Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

A plea to housemates

A supposed value of the Boy Scouts is to leave every place they visit in better condition than when they arrived. ‘Better’ is the critical word here. This is not a matter of walking into the ruins of a depraved binge and bringing it to Martha Stewart’s standards. Rather, it’s about the courtesy and precaution where, regardless of the state in which you encountered a room or a counter-top or a sink or a shower, you depart only when it is in a state marginally better than when you arrived. Wash a fork and put it on a drying rack; wipe away the hair from the edges of the tub; empty the odorous waste bin.

Wilkins Micawber, in Dickens’ David Copperfield illuminates a related point:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

The applicability of this to living with housemates is clear. Doing just a little bit of damage to the state of a shared facility – leaving the detritus of your shaving around the bathroom sink, adding some unwanted food to an overflowing garbage can – produces an effect out of proportion with the seriousness of your contribution to the mess.

People function largely through some conception of social license. They judge their behaviours less with reference to logic, external and abstract questions of morality, or personal moral codes than by the immediate responses of people nearby to what they have done. In this way, every little contribution to shared filth is interpreted by everyone sharing the space as license to do the same and worse.

Life is generally unkind to those who live by the dictum I am suggesting. Once you realize that the single empty cup sitting unwashed in the sink is an invitation to leave the burned pot full of failed tomato sauce in the same position, you will be endlessly cleaning up the messes of others. That said, it has always been the fate of the least filth-tolerant in any living situation to do more than their share for hygiene and, furthermore, if you can convey this basic ethical framework to the people around you (both words and your good example are always necessary), it’s possible a few souls can be rescued from the reckless socially-reinforced worsening of the quality of life for all.

Andrew Coyne on Peter MacKay’s departure from politics

His career at the top of Canadian politics tells us more about the state of Canadian politics than anything else. That such a palpable cipher could have remained in high office for nearly a decade is a testament to many things: the thinness of the Tory front bench, the decline of cabinet, the prime minister’s cynicism, the media’s readiness to go along with the joke. The one thing it does not signify is his importance. He had all of the titles, but little influence, and less achievement.

Hopefully this is a case where the most obvious interpretation is correct: senior Harper Conservatives expect to lose the next election, and are distancing themselves from the defeat in advance. Of course, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the Liberals and NDP to ruin their own chances.

Inequality, instability, and politics

The inequalities of being at U of T are weirdly mixed together and overlapping in my life now. It’s weird to live in one of the most expensive parts of Canada, but regularly find it worthwhile to walk for 90 minutes rather than spend $3 for the subway. It’s weird to be at one of the world’s better universities, and to observe the way in which resources are allocated. Teaching staff and research staff essential to the basic purpose of the university have to fight for pay increases that keep up with inflation, yet we keep building luxury sports facilities. It’s strange to turn out my empty palms for beggars, no longer because I think direct financial transfers to them are more damaging than beneficial, but because it’s now necessary to think about every dollar.

Faced with all this and looking at the political landscape in Canada and the United States, there seems to be a sad consensus among politicians that action on the necessary scale is politically impossible. I would like to see a major North American political party say that we have totally screwed up policy-making, especially since the 1980s. Other countries like Scandinavian states are obviously governed much better, so we should abandon the failed Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney project and establish a system that works better, both for those who are living today and for those in future generations.

Prioritization

Today I had to pull out from an academic collaboration because I don’t have time for that, striking, preparing my PhD research proposal, finding somewhere to live after Massey, and updating the fossil fuel divestment brief.

This is a further illustration of why it is probably pointless to aspire to any sort of long-term work in a university (don’t tell your committee members, though, lest they cast you adrift).

Nonetheless, I think the situation is OK. Fighting climate change is the most important thing any of us can do and, judging by the weak-willed involvement of most U of T faculty, being a professor isn’t much help in the struggle. We have to assume that the world is going to become more and more challenged by forces of destruction, and our chance for countering that depends on new strategies, coalitions, and ideologies.

One advantage of being a student for so long, and of spending times working for good pay paying off debt or saving for more school, is the expectation of a modest standard of living. As a brilliant essay by my hero George Monbiot points out, a big part of freedom is being able to live cheaply.

We have an exceptional struggle ahead of us, and nobody who aspires to social justice can really aspire to personal prosperity at the same time. We can aspire to be among the people who future generations curse less – the ones who didn’t rationalize excessive consumption or dwell in apathy, but who tried to be strategic and political and focused on what matters most.

CUPE 3902 tentative agreement

I am at Convocation Hall for a meeting of the members of CUPE3902 Unit 1 – the union for teaching assistants at the University of Toronto.

We are discussing a tentative agreement which the bargaining team reached with the administration late last night.

To me, the proposed deal looks deeply inadequate. They are proposing wage increases of 1%, 1%, 1.25%, and 1.25% over the next four years.

For starters, the Bank of Canada calculator shows that the real value of the funding package has fallen by 9.89% since it was set in 2008. In addition, the proposed wage increases don’t even keep up with inflation for the years in which they happen.

We will see what happens in this meeting, but I hope my fellow union members won’t accept something so inadequate. The objective here is to get beyond poverty wages for TAs – not to reduce them further.

A couple of thoughts on Tolkien’s writing

One neat thing about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the way in which the story is set within multiple frames. The Hobbit, for instance, is sometimes presented as the account written of his adventures by Bilbo Baggins. It is also presented as part of the Red Book of Westmarch: a fictional collection of hobbit-written texts.

There are times, however, when another level of narration is introduced. An all-knowing narrator hints about events that will happen long in the future (for instance, speaking of Bilbo and the eagles: “Bilbo never saw them again – except high and far off in the battle of Five Armies. But as that comes in at the end of this tale we will say no more about it just now.”), or comments about the ways in which characters have misunderstood their situation (as when Bilbo climbs one of the shorter trees at the bottom of a valley and mistakingly concludes that Mirkwood forest extends great distances all around him). One way in which this narrator jumps out is in terms of using modern metaphors quite out of place in Middle Earth – talking about trains, gunpowder, and telescopes.

This higher-level narrator, I would say, is Tolkien himself, speaking directly to the reader. The relationship is a playful one, as well as one that frequently tries to create sympathy. The reader is often reminded of places where characters are not at their best because of hunger, fear, fatigue, and the like.

All told, it’s an enjoyable and useful element in Tolkien’s masterful style of storytelling.

Another aspect of the books which I appreciate (and which was quite lost in Peter Jackson’s films) is that Tolkien never makes the enemies encountered by the protagonists into pure mindless monsters. We hear orcs talking to one another – sometimes complaining about how little they enjoy servitude to Sauron. Even the giant spiders in The Hobbit speak with one another before Bilbo starts to provoke them. Such character development contrasts positively with the film version of the orcs, who are simply incompetent sword-swingers lined up in the thousands to be slaughtered by the heroes in excessive battle scenes.

Fry on language

The brilliant Stephen Fry on the balance between rule-following and tiresome pedantry in language use:

I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

On ‘love of country’

Love of country! There’s a curious phrase. Love of a particular patch of earth? Scarcely. Put a German down in a field in Northern France, tell him that it is Hannover, and he cannot contradict you. Love of fellow-countrymen? Surely not. A man will like some of them and dislike others. Love of the country’s culture? The men who know most of their countries’ cultures are usually the most intelligent and the least patriotic. Love of the country’s government? But governments are usually disliked by the people they govern. Love of country, we see, is merely a sloppy mysticism based on ignorance and fear. It has its uses, of course. When a ruling class wishes a people to do something which that people does not want to do, it appeals to patriotism. And, of course, one of the things that people dislike most is allowing themselves to be killed.

Ambler, Eric. Journey into Fear. (New York: Knopf, 1943; rpt. Bantam), p. 166.