The stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live.  On the flip side, expressly fictional tales can help make underlying or barely conscious stories that actually do shape our lives more explicit, more reachable.  Good contemporary American fiction can do that—can inform as well as entertain, can help reveal ourselves to ourselves.  Here are reviews of two books that in quite different ways do that: American by Day by Derek B. Miller, and Rough Animals by Rae DelBianco.

There’s more to life than mulling over weighty concerns, fretting about the latest Trump lie, thinking about how to fix what’s broke, or worrying about our grandchildren’s future.  A good book offers entertaining diversion from the sometimes grim or disturbing realities of the contemporary world.  But at precisely the same time, paradoxically, it can also help us see that world—certain aspects or dimensions of it, anyway—perhaps more clearly.  I wish you happy reading.

American by Day (2018), by Derek B. Miller

Miller, Derek B. 2018 American by Day.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

This is a fine, smart, often humorous, often serious novel that explores what a Jungian analyst might call the contemporary American soul. Paraphrasing one of the blurbs on the back cover, it has the brains of literary fiction in the body of a thriller.

American by Day explores aspects of contemporary America through the eyes of its Norwegian protagonists. Viewing today’s America from this European perspective, a reader might think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous nineteenth century study of Democracy in America (originally published in 1835.  No doubt with this parallel in mind, Miller throws in one or two references to that work.)

Surprisingly for a thriller or crime novel, and also in part why it straddles the two genres, the major characters are good people—smart, compassionate, caring, conscientious. They are imperfect, some more so than others, with their own quirks and foibles; but they don’t easily divide up into “good guys” vs. “bad guys” or heroes fighting criminals.  The two or three peripheral and least likeable characters work nominally on the side of law and justice, although in flawed and misguided ways that reflect some of the broken edges of American life.  Its unusually rich character development helps set American By Day off from the run-of-the-mill “thriller.”

The story lines weave around the main characters’ respective struggles to keep their humanness, and each other, within a system that is fundamentally broken by racism, inequality, bureaucratic indifference, and a prevailing focus on political “optics” rather than truth or justice.

Two deaths that had already occurred in a small community in upstate New York set the stage for the novel’s narrative. A policeman known for his “alt-right” sympathies shot a young  black boy who was holding a realistic-looking cap gun as he played in his yard with two white friends.  A local grand jury called the incident an understandable if regrettable error and exonerated the cop without even sending the matter to trial.

Subsequently the boy’s aunt, a bright, beautiful, young black woman professor named Lydia Jones died after falling from the sixth story of an unfinished abandoned building.  Murder, suicide, accident?  It’s not clear.  Her Norwegian lover Marcus Ødegård is implicated in some way in her death—we don’t know how until the end.

Marcus disappears after Lydia dies. The narrative begins as Marcus’s sister, Sigrid Ødegård, a police chief in Norway, puts her job on hold and comes across the Atlantic to upstate New York to find Marcus, help sort things out, and hopefully somehow untangle him from the craziness of American life that he’s become caught up in.  A picture of America—American culture and American justice—unfolds from the perspective of this intelligent and perceptive northern European who must navigate an explosive mix of racial tension, politics, and a fragmented local justice system to save her brother.

Knowing Marcus as she does, Sigrid is certain that he could not have murdered Lydia; but he was at the scene, and the local officials have testimony of what sounds to them like a confession before he disappeared. Even more, they desperately need to tamp down seething anger in the Black community that threatens to erupt into violent riots by charging someone for Lydia’s death—and who better for the purpose than a white foreigner.

Irv Wylie, the local sheriff with whom—and sometimes against whom—Sigrid must work is less sure than she is of Marcus’s innocence, and is under great pressure from above to put the incident to rest.  Initially trained in philosophy by Jesuits, Sheriff Irving Wylie is very smart also; and he is committed to finding the just, and not just the most expedient, resolution.  Sigrid and Sheriff Wylie eventually track Marcus to a lake deep in the Adirondacks where they find him just as he contemplates suicide. His story as he tells it to them there finishes unravelling the complicated skein of personal and cultural tragedies that led to Lydia’s death.

As the story unfolds, Sigrid’s penetrating observations of American culture help open Irving’s eyes to see more clearly the plights of the Black families who helped vote him into office. Toward the end, the sheriff addresses a largely Black congregation in a moving—call it a sermon/confession—in which he helps defuse Black anger over the two deaths and explains what really happened to Lydia.

Some of the book’s more astute explorations of American life come out in conversations between Sigrid Ødegård and Sheriff Irving Wylie, but another nice instance occurs in one of the book’s flashbacks.  I’ll close with it. Marcus Ødegård has come across some of Lydia’s publications, and tries to understand his lover and what happened to her by reading them.  As you would expect of someone in her shoes, she writes about race, culture, and the American identity.  Here Marcus comes across a transcript of an interview with Lydia conducted by Darren Farley, published in the journal Daedalus.

Lydia says that “The primary structuring ideas of American identity—the ones that sustain us as a culture through time—orient us away from dealing with racism, not toward dealing with it.”

But Darren asks: What about “liberty and justice for all, and equality and civil rights?”  Those are the basic American values, aren’t they?

Lydia: “In my view, all those wonderful values are reposed on something else. We think they’re core, but the aren’t…. [Ask yourself:] ‘What’s the gravitational center that holds those ideas together? What is the organizing principle, as it were, that keeps them in orbit?’ If you spend time on it, you’ll find that a productive answer is ‘individualism’ and the worth of the single person. In one way, that is very beautiful. But it’s also pretty unyielding.”

DDarren: “So individualism is the problem?”

Lydia: “It’s not so much a problem as a paradox, isn’t it? It’s both the problem and the solution.” If you carry individualism too far, as the current “conservative movement” in America does, it “negates discussion of race and racism.  It makes any effort to pay attention to group needs divisive.”

But, she continues, “this perspective is overpowering and insurmountable maybe because it’s deeper than race. it’s deeper than politics. it’s a culturally organizing system. it’s how we achieve Americanness. It’s how we do Americanness….  [To fundamentally undo racism] requires people seeing with different eyes; eyes that would force them to unravel and redefine their American selves.  And that’s the one thing we can’t do, because it’s the only thing that binds us all together. One can’t escape the observation that America historically enslaves groups, but only frees individuals.”

That might give you a taste of some of the insights about American culture that twine through this novel.  They do contribute to its interest.  For me, they even tie nicely into some of the same issues I explore in this blog. But fundamentally it is the engaging and moving story that Miller shapes within the contours of American culture that his characters reveal that makes this a good read.

I’ve read sociological/cultural studies of various aspects of American life and the modern world generally.  Sometimes I say “ah ha, yes”; other times I scratch my head, not quite getting it; and occasionally I ask myself, “what planet is this guy from?” But no journal article or sociological tome or textbook made me laugh out loud here, and then brought tears to my eyes a few pages later.  It is an unusual work that can so well weave seriously perceptive analyses and critiques of aspects of contemporary American culture and identity together with a very human story in which the abstractions become the lived experience of believable characters.

 

Rough Animals (2018), by Rae DelBianco.

DelBianco, Rae 2018 Rough Animals: An American Western Thriller. New York: Arcade Publishing.

I started out not liking this book—almost deleted it from my Kindle e-reader before getting into it.  It seemed crude, almost clumsily atmospheric, too consistently negative, the characters over-drawn and not quite real.  It could hardly be more different from American by Day.  But eventually a kind of poetry in the prose, the force of the writing, a compelling descriptive imagery of the characters and the situations they created, and the landscapes through which they struggled, drew me in, reluctantly at first, and kept me reading.

Under DelBianco’s pen the Utah badlands take on much the same qualities as the mythically struggling humans who inhabit them.  Even the trees bleed—box elders some of which show the red stains of an infestation when cut into.  The landscapes of the novel, their harshness and implacable indifference to human lives and purposes even as humans struggle in, for, and against them, beautifully described, take on the substance of a being or character in their own right within storyline of the book.

This is an example of a style of writing and thinking that sees light only in the shadows that it casts. It moves forward by slithering from one patch of darkness to the next, suggesting but never directly acknowledging the light that surrounds and defines them.

The book’s human characters seem altogether to lack beauty—yet like the land itself a kind of rough beauty emerges in their relationships to each other, to the land, and even in their unrelenting commitments to the purposes that drive them.  They sometimes seem as much or more animal than human as they stumble or painfully drag or fight their ways through the different scenes with physical and psychological wounds of varying severity, often leaving literal trails of blood.  Rough animals indeed. Graphic, sometimes almost poetic, descriptions of how they look and act keep the reader aware of their physicality above all—that below their fragile surfaces they are blood and tissue, organs and skeleton, viscera and bone. They live, and die, precariously, each in his or her own way as a paradoxical and uncomfortable mix of indomitable will and vulnerable, very physical, mortality.

I won’t summarize the story or further describe the characters. There is a good, long, and quite favourable review by TinoBee on Amazon.ca, if you want, that does all that. Let me just say that in the end the book is worth reading. But for me, my initial ambivalence never wholly dissipated.  Maybe that’s just to say that it’s not a comfortable book—isn’t meant to be.  Don’t expect an easy ride.

Moral Cross-Currents & Political Rip-Tides

In the present era of globalization we live in not just a smaller but an ever more divided world.  Space shrinks, distant regions get interconnected, no place is truly remote, cultures diffuse and meld.  As the world becomes more like one integrated globalized planet geographically, and even in some sense culturally, divisions along religious, political, and philosophical lines get deeper, more sharply defined, more intense and divisive.  The picture is one of conflicting moral visions in an increasingly secular world.

Setting aside international conflicts, we see deeply contradictory trends even within developed North America. Our cultural life gets ever more secular, rational, interconnected, and bureaucratically managed in both its public and private sectors, while at the same time old battles over conflicting moral visions intensify and new ones break out.

Long-running opposition to abortion, often religiously motivated, clashes with the ideals of freedom and autonomy for women to make that difficult life choice for themselves. Immigration increasingly becomes a flash-point here and in other parts of the world in the wake of inequality and war. Do we let suffering people in, or do we protect our own jobs and resources for ourselves?  Terrorism, both home-grown or directed from elsewhere, politically motivated or seemingly random—as in the rising number of school shootings in the United States—poses growing ever-present threats.

These worsening ills provide fertile ground for fear-mongering and demagoguery, which further divides and degrades our public lives.  Unfortunately, there is no lack of examples, and one of the most obvious is unfolding now (June 21, 2018), going from bad to worse as I write.  Trump has had immigrant families separated, infants torn from their parents’ arms, to protect us, he says (playing to fear and prejudice), from terrorists and criminals pounding on our borders.  Now he parades victims of violence committed by immigrants in front of news networks to make his point.

The truth is, however, that vulnerable immigrants are among the groups least likely to commit violence against American citizens. See here or here or here).   This is not the truthful, responsible leadership that I’d like America to show the world.

In yet another arena, conflicts over environmental issues continue to deepen, breaking out in overt resistance by environmental activists leading to arrests and occasionally violence. On a larger scale, economic interests pit local concerns against perceived national interests. As I write this, the province of British Columbia in Canada, where I live, digs in its heels in intense opposition against the federal government and neighbouring province Alberta over the proposed Kinder-Morgan TransMountain Pipeline Expansion.   B.C. fears oil spills and other environmental damage from the huge project.  

More generally, true believers in the laissez-faire “free market” clash with those who think that democratic government exists in part precisely to regulate and constrain the capitalist market for other (some would say larger) values. In today’s world that centuries-old conflict of opposing moralities gets even sharper and breeds its own movements like the 1999 demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and the more recent 21st  century “Occupy Wall Street” movement.

The modern world, it was thought (or hoped), would embody the Enlightenment dream of a harmonious (or at least increasingly well-functioning) order based on reason. But this happy dream recedes ever farther behind the clash and clamour of conflicting moral visions.

Economic Inequality as a Moral Problem in Today’s World

Other long-simmering conflicts with moral dimensions are also moving more center-stage, catching the public eye as they become more critical. Economic inequality is a big one, and I want to focus on that for a moment, beginning with what a few representative authors and commentators are saying.

Rising to the extremes we see today, runaway economic inequality, says Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, existentially threatens democracy and democratic ideals.  Commentator Umair Haque, points to our extreme inequality as one of a number of “social pathologies” (along with the opioid crisis, school shootings, homelessness). On top of these he adds indifference to these evils: unconcern in the face of others’ social suffering, the uncaring “normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes…”

Taken together, he says, these problems signal the demise of America as already, or nearly, a failed state. “American collapse, [already] much more severe than we suppose it is…”, he says, represents “a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel.”

Author Thomas Homer-Dixon in his popular 2006 book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, also sets his sights on inequality as a moral failure. “There are two things we can say with certainty,” he concludes after reviewing recent economic data: “Never in history have the differences of income and opportunity among us been so great, and these differences are prima facie evidence of a moral failure of almost incomprehensible magnitude.”

The basic dynamics of civilization seem to always create inequality—some more, some less.  A characteristic of all civilizations, inequality has now become an acute problem for us.  The commentators cited above are among the growing numbers of people, ranging from concerned citizens to Nobel-winning economists, who recognize it as such. The level of inequality we’re reaching raises more sharply defined, widely considered and openly debated moral questions than ever, as well as unprecedented fears for the future—especially in the U.S.

The Moral Burden of Policies that Foster Inequality

If a social condition like extreme inequality carries a moral burden, then so do the policies or events that bring about that condition. If it evokes moral responses of condemnation or outrage like those illustrated above, then the policies that result in that condition of inequality also fall under the same moral judgements. In that light we do need to look critically at the economic and social policies that have dominated U.S. politics, that catapulted the runaway inequality we’re experiencing off the starting-blocks.

Remember the clash that I mentioned earlier, between free-market fundamentalists and those who want government to control the market to protect vulnerable people, the environment, and other social values like equality. The free-marketeers have overwhelmingly prevailed in setting policy in the U.S. (and many other countries as well, most notably, Britain), by and large, since the late 1970s or early ‘80s, creating the rising inequality and deteriorating social values that critics and protestors point to.  There aren’t many cause-and-effect relationships in society that are more clear than this one between neoliberal policies and rising inequality.

The policies we have been living under that favour free markets and limited government above all else follow a political philosophy known as neoliberalism. The extreme inequality we’re seeing now came in with neoliberal policies in the United States pursued by both Republican and Democratic political leadership beginning with Reagan in 1980. To just the extent that increasing economic inequality carries a moral burden, so also do the neoliberal policies that worsen inequality—and that discourage or deny actions to mitigate it—carry an equal or even greater moral burden.

---

Even though neoliberal economic policies pervade and govern our lives—and have done for the last nearly four decades—the term “neoliberal”is not well-known. Neoliberalism for us is like water for fish, so all-encompassing it’s invisible. Author and commentator, George Monbiot, calls neoliberalism “the ideology that dominates our lives [yet] has, for most of us, no name.” If you want to know more about neoliberalism, its place in our lives and its relation to runaway inequality, Monbiot’s article is a good start. If you google “neoliberalism and inequality,” you’ll find lots of other sources on the relation between them ranging from the academic to the popular.

---

So, to put it in simplest terms, if extreme economic inequality—concentrating a country’s wealth in ever fewer hands—is immoral because it causes human suffering, stunted opportunities and even deaths for many, then so are neoliberal policies that produce inequality also immoral. In that case, politicians and policy-makers who pursue neoliberal agendas (and ironically often parade under the banner of one moralism or another) in fact act immorally.

The Relativity [?] of Moral Judgment

Ahh, if only it were so simple! Actually, I think on one level it is that simple and straightforward. But some layers of complexity and confusion have to get worked through first. I’ll mostly save that for later, and just briefly mention one major complication for now.

It has to do with the relativity of moral judgement in the modern world. Neoliberalism has its own essentially moral precepts—its own moral vision rooted in a particular view of human nature. Sure, maybe it results in inequality; but, given human nature, isn’t that the price we have to pay for freedom and progress?

Neoliberalism expresses a set of beliefs, a philosophy, that has its own moral framework; and its followers—some of them, anyway—sincerely believe in the rightness of the precepts that underly it. They believe in its (their) own vision of the good. Maybe we have a different vision of the good—different understandings of the scope of human possibilities. But how can we tell someone else that their moral code is wrong, without ourselves falling into the wrongheaded errors of ethnocentrism, moralism, or even bigotry? How can we rightly or fairly judge one moral framework from the standpoint or standards of another?

One answer relates to the factual basis of the moral frameworks in question. This goes back to territory that I touched on earlier here, and here.  I’ll pick it up next time, and try to tie the problem of conflicting moral visions in setting public policies together with what I’ve been saying in earlier posts about human nature.

It’s a paradox—being a human in today’s world. For one thing, as I wrote recently, some of our central social and economic institutions, along with the habits of thought that go with them, are based on old ideas and beliefs that have gone obsolete.  But these batty ideas still live on in entrenched  institutions that originally embodied them, and still govern how we actually live day-by-day.

One critic of ideas that should be dead but live on anyway calls them “vampires” of the mind, and “the philosophical undead.”  Another writer, economist John Quiggin, turns the spotlight on “zombie economics“—that is, “dead [economic] ideas that still walk among us.”

Others use more academic and less colorful descriptions.  Sociologist Brian Singer, for instance, writes that the idea of the social contract as the basis for social and political life no longer has standing in today’s social sciences.  It’s simply not credible, either as fact or as theory; but it still won’t die.  In his own words, the notion that human society came into being as a rational contract between naturally separate individuals gives way to “the empirical basis of the cultural critique,” surviving only “as a technical fable to uphold and elaborate the normative dimensions [the values] of [our own] political life.”

Institutions that still embody undead ideas remain central to our present way of life. They include the (impossible to realize) self-regulating capitalist economy, predatory corporations guided solely by the bottom line, and even in some respects our institutions of democratic governance.

---

John Quiggin 2012  Zombie Economics:  How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us.  Princeton University Press. 

Joseph Rouse  2002.  Review Essay: Vampires: Social Constructivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead.  History and Theory 41:60-78.

Brian C.J. Singer 1996  Cultural versus Contractual Nations.  History and Theory 35(3): 309-337. 

---

What does it mean—dead, defunct ideas holding onto an “undead” lease on life within everyday institutions and habits of thought? Well, for one, it means that we live every day as if we didn’t know what we do know about the complexities of being human, and about the complicated relationships between human civilization and the natural world.  Let me revisit three of these zombie ideas that still rule our lives even though they have gone obsolete—or, at least, should now be seen in larger contexts and in a new light, and perhaps questioned more deeply.

1.      The Undead Myth of Human Exceptionalism

One vampire of the mind falls under the rubric of “exceptionalism:”  Humans are exceptional—not just unique, but absolutely separate and different from everything else on Earth or in the universe.  With our difference, largely even defining it, comes divine entitlement to rule over all kinds of brute matter as well as over the beasts of the fields, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea.

The notion that humans are a separate creation and meant to rule over the merely natural world probably began to take root a long time ago with the invention of agriculture, when people did begin to dominate local nature in fact.  It became a mainstay of civilized life with the rise of cities, advancing technology, and the expansion of empires.

This idea essentially died, however, when Darwin showed that we were not separately created to rule over the Earth, but rather evolved within and as part of it.  We face its failure in real terms in the impressive list of civilizations that have collapsed as a result of over-exploiting their local environments, and as we face the looming consequences of our own  carelessly disrupted climate and ecological systems that we are part of.  Humility and Respect offer proper antidotes to the inflated hubris that poisons the bite of this vampire of the mind.

2.      The Undead Myth of the “Invisible Hand” and other Cannot-Fail “Market Mechanisms.”

The second undead idea I’ll mention is the quaint notion that mechanistic principles like those that govern some aspects of physical reality also apply in human society—and that social and economic life can be understood and manipulated on that basis.  Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), often credited with this idea, “interpreted self-interest as ‘the moral equivalent of the force of gravity in nature'” and tried to understand the role of individual citizens within the state “by analogy with the mechanical functioning of a clock.”

Many influential political and economic thinkers followed Hobbes’s lead—and surprisingly many still do today.  This belief in social mechanism got somewhat less simplistic (but no less misguided) as it became more firmly enshrined in political philosophy and practice.  But later science itself, especially since the mid-twentieth-century, progressively undermined and even outright refuted it.

The undead ghosts of mechanistic social philosophy live on, however, in the souls of economists and policy-makers who hold on to their faith in the infallibility of market mechanisms to govern our lives and advance human wellbeing.  Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow says “There has always been a purist streak in economics that wants everything to follow neatly from greed, rationality, and equilibrium, with no ifs, ands, or buts” (quoted by economics writer Jeff Madrick, p. 78).  As Madrick and many others see, we face the real-time failure of such notions in the growing severity of economic instability and crises, and the relentless advance of runaway inequality that undermines the effective realization of democratic ideals.

“Free market” extremism results in ever-worsening inequality. It’s not hard to see why. The so-called “free” market (which actually is structured and maintained by a complex network of laws) institutionalizes competition in an environment of private property and limited resources. The “invisible hand” of that “zero-sum game” automatically creates and maintains inequality. It’s built into its very nature to do that, as the winners accumulate wealth that gives them the means within the system to tilt the odds ever more in their favor.

That legally-mandated competition does make for a dynamic economy in which hard work and business smarts might be rewarded. If well-managed, its natural inequality-producing dynamic controlled and mitigated, it expands wealth for society as a whole. But that’s a big “if”; that part’s very hard to get right. As resources become more concentrated, many of those who benefit the most use their wealth to fight regulations that would level the playing field, limit their own acquisitive aims, or protect public goods.

That’s exactly what’s been happening over the last four decades.  When the power of wealth gets too massively concentrated its owners can and do capture the reigns of (democratic?) government for their own special interests at the expense of social well-being as a whole. They siphon up ever more of the society’s resources, benefitting themselves, driving up inequality even more, and driving down the fortunes of the middle-class. 

As the nation’s wealth concentrates at the top, large swathes of the populace see their fortunes decline, their lives become more insecure and their aspirations frustrated. They become vulnerable to charismatic authoritarian leaders who find some other vulnerable population (immigrants, Jews, Blacks) to blame. When that happens, we are on the slippery road to fascism.

“The most telling symptom of fascist politics,” writes Yale philosopher, Jason Stanley, “is division. It aims to separate a population into an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’”  The fascist movement targets ideological enemies and frees all restraints in combating them, Stanley writes. “When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.”

Sound familiar?  It should, in the wake of the Trump presidency, the January 6 insurrection, and the now-ongoing Congressional hearings into that event. 

Along with political dangers, extreme inequality as one aspect of an exploitive system that also leads to ecological overshoot, figures prominently in the histories of past civilizational collapse. We’ve seen all this over and over; but the danger is still real. It is harsh but fair, and now especially timely, to signpost extreme inequality as a downhill road to societal decline and fascism.

3.      The Undead Myth of the Inherent Wickedness of Human Nature.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679):  In the state of nature, before civilization, “the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

The third zombie idea I’ll mention is that human beings by nature are incurably self-interested, even brutish, competitive and combative individuals who rationally got together and formed society, instituted laws, and subjected themselves to external authority to protect themselves from each other.  This individualistic take on basic human nature justifies the blind faith in market mechanism that I just mentioned.  It’s also the basis for the “contract theory of the state,” on which much democratic practice remains premised.

What we now know about the evolution of human beings as social beings, and as cultural beings, belies that simplistic Hobbesian view of human nature.  Our reality is much more complex, ambiguous, and rich than that. Humans are not naturally atomistic, competitive individuals; but rather are inherently social by nature.  We’re not always good; but goodness is part of our nature too, and basically defines us as human.  Additionally, we are conscious, creative, artistic.  We are sensitive to beauty, and have souls.  All these are as much a part of human nature as are the one-dimensional, individualistic qualities that Hobbes highlighted before social science had gotten any real purchase as science.

Humans also are, however, cultural beings—and this means that the stories we tell ourselves may become the lives we live.

Is the Hobbesian story of human nature the one we really want to tell ourselves?  In too many ways, we continue to live as if it were.  We meet the failures of this notion of human nature in the same problems I noted above, as well as in the alienation, fear, and indifference to the suffering of others that pervade too much of modern life.

4.      Why Not Reject Bad Zombie Ideas & Begin Living What We Know!

Even bad ideas, in some contexts, can have good aspects or outcomes in others.  Individualism, for instance, in other contexts than those I mentioned above, supports respect for individuals and their fulfillment as humans, which certainly is a good thing.  It’s one of the real advances and blessings of modernity.

Can we reject the bad ideas while holding on to positive values sometimes associated with them?  Absolutely!  In fact, what we now know about human nature, the new more complex ideas and understandings that we’re growing into, even better support those positive values—but that’s a discussion for another time.

Meanwhile, on balance those three undead zombie ideas I mentioned above must be among the worst ever.  Their proponents would  have us believe that we are entitled to rule unchecked over all of Earthly creation, yet at the same time are so inherently bad, self-interested and naturally governed by fear and greed that to save ourselves from each other we must set up, entrust ourselves to, blind social mechanisms modeled after physical mechanics.

Such notions ignore the growth of knowledge as a basis for more intelligent social action.  When they become the basis for key institutions and guide policy, they lead toward ever more extreme inequality and social instability.  They also altogether discount consciousness, conscience, and kindness as guides to policy, just when we need them most.

The proof is in the pudding:  Those are silly (and dangerous) ideas.  Yet a great deal of our entrenched institutions, politics, and everyday habits of thought remain based on them—consciously or unconsciously.

That’s of course what makes them undead.  Otherwise we could say R.I.P. and move on.  After all, we know that neither humans individually, nor human societies, and not even our economies, really function like clockwork mechanisms, nor like the solar system held together by the perfectly balanced forces of gravity and inertia.  There is no “Invisible Hand,” and such “Market Mechanisms” as may exist do so only in the context of legislation and culturally grounded beliefs that support them.  We are not machines, nor are human societies and cultures simple cause-and-effect mechanisms.

Human beings live and function rather as dynamic, creative, chaotic, living systems.  What makes us truly unique is that we are conscious beings—increasingly so—and capable of learning and acting more in accord with the larger truths of our existence.  If there is anything that makes us exceptional—maybe even divine—it is this: that we can and must learn to live consciously,  guided by love, realistic humility, and respect, as responsible members of the larger complex communities of Earthly living beings within which we evolved and live.

Does the trend-line of recent human history advance or decline?

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

I guess that leaves me out.

Looking around at the contemporary landscape of ideas, I find plenty that mutually contradict each other and it just makes me dizzy.  Turning one way lies damnation; turning the other way, salvation.  On the one side:

Humankind rushes blindly toward the edge of environmental and social catastrophe. 

On the other side:

We enter a marvelous age of technological breakthroughs that will solve all our problems and open the way for a glorious future for humankind. 

On the positive side, offering light and hope, writers like Steven Pinker of Harvard whose 2012 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, followed this year by Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, show that violence, prejudice, mutual hostility, and all kinds of mistreatment of humans by humans have steadily declined with the rise of the state, and even more since the Enlightenment.  “We”—people in general through time—have been making ourselves better.

On the other side, mounting evidence of ecological breakdown, potentially devastating climate change, and other looming environmental problems, as well as serious social ills like alienation, rising inequality, bureaucratic indifference and the disintegration of social bonds (Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone), paint opposing, gloomy, scarier pictures.  The overlay to these gloomy pictures is our apparent inability to really confront, any less resolve, these threats.

Both sides seem true. Turning around and around, looking one way and then the other, what can you be except dizzy and confused?  But wait!  Here comes Aristotle to the rescue:

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Or, as I’ve seen the same idea differently expressed on a bumper-sticker: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

So….  Just don’t believe either side.  Hold both thoughts in mind, and hold the outcomes they point to open as real possibilities, without necessarily (at this time) making one true and the other false.  (Thanks again, Aristotle!)

* ? *?  *

The upshot is that we are truly at a crossroads.  Or, we would be if we weren’t already going both ways at once.  Maybe it’s more that humankind now is like an amoeba thrusting out two pseudopods in opposite directions.  But since it is really one organism, it will have to pull its whole self one way or the other in the end.

A graph of our current situation paints a big “X”, with a rising line of increasing peace and well-being trending up, and another line representing decline, collapse and misery trending down. That “X” is the unresolved variable in the human equation in our time.

All that said, I think that it’s realistic to stay hopeful, and we should do—so long as it doesn’t mean discounting the also real challenges and problems we’re making for ourselves.  In that light, I’ll just mention one more thing.  On the side of salvation, I came across a couple of interesting brief essays in Know This, edited by John Brockman (2017, HarperCollins).

One, titled “High-Tech Stone Age” (pp. 55-56),  by Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders, sees possibilities in high-tech to return to some of the benefits and strategies of pre-civilized hunter-gatherers.  The possibilities he focuses on are in the areas of food and food production, harnessing energy (generation of light through improved LEDs), and social and political relationships (decentralization facilitated by technology).

The other by Scott Sampson (pp. 36-38) is called “Technobiophilic Cities.” Sampson sees a convergence of those interested in improving cities through high-tech (“One camp calls for ‘smart,’ ‘digital,’ and ‘high-tech’ cities”), and those who want to make cities green (“From the other camp we hear about the need for ‘green,’ biophilic,’ even ‘wild’ cities, where nature is conserved, restored, celebrated”). The upshot: “Today, few proponents of green cities claim we need to go ‘back to nature.’ Rather they argue for going forward into a future rich in both technology and nature.”

But beyond the few specifics, I like this approach because it speaks to the paradoxical human equation of our time: It goes forward to go backwards; and in so going backwards it goes forward.  It directs current space-age technology to address and simplify some of the really big ancient and long-term problems of civilization.

Preface

Big Problems

Almost everyone knows that humankind faces huge problems now, and will do so even more in coming years. Melting ice, dramatic storms, immigration, terrorist attacks….   But I don’t need to rehearse them here: they’re a feature on daily newscasts and explored more deeply in readily available books and reports.

And everyone knows that we ourselves are creating those problems. They don’t exist without us. It’s no one else, and nothing else. We are making the problems that we have to solve—posing the challenges to ourselves that we alone must meet.

No one solves problems by burying their head in the sand. People solve problems (individual or collective), first, by taking responsibility for them. Then, in the case of large complex societal problems, they may have to ditch cynicism or indulgence or despair and take up the notion to begin with that they are solvable. Those first two steps are often related.

Then—again in the case of complex social problems—people in democracies can (in principle) openly explore their root causes and publicly discuss and debate what they find and think and want to do about them.  And, finally, people in the advanced democracies have many opportunities and resources to work within the possibilities given by democratic institutions to roll back the problems and roll out solutions.

(The environmental and social challenges for poor people in impoverished countries are of a different order: They can’t be ignored; they are an integral part of the picture; but they do need to be considered in their own right. Here I’m thinking primarily in terms of relatively privileged citizens of the developed countries.)

It’s a tall order, though. Just because something is possible in principle doesn’t mean it will happen.  But the longest journey begins with the first steps. And the first steps in this journey—one many people have already begun—is to engage in that which most makes us human: namely talk—or, as the case may be, writing, or making movies, shooting videos, posting blogs—in sum, learning and communicating.  Action of course is important too; but it’s always better to think first.

Reading, Writing, & ‘Rithmatic: One of the Biggest Big Problems

And just here, at the beginning, we slam into one our biggest problems.  If thinking and talking, research and writing, are really our first steps then we’re already in trouble.  People have done that.  Leaping into the fray at this point is a like joining a marathon race already in progress in which no one knows where the finish line is. Just facing the sheer volume of information and communication makes you want to throw up your hands—or maybe sometimes just throw up.  There’s already an overwhelming amount of material and no end of controversy about the problems and prospects of burgeoning high-tech humanity on a limited planet.

Even worse, we already know so much more than we put into practice.  What we’re learning about the world and about ourselves far outpaces the ability of our culture with its entrenched institutions and habits of thought to change in response to that learning.  This creates a widening gap between what we know and what we do.  I’ll say more about that in a moment.

Nevertheless, we have to keep doing it—keep on learning, talking, figuring, and writing; it’s the only way.  And we don’t have to feel totally lost or directionless.  Given the confusing babble already out there, works that offer overviews and perspectives, that bring different aspects of our current situation together into more coherent pictures of where we are and how we got here, are an essential part of the mix.

That’s the intent and thinking behind this blog. I like to figure things out for myself; and by sharing what I know and think, I can hope to make my own small contribution. Furthermore, my own field of anthropology has some uniquely important and widely undervalued (too often even within the profession itself) resources and perspectives to offer.

As a whole, the big story is one of disjunction: Different aspects of our lives are moving increasingly out of phase with each other. That’s a particular instance of a very general pattern—a characteristic aspect or property of complex systems, in fact. Evolution in the universe in general happens at different speeds on different levels; and in itself that’s not necessarily a problem. For us in particular now, however, what we are learning about ourselves and the Earth, and the cosmos we’re in, advances far more rapidly than our cultures adapt or change to reflect this knowledge.

Consequently, we have this widening gap that I mentioned between what we know and how we live; while at the same time troubles with how we live—with the modern individualistic, consumption-based, growth-oriented way of life—rapidly ramp up to truly worrying levels. So much so that increasing numbers of sober, reflective people in different walks of life fear that we may be approaching a tipping point or crisis of civilization itself. For us, in our current situation, then, the growing disjunction between what we know and how we live is a problem, a big one.

The Acceleration of Evolution in the Universe

The advent of life greatly speeded up the evolution of complexity on Earth—and in the cosmos. Similarly, anthropologists have long noted that human cultural life evolves more rapidly and flexibly than biological life. Human biology has not changed significantly since the advent of language and culture—possibly 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, or earlier depending on what criteria you use or evidence you’re looking at.  In any event, it’s clear that since the advent of human culture the most significant human evolution has occurred on the cultural plane, and at a much more rapid pace than biological evolution does. Biological evolution hasn’t stopped, but cultural evolution overtakes and overshadows it.

---

A later note (2018-03-17): I just came across a couple of articles in which the cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking makes a similar point about how evolution occurs at different speeds on different levels.

Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018, the same day that I put up this blog post on my web site. The news of the famous physicist’s passing flashed around the globe, followed by tributes to his life and work. I came across this review article in the on-line news service Quartz, that in turn links to the original short article by Hawking himself. Hawking says that “our view of human evolution as simply biological is too narrow [because now humans] “evolve much more quickly, beyond the physical limitations of their biology, because of written language.” Hawking, of course, wanting to tell the story with numbers as well as words, has some interesting figures to compare the growth of informational content in “the external record in books,” compared to the “internally transmitted genetic material.”

---

Similarly, just as culture evolves more swiftly than biology, so today’s science evolves more swiftly than culture. With the advent of modern science human knowledge and understanding of itself and of the cosmos grows in depth and complexity much more rapidly than our cultures do—and more rapidly than our cultures can keep up with.   Entrenched institutions, habits of thought, and daily practices can’t keep pace with what we’re learning. Consequently, we have that widening gap between what we know and how we live. Let’s take a closer look, beginning with the origins of those modern institutions and patterns of thought that are being overtaken by the growth of knowledge that they themselves generate.

The Widening Gap Between What We Know and How We Live

If you read the following heading sentences one after the other, in order, you’ll have an overview—the skeleton of the story. Then you can come back and read the text under the headings to put some flesh on the bones.

1.  Early modern science gave rise to a new world-view that became the social, political, and economic bedrock of the emerging modern world.

Knowledge about the universe, about our world, about ourselves, has grown dramatically over the past few hundred years. Some of the biggest ground-breaking discoveries—the heliocentric solar system, Newton’s laws of motion, Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics—were made in previous centuries. Those theoretical breakthroughs laid the starting blocks for later scientific advances. But perhaps even more, along the way they also shaped the emerging modern world at large—its institutions, its ways of thinking, its general world-view.

For instance, the idea that things can best be understood by breaking them down into their individual components and then uncovering the universal laws that govern the behavior of those parts became central to our thinking, virtually taken-for-granted, following Copernicus’s and Galileo’s cosmological discoveries and Newton’s mechanics. Similarly, theories of evolutionary growth and development later crystallized around Darwin’s idea of “survival of the fittest” as the engine of evolution—and of the burgeoning capitalist economy.

Those ideas—the world including human society as a machine governed by universal cause-and-effect laws, and human progress as an outcome of that machine driven by competitive individualism—broke free from the Medieval world-view and its institutions. They were powerfully liberating and compelling in their time. Thus, the methods, thinking, and general world-view of early physical and biological science, all too understandably, found their ways into the social philosophies that shaped the modern age.

Ancestral social thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Baron Montesquieu, René Descartes, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer translated Newtonian and Darwinian ideas into the social, political, and economic principles that we still live by. The individualism that underlies political democracy and capitalist economics as we know them, for instance, has roots in the works of those Enlightenment figures whose thought teemed with the creative insights of early modern science.

Take, for instance, the notions of separating and balancing the powers of government as one might design a machine, and of aggregating individual preferences to run a nation and competitively drive its economy. You can easily see in such examples how the powerful Newtonian and Darwinian ideas that dominated the early modern eras got woven into the governing institutions that were being formed then, and that continue to shape how we live today.

As we’ll see, the initial scientific justifications for our economic and governmental institutions dissolved in the light of further scientific advances; but that in itself doesn’t mean they aren’t good and worth preserving in their own rights.  Modern institutions helped greatly to increase some individual freedoms and the material well-being that we enjoy today, and we do need to appreciate and preserve their positive aspects.  But these later scientific advances, which we’ll briefly turn to next, do tell us that we won’t be breaking any natural laws if we work to change destructive and exploitive social dynamics where and when we find them.

2.    Even as early scientific ideas and insights were shaping the institutions and ways of life that became today’s modern Western culture, however, science itself moved on.

While those foundational ideas I just mentioned were becoming entrenched in actual social, political, and economic institution, science itself marched on.  In fact, the cumulative pace of knowledge growth from those earlier discoveries I just mentioned to the present has accelerated rapidly, with the pace picking up especially through the twentieth century.

And, importantly, that later growth of knowledge has not been simply an accumulation of details, a filling-in of blanks. The twentieth century in particular saw transformative advances in understanding the world and ourselves that are just as revolutionary as those that launched the modern age to begin with, that defined the ideals and institutions we still live by.

The general theory of relativity early in the century, and later quantum theory, advances in astronomy and cosmology that explore the evolution of the universe from the “Big Bang,” and more recently yet, further advances in biology, the theory of culture and the rise of systems and complexity theories, profoundly reshape our views of reality, and of ourselves. Just as Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin propelled a gestalt shift away from the Medieval universe populated by angels and demons in which “Man” was the center of all things, so these later developments similarly transform the Newtonian/Darwinian worldview that still in-forms the major institutions of the modern world.

3.  Consequently, today’s understandings of both the physical world and human nature are more complex, holistic, and realistic than are those of the Enlightenment era on the basis of which Western society, politics, and economics developed and still largely function.

The principles that we actually live by today—the social and economic institutions that embody them, and the real, material infrastructures that have grown up around and house these institutions—were conceived and built up within the scope of the Newtonian/Darwinian universe. These underpinnings of modern western culture as we live it today remain those of an earlier era in the history of ideas. While its science and technology have moved on, our lived culture (the social, political, and economic institutions with all the practices, habits of thought, and emotions that make them real and give form to our daily lives) remains grounded in and shaped by ideas that later scientific understandings supersede or relativize within larger contexts.

---

(In this regard, one of the key insights of our current paradigmatic turn is the realization of just how deeply our cultures shape who we are as individuals. One of the now-classic statements of this realization is an early essay, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, originally published in 1966 and now available on-line here.)

---

4.  “New wine in old bottles”: This growth of knowledge within entrenched institutions, therefore, creates the ever-widening gap between what we know and how we live.

The situation I just sketched—the ongoing relatively rapid growth of knowledge about our world and about ourselves, while the weightily entrenched political and economic institutions that govern our lives lag behind and remain relatively the same—produces the widening gap between what we know and how we live. The ways we live no longer reflect the knowledge we have.

Put simply, modern western culture, the way we live, embodies some key advances in knowledge of ourselves and our world that raised humankind (those more fortunate or privileged, anyway) up to new levels of discernment and unprecedented material well-being. But later scientific progress reveals errors and insufficiencies in some of the basic ideas that still underpin modern institutions, that now threaten that same privileged way of life.

5.  The errors being revealed by that gap between today’s knowledge and our ongoing social, political, and economic practices have all-too-real consequences that are coming due.

Living on the basis of principles that are way too simple and out of phase with the complexity of the real world we inhabit, as we now understand it, has consequences; and those consequences are coming due. Daily news programs and papers report increasingly severe problems: the costs of human-caused climate change, species extinction, growing inequality and the angers and resentments that go with it, and out-of-control population growth in the poorest countries, to mention just a few current worries. Many thinkers and writers—philosophers, scientists, journalists—actively delve into these issues, and write about them at sometimes deeper levels in a broad range of technical and popular publications.

6.  With  the problems we’re making for ourselves, and the simultaneous knowledge we’re creating, we challenge ourselves to do better.

One way to look at all this is that we’re creating conditions that force us evolve further—to reach new levels in the integration of thought and action. We’re making a world in which we simply have to become more conscious to survive.  We need, with some urgency, to continue learning ways to use the knowledge we have to make our institutions and practices—the ways we live our daily lives—themselves more conscious, more flexible and resilient, and more in accord with the realities and non-negotiable limitations of the Earth we inhabit.

A New Year

Well, the sun’s rising on the morning of a new year. 2018. As a number it has a nice even round feel. But 2017 leaves us in something of a mess, and at this point, Jan. 7, the end of the New Year’s first week, it might be hard to imagine how things might get better.

 

The big problems we drag with us into the New Year aren’t going away: spreading ecological crises, species extinction, global climate change, terrorism as an aspect of shifting and seemingly devolving political landscapes, massive and still growing inequality and consequent suffering for the great majority of human beings, to name a few of the most obvious. And, in the end, the looming possibility of the collapse of western civilization. We wouldn’t be the first.

We privileged North Americans all feel a strong pull to forget all that and just go about our lives; but the world gifts us with daily reminders. A large winter storm, dramatically called a “bomb cyclone,” piled up snow in the southern states of the U.S.’s eastern seaboard that almost never see snow, and from there up into the maritime provinces of Canada. Meanwhile record arctic cold blanketed central regions of the continent. Our esteemed President Trump responded with one of the dumbest tweets ever, saying in response to the unusual cold that “perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming….”

---

Trump tweets: "In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"   4:01 PM - 28 Dec 2017

---

As if in response, now (a couple of days later), on the other side of the continent massively destructive mudslides hit California following the summer’s devastating wildfires.

Speaking of costs, Forbes reports that climate-related disasters since 1980 have cost the U.S. $1.5 trillion, topped off by 2017’s unprecedented losses from hurricanes, fires, and other events in the hundreds of billions. This year already has a good head-start on beating last year’s record.

On the political front, Trump’s presidency has just been hit with a “bomb cyclone” of sorts itself with the publication of Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.  It’s hard to imagine how, at this point, Trump can ever gain any standing or trust within the world community of nations; or how his administration can ever be anything but a national political disaster for the United States, and a terrible embarrassment internationally. We’ll see what 2018 brings.  Many of us wonder if he’ll make it through his term.

Those and many other problems are all too obvious. We don’t all interpret them in the same way, or agree on what they mean, but everyone on Earth sees and experiences them in some way, on some level.

 

A New Level of Consciousness

At the same time, I’m becoming more and more sure that we (humankind) are moving into or birthing a new level of consciousness—of reflexive self-awareness and understanding that runs like a tidal slipstream against the kinds of problems and apparent backsliding that I’ve been describing. But it is hard to set your sights on such large changes when you’re in the midst of them as they’re happening. It’s hard to wrap your mind around your own mind….

Nevertheless, our own culture (call it the modern or postmodern West, just to give it a name) is continuing to develop ways, far beyond those of any previous civilization, to reflect on its place in the long stream of human history; to understand its place in and effects on the natural environments that sustain it; and to discover and examine its own most basic ideas and assumptions about the world, nature, and human nature.

In future posts, I aim to explore further such reflexive knowledge—knowledge that is about us—knowledge that, I think, represents the emergence of a new level of consciousness. We’re not there yet—not by a long shot; we have to keep working on it. But if more people understand what we truly have going for us, there might be less cynicism and despair, less vulnerability to the siren songs of demagogues, and more positive action based on what we know.

On September 15, 2017, Faye and I left Vancouver Island for a long-awaited trip to the maritime provinces of eastern Canada. We flew overnight to our farthest point, St. John’s, Newfoundland, and stayed there our first day and night with generous friends. Among other things, they took us a few miles even farther east to Cape Spear, the easternmost point of North America. On the walk back to the car we watched a whale repeatedly rolling and thrusting itself out of the Atlantic Ocean, blowing spray into the air. Was it playing, or hunting? Or both?

Exploring the Edges.

We stayed in Newfoundland for ten days, driving up peninsulas and around coastlines, venturing to smaller off-shore islands by bridge and ferry. The trek began in the small fishing towns of Trinity, Elliston, and Bonavista (Trinity, not shown, is below Elliston on the Bonavista Peninsula, on the lower right corner of the map).  From there we went southwest back down the peninsula and around the deep inlet, and then up through Terra Nova National Park, made a quick pit stop in the larger community of Gander, and then motored on northward over two bridges connecting small islands to Twillingate where we spent a pleasant night and morning at the aptly-named Tranquility Hill B&B.

The next day we drove from Twillingate back over New World Island and around to Farewell, to take the half hour ferry ride to Fogo Island for two more days and nights at Tom’s Tilting Harbour B&B. After we returned to St. John’s our friends took us south down the Avalon Peninsula to the spectacular bird sanctuary at Cape St. Mary’s.

 

It’s tempting to launch into descriptions of the interesting places and beautiful sea- and landscapes we experienced on Newfoundland. Colourfully-painted “salt-box” style houses, infinitely-varied rugged coastlines, expanses of small, densely-packed evergreens broken by green meadows, waterways, and rock outcroppings. Seemingly constant wind and rapidly changing weather.

The people we met were as interesting and impressive as the land they inhabit. The land, the sea, the people, and their difficult and often painful history, weave a rich tapestry that defines Newfoundland as a unique place in Canada, and in North America.

A person could go on and on (and I’m sure many have). But I’m afraid this already is turning into more of a travelogue than a blog about culture, ideas, and occasionally current events.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

But why am I, an anthropologist, even worrying about that? What else is there to see when you or I travel but culture? It’s hard to find a landscape that hasn’t been modified by humans—and even if I think I’ve found one, it’s already been labeled or categorized in some culturally-defined ways as a national park, a wilderness preserve, a bird sanctuary…. (Makes me wonder: is there such a thing as true wilderness any more?)  Like travelers everywhere, we met people, shared ideas, talked about what we saw, explored perceptions. We visited museums and monuments, and came away knowing a lot more than we did about Maritime history and culture.

Maybe even more important, we also gained more subjective but still tangible impressions of life on the East Coast of Canada, which in many ways is quite different from where we live on the West Coast. For me especially, as a relative newcomer to Canada, it added depth and perspective to my appreciation for this country—which despite sharing much history and the longest international border in the world with the U.S., remains relatively unknown to too many residents south of that border.

History, Economics, Politics

One of the great things about traveling is learning about the places you visit. We didn’t study Newfoundland in depth, but did learn enough by talking with people, visiting museums, and a little reading, to get at least a rough understanding of how Newfoundland’s difficult history, both politically and economically, is important for understanding it today.  Here’s a brief overview (for quick summaries in a little more depth, see here and here):

Newfoundland-Labrador has always had a natural-resource-based economy, largely based on fishing. European fishing crews—and later local fisherman of European descent—mined the rich cod fishery off the coasts of Newfoundland-Labrador and Nova Scotia for export since the early 16nth century. The coastal villages we visited still rely heavily on this resource; but much has changed.

In the beginning, fishing crews from Spain, Portugal, England and France all participated, but Spain and Portugal dropped out of the game in the late 1700s. France and England continued fishing the rich Newfoundland waters until 1904 when France pulled out, leaving the resource for the residents of the large island.

Here begins a familiar unhappy story. Unregulated industrial-scale fishing began to decimate the fishery. By the late-1960s it was in decline, and collapsed in the early 1990s from over-fishing. Only now is it recovering under tight controls. We did eat a lot of cod while there, including a local delicacy: cod tongue fried with salt pork.

It’s economic history intertwines (as is true always and everywhere) with political history. A former colony, Newfoundland participated in WWI in defense of Britain, coming out of the war heavily in debt. It’s dependence on declining fisheries and unpredictable markets for natural resource exports compounded Newfoundland’s economic problems. Out of necessity, it became a British Dominion in 1933, and later entered the Canadian Confederation as the tenth province in 1949. As a relatively poor late-comer whose remote populations seemed relatively uneducated and had their own distinctive dialect, Newfoundland sometimes found itself the butt of jokes in other parts of Canada—though I have the impression this is less so now than in the past.

Impressions of Newfoundland’s Present-Day Tourism

I was surprised (but maybe shouldn’t have been) by how important to local economies tourism has become, and by the numbers of visitors we encountered, especially this late when so many tourist facilities are shuttered for the season. Tourism, where it flourishes, clearly is important in the Maritimes.

But despite having become so central, tourism doesn’t seem to disrupt or displace people’s immediate connection to their traditional economies, way of life, and sense of identity as much as it does in some other places.  The dramatic coastlines, the beauty and mystery of the sea, draw visitors to the Maritimes from elsewhere.  For the resident coastal communities we saw, the sea with its many riches, and dangers, remains elemental and eternal.

What’s Different Here?

I’ve traveled some, and hit my share of tourist destinations. I’ve seen what often happens when local communities struggling on the margins of the global economy turn to selling culture as a tourism commodity. Things are different here.  We felt little of the “tackiness” and over-commercialization, the “anything-for-a-buck” mindset, that often seems to be part of tourist industries elsewhere.

No one ran after us peddling local crafts or trinkets of indigenous design made in China. There were no over-priced hotels or glittery casinos. History, the natural environment, culture, were on display, to be sure.  But beyond such obvious markers lay other differences that are harder to describe.  Most of the local people who we met and talked with in various capacities welcomed our interest in Newfoundland graciously—more like we were first-time guests being shown around, rather than a source of revenue or parties to financial transactions.

With the exception of St. John’s, which is a modern city, the communities we visited in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia are all small fishing villages hugging rugged, exposed coastlines. Their small size, remoteness, and harsh climate breeds toughness and resilience coupled sense of community—but not, it seems, in “us-against-them” or exploitive ways. At least that’s how it seemed in the few days we were there.

This was also true of the fishing villages of Nova Scotia we visited. I had to wonder whether perhaps on some level people here had made a cultural choice.  Rather than responding to their difficult history and often harsh climate by turning hard, insular, or bitter, these communities instead emphasize the felt comradeship of humans against the harshness of the environment and our shared mortality.

 

In any event, the people we met there—many of whom worked in the tourist industry—all related to us as interested visitors, not as dumb outsiders from whom they hoped to wring a buck. They were proud of their history and culture, and welcomed the opportunity to share them with us—even the difficult parts—whether or not we bought anything. (The cynical might say that all this is just a better or more effective way to sell themselves to more discerning tourists. Perhaps so. But still, it is better. And like all such cultural things, it must be rooted in truth and makes itself true in the performance.)

Let me give you just a couple of representative examples. Twice in Nova Scotia we arrived at our destinations in the evening, tired and hungry after long days. Fall festivals, seasonal closures, and unprecedented numbers of late-season tourists unexpectedly made it hard to find places to stay. Both times local people who knew the town didn’t just give us possible names and directions, but instead volunteered, nearly insisted, on calling around for us themselves to locate lodging—as had our generous hosts in St. John’s.  Similarly, the people we met in shops or in the places we stayed were unfailingly generous in sharing their lives and stories without expecting us to buy or looking for any other immediate return.  Little things, perhaps, but little things that matter and show the spirit of the people.

 

Given the beauty of the environment, and the friendliness and integrity of the people we met, it’s hard not to let a little romanticism steal into the story. There is, of course, always another side to things—as the natural turn of the seasons might remind us. The seasons and the weather are very much part of life here, perhaps even more than in most places. We went in early autumn, a beautiful time of year, and not in the middle of winter. I’m sure a longer stay would give us a more nuanced or complicated appreciation in many ways. As it is, we did get some hints of this.

Prince Edward Island, we found, has a very different kind of beauty than Newfoundland: surprisingly milder climate, emerald green fields, carefully tended houses and gardens, famous red earth, and potatoes. It is similar, however, in having a traditional resource-based economy that has become overlain by thriving, if seasonal, tourism.

I commented to one local shopkeeper there on how many businesses already were closed for the season despite the numbers of tourists still around. He replied that in a few weeks, there would be hardly anyone there at all, except for a few local farm families. I do have to wonder about an economy (and society) that seemed so based on only two forms of monoculture: potatoes and tourists.

Someone else told us that PEI is a great place to visit, but we wouldn’t want to move there. It would take several generations before we’d be accepted, he said. Similarly, the hostess of a motel in a little larger inland town in New Brunswick confided that she often felt lonely because she and her husband hadn’t been able to make friends among the established locals. I can imagine that much the same might be true in many other Maritime communities.

The Question:

In the end, though, I’m still left with the question: Why are the places we visited different from so many other remote, relatively undeveloped tourist destination?  I just finished reading an excellent book by Michael J. Sandel, an endowed professor of government at Harvard, that relates to this question.  The book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012), is well worth reading.

Sandel’s main point is that, contrary to standard economic reasoning, markets are not morally neutral. They tend to crowd out or degrade non-market norms. In Sandel’s own words: “markets are not mere mechanisms; they embody certain values. And sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket norms worth caring about” (p. 113).  You’ve probably experienced that effect yourself—it often happens, for instance, in tourism, as local culture or interesting natural features, sometimes even people, are marketed as commodities.

We live in a market society. We’re all shaped by a culture that is itself very largely shaped and defined by its market-based economy. As Sandel shows, it’s always a challenge (and one that often becomes the focus of political contests as well), to keep certain values and institutions out of the market sphere. But it is also a challenge, maybe an even more difficult one, to keep aspects of cultural life that do get drawn into the market from being defined solely in terms of market values and valuations.

For now, even as Newfoundland communities build up the tourism sector of their economy, they still largely manage to keep Newfoundland life as an experience to be lived and shared more than something to be objectified, commodified, and marketed.  In this sense, if in sometimes nuanced shades of gray, they answer the stark question Sandel poses in book. “In the end,” Sandel writes in his final paragraph,

The question of markets is really a question of how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

* * * *