Currently at Toronto Pearson: -1. High today: 1. Some more sloppy snow today. (Thanks, Sean Avery: I'll probably never see the word "sloppy" the same way again. Or "seconds", for that matter.)
So, after some 20 years of debate, the Attorney-General of British Columbia has decided to charge two men associated with the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints of Bountiful, BC with polygamy. This prompted me to go look at the Criminal Code, to see how exactly the offence of polygamy is defined. I append the section below. Reluctance to press charges in Bountiful has long been reported to be motivated by fears that the law would not withstand a Charter challenge on grounds of religious freedom (and, less plausibly, that this could open the door to religious challenges of other marriage-related statutes). Looking at the actual law, in light of the fact that it applies to "any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time", it seems fairly clear to me that it is not justifiable in a modern liberal state in the first place--hardly more justifiable than sodomy laws, for instance. In any event, it seems obvious that special attention has been directed to the FLDS in terms of the enforcement of this law.
Polygamy
293. (1) Every one who
(a) practises or enters into or in any manner agrees or consents to practise or enter into
(i) any form of polygamy, or
(ii) any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time,
whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage, or
(b) celebrates, assists or is a party to a rite, ceremony, contract or consent that purports to sanction a relationship mentioned in subparagraph (a)(i) or (ii),
is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.
Evidence in case of polygamy
(2) Where an accused is charged with an offence under this section, no averment or proof of the method by which the alleged relationship was entered into, agreed to or consented to is necessary in the indictment or on the trial of the accused, nor is it necessary on the trial to prove that the persons who are alleged to have entered into the relationship had or intended to have sexual intercourse.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Or just some human sleep
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -1. High today: 0. Snow on the ground almost for the whole month of December, which is very unusual. 2008 was the first year Pearson has recorded over 1000 mm of total precipitation. Pearson and K-W are both running well ahead of last year's snow pace.
Still on strike.
Finally saw No Country for Old Men a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what I would've made of it if I hadn't read the book, though I'd read the book too long ago to remember many details. I'm not sure about playing Cigurrh with this touch of goofiness. (I have no picture of Cigurrh like I do of the Judge, though. The Judge might be easier to play because of his imposing physicality; anyway, he's more of a character than Cigurrh. I don't know of anyone who could play him, though. Brando, at some point, might have been perfect.) I'm also not sure some of McCarthy's dialogue can work off the page: "Tell momma I love her." "Your momma's dead, Llewelyn." "Well, I guess I'll tell her myself, then." I think that works on the page because you don't really know how someone would say that. (On the other hand, I will keep thinking "if this ain't a mess, it'll do 'til one gets here" for a while.)
I was happy that the film does some things (well, one thing in particular) even more indirectly than McCarthy does. This is one of the things about McCarthy's style that, to me, is most distinctive and that I like the most. So one of the best things you could do in making a McCarthy film would be to take that even further. I wish they had found a way to get deeper into the sheriff, though I guess there's only so much sitting around talking after the action's over you can expect an audience to put with. On the other hand, given the changes that are made to the narrative sequence at the beginning (which I can't say I like), I wonder why not spread the sitting around talking through the movie. Starting out with some of it would seem like a good idea. The more I think about it, the more I think that this movie is too much about Cigurrh, too little about the sheriff. (At least I keep forgetting that it's a Coen brothers movie. I can't say I have anything in principle against them, because I love Fargo, but I'm suspicious of them.)
For a fair bit of the time L. and I were watching it, there were dogs running around and someone playing with the dogs. This got me thinking about Benjamin and film and distraction:
"The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception [i.e., something like 'unconscious' apprehension of something in terms of gestalts you've established]. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value [i.e., the force of what Benjamin calls the 'aura' of the artwork] recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one."
Another question having to do with Benjamin I've kept returning to over the last year: is there any such thing as a great film actor? We watched Night of the Generals the other night. It stars (among others) Peter O'Toole as Peter O'Toole. Well, as Evil Peter O'Toole. Actually, he's, you might say, Lawrence with the rest of the goodness drained out of him. You know, I like Peter O'Toole a lot, but it seems like there is probably a reason that he didn't have many great roles, or even good ones. As Socrates says in the Republic, just because you have this purple paint which is the most beautiful paint in the world, you don't go painting your whole statue with it. I had no use for Tom Cruise until Eyes Wide Shut, but he was the perfect colour for that movie. Is that what movie actors are, shades of paint? Can you be a great actor if you're a shade of paint?
But then again: is a chameleon a great actor? (Well, it's about being able to understand the character, right? No, not understand.) And then again: it has always seemed to me that a lot of acting performances that people are impressed by (including me) are caricatures, cartoon characters, exaggerations. (It's easy to impersonate Elvis because Elvis is so distinctive.) I think right away of Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, which may have been the most impressive job of creating a character I've seen, but it is a very exaggerated character. Peter O'Toole has the bearing of a stage actor because the state actor has to exaggerate. You couldn't have someone mumble like Brando on stage, could you?
But film also tends to exaggerate, and this is another thing I've been mulling lately--oddly enough, thinking about Stephen Harper as an example. That moment in the debate when Paikin asked whether Harper would raise taxes, and Harper lifted his water glass to his mouth and said he wouldn't: it looked like Harper hiding behind his glass, saying something he knew he shouldn't say but had to, something he probably should have instantly recognized (apperceived) as the classic Bush (I) trap ... it looked kind of like that; it looked like it should have been that, but, well, maybe he just happened to lift his glass at that moment, you can't be sure. If it was in a movie, it would have been exaggerated into being that and only that.
Ah, now I remember what it was that got me into thinking about this exaggeration-in-film thing in the first place: Frost/Nixon, seeing the clips of the film juxtaposed with clips of the actual interviews, seeing how the film exaggerates Nixon's attitudes. It especially exaggerates anger. This is something I learned in highschool, playing Henry Higgins in a scene of Pygmalion (after seeing O'Toole do it): it's easy to impress people by playing anger.
One more random film note: I saw about half of Stardust last week. At one point, when Captain Shakespeare is talking, it struck me that De Niro is actually delivering the lines in in the manner of a not-entirely-immersed-in-the-material actor doing Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. If he was really doing that and it wasn't just my imagination, that was absolutely brilliant.
Got to move on....
Still on strike.
Finally saw No Country for Old Men a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what I would've made of it if I hadn't read the book, though I'd read the book too long ago to remember many details. I'm not sure about playing Cigurrh with this touch of goofiness. (I have no picture of Cigurrh like I do of the Judge, though. The Judge might be easier to play because of his imposing physicality; anyway, he's more of a character than Cigurrh. I don't know of anyone who could play him, though. Brando, at some point, might have been perfect.) I'm also not sure some of McCarthy's dialogue can work off the page: "Tell momma I love her." "Your momma's dead, Llewelyn." "Well, I guess I'll tell her myself, then." I think that works on the page because you don't really know how someone would say that. (On the other hand, I will keep thinking "if this ain't a mess, it'll do 'til one gets here" for a while.)
I was happy that the film does some things (well, one thing in particular) even more indirectly than McCarthy does. This is one of the things about McCarthy's style that, to me, is most distinctive and that I like the most. So one of the best things you could do in making a McCarthy film would be to take that even further. I wish they had found a way to get deeper into the sheriff, though I guess there's only so much sitting around talking after the action's over you can expect an audience to put with. On the other hand, given the changes that are made to the narrative sequence at the beginning (which I can't say I like), I wonder why not spread the sitting around talking through the movie. Starting out with some of it would seem like a good idea. The more I think about it, the more I think that this movie is too much about Cigurrh, too little about the sheriff. (At least I keep forgetting that it's a Coen brothers movie. I can't say I have anything in principle against them, because I love Fargo, but I'm suspicious of them.)
For a fair bit of the time L. and I were watching it, there were dogs running around and someone playing with the dogs. This got me thinking about Benjamin and film and distraction:
"The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception [i.e., something like 'unconscious' apprehension of something in terms of gestalts you've established]. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value [i.e., the force of what Benjamin calls the 'aura' of the artwork] recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one."
Another question having to do with Benjamin I've kept returning to over the last year: is there any such thing as a great film actor? We watched Night of the Generals the other night. It stars (among others) Peter O'Toole as Peter O'Toole. Well, as Evil Peter O'Toole. Actually, he's, you might say, Lawrence with the rest of the goodness drained out of him. You know, I like Peter O'Toole a lot, but it seems like there is probably a reason that he didn't have many great roles, or even good ones. As Socrates says in the Republic, just because you have this purple paint which is the most beautiful paint in the world, you don't go painting your whole statue with it. I had no use for Tom Cruise until Eyes Wide Shut, but he was the perfect colour for that movie. Is that what movie actors are, shades of paint? Can you be a great actor if you're a shade of paint?
But then again: is a chameleon a great actor? (Well, it's about being able to understand the character, right? No, not understand.) And then again: it has always seemed to me that a lot of acting performances that people are impressed by (including me) are caricatures, cartoon characters, exaggerations. (It's easy to impersonate Elvis because Elvis is so distinctive.) I think right away of Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin, which may have been the most impressive job of creating a character I've seen, but it is a very exaggerated character. Peter O'Toole has the bearing of a stage actor because the state actor has to exaggerate. You couldn't have someone mumble like Brando on stage, could you?
But film also tends to exaggerate, and this is another thing I've been mulling lately--oddly enough, thinking about Stephen Harper as an example. That moment in the debate when Paikin asked whether Harper would raise taxes, and Harper lifted his water glass to his mouth and said he wouldn't: it looked like Harper hiding behind his glass, saying something he knew he shouldn't say but had to, something he probably should have instantly recognized (apperceived) as the classic Bush (I) trap ... it looked kind of like that; it looked like it should have been that, but, well, maybe he just happened to lift his glass at that moment, you can't be sure. If it was in a movie, it would have been exaggerated into being that and only that.
Ah, now I remember what it was that got me into thinking about this exaggeration-in-film thing in the first place: Frost/Nixon, seeing the clips of the film juxtaposed with clips of the actual interviews, seeing how the film exaggerates Nixon's attitudes. It especially exaggerates anger. This is something I learned in highschool, playing Henry Higgins in a scene of Pygmalion (after seeing O'Toole do it): it's easy to impress people by playing anger.
One more random film note: I saw about half of Stardust last week. At one point, when Captain Shakespeare is talking, it struck me that De Niro is actually delivering the lines in in the manner of a not-entirely-immersed-in-the-material actor doing Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. If he was really doing that and it wasn't just my imagination, that was absolutely brilliant.
Got to move on....
Monday, November 24, 2008
Fellas, it's too rough to feed you
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 4. There has been snow on the ground, uninterrupted, in K-W for eight days now. K-W got a bit more sloppy snow today; Toronto's five days' growth of snow is just about finished going down the drain.
Last week I heard someone on the bus say that someone had won the $39 million in the Lotto 6/49 or whatever, and maybe someone asked "what would you do with all that money?" and I thought "what would I do with all that money?" and thought, well, first I'd give away $38 million ... only $38 million? No, maybe $38.5 million. And I thought, of course, this is why I would never play the lottery--but then I realized, maybe this is why I should play the lottery! When other people win, they usually spend the money on stupid stuff. (I guess.) But I would, I don't know, give it to Doctors Without Borders and whatever the hell. (I really don't know.) So, maybe I am actually morally required to play the lottery, in order to do my part to try to divert lottery money to something worthwhile.
Turns out I was wrong about the idea of deflation taking a long time to sink in. It was the lead headline in the Star today. Gas is below $0.80 a litre around here these days. Again I remember the Globe poll, some time after Katrina, asking whether gas would ever be less than $1/litre again. Most people said "no", of course. Most people would have said "no way in hell" a few months ago.
The price of a can of beans is up 40-60% since the summer in the local grocery store, though. For some reason the grocery price war is over; Loblaw's has been steadily jacking up its prices and just reported a large profit. This is going to be some jagged disinflation/deflation; I would guess that relatively poor people are going to continue to see steep inflation for some time, since they spend proportionally a lot on food and not much directly on energy. It has occurred to me to wonder as house prices fall whether the conditions that produce falling house prices put upward or downward pressure on rental prices. House prices are falling because people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing. If people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing, does that mean that people who would otherwise have been at the low end of the home-ownership market are forced into the rental market, increasing demand for, and thus creating upward pressure on the price of, rental units? And: does it result in a flattening of price differentials between the high end and low end of the rental market, as people are forced downward in the market, creating more demand and higher prices at the bottom of the market?
And I am still on strike. The deep, dark stupidity of it all is upsetting, but also amusing in its way. Somehow I have begun to love my enemies. Soon I'll find myself in love with the world, and the only thing left to do will be to ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
Last week I heard someone on the bus say that someone had won the $39 million in the Lotto 6/49 or whatever, and maybe someone asked "what would you do with all that money?" and I thought "what would I do with all that money?" and thought, well, first I'd give away $38 million ... only $38 million? No, maybe $38.5 million. And I thought, of course, this is why I would never play the lottery--but then I realized, maybe this is why I should play the lottery! When other people win, they usually spend the money on stupid stuff. (I guess.) But I would, I don't know, give it to Doctors Without Borders and whatever the hell. (I really don't know.) So, maybe I am actually morally required to play the lottery, in order to do my part to try to divert lottery money to something worthwhile.
Turns out I was wrong about the idea of deflation taking a long time to sink in. It was the lead headline in the Star today. Gas is below $0.80 a litre around here these days. Again I remember the Globe poll, some time after Katrina, asking whether gas would ever be less than $1/litre again. Most people said "no", of course. Most people would have said "no way in hell" a few months ago.
The price of a can of beans is up 40-60% since the summer in the local grocery store, though. For some reason the grocery price war is over; Loblaw's has been steadily jacking up its prices and just reported a large profit. This is going to be some jagged disinflation/deflation; I would guess that relatively poor people are going to continue to see steep inflation for some time, since they spend proportionally a lot on food and not much directly on energy. It has occurred to me to wonder as house prices fall whether the conditions that produce falling house prices put upward or downward pressure on rental prices. House prices are falling because people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing. If people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing, does that mean that people who would otherwise have been at the low end of the home-ownership market are forced into the rental market, increasing demand for, and thus creating upward pressure on the price of, rental units? And: does it result in a flattening of price differentials between the high end and low end of the rental market, as people are forced downward in the market, creating more demand and higher prices at the bottom of the market?
And I am still on strike. The deep, dark stupidity of it all is upsetting, but also amusing in its way. Somehow I have begun to love my enemies. Soon I'll find myself in love with the world, and the only thing left to do will be to ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Strike Two
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 14. High today: 16.
So I'm on strike, for the second time in my ten years at York. (I'm not on strike at Laurier.) The ideological stridency of the union--apparently including most of the members, a large majority of whom are grad students (a large majority of whom are in the humanities and social sciences), not just the activists and the leadership (such as it is, which isn't much, since the activists have gutted the leadership structure since the last strike)--is remarkable. I can't help but feel that some political switch has been flipped lately in North America. The resurgence of the NDP, the financial crisis, Obama, the settled feeling that Iraq and Afghanistan have both been lost ... it's hard to tell how it all fits together, but somehow it seems to. But where's it all going? The members of the union generally seem to sincerely believe that there are no legitimate interests in the university contrary to their own. They believe that they have a moral right to dictate terms, without limitation, to the university. Of course, labour generally feels that it has an unlimited moral right against management on the Marxist ground (whether particular workers or unions are fully conscious of this or not) that all value in the enterprise is produced by labour and so all value in the enterprise is owed to labour. What seems different about this union this time--and this union is always among the most militant and ideologically driven you'll find anywhere--is the more-or-less complete refusal to compromise on the absolute claim of right for pragmatic purposes. No dialogue, no dialectic, just sheer self-assertion.
What's interesting about the union as a labour union is that the basic issue no longer has anything to do with compensation for labour, though it is constantly portrayed that way in the media because no one can understand what's going on in any other terms. (The numbers quoted on wage increases are meaningless because the main monetary issues are not technically about wages.) I have a feeling that if the general public knew what the real issue was, the people who are currently calling for the TAs to be fired Reagan-style would be calling for the university to be shut down. TAs already are not paid primarily for the work they do as TAs; they're paid primarily to support them while they're (supposed to be) doing their graduate work. If the relevant market was the market for TA labour, their compensation would presumably be much lower than it currently is. TAs get as much as they do currently, and they want much more than that, because the relevant market is not the market for TA labour but the market for graduate students, and that's a market in which the student-TAs not only hold much more leverage (because while the supply of potential TA labour greatly exceeds the demand, the demand for grad students on the part of schools does not exceed the supply of potential students by much at all), but also benefit from an ethical feeling on the part of their superiors that grad students ought not to live too shabbily. (A few years back, TA negotiations at U of T were blown out of the water when the administration came up with a student-support package that made the demands for TA compensation largely irrelevant.)
What the union wants for the 25% of us in the union who teach courses on contract is a whole other kettle of fish. That's all about "job security", and it's a real concrete issue. Job security is the oppressively insistent practical issue in my life. But from a relatively disinterested point of view, considering only the good of the university or of the philosophy department, I would not want the make-up of the teaching staff to be determined in any serious way by union rules; I want departments to be free to decide their own compositions. Materially, there appears to be a lot at stake for me in this strike (because the administration appears to be proposing serious concessions on mechanisms that can turn contract jobs into permanent jobs), but I'm ethically opposed to winning it.
Similarly, the union is claiming a tactical "victory" in these negotiations for persuading the administration to withdraw a proposal to increase the number of teaching jobs allowed to doctoral students. It's a "victory" because it leaves more jobs open for people like me; it's very much in my material interests. But my job security currently might not be so desperately tenuous if I had been able to get a teaching position while doing my PhD; ethically, I can only be in favour of making more teaching positions available to doctoral students. So why doesn't the union recognize this "victory" as a defeat for the doctoral students it represents? Looks to me like some combination of these reasons:
(1) York doctoral students don't believe that they will ever have teaching jobs after they graduate (and so don't see themselves as having an interest in gaining teaching experience; some of them, when in union-rhetoric mode, actually spin having teaching jobs as opposed to TA positions as a burden, since they take up much more time and their compensation is taxable (whereas the large part of TA compensation that doesn't take the form of wages is classed as student support and therefore is mostly not taxable)).
(2) York doctoral students don't understand that the single most important thing in helping them get teaching jobs after they graduate is teaching experience (presumably due in part to their having swallowed the "publications" Koolaid, not realizing that publications=jobs only applies to students whose doctorates have prestigious brand-names).
(3) The union collectively sees its interest in keeping peace among the different constituencies of the union (and having more teaching positions available for doctoral students would more obviously and immediately damage the material interests of the current corps of contract teachers than it would advance the material interests of doctoral students) as being more important than increasing the employability of doctoral students--but this, to me, just dissolves back into (1).
I think (1) is really at the heart of everything. Everyone knows, now, that, in material terms, doing a PhD is a losing "investment" (unless you're invested in one of the prestigious brand-names), so doctoral students like those at York have stopped seeing it as any kind of investment at all. They want the material pay-off from academia now, because they don't expect to get it later.
The really stupid thing about York's situation is that it is largely a product of a strategy over the last decade to dramatically increase graduate enrolment. The strike of 2000-01 should have made it evident to everyone that graduate students at York are a box crammed full of hornets. But since then, the university administrators have crammed a whole bunch more hornets into the box and shaken it. (I don't fully understand why they've done this. There appear to be two main reasons behind it: they want to make York a more "research-intensive" university, and the provincial and/or federal governments have been putting pressure on universities to produce more PhDs to make up for the shortage of professors which is always just around the corner. The first reason has been motivated in some part by the fear that if York is classed as a "teaching" university, the province will sooner or later force it to shut down its graduate programs altogether--so, by drastically increasing graduate enrollment, we're creating facts on the ground that would make that impossible. I can't imagine that that isn't sheer paranoia. But there is also the plain prestige of being a "research" university; I think that probably has more to do with it than anything.) My guess is that they don't recognize what they're doing as shaking a box full of hornets because they, like--it seems to me--almost everyone who has made it in academia, operate under the delusion that grad students are (and feel themselves to be) on the road to being as successful as they are. Those who have made it imagine that those who have not (yet) made it would identify with them and aspire to be like them. Instead, those who have not (yet) made it almost universally resent those who have made it, more and more intensely all the time.
I wish to God the "first black president" business would blow away. When you make some symbolic move out of a long national embarrassment, is it really something to celebrate? Should your family throw a party when Daddy stops beating Mommy? Shouldn't you, with your newly gained virtue, only feel all the more embarrassed at what you've been? Isn't it embarrassing that the president's skin colour is still an issue? Move on, indeed.
And it annoys me because, though I haven't paid very close attention to the man, Obama strikes me as an exceptionally good person. I don't mean an exceptionally "moral" person; I mean someone who is both basically decent and exceptionally able to put his basic decency into action. (If I were an American and had voted for HRC as I was supposing I would have early on, I would have come to regret it and been relieved at the outcome.) You don't find many characters like this, not just in politics, but anywhere. (I'm trying to think of who strikes me as this kind of character--for some reason, Charlie Rose comes to mind, which then prompts me to think of Peter Gzowski. Howard Adelman. Chretien has probably been the closest thing to it in recent Canadian politics; Martin, who was more decent but less capable (which unfortunately seemed to lead him to surround himself with people who lacked his own decency, which unfortunately brings Rahm Emmanuel to mind), might have been in different circumstances. I feel like David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, could have been this kind of character if the deck wasn't stacked against him. Cito Gaston. Nader got lost somewhere in the neighbourhood. Preston Manning and Joe Clark were probably both separated from it mostly by their dorkiness, which, unfortunately, has a lot to do with capability.) Obama the decent, practical man of reason is something like something that some part of me might aspire to be. (Ignatieff is the sham version, the cautionary tale--pieces of it are right (Blood and Belonging) but the whole is wrong.) That this is overshadowed by the colour of his skin seems profoundly disrespectful of the man. (But would a white Obama have been a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination this time around in the first place?)
So I'm on strike, for the second time in my ten years at York. (I'm not on strike at Laurier.) The ideological stridency of the union--apparently including most of the members, a large majority of whom are grad students (a large majority of whom are in the humanities and social sciences), not just the activists and the leadership (such as it is, which isn't much, since the activists have gutted the leadership structure since the last strike)--is remarkable. I can't help but feel that some political switch has been flipped lately in North America. The resurgence of the NDP, the financial crisis, Obama, the settled feeling that Iraq and Afghanistan have both been lost ... it's hard to tell how it all fits together, but somehow it seems to. But where's it all going? The members of the union generally seem to sincerely believe that there are no legitimate interests in the university contrary to their own. They believe that they have a moral right to dictate terms, without limitation, to the university. Of course, labour generally feels that it has an unlimited moral right against management on the Marxist ground (whether particular workers or unions are fully conscious of this or not) that all value in the enterprise is produced by labour and so all value in the enterprise is owed to labour. What seems different about this union this time--and this union is always among the most militant and ideologically driven you'll find anywhere--is the more-or-less complete refusal to compromise on the absolute claim of right for pragmatic purposes. No dialogue, no dialectic, just sheer self-assertion.
What's interesting about the union as a labour union is that the basic issue no longer has anything to do with compensation for labour, though it is constantly portrayed that way in the media because no one can understand what's going on in any other terms. (The numbers quoted on wage increases are meaningless because the main monetary issues are not technically about wages.) I have a feeling that if the general public knew what the real issue was, the people who are currently calling for the TAs to be fired Reagan-style would be calling for the university to be shut down. TAs already are not paid primarily for the work they do as TAs; they're paid primarily to support them while they're (supposed to be) doing their graduate work. If the relevant market was the market for TA labour, their compensation would presumably be much lower than it currently is. TAs get as much as they do currently, and they want much more than that, because the relevant market is not the market for TA labour but the market for graduate students, and that's a market in which the student-TAs not only hold much more leverage (because while the supply of potential TA labour greatly exceeds the demand, the demand for grad students on the part of schools does not exceed the supply of potential students by much at all), but also benefit from an ethical feeling on the part of their superiors that grad students ought not to live too shabbily. (A few years back, TA negotiations at U of T were blown out of the water when the administration came up with a student-support package that made the demands for TA compensation largely irrelevant.)
What the union wants for the 25% of us in the union who teach courses on contract is a whole other kettle of fish. That's all about "job security", and it's a real concrete issue. Job security is the oppressively insistent practical issue in my life. But from a relatively disinterested point of view, considering only the good of the university or of the philosophy department, I would not want the make-up of the teaching staff to be determined in any serious way by union rules; I want departments to be free to decide their own compositions. Materially, there appears to be a lot at stake for me in this strike (because the administration appears to be proposing serious concessions on mechanisms that can turn contract jobs into permanent jobs), but I'm ethically opposed to winning it.
Similarly, the union is claiming a tactical "victory" in these negotiations for persuading the administration to withdraw a proposal to increase the number of teaching jobs allowed to doctoral students. It's a "victory" because it leaves more jobs open for people like me; it's very much in my material interests. But my job security currently might not be so desperately tenuous if I had been able to get a teaching position while doing my PhD; ethically, I can only be in favour of making more teaching positions available to doctoral students. So why doesn't the union recognize this "victory" as a defeat for the doctoral students it represents? Looks to me like some combination of these reasons:
(1) York doctoral students don't believe that they will ever have teaching jobs after they graduate (and so don't see themselves as having an interest in gaining teaching experience; some of them, when in union-rhetoric mode, actually spin having teaching jobs as opposed to TA positions as a burden, since they take up much more time and their compensation is taxable (whereas the large part of TA compensation that doesn't take the form of wages is classed as student support and therefore is mostly not taxable)).
(2) York doctoral students don't understand that the single most important thing in helping them get teaching jobs after they graduate is teaching experience (presumably due in part to their having swallowed the "publications" Koolaid, not realizing that publications=jobs only applies to students whose doctorates have prestigious brand-names).
(3) The union collectively sees its interest in keeping peace among the different constituencies of the union (and having more teaching positions available for doctoral students would more obviously and immediately damage the material interests of the current corps of contract teachers than it would advance the material interests of doctoral students) as being more important than increasing the employability of doctoral students--but this, to me, just dissolves back into (1).
I think (1) is really at the heart of everything. Everyone knows, now, that, in material terms, doing a PhD is a losing "investment" (unless you're invested in one of the prestigious brand-names), so doctoral students like those at York have stopped seeing it as any kind of investment at all. They want the material pay-off from academia now, because they don't expect to get it later.
The really stupid thing about York's situation is that it is largely a product of a strategy over the last decade to dramatically increase graduate enrolment. The strike of 2000-01 should have made it evident to everyone that graduate students at York are a box crammed full of hornets. But since then, the university administrators have crammed a whole bunch more hornets into the box and shaken it. (I don't fully understand why they've done this. There appear to be two main reasons behind it: they want to make York a more "research-intensive" university, and the provincial and/or federal governments have been putting pressure on universities to produce more PhDs to make up for the shortage of professors which is always just around the corner. The first reason has been motivated in some part by the fear that if York is classed as a "teaching" university, the province will sooner or later force it to shut down its graduate programs altogether--so, by drastically increasing graduate enrollment, we're creating facts on the ground that would make that impossible. I can't imagine that that isn't sheer paranoia. But there is also the plain prestige of being a "research" university; I think that probably has more to do with it than anything.) My guess is that they don't recognize what they're doing as shaking a box full of hornets because they, like--it seems to me--almost everyone who has made it in academia, operate under the delusion that grad students are (and feel themselves to be) on the road to being as successful as they are. Those who have made it imagine that those who have not (yet) made it would identify with them and aspire to be like them. Instead, those who have not (yet) made it almost universally resent those who have made it, more and more intensely all the time.
I wish to God the "first black president" business would blow away. When you make some symbolic move out of a long national embarrassment, is it really something to celebrate? Should your family throw a party when Daddy stops beating Mommy? Shouldn't you, with your newly gained virtue, only feel all the more embarrassed at what you've been? Isn't it embarrassing that the president's skin colour is still an issue? Move on, indeed.
And it annoys me because, though I haven't paid very close attention to the man, Obama strikes me as an exceptionally good person. I don't mean an exceptionally "moral" person; I mean someone who is both basically decent and exceptionally able to put his basic decency into action. (If I were an American and had voted for HRC as I was supposing I would have early on, I would have come to regret it and been relieved at the outcome.) You don't find many characters like this, not just in politics, but anywhere. (I'm trying to think of who strikes me as this kind of character--for some reason, Charlie Rose comes to mind, which then prompts me to think of Peter Gzowski. Howard Adelman. Chretien has probably been the closest thing to it in recent Canadian politics; Martin, who was more decent but less capable (which unfortunately seemed to lead him to surround himself with people who lacked his own decency, which unfortunately brings Rahm Emmanuel to mind), might have been in different circumstances. I feel like David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, could have been this kind of character if the deck wasn't stacked against him. Cito Gaston. Nader got lost somewhere in the neighbourhood. Preston Manning and Joe Clark were probably both separated from it mostly by their dorkiness, which, unfortunately, has a lot to do with capability.) Obama the decent, practical man of reason is something like something that some part of me might aspire to be. (Ignatieff is the sham version, the cautionary tale--pieces of it are right (Blood and Belonging) but the whole is wrong.) That this is overshadowed by the colour of his skin seems profoundly disrespectful of the man. (But would a white Obama have been a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination this time around in the first place?)
Thursday, October 23, 2008
I thought of the farm ... and the work to be done
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 7. High today: 9.
A couple of Old-Order Mennonites got on the bus at the Central Fresh Market in Kitchener yesterday, loaded down with--what? I always found it surprising and a little disappointing when the Mennonites showed up in the Central Fresh Market. What does the Central Fresh Market have that they can't grow or raise or whatever it is themselves? Well, anyway. I supposed to myself when they got on the bus that they wouldn't have voted in the election last week--I don't know; do Old-Order Mennonites vote?--and it doesn't matter to them who won. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, it matters, sure, in that it makes some global difference if everyone keeps electing anti-environmentalists instead of environmentalists. Which reminds me of a story I read in highschool, in one of those anthologies of stories for highschool students, about somebody living in the northern woods of somewhere, who sees a strange light in the sky one day and then spends the next week, or month, or whatever it is, dying of radiation poisoning. (This was one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.) But look, it doesn't have to be a nuclear bomb; it might be an asteroid.
Anyway, I don't know anything about these Old-Order Mennonites really, but I imagine that what they do is they just live their lives. I'm probably wrong about them. I wonder, these people always make me wonder, and I see them fairly frequently in bus terminals, to what extent they live their lives reflectively. They must be aware that everyone, everyone, around them thinks they're crazy, or stupid, or both. Does it make them doubt themselves, or at least inquire into themselves?
The temptation to idealize a simple life is the temptation to idealize what Socrates calls the "healthy city" in the Republic. The healthy city, which lives within its means, is the "true" city, he says. The "kallipolis", the noble or beautiful city, which the Republic goes on to describe, is called the just city. (It just today struck me, unfortunately on my feet standing at the front of the classroom, that it is not clear that the Republic does not suggest that the just and the good are two different things and possibly in tension with each other--talk of "justice" has dropped out of the picture by the time the form of the good enters, and the good government of the kallipolis apparently requires the philosophers to neglect their natural function in order to rule.) The kallipolis is, by its nature, not healthy but feverish. It is founded on appetites run wild that engender conflict. The story implies that without conflict there would be no philosophy. As Heidegger says, you stop to examine the hammer as an object when it isn't doing the job. When everything is going smoothly, when there's no resistance, you don't reflect. Do you?
But what is reflection worth? "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Really? Heidegger points out (I don't know if this gets at the heart of the matter ... ) that for Plato the forms are images that guide the making of things. Plato launched productivism in philosophy. Eh, but mostly what Socrates wants to produce is some state of the soul. In the Republic, we want to know what justice is in order to be just in order to be happy. But "happiness" is stipulated as consisting in having your soul in order, not having one part pulling against another--which is to say, being ruled by reason, because reason tells you the one thing you should do, as opposed to the many different things you want to do. If you didn't want many different things in the first place, you wouldn't need reason's mandate to unify the soul and bring it peace. The happiness of the Republic is happiness for the complicated life. Glaucon's objection to the simple life is that it is a life for pigs. We human beings are complicated beings. Glaucon's objection is ambiguous between being an ethical claim and a natural one. The partisan of the simple life claims that we should not be so complicated. Socrates simply concedes Glaucon's point (though pausing to say that the healthy city is the "true" city. True to what?)
I'm the last person on the floor here tonight, which has made me the last line of possible assistance for two distressed students at mid-term time. Everyone seems so innocent when they're in distress.
A couple of Old-Order Mennonites got on the bus at the Central Fresh Market in Kitchener yesterday, loaded down with--what? I always found it surprising and a little disappointing when the Mennonites showed up in the Central Fresh Market. What does the Central Fresh Market have that they can't grow or raise or whatever it is themselves? Well, anyway. I supposed to myself when they got on the bus that they wouldn't have voted in the election last week--I don't know; do Old-Order Mennonites vote?--and it doesn't matter to them who won. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, it matters, sure, in that it makes some global difference if everyone keeps electing anti-environmentalists instead of environmentalists. Which reminds me of a story I read in highschool, in one of those anthologies of stories for highschool students, about somebody living in the northern woods of somewhere, who sees a strange light in the sky one day and then spends the next week, or month, or whatever it is, dying of radiation poisoning. (This was one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.) But look, it doesn't have to be a nuclear bomb; it might be an asteroid.
Anyway, I don't know anything about these Old-Order Mennonites really, but I imagine that what they do is they just live their lives. I'm probably wrong about them. I wonder, these people always make me wonder, and I see them fairly frequently in bus terminals, to what extent they live their lives reflectively. They must be aware that everyone, everyone, around them thinks they're crazy, or stupid, or both. Does it make them doubt themselves, or at least inquire into themselves?
The temptation to idealize a simple life is the temptation to idealize what Socrates calls the "healthy city" in the Republic. The healthy city, which lives within its means, is the "true" city, he says. The "kallipolis", the noble or beautiful city, which the Republic goes on to describe, is called the just city. (It just today struck me, unfortunately on my feet standing at the front of the classroom, that it is not clear that the Republic does not suggest that the just and the good are two different things and possibly in tension with each other--talk of "justice" has dropped out of the picture by the time the form of the good enters, and the good government of the kallipolis apparently requires the philosophers to neglect their natural function in order to rule.) The kallipolis is, by its nature, not healthy but feverish. It is founded on appetites run wild that engender conflict. The story implies that without conflict there would be no philosophy. As Heidegger says, you stop to examine the hammer as an object when it isn't doing the job. When everything is going smoothly, when there's no resistance, you don't reflect. Do you?
But what is reflection worth? "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Really? Heidegger points out (I don't know if this gets at the heart of the matter ... ) that for Plato the forms are images that guide the making of things. Plato launched productivism in philosophy. Eh, but mostly what Socrates wants to produce is some state of the soul. In the Republic, we want to know what justice is in order to be just in order to be happy. But "happiness" is stipulated as consisting in having your soul in order, not having one part pulling against another--which is to say, being ruled by reason, because reason tells you the one thing you should do, as opposed to the many different things you want to do. If you didn't want many different things in the first place, you wouldn't need reason's mandate to unify the soul and bring it peace. The happiness of the Republic is happiness for the complicated life. Glaucon's objection to the simple life is that it is a life for pigs. We human beings are complicated beings. Glaucon's objection is ambiguous between being an ethical claim and a natural one. The partisan of the simple life claims that we should not be so complicated. Socrates simply concedes Glaucon's point (though pausing to say that the healthy city is the "true" city. True to what?)
I'm the last person on the floor here tonight, which has made me the last line of possible assistance for two distressed students at mid-term time. Everyone seems so innocent when they're in distress.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
At noon release another leaf
Currently at UW: 8.3. First snow of the cold season yesterday. Nothing on the ground around here, but some up toward Georgian Bay.
Overheard in the WLU library: "Why's there even an apostrophe in French?"
Qu'est-ce que c'est, cette question stupide?
Man overheard talking to TTC fare collector last week: "I have a picture here of my elbow with the hair shaved off."
I have spent the last hour or more poking through stuff on the web about the is-ought debate from the '60s and '70s, mostly to do with Searle's "How to Derive an Ought from an Is". I was just thinking again yesterday or so that I really need to not do things like spend, cumulatively, several weeks writing about the Gettier problem, but unfortunately I am now thinking of writing a paper called "Hobbes on Deriving an Ought from an Is". I don't really know anything much about either Hobbes or the is-ought debate. But I've been teaching Hobbes this week....
Things that make teaching difficult for me:
1. I regard how to teach philosophy as an open philosophical question.
2. I think that teaching and learning philosophy both require doing philosophy.
2. a) I regard how to do philosophy as an open philosophical question. (There are very few philosophy departments, as far as I can tell, that offer courses called "Philosophical Methods". In my experience, "Intro to Philosophy" courses don't even suggest that there might be such things as philosophical methods. I was doing my PhD before I really had much idea what about doing philosophy is. But it's extremely important! You can't do serious work in philosophy unless you have some idea what doing philosophy is. Can you?)
3. I think that philosophy has to dwell on the insights of great philosophers, because each of the great philosophers attempts to show an aspect of experience that is available to us all but difficult to attend to.
3. a) I think that any aspect of the thought of any great philosopher has to be understood in the context of their thought as a whole.
3. b) I think that philosophy must be read slowly and dialectically, moving back and forth between the abstract and the concrete.
3. c) I doubt that the thought of any philosopher is internally consistent. (The philosopher sees through many particular appearances, many eidoi, many forms, and attempts to describe the appearance, the eidos, the form. The form will only stand still if the same forms are seen through in the same way. This is not to say that there is no form, but that the form is indefinite and descriptions will not be consistent if they remain true to the shifting experience they are founded on. Thus the inconsistency of the philosopher is not a vice--rather, it is a virtue, because each inconsistent description provides a new perspective that deepens the whole--though the philosopher's failing to recognize it may be. On the other hand, the failure to recognize it may be a condition that makes it possible for the philosopher to go on, and it may be the condition that makes it possible for the student to go on with the philosopher. The student approaches the philosopher with the attitude of the judge, and witnesses who give inconsistent testimony are not reliable.)
4. I think that teaching philosophy well requires ongoing dialogue with each student individually.
(This is another thing that has become important to me about the many short assignments that I have my students do, which I often comment on extensively. These things are consuming my life! But I think they're serving an essential function.)
Overheard in the WLU library: "Why's there even an apostrophe in French?"
Qu'est-ce que c'est, cette question stupide?
Man overheard talking to TTC fare collector last week: "I have a picture here of my elbow with the hair shaved off."
I have spent the last hour or more poking through stuff on the web about the is-ought debate from the '60s and '70s, mostly to do with Searle's "How to Derive an Ought from an Is". I was just thinking again yesterday or so that I really need to not do things like spend, cumulatively, several weeks writing about the Gettier problem, but unfortunately I am now thinking of writing a paper called "Hobbes on Deriving an Ought from an Is". I don't really know anything much about either Hobbes or the is-ought debate. But I've been teaching Hobbes this week....
Things that make teaching difficult for me:
1. I regard how to teach philosophy as an open philosophical question.
2. I think that teaching and learning philosophy both require doing philosophy.
2. a) I regard how to do philosophy as an open philosophical question. (There are very few philosophy departments, as far as I can tell, that offer courses called "Philosophical Methods". In my experience, "Intro to Philosophy" courses don't even suggest that there might be such things as philosophical methods. I was doing my PhD before I really had much idea what about doing philosophy is. But it's extremely important! You can't do serious work in philosophy unless you have some idea what doing philosophy is. Can you?)
3. I think that philosophy has to dwell on the insights of great philosophers, because each of the great philosophers attempts to show an aspect of experience that is available to us all but difficult to attend to.
3. a) I think that any aspect of the thought of any great philosopher has to be understood in the context of their thought as a whole.
3. b) I think that philosophy must be read slowly and dialectically, moving back and forth between the abstract and the concrete.
3. c) I doubt that the thought of any philosopher is internally consistent. (The philosopher sees through many particular appearances, many eidoi, many forms, and attempts to describe the appearance, the eidos, the form. The form will only stand still if the same forms are seen through in the same way. This is not to say that there is no form, but that the form is indefinite and descriptions will not be consistent if they remain true to the shifting experience they are founded on. Thus the inconsistency of the philosopher is not a vice--rather, it is a virtue, because each inconsistent description provides a new perspective that deepens the whole--though the philosopher's failing to recognize it may be. On the other hand, the failure to recognize it may be a condition that makes it possible for the philosopher to go on, and it may be the condition that makes it possible for the student to go on with the philosopher. The student approaches the philosopher with the attitude of the judge, and witnesses who give inconsistent testimony are not reliable.)
4. I think that teaching philosophy well requires ongoing dialogue with each student individually.
(This is another thing that has become important to me about the many short assignments that I have my students do, which I often comment on extensively. These things are consuming my life! But I think they're serving an essential function.)
Thursday, October 16, 2008
I tried to remember things that the pastor used to say
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 11. High today: 14, at 1 a.m. and 3 p.m. Dewpoint's been slowly dropping all day from 12 at midnight to 3 at 4 p.m.
For the first time ever, the NDP has won seats in eight out of the ten provinces. The only two provinces they didn't win seats in are PEI and Saskatchewan. Ten years ago you could have won a lot of money betting that the NDP would someday win seats in eight of ten provinces but none in Saskatchewan, the home of Tommy Douglas and the heartland of the CCF. This is the third election in a row that the NDP has won no seats in Saskatchewan. The only other elections in which the NDP didn't win seats in Saskatchewan were the first three elections of its existence, when the prairie-populist Diefenbaker PCs won 50 of 51 seats in 1962, 1963, and 1965. The CCF was never shut out of Saskatchewan.
At least Bill Blaikie's successor beat Alex Steen's father in Winnipeg.
For the first time ever, the NDP has won seats in eight out of the ten provinces. The only two provinces they didn't win seats in are PEI and Saskatchewan. Ten years ago you could have won a lot of money betting that the NDP would someday win seats in eight of ten provinces but none in Saskatchewan, the home of Tommy Douglas and the heartland of the CCF. This is the third election in a row that the NDP has won no seats in Saskatchewan. The only other elections in which the NDP didn't win seats in Saskatchewan were the first three elections of its existence, when the prairie-populist Diefenbaker PCs won 50 of 51 seats in 1962, 1963, and 1965. The CCF was never shut out of Saskatchewan.
At least Bill Blaikie's successor beat Alex Steen's father in Winnipeg.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
