brought down, and it's a good thing to rein in the almighty every now and then. Second, even if he isn't impeached or forced to re-sign or demonized in the 2008 presidential election, he will at least have given us a common object to safely curse, despise and ridi-cule.

It's better than reality TV.

 

160 Willowing Skywardly Don't Let the Political Cartoons Fool You: These Guys May Be Too Smart For Watergate (April 2006)

Would Nixon's imperial presidency have been brought down had the Watergate break-in never been discovered?

Maybe we'll have a clue to the answer, if the Bush Administration doesn't caught red-handed breaking the law in its own bungled plumbing job.

More and more often comparisons are being drawn between the Nixon and Bush presidencies. Both are associated with foreign wars that have divided the American public. Both are associated with wartime tactics that raised constitutional issues. Both sought greater powers for the presidency on the grounds of executive privi-lege and national security.

Both adopted extreme measures to plug leaks to the media. Publi-cation of the Pentagon Papers was the big leak for Nixon, while the CIA's secret interrogation prisons in East Europe and the National Security Agency's illegal domestic eavesdropping are only Bush's most recent big leaks. So far Bush has managed to survive the big leaks and the damning revelations, most notably the falsehoods used to justify the Iraq War and then the prisoner abuse and torture sanctioned by the war on terror which, after all, is not a war like any other war, and therefore has no rules.

If Bush is not impeached and is not forced to resign from office, then that can be considered evidence that Nixon, too, could have avoided impeachment and resignation had he simply not been sucked into the Watergate scandal.

By avoiding, or not getting caught in, outright illegal activity, Bush may escape the intense, prolonged congressional scrutiny of all of

Peter McMillan 161 his administration's dubious actions. As long as government agen-cies can effectively intimidate and silence internal criticism and dis-dissent, it may not even be necessary to burgle offices in downtown Washington D.C.

In fairness, there probably aren't any American presidents who did-n't cross the line at some time. On the other hand, even though there might be some historical fairness in letting Nixon and Bush off the hook, there is good reason to judge them harshly. That reason has to do with the evolution of the office of president, an evolution that ought to be guided in the direction which keeps to the belief that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To have steered a course towards tyranny and not to recognize it as such is to create conditions favourable for a dangerous repetition.

 

162 Willowing Skywardly O Canada ... Where Art Thou Going? (June 2006)

As a result of its recent terrorism scare, Canada has been unwill-ingly thrust on the world stage, this time not as the world's peacemaker and peacekeeper but as a nation that has to face up to some pretty harsh choices about how to balance national security against civil liberties.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative Party would be ex-pected to follow a course not too different from President Bush in the U.S. and Prime Minister Blair in the UK. However, the Canadian electorate has been more than a little reluctant lately to give either of the viable national parties (Conservatives and Liberals) a re-sounding vote of confidence in the form of a majority government. So, the Tories do not have carte blanche.

In a British-type parliamentary system, minority governing status is the most effective check on the abuse and misuse of government authority, and Canadians have used this weapon many times in the past. In 11 of the 39 federal elections since independence, no sin-gle party has won a majority of the seats in the House of Commons—the most recent instance being the January 2006 elec-tion, which brought in a Conservative minority government. And, if that is not enough, Canadians have turned the governing party out of office entirely in 16 elections, again most recently in this year's election, which terminated the scandal-ridden Liberal government.

Now, Canada's democracy faces a test arguably even greater than that posed by the corruption scandals that brought down the Liber-als. The recent arrest of 17 alleged terrorists, with potential links to the enemy of President Bush's 'war on terror,' has put Canada un-comfortably on the front pages of the world's newspapers. Now Canada has some really important policy decisions for the world (including the U.S.) to watch.

Peter McMillan 163 Two institutions which have figured prominently in protecting Can-ada's democracy up to the present—a multiparty system and a free press, which necessarily complement one another—will be severely tested over the next little while.

Should the need arise, will they be up to the task of exposing do-mestic spying, denial of due process, torture, fearmongering and 'clash of civilizations'-style foreign policymaking?

 

164 Willowing Skywardly On Regicide (June 2006)

Ben Metcalf’s 'On Simple Human Decency,' from the June 2006 is-sue of Harper's Magazine, makes a playful case for regicide but a more important and provocative case for curbing presidential power. Among the many comments and questions that the piece will elicit, here are just a couple.

First, is it possible to imagine there ever being an acceptable occa-sion for the overthrow of an American Government? If government becomes a tyrant, then in keeping with good Anglo-American politi-cal theory, the governed are said to have the right to defend themselves by revolution. However, just how bad would things have to get before such a political revolution could occur? Imagine how hard it would be to give up American electoral democracy, even if it had degenerated into one party rule. Credit Harper's with raising the spectre of political revolution, however far-fetched, to the level of political debate with its April 2006 cover story 'American Coup d'Etat.'

Second, the problem of the Bush Administration is much bigger than President Bush, so regicide does not get to the root of the problem. Just as the nd Washington Post’s June 22 editorial "Close Guantanamo?" argued, closing Guantanamo Bay, as an isolated action, would be of limited value as long as the U.S. detentions at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan, secret overseas detention facili-ties used by the CIA and the endless limbo between POW status and criminal defendant status persisted. Even if the King’s head were lopped off, there would still remain those who created him and those who followed him, whether out of ideological sympathy, a re-gime-neutral sense of corporate loyalty, or renewed respect for the limits of democracy in the workplace in light of Garcetti v. Ceballos.

 

Peter McMillan 165 It would be in vain, silly and servile to pine for a wise leader who will bring out the best in his subjects. Instead, expect every Presi-dent to want to be King, but let none succeed.

 

166 Willowing Skywardly On Feudal Loyalty (July 2006)

Subservience to those above, severe discipline towards

those below, and only in the third place competence—this

is the prevailing order of selection criteria. The result is that

the productive and creative elements suffer from an in-

crease of mediocrity, indeed incompetence, dishonourable

behaviour and insecurity in official positions, not to speak

here of the political standardization that is required. (Ru-

dolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe)

Rudolph Bahro, East German dissident, was writing about the bu-reaucracy of centralized planning in the German Democratic Republic—the hierarchical and overlapping bureaucracies of the Party, of the State, of the factories, etc.

For those familiar with the history of the Cold War, communist Europe and the dissident writings from behind the Iron Curtain, Bahro's pithy statement about party loyalty/fealty was striking mainly because it was the sort of stuff that we in the West did not expect to pass the censors. Bahro was able to bypass the East German censors by smuggling a copy of The Alternative into West Germany where it was duly published, although he was subse-quently and unduly arrested and imprisoned as an enemy of the people.

Now that European communism is dead, isn't it ironic that Bahro's words still have some resonance ... here in the free market, liberal democratic West?

We are taught and persuaded and sometimes coerced into believ-ing in the anti-feudalism of democracy and its natural, universal and irrevocable principles of fundamental human rights respecting “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But then we see what we see

Peter McMillan 167 and we hear what we hear, and it doesn’t seem to connect to the comforting metaphysics of Western political thought.

President George W. Bush has probably done more than most to show us what we in the West are still capable of becoming. Sub-servience, tyranny and dubious competence—for most of us, these are the hallmarks of the Bush Administration. This would include those whose economic and psychological well-being is tied up with the hyper-dominant feudal hierarchy that leads up to King George and then upwards to that super-secret society of queer hand-shakes, winks and nods where one would nevertheless likely recognize some familiar faces in the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense and maybe even the President of the World Bank.

It is unbelievably easy to rally an audience around a severe critique of President Bush, and so much the better, because otherwise, if President Bush were highly regarded worldwide, there would be good reason to give up in despair for the human condition.

However, President Bush is in some respects like European com-munism—an easy target to critique but also a target that can easily divert our attention from targets much closer to home.

Staying with the Bush Administration for a moment, the term 'kiss up/kick down' is apparently a well-circulated term, as it was used in a New York Times' article to describe current U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton's management style while he was at the State Department. Although not as evocative or provocative as Bahro’s language of subservience and tyranny, ‘kiss up/kick down’ comes to the same thing. It is all about feudal loyalty – one’s place in the hierarchy and one’s identity and well-being derived therefrom.

Moving from the centre of public attention to the periphery of per-sonal experience, the same pattern of feudal loyalty emerges.

168 Willowing Skywardly There is the classic management speak from a former vice-president of a local commuter school in downtown Toronto, which goes as follows: "If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem." Enthusiasts of ‘Bushisms’ will recognize this one as a variant of something like this: “if you’re not with me on the war on terror, then you’re probably a terrorist.”

Those who have experienced corporate restructuring may have heard this one: "Keep your lips as close to so-and-so’s ___ as you can," although it may not have been so clearly stated as it was in the case of this senior manager in the Ontario Ministry of Education who, for all his good advice, must have been wearing a blindfold, because he was soon departed.

Quite likely, everyone who has worked for a Fortune 500 company, whose survival depends on endless acquisitions and state-of-the-art accounting, e.g., Computer Associates, is familiar with the com-bined performance evaluation/loyalty test that follows on the heels of a major merger announcement and precedes a lot of ‘career moves.’

Those who have interviewed for factory supervisory positions, e.g., with Xerox, where the questionnaires were developed before the term ‘human resources’ became fashionable, will probably recall questions like "Would you enjoy or dislike teaching 4th grade boys?,” which seems to get to the point without being overly vague.

Then, finally, back to the world of academia, some may appreciate the incongruity between the world of academic freedom—one of the few places where there is protection of civil liberties even in the workplace—and the Ryerson professor's self-acclamation "I'm nei-ther fish nor fowl." Obviously, a wise educated man who can hedge his bets on where his loyalties lay.

 

Peter McMillan 169 So, Bahro’s critique of East German society seems to find suitable targets here in the West, too. This, of course, means that the con-tempt in which we were told to hold communism can find its long lost home here in the West. While conformity and hierarchical power are no less the rules of the game in the West than they were in communist Eastern Europe, you may not recognize the similari-ties unless and until you experience the anti-epiphany of your own Darkness at Noon. Identity and well-being are not easily maintained independent of some feudal chain of loyalty, which is perhaps the tragedy and the curse of John Donne’s well-worn coin “no man is an island.”

 

170 Willowing Skywardly Retreating from Iraq? (November 2006)

Why a change in course?

There is increasing pressure on the White House to develop an exit strategy that would bring about an immediate and significant de-escalation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Anti-war sentiment continues to climb alongside the daily reported casualty and death tolls, not unlike the not so long ago East Asian war in Vietnam. De-spite the highly publicized Iraqi elections as evidence of America's success in transplanting democracy to the Muslim world, the esca-lation of violence in Iraq seems to have tipped the country into civil war. The rising costs of the war in terms of American blood com-bined with the increasingly bleak outlook for American success of any kind has created great and gathering disaffection in the U.S. with President Bush and his Iraq policy. The November 7 th con-gressional elections which stripped the President's Republicans of their House and Senate majorities can fairly be interpreted as an American rebuke of the President and his failed policies. What is worth remembering, at what may mark a momentous turning point in U.S. foreign policy, is that half of voting Americans seem to have already sensed the foolhardiness and arrogance of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, while the other half voted for President Bush a sec-ond time.

What was behind the original plan?

So what were we doing in Iraq in the first place? At first, we were told by the Bush administration and one of the most respectable members of his cabinet, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, that there was sufficient evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs to warrant pre-emptive, if not preventa-tive, military intervention, even if waged unilaterally. Now, we know that the so-called casus belli, or justification for war as they say in

Peter McMillan 171 international law, was a fabrication of an incompetent or complicit intelligence community. Sounds like Vietnam, where it was Presi-dent Johnson who stage-managed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident in order to propel a massive escalation of combat troops into Viet-nam.

Scrambling for a new message to market the Iraq war, the White House decided on the missionary theme of delivering democracy to the Muslim world. Policy wonks in America's great think tanks started dusting off their histories of U.S. efforts in rebuilding post-war Germany and Japan. This seemed plausible for awhile. But then the insurgency followed by civil war have threatened to un-dermine Iraq's electoral democracy by stripping away the most basic right of freedom from arbitrary physical violence. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to maintain strong diplomatic relations with non-democratic regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Paki-stan, and Kazakhstan. Behind the face of democratic evangelism is the face of realpolitik. Even the hidden, self-serving motive of seek-ing to gain control of strategic oil reserves—an American foreign policy priority since the oil embargo of 1973-74—has failed to im-press the American public, at least that part of the American public whose inflated gas bills have not been more than offset by record profits in their oil and gas industry stocks.

How do you acknowledge failure?

So, just like in Vietnam, once you know that the game is up, how do you get out? At one end of the spectrum are those who advise get-ting out of Iraq now for the following reasons. The U.S. has no reason to be there in the first place, and now, it is only making the situation worse. The war began with lies, the occupation continues with lies, and with that knowledge, American casualties in Iraq can no longer be justified. Civil war is in progress in Iraq, and there is

 

172 Willowing Skywardly risk that the chaos in Iraq will destabilize the region. However, there is nothing more that the U.S. can do to improve the situation.

This 'retreatist' view, in whatever variant, including the one ad-vanced in George McGovern's essay in the October 2006 edition of Harper's Magazine, is irresponsible. It would be irresponsible for the U.S. to ignite the flames of civil war and anarchy in the Persian Gulf and then abruptly leave, promising help from a distance ... over time.... The Balkanization of Iraq would become the legacy of America's military overthrow of Iraq's authoritarian government— hardly a victory. It does not really matter to Iraqis or anybody else that this was President Bush's war. The U.S. is committed to Iraq, and it does not matter whether the President is George W. Bush or Hillary Rodham Clinton or whomever. It is a commitment, damages have been caused and liability should be attached. If the U.S. fol-lows the advice of McGovern and others, it will still be one and the same America that invaded Iraq, then precipitated civil war and then exited the battlefield with hands in the air and a shrug of the shoulders.

How can the damage be undone?

McGovern, in his article with William Polk, provides some ideas in 'The way out of war: A blueprint for leaving Iraq now.' However, the biggest problem with the retreat now and give moral and financial assistance later is—and this is brutally cynical—that once the troops are home the urgency of restoring law and order in Iraq dis-appears. But even more cynically, until and unless the price of this war reaches a level that disgusts a decisive majority of Americans there will be other wars just like Vietnam and Iraq—misconceived, misrepresented and mismanaged.

So, broadly speaking, having been invaded and occupied by the U.S. military, Iraq deserves ironclad security and re-building com-

Peter McMillan 173 mitments from the U.S. The U.S. military should stay the course if only to absorb fully the consequences of a misconceived war. This version of staying the course is not the same as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's views—the Cold War domino theory up-dated for the Middle East and radical Islam—as described in Bob Woodward's State of Denial. Indeed, the U.S. should not retreat, but it should go back to the nation building drawing board and fig-ure out how to provide security against civil war and belligerent neighbour states, how to rebuild the war-torn physical infrastruc-ture, how to provide reparations payments for damages caused by American foreign policy and how to promote international checks and balances against abusive power (just in case the domestic ones fail again).

An American tragedy—a democracy that has become too powerful for the world's good?

Thus far, U.S. foreign policy in Iraq is a failure. The one positive is that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been deposed, convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. However, does this outweigh the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths during the war and the occupation, the nearly 3,000 U.S. dead, a civil war with no end in sight, the U.S. faced with another Vietnam debacle and U.S. moral leadership compromised? What effect will the U.S. failure in Iraq have on longer term global oil supplies and prices? Will U.S. influence among key Persian Gulf states decline, and will U.S. interest in democracy in the Middle East be sidelined? Will other countries and non-state actors act more recklessly in the belief that U.S. military force is incapable of successfully waging protracted conflicts? Will the U.S. ever be able to regain its credibil-ity as a world leader in championing universal democratic rights and freedoms? These are difficult questions, which cannot be eas-ily answered by the sound of retreat.

 

174 Willowing Skywardly The Arctic Maquiladora (December 2006)

The Spanish term maquiladora refers to the Mexican border factory located in a special export processing zone, where the costs of regulatory compliance are subsidized or otherwise reduced in order to attract foreign, usually U.S., multinationals.

Along the industrialized northwest shore of Lake Ontario, one can find the Canadian version of the maquiladora—the Arctic maqui-ladora. Along this industrial corridor, factories and warehouses employ large numbers of temporary workers. This temporary labour force provides a surplus of cheap, flexible, unorganized and dis-posable labour for U.S. multinationals such as Xerox, Kraft, Dana and CTDI, which have low-end manufacturing, storage and distribu-tion facilities along the corridor. The temporary workforce also increases overall employment figures so that Statistics Canada can present optimistic labour market statistics for the government's in-formation departments/ministries and for secondary consumers of government-produced economic data.

Notwithstanding the alleged scientific and non-political claims of mainstream economics, government and business collusion in cre-ating the legal arrangements whereby employers can acquire labour on an as needed basis is a classic example of the political nature of economics. In response to such government and busi-ness collaboration, French workers rioted in the Spring 2006 to protest the 'flexible' labour law that would exempt employers from giving cause when dismissing workers under the age of 26 who have less than two years employment. On the other hand, the European Central Bank, the European Union's counterpart to the Bank of Canada, is well known for its persistent advocacy of labour market reforms—reforms which would essentially make wage-benefit packages downwardly flexible to reduce the stubbornly high levels of unemployment in Europe's welfare states.

Peter McMillan 175 Governments are keen to portray themselves as the custodians of a strong economy with tolerable levels of unemployment and pros-pects for economic growth and increasing employment. As the International Monetary Fund commented in its 2003 post-mortem of the 2001-02 Argentine crisis, "combining an increase in labor mar-ket flexibility to U.S. levels with a 5 percentage point reduction in the payroll tax rate could have halved the unemployment rate," bringing it down to approximately 10 percent. Through the informal stakeholder selection process common to bureaucratic governance, business interests emerge as key stakeholders who are well repre-sented and well placed during the economic policy planning and development process. Not surprisingly— although not fully appreci-ated for its impact on democratic principles—business uses its influence, both during and in between elections, to get tax relief, subsidies, contracts and, in this case, lower labour costs through regulatory immunity.

The economic efficiency of maximum employment at minimum costs is what mainstream economists teach as value-neutral, scien-tific economics in universities, in Fortune 500 companies and in federal, provincial and local governments. Paraphrased, the idea is that if business is freed to operate in feudal-like independence of the state, then corporations will be able to influence unemployment levels, keeping them neither too low (which would be inflationary) nor too high (which would be incendiary).

A comparison of the modern corporation with the landed nobility of the Middle Ages is useful to draw attention to the parallel relation-ships between corporations and government in the modern age, on one hand, and the aristocracy and the monarchy of the Middle Ages, on the other hand. Each helps the other govern in its respec-tive domain. Political and economic power flow mainly between these two groups—between corporations and government in the modern world and between the lords and the monarch in the feudal

176 Willowing Skywardly world. In each world, as in a federal system, there are shared and reserved powers, so that the rights and responsibilities of the sub-jects in the larger society are delegated from two different sources.

This comparison highlights the important and controversial point that actually existing democracy falls short of the rhetoric of democ-ratic idealism and fails to convincingly demonstrate the best of all possible worlds. The political power of the ordinary voter, limited as it is to elections, is overwhelmed by the interest group and stake-holder politics that takes place in between elections and mostly behind the scenes of the elected parliaments and councils and even of the news media.

In the political realm, the individual rights of democracy are not what they seem, but in the economic realm—the world of busi-ness—the rights of the individual become even less discernible. Joining a corporate organization involves a contractual agreement according to which the individual receives economic benefit in ex-change for work and also forfeits certain rights, which might apply in the political realm. The justification of corporate supremacy is one of the primary contributions of business-academic partner-ships—among the most influential corporate image and ideology shapers being the Harvard Business Review and the Chicago School of economic thought. Dissent is certainly not acceptable; conformity is expected. The demand for loyalty is exaggerated be-yond what would be imaginable in the political realm. Corporate values—from the prime directive to maximize profits to the post-Enron primer on business ethics—supersede all other values. In accordance with one's compliance with the rules, an identity is made, circulated for a time and then retired.

It is completely disingenuous to claim objectivity for the field of eco-nomics given the unmistakable collaboration within the business-academic-government community of inegalitarian lords and their

Peter McMillan 177 economic advisors. Furthermore, this alleged science-based objec-tivity provides for a rhetorical separation of the political and the economic. The separation is rhetorical as it is clearly unmistakable that in the real world of state capitalism there is no such line of de-marcation between politics and economics. Nevertheless, this rhetorical separation of the scientific from the political persists, and it has the negative consequence of denying that freedom from arbi-trary and overwhelming violence is just as valid in the economic realm as it is in the political realm. Unchecked power in the eco-nomic realm threatens to unleash with Nazi-like inhuman efficiency a world where universal human rights based on natural law are re-placed by a world where political human rights are nominal and economic human rights are based on privilege, i.e., one's place in the feudal hierarchy.

As long as the political and the economic can be kept apart, the perpetuation of asymmetric rights and freedoms in the political and economic realms can be maintained. As long as there remains some significant level of political human rights, totalitarianism can be held at bay. However, as long as there continue to be significant inequalities in economic human rights, economic authoritarianism is unchecked and presents a constant obstacle to universal political freedom. And so the Arctic maquiladora is, or should be, an embar-rassment for Canadians, since it reveals the hypocrisy of Canadian political, business and academic leaders who pride themselves on not being obsessed with power, wealth and status like their Ameri-can counterparts.

 

178 Willowing Skywardly On Tyrannicide … by due process? (January 2007)

"For they that are discontented under monarchy call it tyranny." (Levia-than, 142)

Introduction

In March 2003, the U.S., with less than unanimous support from its Western allies and the UN Security Council, invaded Iraq and re-moved the Iraqi government from power. The Iraq War was launched on the pretext that Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian re-gime, its anti-U.S. animus and its weapons of mass destruction and terrorist connections represented a threat to U.S. national security. Under new American foreign policy guidelines for pre-emptive war, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, therefore, a legitimate target for inva-sion and regime change.

By April 2003, Saddam Hussein’s government had been over-thrown and replaced by the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Administration (CPA). As the occupation government for Iraq from April 2003 through June 2004, the CPA removed the old guard, created new laws and attempted to bring peace, security and jus-tice to a country long victimized by the violent abuses of power of a seemingly invincible tyrant. Among the legislative acts of the CPA was the creation of the Iraqi High Tribunal – a new court created to address the human rights crimes, including war crimes, of the dicta-torial regimes of the past forty years.

In 2005, Saddam Hussein was brought to trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal on charges related to the deadly government retaliation against those involved or sympathetic to the failed assassination attempt on Hussein in Dujail in 1982. A year later, the Iraqi High Tribunal found Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and or-dered that he be sentenced to death, with the sentence to be carried out within 30 days. In record-breaking time, the Appeals

Peter McMillan 179 Chamber of the Iraqi High Tribunal refused to challenge the verdict or the sentence, and on the last day of 2006 but one, Saddam Hus-sein was hanged. Despite Hussein’s removal, the Iraqi High Tribunal has proceeded with the Anfal case of the 1988 massacre of Kurdish civilians by the Iraqi military’s use of chemical weapons. While Hussein was dismissed as a defendant after his execution, the trial and judgment in the Anfal case is expected to validate the verdict of the Dujail case.

The title of this essay raises questions about the conflict between tyrannicide and the rule of law. The prospect of conflict emphasizes the apparent contradiction between rendering a judgment that never was in doubt (that Saddam Hussein was guilty of crimes against humanity) and establishing the legitimacy of the trial and the execution (both for the transition from tyranny and for history). In considering the potential conflict between tyrannicide, on one hand, and due process and equality before the law, on the other, the principal issues involved questions of jurisdiction (who judges), the rule of law (how the judge judges) and the Western perspective (how we see the judges and the judging).

Jurisdiction

First, on the issue of jurisdiction, should the trial have been con-ducted before the Iraqi courts or through the international courts? This important question evokes profound issues concerning sover-eignty, justice and self-determination. Was Iraq acting as a sovereign nation in trying, sentencing and executing Saddam Hus-sein? Was the Hussein trial and execution an act of national justice in the sense that the Iraqi courts, acting on behalf of the Iraqi na-tion, held Hussein to account for violating the implicit social contract between the government and the people? Was the Iraqi nation, rep-resented by its national judiciary, determining its own future as it exacted punishment for crimes committed by its former sovereign?

180 Willowing Skywardly Before answering these questions, consider the following. Why was Hussein not tried before the International Criminal Court or even a special tribunal as in the case of Slobodan Milosevic who was tried before the International Criminal Tribunal of Former Yugoslavia? Were the reasons for Iraqi jurisdiction similar to those used to justify the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem? Was it necessary for Iraqis to judge the man who had victimized the Iraqi nation in order for the era of the tyrant to be ended and the stage set for something bet-ter? Was there doubt as to the verdict and sentence that might be handed down by an international court or to whether a verdict would even be reached? Was this case to be a precedent for the supremacy of national courts in human rights jurisprudence?

Rule of law

Second, on the issue of the rule of law, were due process and equality before the law compromised to the point that the verdict of the Iraqi judiciary is invalid? According to Human Rights Watch, a leading international human rights monitoring organization, the rule of law was violated in the Hussein trial. But in the case of a de-posed head of state, and a tyrant at that, what does equality before the law mean? Similarly, how much does it matter whether the jus-tice is delivered by means of pro forma due process—a show trial— where the veil of legal justice is lifted momentarily to reveal revenge and retribution for arbitrary violence and death at the hands of a ty-rannical head of state? Does the rule of law bend in the case of tyrannicide so that the outcome can be guaranteed? Usually the question is whether the head of state is above the law, but in this case, the question is whether a tyrant may be beneath the law.

Western Perspective

Third, on the issue of the Western perspective, how much of West-ern political theory and history is projected onto the Hussein trial

Peter McMillan 181 and execution? From Anglo-American political theory developed in the crucible of constitutional struggle in 17th century England, Tho-mas Hobbes, author of Leviathan and defender of authoritarian law-and-order government, grants Leviathan’s subjects freedom from their ruler when he can no longer provide protection against anar-chy or foreign invasion. Likewise, John Locke, author of Two Treatises on Government and defender of the parliamentary su-premacy, allows for the use of force to resist the tyranny of either King or Parliament. Although neither explicitly advocates tyran-nicide, both allow that a tyrant can be removed from power and hint that the deposed tyrant may be subject to a lesser standard of jus-tice.

The Western political legacy includes two important events relevant to the Iraqi trial and execution of Hussein. First, in 1649 during the English Civil War, King Charles I was executed for plotting to over-throw the Commonwealth. Second, in 1793 during the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was executed for conspiring against the new French Republic. In English and French history, tyrannicide marks a watershed in the development of democracy. As in the case of Iraq, not all English or French agreed with their respective verdicts. Nevertheless, will tyrannicide be an epochal event in the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the important differences that Iraq’s tyrant was deposed by a foreign power and that the trial and execu-tion took place while a foreign military patrolled the streets of Baghdad?

 

182 Willowing Skywardly H. and the Castle (June 2007)

1st backdrop Production opens with the distant picture of the

castle: flags flying on the four towers, great stone walls rising from the isolated mountain top, a huge arched door open and revealing a busy marketplace inside and row on row of arched windows on the second and higher lev-els where brightly-colored banners flutter in the breeze.

The castle has long been a symbol and bastion of justice,

where freedom from arbitrary detention and punishment has

been extended gradually to everyone … in principle.

On September 11, 2001, the castle was attacked.

2nd backdrop The huge arched door entrance to the castle is

now closed.

In June 2004, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the

President, through his military, could detain people— even

Americans—as 'enemy combatants' indefinitely and without

formal charges as long as these detainees were given some

opportunity to question their detention.

3rd backdrop The castle wall is solid from top to bottom with

no windows or doors.

In December 2005, the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) be-

came law and blocked foreign 'enemy combatants' from

using the U.S. federal courts to challenge their detention.

 

Peter McMillan 183

4th backdrop The huge arched door reappears and is slightly

ajar.

In February 2006, the Supreme Court allowed the case of H.

(a foreign 'enemy combatant') to proceed, since it was al-

ready pending when Congress passed the DTA.

In June 2006, the Court ruled that the President's special

military courts were unconstitutional.

 

5th backdrop The great castle door has disappeared and a

new, smaller door has appeared on the 2nd story, but there are no stairs.

In October 2006, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) was

signed into law, reversing the Court's June 2006 decision.

Congress explicitly authorized the President's special military

courts and categorically denied habeas review in all foreign

'enemy combatant' cases.

In April 2007, a reconstructed Supreme Court was given the

opportunity to consider the constitutionality of the MCA, but

the Court avoided the case.

 

6th backdrop A ladder has been placed against the castle

wall giving access to the 2nd story door.

In June 2007, the military judges in two separate military

commission cases, including the case against H., ruled that

the President's special military courts did not have jurisdic-

tion.

 

184 Willowing Skywardly Final backdrop Production ends with the 6th backdrop slowly

rising, but the curtains close before the audi-ence can see whether in the final backdrop the ladder and the door are still there.

At the end of the Supreme Court's 2006-2007 term, the

Court reversed its April 2007 decision and agreed to hear

the case of the foreign 'enemy combatants.'

The Court will reconvene in October 2007.

 

Peter McMillan 185 The Project (July 2007)

It was the most optimistic of times. Innovation was satisfying tastes we never knew we had. And low prices made the increasingly nec-essary new gadgets and things affordable. It was a time of confidence. Business was booming—profits were breaking records, and ever larger numbers watched the omnipresent ticker. Workers were gainfully employed— unemployment had nearly disappeared. Money and credit were as easy to come by as drinking water. Prosperity was the word for the age.

We, i.e., humanity, or at least the thinking part of humanity, had be-come confident that we were in control of the future. The last great war was over, and capitalism had trumped socialism and was des-tined to become the greatest organizing force in history. The vast Western market was unopposed as it swept over the collapsed Iron Curtain and throughout the developing world.

All of this was happening on the grand stage of world history where the Zeitgeist—a converted and ardent capitalist—was becoming its potential. Skeptics said we'd invent a new basis for worldwide con-flict—these were the 'clash of civilizations' people. However, for the most part, we were inclined towards the notion that we had seen the promised land and found it accessible.

Much further down at the level of particularized existence, we indi-viduals were also becoming our potential. What animated the Zeitgeist on the world historical stage also animated us on the stage of everyday life. Dynamic innovation, maximum profit, full employment and unlimited buying power—these had become the great universal principles, which determined and organized our lives.

 

186 Willowing Skywardly In the workplace, assimilation of change was sometimes difficult. When considered outside the context of the grand world historical development that was reorganizing human history, the changes looked to be no more than just the automation of the white-collar workforce. But when viewed properly,

• standardization of goods, services, processes and

people

• flexibility of inputs and input prices/wages to re-

spond to unexpected changes in market supply and demand

• efficiency of lowest cost production to ensure

wage/price flexibility

• portability of production to maximize efficiency

through competition

• discipline to enforce compliance with standardiza-

tion and flexibility

• predictability through standardized flexibility and

• quality control for uniform products/services

were all essential components for the new universal economy that would deliver

• market-renewing innovation

• continuous business expansion

• ever-rising profits

• full capacity employment and

• easy money/credit needed to keep the whole thing

going.

The project was often the means by which these changes were in-troduced at the micro level. Not having an assembly line, the office environment needed to be structured, and the project provided that structure. The project had a prescribed beginning and end, defined

Peter McMillan 187 inputs and outputs, process flow for converting inputs to outputs, progress milestones and quality control checkpoints. All workloads could be managed by project, and projects could do it efficiently, cost-effectively and always on time, on budget and in scope. All work could be packaged into standardized project modules. As packages, projects could be shipped anywhere, unpacked and run anytime always with the same uniform result.

Coming to the end of the 1990s, I was a believer. It seemed like we had reached something like the 'End of History,' with capitalism and technology and, of course, democracy, freedom and liberty in the ascendancy. It seemed reasonable that business logic was pene-trating every aspect of our lives—transforming governments, countries and ordinary people into entrepreneurial cost/benefit cal-culators. Order was necessary to produce certainty. Conformity, normalization and something called the long view were necessary for order.

As I said, I was a believer in those heady days at the end of the mil-lennium. Not only did it seem like the logic of business was inevitable, it also seemed that it was for the good—more money, more things, more security, etc. In addition, in this world where God had disappeared, we had found a new one. Now, more than ever, one could feel proud and respected for believing and promoting something as big as God. And so, the logic of business seemed unassailable—it satisfied both material and spiritual needs.

My first assignment was also my last. I thought as a consultant that I could bring the logic of business to primitive work environments. I was not prepared to accept defeat even though I encountered one red flag after another. For two years I believed that the logic of business could overcome even the most obstinate culture. Now, having failed miserably, lost my career as a consultant and ended up as an industrial migrant in Canada's rusting auto corridor, I can

188 Willowing Skywardly look back and spot some of the signs that I missed, while neverthe-less catching a glimpse of the action on the larger stage. Below is a sample of indicators, which point to a work culture that is openly hostile to business logic and capable of holding out—at least for a generation or two—against even the mighty Zeitgeist. Project people call them red flags, because they signal disaster.

 

Everyone on the seven-member interview panel looks ready

for a nap—in fact there are traces of dust on their eyelids.

When they say that they are family-oriented, they mean that

everybody is related to everybody else.

The guy you will report to is a master illusionist and a dead

ringer for Groucho Marx.

The employee turnover is remarkably low, but when it does

occur there is usually a memorial service.

You feel like you're walking through one of those grainy '70s-

style movies of the week.

The building has no windows and no mirrors.

That's the level of detail where individuals matter. It is far removed from the great stage where the action shows the irresistible force meeting the immovable object and pulverizing everything in be-tween. But at the proper distance, one can miniaturize a particular project in its environment at a specific point in time and still see the larger backdrop of the Zeitgeist and its irresistible force imposing its form as the sea shapes the coastline. By now, the reader may wonder where we get the idea that the Zeitgeist brings progress and not just change.

First published in Events Quarterly, June 2007.

Peter McMillan 189 Eichmann in Phnom Penh (November 2007)

Thirty years after the genocide began, Cambodians have a chance to bring to justice the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge re-gime. Pol Pot, whose name is synonymous with the Cambodian genocide from 1975-1979, died in 1998, but others are alive and can be held accountable for the horrific period in Cambodian his-tory, which remains open for so many. On November 19th Khieu Samphan became the fifth Khmer Rouge leader to be arrested to face charges before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a special war crimes tribunal convened to try Cambo-dian genocide cases.

Forty-six years ago a similar trial was held in Jerusalem. Kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina, Adolph Eichmann was tried for war crimes and crimes against the Jewish nation for his role in the World War II holocaust in Europe. Hannah Arendt, who covered Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker, coined the phrase ‘banality of evil’ to capture a different kind of evil and a different kind of crimi-nal. Such a man was Eichmann—perfectly ordinary and not sadistic and murderous. But self-exiled from reality, he became one of the world’s most evil men. Driven by self-promotion to blind obedience and tunnel vision efficiency, Eichmann actively facilitated unspeak-able atrocities.

Now, enter Khieu Samphan, the Paris-educated Communist intel-lectual and Cambodian head of state during most of the Khmer Rouge's management of the killing fields, on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Khieu Samphan denies knowledge of and responsibility for the killings. As he wrote in an open letter to all Cambodian newspapers in August 2001, “I was only a scholar.” Unlike Eichmann who, as an SS lieutenant colonel, was only a mid-level functionary in the Nazi regime, Khieu Samphan was a mem-ber of Pol Pot's inner circle. Yet Khieu Samphan maintains that he

190 Willowing Skywardly did not have the authority to commit murder, let alone mass mur-der, and did not even know about the government’s program of mass murder until years later.

In the case of Khieu Samphan, it is the intellectual, not the bureau-crat, who is so far removed from reality. As a Communist intellectual in postcolonial Indochina, Khieu Samphan's remoteness undoubtedly has something to do with what Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács described as class consciousness. Class conscious-ness is the recognition of the historical role of the proletariat in Marx's dialectical materialism, and it is not to be confused with con-sciousness of class, which is the trivial and the mundane consciousness of the workers who must be made to see the future. For Khieu Samphan, dwelling in the abstract concept of class con-sciousness would understandably have removed him from the reality of the killing fields. The killing could be attributed to the ne-cessity of the dictatorship over the proletariat and of the inevitable march of history.

However, a claim of 'not guilty' on Khieu Samphan’s part by reason of ignorance or impotence or intellectual otherworldliness suggests what Arendt might have called remoteness from reality. And the lesson from Jerusalem was that this remoteness from reality “can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.”

Like the Eichmann trial, Khieu Samphan's trial will be held in the country called home by victims of the genocide. The Phnom Penh court, like the Jerusalem court, is basically a national court, albeit with UN underwriting, that reserves the sovereign right to deliver justice to the nation of Cambodia for the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge during the late 1970s.

If Khieu Samphan is found guilty, he may go down in history as Cambodia's Eichmann—a facilitator of mass murder in a regime

Peter McMillan 191 where the ends justified the means and the long run was all that mattered.

 

192 Willowing Skywardly The War Flower (November 2007)

Every year in the week leading up to November 11th, the red poppy blooms across Canada. It's part of the ritual remembrance of Ca-nadian wars and casualties, the price of freedom and the victory of good over evil.

Among Canadians, the war poppy is about all of these things, but it's about something else as well. It's about the rightness of confor-mity and assimilation through received truths.

Jostled and tossed about in the bustling crowds in train stations, airports, shopping centres and sporting events in the days leading up to Remembrance Day, you cannot help but be struck by the sea of red poppies, rising and falling and sweeping up everything in its way. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone without a red poppy pinned to a coat, jacket, sweater, blouse, shirt, hat, scarf, necktie or backpack.

These red poppies, memorialized in the solemn war poem 'In Flan-ders Field,' mark the dead from bloody World War I battles in northern France and Belgium. Here in Canada, today in the 21st century, this war poem is the liturgy and the red poppy the icon for the annual observance of remembrance and sacrifice.

There is, however, a casualty that often goes unnoticed. There's little remembering just why Canada went to war in 1914, whether the guys on the other side really were evil monsters, how exuberant patriotism and thin-skinned nationalism can distort reality, or whether war can ever be thoroughly revolting one or more genera-tions removed. And there's little distinction between the due respect and pity for those consumed by the war and the dubious notion that fighting and dying can always be given meaning by the just cause.

 

Peter McMillan 193 Worst is the poem’s eternally recurring and disturbing call to arms for all who remain ... undead.

First published in Arts and Opinion, Vol. 18, No. 5, 2019.

 

194 Willowing Skywardly Long Live the Queen (December 2007)

While some in the UK, Canada and Australia question the rele-vance of the monarchy in 21 st century democratic society, I think the U.S. should consider adopting the Queen.

It's not without some hesitation that I recommend this. After all, I'm an American living in Canada, and there are a lot of people up here who still think the American Revolutionary War went the wrong way. For both sides, the myths and passions from our distant past are still very strong and difficult to escape. But now, the British Em-pire is only a scholar’s memory, and American sovereignty and constitutionalism are well-established. So, it seems that an Ameri-can constitutional monarchy might be compatible with American independence history.

Having sworn an oath of allegiance to the Queen for a provincial government job, I have had to argue the pros and cons of monar-chy for many years. For the sake of a clear conscience, I interpreted my oath to be my consent to respect the laws of Can-ada, a sovereign nation, where the Queen is just a symbol for the supremacy and continuity of the rule of law, yada yada yada.

So, why suggest that the U.S. adopt the Queen? First, so many Americans are fascinated with larger than life figures, including Brit-ish royalty. The Queen, properly controlled, can be an important social safety valve for leader worship. As a figurehead, her political power would be limited, but she would still command respect and admiration. Second, as reigning monarch, she could resist ambi-tious presidents who would step on the ballot box to reach the throne.

Monarchists argue that since governments come and go, there must be something that persists through changes in government.

Peter McMillan 195 There must be something, they add, that withstands the violence of coups and the reign of dictators. That something, they say, is the monarchy.

That leads to the third point. With the most powerful standing army in the history of the world, what if a U.S. president one day an-nounced an end to U.S. military engagements and deployments overseas? Would there be a coup, and would it have the support of a redundant military? Who would represent the government in ex-ile?

That role could fall to the Queen, who is already the head of state for Canada and a few island countries. As the head of the constitu-tional democratic state of the U.S.A., the Queen would command loyalty to the Constitution and to the principle of limited and non-arbitrary government. She would be the symbol of the resistance.

But what if the Queen expanded the scope of the royal prerogative or collaborated with a megalomaniacal president? Well, the British haven't always played the supine servant to their monarchs. Having a monarchy doesn't mean you can't knock their blocks off or swap Houses when they get out of hand. This is the ultimate safeguard. It even comes with its own 17th century political treatise. The Queen is the penultimate check.

 

196 Willowing Skywardly Language Catching up with Thought (July 2008)

We think through language, but we also think prior to language. These two statements are at the centre of a longstanding debate about the priority and primacy of language versus thought. In this summary paper, only one view will be featured, although it will be described with reference to its competition. The view in this paper is that thought creates the initial conditions for the emergence of lan-guage and that generally, the world of language is a subset of the world of thought. Bloom and Keil refer to the priority of a ‘language of thought:’

Before being exposed to words in a language such as

English, all humans possess the concepts that these words

correspond to, as part of what Jerry Fodor (1975) calls

‘mentalese’ or a ‘a language of thought.’ Under this view,

as Fodor puts it, all language learning is actually second

language learning – when a child learns the vocabulary of

English all that happens is that the child learns the map-

pings from the English words onto the symbols of this prior

language of thought. (351)

Pinker, one of the leading proponents of the view that thinking is prior to using language, continues with Fodor’s metaphor of ‘men-talese:’

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate

mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People

without a language would still have mentalese, and babies

and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler

dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to

translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning

English could take place. (1994, 82)

For these authors, ‘mentalese’ or non-linguistic cognitive represen-tations convincingly demonstrated that thought is prior to and

Peter McMillan 197 always behind language. That is not, however, to deny that thought and language interact causally, but it is different from the opposite view, stated by Boroditsky:

It appears that acquiring abstract concepts requires ex-

perience with language and that the eventual form of these

concepts is largely shaped by the language experience….

Language can be a powerful tool for shaping abstract

thought. When sensory information is scarce or inconclu-

sive (as with the direction of motion of time), languages

may play the most important role in shaping how their

speakers think. (20)

Boroditsky is careful to avoid defending a straw man argument, de-claring that “the strong Whorfian view—that thought and action are entirely determined by language—has long been abandoned in the field” (2). Even so, language is assigned the primary role for ab-stract conceptualizing. Slobin agrees that the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is unsupportable:

For one, language is only one factor that influences cogni-

tion and behavior. For another, if the Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis were really true, second language learning and

translation would be far harder than they are. (Slobin)

It is undisputed that language facilitates the internal and external expression of thoughts, but from the perspective that language is always catching up with thought, we are able to think thoughts be-fore we have words to linguistically communicate these thoughts. As human communities, we continuously add words to fill the lexi-cal gaps—gaps which are always emerging due to the dynamic nature of social conditions and needs. Borges reminds us that even in the imaginary Tlönic languages in which there are no nouns, the moon rose over the sea can be translated into the verb-based ut-

198 Willowing Skywardly terance upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling or the adjectival cluster airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky. But either way, the linguistic formulation is a reflection of the Berkeleian idealism of the planet Tlön (Borges 10-11). Pinker makes a more general argument about the motive force behind lin-guistic change:

Another reason we know that language could not deter-

mine thought is that when a language isn’t up to the

conceptual demands of its speakers … they simply change

the language. They stretch it with metaphors and meto-

nyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or

coin new slang or jargon…. Unstoppable change is the

great given in linguistics, which is not what you would ex-

pect from [Nietzsche’s] “prisonhouse of thought.” (2007,

149)

And so language is always changing to meet the demands placed on it by thought and experience, including linguistic experience. Pinker adds that even in the face of Orwellian totalitarianism— referring to the 1984 prediction that Newspeak would eliminate all nonconformist thought by 2050—maintains that the “concepts of freedom and equality will be thinkable even if they are nameless” and that since concepts will greatly outnumber words, “existing words will quickly gain new senses, perhaps even regain their original senses (1994, 82).

While we may always experience language change and perhaps even linguistic progress, as long as the horizon recedes to infinity there will be an ineffable. The ineffable may be inexpressible, be-cause it is only indirectly accessible (e.g., the Kantian Ding an sich) or it may just be a lexical gap, which may be closed eventually. The world of science may be considered an example of ineffable or my-thologized experience that is now more formally thinkable and linguistically expressible. However, domains like religion and meta-

Peter McMillan 199 physics remain as elusive as ever. As Chien-hsing Ho puts it, lin-guistic access to the external world must be balanced by the use of language that does not overreach:

[L]anguage continues to be our very important access to

reality…. Abandoning language would unwisely sever our

relationships with others and with the world around us….

Whenever we can we should do our best, adopting the fit-

test way of expression, to express what seems ineffable….

But, with due respect to language, we must not think lan-

guage knows no limits. (422)

This expression of the effable and the ineffable is reminiscent of the Kantian worlds of phenomena and noumena—the former a world that we think and talk about and the latter one about which we can at best speculate. The noumenal world and the ineffable world are, however, distinguished by the fact that the latter is even more inac-cessible. As the Chan poet Hanshan writes:

My heart-and-mind is like the autumn moon,

Brightly reflected in a crystal-clear lake;

Nothing can make a good comparison,

How then shall I put it into words? (Chien-hsing Ho 422)

In summary, the examples of language catching up with thought— childhood L1 language acquisition, language change in linguistic communities, and L2 language acquisition—combined with other evidence of thought preceding language—animal communication and the transcendentally ineffable—support a strong case for Pinker and his colleagues who reject the linguistic determinism of Sapir and Whorf. The implications of successfully countering lin-guistic determinism are several. It does not lead to the conclusion that there are innate ideas. But it does suggest the idea of Kantian-like faculties that make experience possible and are therefore in-nate and a priori. But unlike Whorf’s linguistic dissection of nature,

200 Willowing Skywardly this one is conceptual and pre-linguistic. Furthermore, Bloom ar-gues that the line of causality in Whorf’s linguistic determinism is flawed:

[C]orrelation is not causation; the fact that people who

speak different languages tend to belong to different cul-

tures does not entail that language has a profound

influence on thought. So although there is a strong impres-

sion that the language one speaks must influence how one

thinks, we think that this impression is more seductive than

it is instructive. (365)

In conclusion, if a person's language limits do not reflect the limits of his/her thought, then for ESL teachers the corollary is that an L2 English language learner's thoughts will likely exceed his/her Eng-lish linguistic performance. The L2 ESL student will be doubly burdened by the frustration of thinking thoughts that he/she can ex-press adequately in his/her L1 language but cannot yet express in English and by the prejudice that he/she will experience when oth-ers correlate linguistic performance with intelligence and knowledge.

Works Cited

Bloom, Paul and Keil, Frank C. 'Thinking Through Language.' Mind & Language 16.4 (September 2001) 351-367. Boroditsky, Lera. 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time.' Cognitive Psychology 43 (2001) 1–22.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.' Ficciones. Trans. Alastair Reid. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993.

Ho, Chien-hsing. 'Saying the Unsayable.' Philosophy East and West 56.3 (July 2006) 409-427.

Peter McMillan 201 Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Lan-guage. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994.

Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2007.

Slobin, Dan. 'Language and Thought.' Linguistic Society of Amer-ica.

 

202 Willowing Skywardly Supplementary Notes

Bloom (364) – “Language may be useful in the same sense that vi-sion is useful. It is a tool for the expression and storage of ideas. It is not a mechanism that gives rise to the capacity to generate and appreciate these ideas in the first place.”

Chien-hsing Ho (421) – “The ineffable can never by touched, in part or in full, by human concepts and words. The ineffable can only be indirectly and rather vaguely expressed and conveyed.”

Pinker (1994, 59-60) – quoting Benjamin Lee Whorf, “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impres-sions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech commu-nity and is codified in the patterns of our language.”

Borges (10-11) – in 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' Borges describes the imaginary world of Tlön in which there are no nouns. In one of the languages, the verb is the basic unit of language. In this lan-guage, "The moon rose over the sea" would be translated as "upward beyond the constant flow there was moondling" or alterna-tively "upward, behind the outstreaming it mooned." In another Tlönic language where the monosyllabic adjective is the basic unit of language, our noun moon would be replaced by an accumulation of adjectives such as airy-clear over dark-round or orange-faint-of-sky. The point is that the languages of Tlön presuppose thought—in

 

Peter McMillan 203 this case the idealism of the 18th century Irish philosopher, Bishop Berkeley.

 

204 Willowing Skywardly