Even More Modest Proposals

I've had a few more thoughts on how we might reverse the population collapse in
Canada and the developed world.

First, put a heavy tax on contraceptives. In the old days, contraceptives were simply illegal; probably largely because they threatened the sustainability of the nation, as they do now. I assume it would be politically impossible to make them illegal again. Nevertheless, there is justification to at least hit them with the same "sin tax" we put on other disreputable pleasures, like alcohol and tobacco. Perhaps condoms could remain tax-free for their role in disease prevention.

Unlike so many political proposals, note, mine here would mostly cost government no money. In fact, they would probably increase revenues, especially this one. And my final suggestion is just as revenue-positive: automatic Canadian residence for any Filipinas of child-bearing age who wish to come.

I say Filipinas, not any other nationality, for a reason—the same reason that Filipinas are sought the world over as nannies. The Filipino culture places an extremely high value on children—the patron saint of the Southern Philippines, for example, is Santo Nino, the Holy Child. Just what we need.

This policy would do several desirable things at once, and at zero cost. First, of course, it would immediately boost the population of working age. Filipinos already speak English—there should be no lag before they were employable and contributing tax dollars. Second, given the Filipina specialty, this would at a stroke reduce the cost and boost the quality of child care in Canada, making it more appealing for Canadians to have children, and to have larger families. Unlike “day care,” this would require no staggering government expenditure—instead, the government could expect to profit from the increased business activity. Third, a large enough presence of Filipinas, otherwise very much like Canadians, thanks to their long colonization by Spain and the USA, might strategically graft this love of children onto the broader culture. Fourth, if only women were let in, as proposed, they would soon seek Canadian husbands. This would guarantee their full integration into existing Canadian society, and that of their offspring. Fifth, the extra women would permit many Canadian men to marry and have children who cannot at present. The cumulative effect could be overwhelming.

Granted, Canadian women might not appreciate the competition. But hey, let's remember: a women needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, right? And the result would only be simple justice, since it is largely feminism which has brought us this population crisis. Canadian women have had their way in all things for over a generation now, while Canadian men as well as Canadian children have been correspondingly suppressed. This would only begin to right that balance.

The more so, of course, if each man were permitted four Filipina wives...

A Few Modest Proposals

The CD Howe Institute said recently it has run the numbers, and immigration cannot solve the problem of Canada's demographic collapse. Even at a level much higher than it is today, it just would not be enough. And this is without taking into account the fact that the supply of potential immigrants is itself not limitless—the demographic crisis is moving rapidly through the Third World.

The only real solution is to have more babies.

It seems to me there are a few policies the government could pursue to make this more likely—and all the other governments of the developed world should probably do likewise.

1. Free tertiary education for all. How many families balk at having another child for fear of the cost of a college education? In any case, there are other good reasons for doing this. First, it is an equality issue—without free tertiary education, we are not allowing all our young to compete on an equal footing. Second, it would promote a more skilled workforce, and a more meritocratic system, both of which are vital in order to compete in this increasingly hi-tech world. Third, it would probably more than pay back the government outlay over time by raising the incomes of the next generation, and therefore their tax brackets.

2. Ban abortion. This is a no-brainer. Currently, there is about one abortion in Canada for every two live births. Of course, there are also other, compelling, moral reasons for banning abortion as well.

3. Ban affirmative action for women. Women's pay before feminism was at a par with that of unmarried men. The premium was never paid for men, but for married men. There are practical reasons for this: married men, with a family to support, are much more stable and diligent employees. Accordingly, the main effect of affirmative action has been to penalize families and children in favour of single women. This is obviously bad policy.

4. Ban mandatory retirement ages. This will not direclty produce more babies, but it will ease the demographic crisis. And it is a human rights issue in any event. Everyone should have the right to work if they can physically and if they so choose.

5. Limit men's liability for child support. At present any man is putting his neck in a noose by having children. In case of divorce, he can be financially ruined. His liability should be limited to 25% of income or, say, $1,000 per month for the first, and $600 per month per subsequent dependant child, whichever is lower.

Some will want to argue that this is not recognizing the best interests of the children. I say nonsense—the best interest of the children is ensured by keeping the family together, and this limit on liability will make that more likely. Even if the family must split up, no child really needs more than perhaps $1,000 per month for a decent life—any more than that is probably going to the mother in any case.

Fathers could, of course, voluntarily pay more—or use any additional amount to negotiate their continuing custody or visitation rights.

6. Allow men to have four wives.

Well, there's no harm in asking, is there?

The Plight of African Women

A friend, a left-leaning columnist, tells the heart-warming story of an Ghanaian woman who came to Canada to get her Ph.D. Not forgetting her homeland, she has set up a charity offering microcredit to the women of her home village. Her name is Vida.

Here is my response:

I'm not at all sure Vida's charity is a good idea. I am not at all sure it is doing more good than harm.

Your column claims that women in Ghana are notably deprived of an education. Not true, according to the statistics at Nationmaster. Male/female attendance at primary and secondary school is close to 50/50: 47.4% female primary, 44.7% female secondary. For comparison, in Singapore it's 47.6% female in primary school; Netherlands 48.3%; Canada 48.8%. Not too far off the mark; and especially impressive in the Third World, where a lack of jobs makes it less useful to educate women as a practical matter. Indeed, your own column contradicts the claim that Vida's family was opposed to educating women: her elder sister, you note, was able to finance Vida's education, because she held a job.

Your column claims that hospitals and health care in Ghana discriminate against women. But again, the statistics belie this: as in most parts of the world, women's life expectancy in Ghana is higher than men's: 60.35 vs. 58.65 years.

You further claim that, in Ghana, men control the money. If so, Ghana is nearly unique in world terms: almost everywhere else, women do. This includes Canada: since long before “women's liberation,” and still today, women control fully 80% of all consumer spending. The typical situation everywhere is that the husband earns the money, the wife spends it. And, in fact, your own column again belies this claim: obviously, Vida's own sister was able to control her own money, to the extend that she had a large enough disposable income to support her sister in school. Note too, in Vida's micro-credit scheme, that the women are able to back one another's loans. Obviously, they have some cash to work with, entirely at their own discretion, despite Ghana's poverty, or this would not be possible.

Anecdotally, you tell the story of a woman who had to sneak away from her husband to get birth control pills. This is not too surprising. In an agricultural society, another child is usually of overall benefit to the family—not just one more mouth to feed, but two more hands to work, and one more member of the mutual support network. Each further child helps guarantee the parents' welfare in old age. For the wife, specifically, though, it represents a risk: death in childbirth is not that uncommon. So the husband is normally likely to want more children, while the wife may fear it.

But of the two, who is right? Who is thinking of the greater good to the greater number, of their family reponsibilities? It seems to me that supporting the wife against the husband in this situation is likely to be to the overall detriment of Ghanians.

There seems, in sum, no objective justification for the radical discrimination against men that Vida's project proposes; nothing, perhaps, but cultural prejudice. And is radical discrimination really a good thing to promote in Africa, which has been rocked so many times already with ethnic genocides?

As noted, the wife almost always gets to spend the family money at her own discretion. So what, exactly, is the point of putting this money very publicly in front of the whole village directly into the women's hands, ad Vida's scheme proposes? The only obvious value of this is to dramatically cut men out of the family equation, and to humiliate them—to subvert the family role of the husband and father as provider.

This obvious direct attack on the Ghanian family structure is more likely to increase poverty than to reduce it.

First, it is a serious thing to subvert the family in the Third World, because in such poor countries the family is the only form of social insurance there is. There is no government safety net—indeed, government barely functions at all, and commonly you cannot trust anyone outside your own family even to deal with you fairly. Beyond the family, it is almost a war of each against each.

Second, what is the likely and demonstrated reaction of men to having their family role as provider removed? Daniel Patrick Moynihan did a famous study of this years ago, in relation to the US welfare system. Most often, men in this situation do one of two things—or rather, families do, as the women's wishes are probably also involved: either the men stop working and relax; or they leave. Either way, the whole family suffers, and especially the children. As a result, the black family in America has almost disappeared since the 1940s, creating a permanent welfare cycle, a permanent underclass. The same is likely to happen in Ghana to the extent that Vida's approach is embraced.

Make no mistake; the result will be worse than a zero sum game. What more money the mother makes will be cancelled out by less from the father, yes. But the father is unlikely, on the evidence, to embrace the idea of taking care of the children now that the mother is too busy with her business. He's more likely to get drunk and stay drunk. Or go. And stacks of studies show that children suffer greatly every which way from having fewer than two parents. So the next generation is being mortgaged for the sake of this present social experiment; Ghana's future prosperity is being mortgaged.

I cannot imagine a more perfect recipe for Ghana's permanent colonization.

Some Say He's Hardy...

Having just watched the movie “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” (I watch movies while I exercise), I was pondering the British Empire—on balance, was it a force for good or evil.

So I thought, once again, I'd throw the question to Ask500People, and see what the world thought.

The overall result: 69% good, 31% evil. That's a pretty positive result, and belies the usual politically correct line. So much for “post-colonialism” and all that guff.

Here's an even more interesting result: a quick scan of the world map shows the opinion of the British Empire is especially positive not in Europe, but in the “Third World”--just the folks who are supposed to have suffered from it. South America and Africa love it. The Middle East loves it. So does India. The negative votes seem clustered in Europe—that is, the one spot that did not actually experience it.

To be perfectly fair, there were two former British colonies in which the negative vote surpassed the positive, though only by 1 to 0: Jamaica and Australia. Ireland posted no votes. In Britain itself, the feeling was perfectly ambiguous: a tie. In the US, the Empire swept two thirds of the vote. The two countries in which the British Empire seemed most popular were Brazil and Argentina. Argentina—Britain's opponent in the Falklands War.

Another folk version of Ave Maria for Canada Day

Raylene Rankin sings Ave Maria.

Cape Breton Responds

Not to be outdone, here are the Rankins doing it Cape Breton Highland style.

Leahy Show How it's Done in the More Traditional Irish Style.

Here.

Happy Dominion Day

Did you know there was a distinct Canadian style of stepdancing? It comes from my own home area, the Ottawa Valley. Here's an online illustration from YouTube.

Here's more from the Stepcrew.

As I think you will agree, it's a lot livelier than the Irish style, as practiced in the Peterborough region by Leahy.

And here's Father Eugene Morris doing it in the Cape Breton Highland style. Quite different again.

Idi Amin--Was He Really So Bad?

I am really out of touch with popular culture. I finally got around to seeing “The Last King of Scotland” just last night.

It was a disturbing experience.

Disturbing firstly, of course, for the horror it showed, with the knowledge that much of what it showed was not fiction.

But also disturbing for how the original story—I am old enough to remember Amin in power—has been subtly filtered through a lens of left-wing political correctness, and partly falsified. I fear that, as with The Da Vinci Code or Inherit the Wind, too many will be left thinking this is what really happened.

To begin with, the film makes it clear that, for whatever Amin did, white people were ultimately to blame. It prominently features an arrogant ferret-like British diplomat boasting that Amin was put in power by the British Foreign Office, to “keep the Africans in their place” and as part of some vaguely McCarthyite anti-Communist struggle. This is completely fictitious—the British Foreign Office documents of the time have since been declassified, and Britain had no part in Amin's rise to power. It is just one more attempt to blame everything on “colonialism” and the international WASP conspiracy. In fact, Amin taunted Britain more or less constantly—something the movie does show--and moved Uganda into the Soviet orbit—something about which the film is conspicuously silent.

Then the film twists the story of Kay Amin to push a pro-abortion message. In the movie, she dies from a botched “village abortion,” because she is unable to get a proper medical one within a bizarre personally set deadline of less than 24 hours—no matter the consequences, of which she is clearly warned in the movie.

The message is clear: women must be given free, unrestricted access to abortion on demand, or they simply cannot prevent themselves from going into back alleys to get themselves killed by coathangers.

Bollocks—Kay's actions in the movie are plainly illogical. And the real Kay Amin died from an abortion, all right. But it was an abortion performed in a medical clinic by a qualified doctor.

That, obviously, would not have sent the right message. Though it would have made far more plot sense.

Idi Amin too, if anything, mad as he seems in the movie, is given far too much credit for good intentions. I wonder if a white dictator who had done the same—killed up to 500,000 of his countrymen--would have been portrayed as sympathetically? He is shown as a basically decent if foolish man gradually driven to paranoia by real threats from his enemies. He seems in the movie to have been provoked by an early assassination attempt and an armed attack on a prison in Kampala.

This does not fit the facts. I cannot find any reference to an early assassination attempt. The attack on the prison, too, never seems to have happened. The mass executions of Acholi and Langi ethnic groups began almost immediately—and there was no chance anyone could have missed this, as the movie's protagonist does. Indeed, there was no attempt at secrecy. Amin's common practice was to have people, when seized, take off their shoes at the point of arrest—left on the roadside as a warning to everyone else. “Disappearances” were often preannounced on the radio, to heighten the terror. He expelled all the Asians in Uganda barely a year after coming to power. The reason was transparent, and it was not a fit of madness or misplaced patriotism: it was to seize their property. The technique had been perfected by Hitler against the Jews, and has been used since against whites by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

He was, wuite simply, a serial killer, a pure psychopath, in political power.

And for what it is worth, he shares one interesting biographical detail with many other known serial killers: an absent father.

Consider that next time you hear of a marriage breakup, and the de facto custody of the children being awarded—as it is about 94% of the time—to the mother.

Back from the Dead

Feeling nostalgic? Those of us who cut our teeth on the old Apple II may enjoy this site.

Ave Maria

... on the barrel organ.

More Music of the Soul

Amazing Grace played on the hurdy-gurdy.

There ain't no hiding place from the Father of Creation.

Ever listened to the lyrics?


"Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right."

All great art is religious.

Neda Ascends

Like many others, I have watched the recent video of Neda Agha-Soltan being shot dead in Tehran. Like many others, I found the images disturbing. But I'm not sure it was for the same reason in my case. At the risk of sounding callous, my concern was not that Neda died. It was the way the people around her shouted at her, manhandled her, and tried to keep her alive. It seemed to me to rob the event of all dignity, and her of her dignity, and must have made the experience of dying, which ought to be an epiphany, more difficult.

Why do those who are still alive see life on any terms as so important, and death as so unthinkable? When they swarm someone who is dying like this, and shake them, and shout “come back, come back,” are they really expressing any concern for the dying, or only for their own fears?

Such hostility to death seems to me a type of plain madness, since death is what necessarily happens to us all. And anyone who is a true Muslim or Christian should welcome it, even if we do fear the pain and possible indignity that we face just before that threshold.

Pain and indignity that we must often fear most from the living.

The Boss: Man or Woman?

Ask500People is a website at which you can pose a simple question, and people from around the world answer it. Answers are broken down demographically in several ways. Instant research.

A couple of days ago, I asked the question, “Who would you rather have as your immediate superior in your job? A man or a woman?” I got about the result I expected: 66% prefer a man as their boss.

Discrimination? Maybe; but consider this: women were about twice as likely than men to prefer a man. This makes me suspect the bias is the other way: men probably feel more contrained in seeing or saying the truth, for fear of being considered sexist.

Results were consistent across all age groups past age 25—i.e., beyond the point when people were likely to have had actual experience of both. Results by country were too small to make much of. The US, with the greatest response, matched the general trend pretty closely. India preferred women.

Even feminists now admit that men and women are not the same. It may well follow that one sex is better than the other at any given task, including that of managing other adults. It would only make sense to organize enterprises accordingly.

How to Improve the Schools

A few weeks ago, someone sent me an interesting report. This year, the Massachusetts Dept of Ed required Ed School grads to take a test in grade school math for certification. Only 27% passed.

This seems to mean that the average teacher in grade school actually knows less math than the pupils. How can someone teach what they do not know?

But this also implies that the worst students in grade school are the ones who go on to be teachers. This, surely, is the opposite of what we should seek. How has this come about?

I Googled for a site that analyses SAT figures. These scores are supposed to measure innate academic ability, and are used by universities as an objective check on actual marks to determine who will do well in further education. As such, they are also a fairly good proxy for IQ. Checking the rankings finds Ed School entrants indeed near the bottom of the barrel. They are third to last on math skills.

But here's an even bigger shocker: they are even worse in their verbal skills: second to last. Yet this is the one essential skill for a good teacher: the ability to communicate clearly. A teacher is a public speaker, and rhetorical skill was for two thousand years roughly equated with teaching ability. It seems we would do better by choosing any other major instead of education as our qualification for teaching in the schools.

Mind you, the problem might not be that only the dull want to study education. The more likely hypothesis is that only the dull want to teach in the schools.

That's as may be, but the thesis is easily tested. Abolish education schools, open the doors of official teacher certification to all majors, and see what happens. At worst, we would be no worse off.

For what it's worth, I also checked GRE scores. At graduate level, the SAT is replaced by the GRE. Here, too, those seeking second degrees in education do not distinguish themselves. Various education specialities get various scores, but almost all are in the bottom half of all majors. And the lowest education specialties are again close to scraping the bottom in all skills—second to last in verbal and math, and fifth to last in writing. These are the people running the schools and designing the curriculum.

And this turns out to look like a fluke. At the Ph.D. level—those teaching the teachers to teach teachers to teach—Education majors are again second to dead last. Only professional bureaucrats score worse.

Since most universities in Canada also use the SAT and GRE, there is every reason to believe that these figures reflect the Canadian situation as well as that in the US.

Some—certainly most teachers' unions—argue that the problem is that teachers are underpaid. Pay them more, and you would attract better-qualified candidates. But these same figures do not seem to bear this out. Who is most driven by money in choosing their major? Wouldn't that be the business grads and the MBA's? But it turns out that Business grads and MBAs are not scoring that much better than teachers; below the fold in all skills. And—believe it or not—neither are medical students, the best-paying career of all.

Who is actually pulling the big IQs and academic talents?

Philosophy. English language and literature. Arts and Humanities. Religion. Physics. Mathematics.

This makes sense, in fact. Money is less likely to be a motivator the smarter you are. The really bright are going to be driven by ideas. These are the fields in which you get to encounter the biggest and best ideas of mankind, with a minimum of BS.

But the greater irony is that these are also the fields most likely to develop good teachers: they teach clarity of thought and of expression, enthusiasm for learning, a sense of mission, and a broad knowledge of the best ideas of human civilization.

The way, then, to improve the schools is clear, and it costs less than nothing. Abolish the Teachers' Colleges, and make these degrees the basic requirement for a job as a teacher.

In two generations, the country that does will rule the world.

Let's Stop Foreigners from Marrying and Having Children!

A casual reader of this blog reports herself “dismayed” by my post on May-December marriages—or “child brides,” as most prefer to call it. She refers me to a UN web site titled “Child Marriage Fact Sheet.”


So let's examine the facts, one by one:

“Married adolescents are typified by:

large spousal age gaps.”

Never mind the mangled grammar--just note that this is cited, without explanation, as a problem with the marriages. It is simply a strong expression of prejudice.

“limited social support, due to social isolation”

If this is a concern, and it should be, our efforts should be fully directed to introducing the practice of child marriage into the First World. Social isolation is an endemic problem in the developed West, and it is largely due to separation from the extended family. By contrast, a child bride in the Third World has just doubled her number of close relatives. In most cases, they will all be living close by.

“limited educational attainment and no schooling options.”

In other words, the child bride has managed to escape years of unpaid labour. This sounds like an advantage to me—but probably isn't. There's little chance she could have afforded to go to school in any case. Not that school would have been any use to her--it would prepare her for jobs that do not exist.

“intense pressure to become pregnant.”

Anyone who has actually known a real girl or woman knows that women want children. Two-year-olds will play with dolls. Women without children will treat a dog or cat as one. The chance to have children before other women is a significant advantage of the practice, for women.

For some reason, we enjoy torturing our youth by denying them marriage and responsibility until long after puberty. And then we wonder why they are so difficult during those teenage years. Girls, at least, avoid this in the Third World.

“increased risk of infant and maternal mortality.”

This just is not true. Maternal mortality risk rises steadily with age, and is highest for the first birth. “Puerperal fatality [that is, death of the mother in childbirth] was at a minimum for the youngest mothers and increased very sharply with advancing age of mother,” notes a study done in New York State.

That means it is safest to have your first child when you are quite young; and this is more crucial in the Third World, where there is often little medical care available. The UN page claims the reverse, that younger women are more likely to die in childbirth--but it does not seem to have controlled for the fact that younger women are much more likely to be undergoing their first birth.

Maternal mortality risk is also correlated with nutrition—and one important advantage to marrying a much older man is that he is probably more financially established. If one truly cares for the life and health of Third World women, one should encourage the practice.

Increased vulnerablity to HIV and other STIs.

Once again, this is the reverse of the truth. The surest way to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases, next to lifelong chastity, is to marry young and stay monogamous.

Restricted social mobility-freedom of movement.

When a woman marries, she is out from under the control of her father, and mistress in her own home. At worst, she has a bossy mother-in-law to contend with instead of a bossy mother; but she has her husband as a possible ally against her. Probably in most cases a step up in terms of social mobility and freedom of movement.

Little access to modern media.

Again, one of the points of May-December marriage is that the husband will be more financially established, and so better able to support a wife and children. It follows, in case it is important, that the child bride will as a result have greater access to modern media than otherwise.

Lack of skills to be viable to the labour market.

She already has a job—wife and mother. It is a good job, and a well-paid one. Good jobs are rare in the Third World—jobs of any kind are rare in the Third World. Those that are available are almost entirely unskilled—and so she has the skills she needs in any case.

The page goes on to say, “The link is clear. It is no coincidence that the same countries ... that have high rates of child marriage are those with: high poverty rates, birth rates, and death rates.”

Yes, indeed, the link is clear—it is poor countries in which May-December marriages are most advantageous to both parties. Men cannot afford to support families until later in life. Women cannot afford to wait too long to have children, or the health risks become significant.

Greater incidence of conflict and civil strife.

This is a major cause of poverty everywhere. But it is also a good reason why it is not wise for a woman to remain single longer than necessary. She needs all the male protection she can get.

The UN page goes on to use the subhead “Disparities in Age and Power,” without explaining how these two things—age and power—might be related. In fact, a woman who is significantly younger than her husband, in the Third World, has a great deal of power over him as a direct result. Inevitably, in old age, should he survive that long, he will be wholly dependent on her. This becomes an overwhelming incentive to treat her well in youth.

My correspondent goes on to say “Your synopsis of feminism is also painfully underthought - the foundation of feminism is simply human rights- that no person, regardless of race, gender, age, should be systematically oppressed by another individual or group.”

Again, this is just about the opposite of the true foundation of feminism. Feminism has never been about equality. It was, in the first place, about enabling casual sex. It has since become about getting more for women under any circumstances, and suppressing the rights of men. It has also become quite actively racist, and hostile to all non-Western cultures.

As the current discussion shows.

Ave Maria

Here's a beautiful website: the Hail Mary in many languages.

I like the Old Provencal.

That'll Teach 'Em

David Steiner and Susan Rozen did a study in 2004 of what books were actually studied in 18 top Education Schools across the US. Those studied included Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and U. Michigan. In seven, required courses were all and only psychology courses—no history of education, no philosophy of education. This is all very well, except that psychology has virtually no verifiable results of any sort. Psychology was a part of the curriculum in all but three programs.

Only ten out of eighteen programs, covered either philosophy or history of education. Even in philosophy of ed programs, they found only one prominent philosopher studied in more than one program: John Dewey. Only one program, out of eighteen, featured any mention of Plato, the founder of the Western pedagogical tradition, at all. “Philosophy of Education” courses, when they existed, were much more likely to feature the book “Pedagagy of the Oppressed,” by Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Friere.

Courses in “Foundations of Education” were found to deal almost exclusively with “constructivism,” the recently fashionable (though now apparently being replaced by the new fad, “connectivism”) postmodern theory translated into educational terms. To sum it up: Nothing is real: reality is socially constructed. The traditional view of reality is constructed by the oppressor. It must therefore not be taught.

Only two schools, out of eighteen, featured any mention of direct instruction, the one educational technique actually demonstrated to work in reasonably reliable scientific studies. In both these curricula, its place was relatively minor.

What about rhetoric, which was, as we have pointed out in this space, the Western teaching tradition for over twenty-three centuries? Was there anything preserved from all those years of thought, study, and empirical observation, to be passed down to present teachers?

Nothing. Not a word.

What about non-Western teaching methods?

All of the schools featured required courses on “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” But what did this really consist of? As Steiner and Rozen found at Stanford, “all of these authors were American, and all but one of their books was written in the past 30 years.”

The student teachers learned (and learn) no more about non-Western than about Western traditions of teaching.

And people must go through these programs to be permitted to teach in American public schools. Yes, there are alternative routes to accreditation—but these too are controlled by the Ed Schools, and require essentially the same curriculum.

I have no real idea whether the same is true in Canada as in the US--but given that Canada tends to lean further to the left, it seems likely. You are paying for this with your tax dollars, and unless you are rich your children are required to attend the schools that result.

Me, I'm looking hard at home schooling.

Thank Heaven - for Little Girls

The shock about President Lugo of Paraguay having had a relationship with a much younger woman, perhaps as young as sixteen, and having a son by her, continues. At least for my friend in Paraguay. This has provoked the following more recent reflection about the immorality of having sex with teenagers--”pedophilia,” as he calls it.

It is certainly a huge cause for scandal these days—Anne Landers wanted all offenders castrated just a few years ago. But this concern, or at least this level of concern, is quite new, even in the West. In the old days, the only issue was sex outside of marriage. But today, governments like those in India or Saudi Arabia face heat on the grounds of "human rights" for "child brides."

But is there really something morally wrong with women marrying young? This is a very new idea even in the west. First, consider the ancient tradition (and historical likelihood) that Mary herself, at her marriage, was barely past puberty, no older than 15 at the outside. And that Joseph was an aged man--some early written sources say he was 90 at marriage.

How about that archetype of Western romance, Romeo and Juliet? According to the play, Juliet is 13. Romeo's age is not given, by Shakespeare-but in pre-Shakespearean sources, he is 20 or 21.

Some sources say Mohammed married his last wife, Ayesha, when he was 53 and she was nine. In Judaic tradition, consider the Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs. We do not know the precise age of the woman in that famous love poem. But consider this moving verse:

"Our sister is little: her breasts are not yet formed. What shall we do for her on the day she is spoken for?"

How about that great medieval romance, the story of Abelard and Heloise? He was 22 years older than she was.

How about the romance that built the Taj Mahal? That's a big one, isn't it?

When Shah Jehan married Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj was built, she was fourteen.

Probably the most famous Korean romance is the story of Chunhyang and Yi Toryong. Chunhyang's age at marriage? 15.

You might also have heard of the marriage between Mohammed and Ayesha; the precise ages are in dispute, but there is no question she was much younger than he.

Obviously, there was no moral issue, until a few years ago, for Christians, Jews, or Muslims.

So most cultures at most times seem to have thought a very young bride, and a significantly older groom, was not a scandal, but the ideal match. And this makes perfect sense: a younger woman is better able to bear many children, while an older, more established man, is more likely to be able to support them. Sheer survival of the species.

How recent is this prejudice against young women and older men?

Pretty recent. Among the five greatest romances of the twentieth century, Time magazine lists Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. It has inspired popular songs and further movies. Bogart was twice her age. When they played a romantic couple in To Have and Have Not, she was 19, and he was 44.

How about “The Misfits,” 1960? There were at least twenty years between the romantic leads, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. How about “Gigi”? Gigi was supposed to be 15; Chevalier was 60. “Gone With the Wind”--there's a romance classic. Gable had twelve years on Vivian Leigh. In Shaw's play Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, she is sixteen. He is 52. Oona O'Neill, daughter of the playwright, spurned both Orson Welles and J.D. Salinger to wed Charlie Chaplin, 36 years her senior, in 1943. Unfortunately, they had to wait until her 18th birthday, becuase her father refused to give his consent.

And so it goes.

Something happened in the Sixties, obviously. It was feminism.

I really wonder, though, whether the objection was ever really to the age difference, or rather to marriage per se?

After all, self-respecting feminists from the Sixties onwards resisted getting married—-or, if married, divorced as soon as they could get child support. Not already safely married, at a relatively advanced age, they unfortunately discovered they could not compete for the attentions of men with these much younger women. They were scabs. They were busting the union. But of course, they could not be blamed directly or oppenly, because they were women. But the practice had to somehow be stigmatized, de-normalized.

Hence the new, ultimately wild-eyed, stereotype of "pedophilia."

Was Walt Disney Naughty?

Dante doesn't mention it, but I'm sure there must be a special place in hell reserved for biographers.

Not all biographers, to be sure, but for a certian type: those who write the inevitable highly-critical “revisionist” biography of a famous person after his death. The act itself is inherently cowardly, and inherently dishonest: the subject, no longer alive, can no longer defend himself, let alone sue for slander. It is done with the soul of a Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan: the perpetrator seeks fame and fortune from the accomplishments of someone else, while at the same time destroying those accomplisments and their true author. Even if the accusations are true, they can serve no purpose, after the subject is dead, and so necessarily are the sin of calumny even when they are not a libel.

On YouTube, I recently ran across such a piece, done by Britain's TV 4, on Walt Disney. Their claims against them, as I could isolate them, were the following:
That he employed women in the relatively menial job of inker, but did not employ them as illustrators.
That he was anti-semitic.
That he took credit for everything the studio did, though he was not in fact the artist.
That he was actually a lousy artist who could not even draw Mickey Mouse.
That he fought unionization of Disney Studios.
That he was an informant for the FBI.
That he testified in front of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and named people as Communists.

Let's look at them one by one, in Disney's defense.

That he employed women in the relatively menial job of inker, but did not employ them as illustrators.

That's just good sense. Women would be better at inking than men, because they have greater manual dexterity. This is the same reason they were universally preferred, at the time, as secretaries. But to put them in responsible jobs requiring a very high level of expertise did not make sense, because they would almost always leave their jobs at marriage.

That he was anti-semitic.

This seems to be a total fabrication, perhaps an urban legeng. Disney hired scads of Jews for his studio, and many of his closest associates were Jewish. He donated to Jewish charities. He was Beverley Hills Bnai Brith's man of the year in 1955.

That he took credit for everything the studio did, though he was not the artist.

First, this is just good business. Aunt Jemima didn't really cook all those pancakes, either. Sara Lee didn't make all those cakes. Putting a single human face forward as spokesperson is of great value in establishing a brand, and in Disney's case, it was far more authentic than most. I'm sure no one really thought he drew all those pictures personally, did they?

Second, this follows well-established practice in the art world. In the case of sculptors or even painters, since the Renaissance and before, the named artist very commonly only supervised the work, with details left to apprentices. But, because it was his vision, it is still considered his work. Surely it is reasonable to do the same with movies?

That he was actually a lousy artist who couldn't even draw Mickey Mouse.

Disney may not have been as good a draughtsman as many he employed, but he was surely legitimately an artist. First, that is what he was trained in, and that is how he began—by drawing his first illustrations and cartoons himself. Second, anyone can see a single, unified vision behind the great Disney animations; anyone can tell there is one mind and one voice behind them. Anyone can see this voice was lost when Disney died.

That he fought unionization at Disney Studios.

Why wouldn't he? It was more or less his duty as an executive. Unionization is bad for business. Ask Detroit. But even so, Disney claimed later that he was not fighting against unions per se, and pointed out that Disney Studio recognized over thirty different unions in their operations. The problem was with this particular union, because it was refusing to allow a free vote of members. Disney claimed to be defending his workers' rights.

That he was an informant for the FBI.

This claim has apparently not been proven. But if so, why is that a bad thing? Isn't it, rather, the sort of thing one normally would expect of a responsible citizen, so long as the government is not oppressive? Aren't we more or less legally obliged to give the law enforcement authorities all possible assistance?


That he testified in front of the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and named people as Communists.

The actual transcript of Disney's testimony is available online.

http://filmtv.eserver.org/disney-huac-testimony.txt

In it, Disney says nothing unreasonable. He does not name anyone as a Communist, because, as he notes, nobody can ever really know. He gives the names of people he suspects are Communists, and explains why he thinks so. Why wouldn't he?

Of course, as has since been revealed thanks to now-released Soviet archives, the US State Department and the Hollywood Studios really were targets for Soviet penetration, and many there really were active Soviet agents, apparently including the first name Disney puts forward.

So where's the problem? There is a problem, I suppose, if you hold the entire idea of opposing and rooting out Communists to be illegitimate, and a violation of one's freedom of thought. Then Disney is guilty of something—along, of course, with most Americans of his time. But I think there is genuine room for the thesis that Communism as a movement was bent upon overturning the American system of government. If so, to actually sign up for the Communist Party would be, legitimately, the classic crime of treason. This is not usually considered a trivial offense. And concealing the identities of those you suspected of it would not be a patriotic act.

The real question, I suppose, is this: when, in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the Soviet Union targeted the American entertainment industry, the American press, and the American education system for infiltration, subversion, and conversion to their ideological purposes, did they succeed?

Catholic Culture Studies

All art that is not yoked to religion, like a big strong to to a plough, is useless. Any artist who is not religious is worse than useless: he is playing barehanded with fire, and will suffer for it.

But what religion? In the west, nearly inevitably, Catholicism. Protestantism has never understood the uses of art. For Catholicism, it is a native language. Judaism, of course, generates more than its fair share, but Judaism is a small faith.

I continue to be astonished to learn of artists who are devout whom I never suspected. Did you know Andy Warhol, that icon of the gays, was an almost daily churchgoer? Did you know Salvador Dali was very publicly Catholic? That Aubrey Beardsley converted? That Cezanne was very devout? That Anton Gaudi is a candidate for beautification?

Cinema: Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Robert Altman, Frank Capra, Mack Sennett—where would English-language film, be without the Catholics? Never mind French or Italian cinema.

And it isn't just the visual arts. English-speaking culture is especially strong in the language arts, traditionally—but don't the mostly-Catholic Irish tend to stand out within the English world in that regard? Even many of the big names of the literature of England tend to be Catholic, despite the rarity of the breed in that country, and the oppressions it faced: William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, TS Eliot, John Gray; in the USA Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac.

Music? JS Bach was a Catholic convert. So was Gustav Mahler. Franz Liszt was a Franciscan. Vivaldi was a priest. Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, all identified themselves sufficiently with the Catholic church to compose Catholic sacred music.

Credit Protestantism with being more successful at commerce and good government; but it is Catholicism that gives Western civilization all of its preeminence in the arts.

With all those heavy guns, it seems to me odd that we do not see faculties of “Catholic Cultural Studies” in the universities, the way we see faculties of cultural studies of every other imaginable group. I think it would reveal a consistent cultural message. In fact, it is surpassingly odd that the main thrust of our literary and artistic criticism is Marxist or Freudian or existentialist or Jungian or structuralist or postmodern or “queer,” and not theological and parabolic.

It is also ironic that most folks today who have artistic pretensions are violently anti-Catholic. That is probably the primary reason that the arts are now so bankrupt. The Pharisees have taken over the temple.

The Green World

It is possible to objectively prove the existence of God. Is it possible to objectively prove the existence of an afterlife as well?

I think it is, at least for some, by an appeal to their own experience.

Northrop Frye wrote a book, “The Green World,” in which he argued that most of Shakespeare's comedies feature a retreat to such a realm of nature, “typically a forest,” in which all the problems faced by the characters are somehow solved; and they live happily ever after.

He was close. Shakespeare's comedies, and romances, do usually feature such a world, but it is not really a realm of nature—it is not the real forest at all. For what do you make of an English forest that, in Shakepeare's conception, includes lions and palm trees? And sometimes the “green world” is instead some form of celebration, a holiday, or a performance.

“Nature” itself, in other words, is a metaphor for what these worlds really represent. What they really represent is the world of the imagination, aka “second sight,” which mimics the physical senses, and is also like nature in being endlessly fertile.

And as such, it is a keen analysis by Shakespeare. Every artist knows that it is in the imagination that problems are solved. According to Arthur Koestler's painstaking study, “The Act of Creation,” every important inventor or scientist knows this as well. You cannot be creative in any way without it. Einstein's “thought experiments,” for example, were and are green worlds in the same sense.

The imagination, I think, is also objective proof, for the strongly imaginative, of the existence of heaven and of an afterlife. One can become aware, powerfully, of a realm separate from the common physical world, but which has its own definite rules and exists apart from our own consciousness of it, out of our conscious control.

If one's imagination is powerful, one also becomes aware that this realm is a much better place than the everyday world—so much so that one develops a powerful yearning for it, and a corresponding disappointment with the visible world of the tiresome daylight hours.

I guess everyone has some experience of this second world—in dreams, at a minimum. But some clearly have far more awareness of it than others. When someone seems to think imagination is something under our control --- “stop daydreaming!” the teacher insists, or someone says “it's only your imagination” -- it seems to me they reveal that for them it is quite weak. But I think you can see clear references to it in the work of any really good artist—this is what makes artists, their awareness of the other world. Frye's “green world” could just as easily be located in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Robet Louis Stevenson, or Stanley Kubrick, or anyone of that calibre; under various metaphors.

I think it is also the reason that artists of all kinds are also very likely to be depressives, or manic depressives. They become depressed, because they are painfully aware of this better place, and unable to go there, trapped mostly in this insufficient present world.

Conversely, I think most depressives I have known have been depressive because they are too aware of this other world.

“Schizophrenics”? I think schizophrenia may happen when one has no concept of the existence of this other world, and it suddenly manifests itself vividly. That's when one is liable to mistake the things of imagination for the things of the material world.

One corollary, I suppose, if this is right, is that people in general are wise to fear the mentally ill. For if this conception is true, it is also likely that mental illness is contagious. We may know that, instinctively.

The kingdom of heaven is among us.

For those of us who do not have a strong natural ability to perceive the imagination, the experience of art often does it for us. If and when we can become fully engrossed in a book or a movie, as most of us can, we are there.

That is our warrant. That is our proof that we can exist quite apart from the physical world around us, and apart from our physical bodies.

All human cultures have known this. It is more obvious than the nose on your face.

The Crisis in Paraguay

A friend of mine is an American diplomat stationed in Paraguay. He reports on the recent scandal there: the President, a former Catholic bishop, has been accused by three women of fathering their children. He has admitted to fathering at least one of the children.

A BBC story adds that one of the women claims the affair began when she was only 16, under the legal age of consent, making it a crime. It also accuses Lugo of “breaking his vows.” The Washington Post avers that “in this heavily Roman Catholic country, the revelations about a man who had sworn chastity vows as a priest has stirred deeper concerns.”

My friend goes even further, taking the opportunity to do, as he puts it, “a little well-deserved Catholic-bashing.” He accuses the pope and the Paraguyan bishops of hypocrisy for not having excommunicated Lugo, the president in question, long ago, for not removing him as a bishop nad as a priest, and for keeping silent on the matter when he was running for president.
These accusations are based on a misunderstanding of Catholic morality. I'd say they're based on a misunderstanding of morality itself, but let's not even assume that. Since the charge is hypocrisy, it is sufficient to show that the Church and the Pope are following it, whether one agrees with it or not.

I post my response here, because I find that too often deep-seated prejudices are based on pure ignorance of a given religion. And we are, these days, remarkably ignorant of religions, including, often, our own.

There is no way Benedict or the Church could excommunicate Fernando Lugo merely for sinning. In the Catholic understanding, we are all sinners. If this were the rule, the Catholic church would necessarily have no members. Believing this, it would be the height of hypocrisy to excommunicate Lugo. One is excommunicated for rejecting Church teaching.

Nor would it be proper to remove Lugo as a priest or bishop because of his personal morality: one's personal morality is irrelevant to the conduct of this office. This logically follows, in part, from the Catholic understanding that we are all sinners: the church makes no claim, and has never made any claim, that priests are morally superior to the average layman. They are sinners like the rest of us, but they hold a specific sacramental function. I gather Protestants have a different concept of what their ministry involves, and so they are almost always confused on this point.

It is true that a breach of priestly discipline, i.e., violating one's vows, would be cause for dismissal. However, Lugo does not seem to have done this. Another common Protestant misconception is that the vow of celibacy is a vow to have no sex. That would be a vow of chastity; priests do not take such a vow. The vow of celibacy is a vow not to marry. Lugo has apparently kept this vow. There are no grounds to dismiss him there.

His personal morality, of course, does not look that good. But it is not the business of the church, or of any of us as Christians, to cast judgement on particular cases. To sin requires the motive to sin, and we can never be sure whether it was present in any given case. We can also never be sure that Lugo has not repented and been forgiven in Confession. Such matters are always between the individual and God. "Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

And consider Lugo's specific failing: having sex out of wedlock. Not to commit adultery is one of the ten commandments. It is binding on priests exactly as much, neither more not less, as on laymen. Now, how many of those accusing Lugo now have never had sex out of wedlock? How many of the readers of the Washington Post? How many listeners to the BBC? Doesn't the current culture, in Britain and in America, positively promote it?

Who here, indeed, is guilty of hypocrisy?

Neither is Lugo's personal morality obviously relevant to the performance of his duties as President. The issue of lying is of concern, if he has in the past publicly denied the matter; the most the Washington Post actually claims is that “during the campaign, he did not admit to having children.” Not even a sin; all of us have the right to remains silent. But the matter of fathering children out of wedlock doesn't even register.

It is therefore certainly not the job of the church or of his fellow bishops to have made their own knowledge or suspicions about him public. Unless there is a clear danger to someone else which could thereby be averted, speaking ill of another, even if one's words are truthful, is the sin of calumny. There was no such clear danger here, apparently.

So it would in fact have been a sin on the part of the Church or the bishops to have done so. Lugo's personal matters are between himself, the women and children concerned, and God.

My friend goes on to slam Paraguay itself for not being more scandalized about this. “In a developed country, this news would probably bring down the president and devastate the church. But this is Paraguay."

I don't think being underdeveloped has much to do with it. I think it has a lot more to do with Paraguay being a Catholic country. I cannot see such revelations bringing down a govenment in France or Canada, either. When former PM Trudeau had a child out of wedlock, and everyone knew about it, the common reaction seemed to be "Good for him." French President Mitterand's mistress was a well-known fact in France; nobody cared. Not the public's business. Former Philippine president Estrada boasted openly of having extramarital affairs. The Church did not like it, but it apparently did no harm to his popularity.

Part of the misunderstanding here is that Protestants are a lot more concerned about sex than are Catholics. Too often, when Protestants hear the word "sin," they think "sex," and vice versa. This connection is not there for Catholics. As sins go, adultery is fairly minor. Abortion would be vastly worse—and, to his credit, Lugo obviously did not opt for it.

Now go, Catholic-bashers. Go and sin no more.

Leonard Cohen's Hat

In his current and recent tours, Leonard Cohen always appears on stage wearing a generous-brimmed fedora.

http://aroundtheedges.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/blog-image-june10-2008.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3352/3448742085_e27fa97430.jpg?v=0

Maclean's magazine asked him why. His answer sounds like a dodge: he simply said “I’ve been wearing a fedora for a long, long time. This particular hat is from a little hat store just opposite my daughter’s antique store in Los Angeles. They have a very good hat store there.”

Changing the subject, in other words.

The immediate, cynical suspicion, might be that he is going bald. But he is not. That can be easily proven—he doffs his hat at times, and shows it hides a silver mane:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisboland/2625110452/

Nor is it a question of style—for it is not, despite the hint in his answer to Maclean's, a question of one particular hat, or style of hat. In Dallas, he appeared in a cowboy hat. For a long CBC interview recently, he wore a slouch cap:

http://images.celeb9.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/leonardo_cohen.jpg

And he wore it, in this case, even though he was at home, indoors.

The real reason he wears the hat is obvious. Leonard Cohen has become (or has long been) an Orthodox Jew.

Orthodox Jews, in line with the Halacha, traditionally keep their head covered at most if not all times. Even indoors, directly counter to the traditional Canadian practice.

Cohen's “fedora” is in fact a black trilby, the most traditional style of hat among North American Orthodox Jews. The rest of his standard dress also conforms precisely to the traditional halachic norms: covered arms, covered legs, shirt buttoned at the throat, no view of skin below the neck, and black in colour.

He dresses like a Rabbi.

It is remarkable that no one has noticed this; it is a measure of just how out of touch mainstream culture has become with the single most important subject of all, religion.

Cohen, accordingly, is probably wise to dissemble on the point. He knows what happened to Bob Dylan when he went evangelical.

Cohen has always been deeply religious in his sentiments; but everyone wants to believe that he is a Buddhist. Adherents.com lists him as the fifth most famous Buddhist alive:

http://www.adherents.com/people/pc/Leonard_Cohen.html

This is particularly odd, since Cohen so far as I can tell has never claimed to be a Buddhist, and, when asked, has always said he is Jewish. In this, his experience is very much like—and probably informed by—Jack Kerouac, whom everyone also thinks is Buddhist, although he always claimed to be, as he was raised, Catholic.

It is, I think, the general experience of great artists. Most of them end up, if they do not begin, deeply religious. But their public, and even more their critics, academic and journalistic, are rarely able to follow them there. Either they lose their audience, and become uncool, or they conceal their true message behind parables and smokescreens of superficial beauty, hoping the truly discerning will yet have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Buddhism is a good screen, in the modern West. People think it is cool; people think it is an amoral religion, and so they feel safe around it.

Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, is uncool, because it comes with all those tiresome moral precepts.

But Leonard Cohen, I suspect, really believes in all those tiresome moral precepts.

“You don't know me from the wind
You never did, you never will;
I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible...”

Afghanistan's "Rape Law"

There is a lot of outrage everywhere in the West these days about the proposed new Shiite marriage law in Afghanistan. Canada, Germany, and New Zealand have all protested. The Toronto Star calls it “Afghanistan's 'rape' law”in headlines--the point being that it allegedly allows men to rape their wives. It also supposedly requires the husband's permission for a wife to work outside the home; though the details of this second provision are unclear from what is available in the news reports. The Huffington Post huffs and puffs: “to imagine that this injustice goes on in today's world is confounding.”

But all the outrage must seem rather odd to Muslims--given that it was a universal principle of common law in all English-speaking countries right up to 1991 that spousal rape was a logical impossibility. As recently as 1997, it was a recognized crime in only 17 countries. Okay, possibly we are right, and were wrong for the past five hundred or ten thousand years—but it does seem a bit hypocritical to so soundly condemn Shiites in Afghanistan for believing the same thing we all did up to twenty-five years ago. And it seems a bit anachronistic to refer to the law, as the Toronto Star does, as “Medieval.”

Though of course the Bible too, just like the Muslim sharia, recognizes a marital obligation to provide sex: see Corinthians 7:3-5. That would, of course, make Christians as guilty of “marital rape” as Muslims in this postmodern age.

More guilty, really. Neither the Bible nor the British common law allow the spouse to refuse sex for three nights running—the Afghan law would.

It is also, of course, wholly impossible to prove rape inside marriage, making it a bit awkward to enforce laws against it. Unenforceable laws do tend to bring the administration of the law into disrepute. Chillingly, though, a web source claims that, in Virginia at least, 88% of spousal rape cases result in conviction. This has to mean that a lot of men are being sent to prison solely on the testimony of their wives—suggesting a certain distinct lack of equal treatment before the law.

There seems to be much less concern over the part of the law that requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. I can't even find a clear statement on the Internet of what this actually entails, in the proposed legislation. The clearest reference I find says "The law also contains stipulations that women can pursue employment, education, or avail of doctor's services only with their husband's permission."

But this actually makes good sense: it is not a matter of discrimination against women, but of balancing rights and duties between the sexes. For it is also true that, in Muslim law, a man has an absolute obligation to support his wife financially. It does seem only fair, accordingly, that he has a say in what she does with her time, when it affects him directly. Indeed, sexual equality argues that we ought to have similar provisions in our own laws: why are women free to chose whether to work inside or outside the home, regardless of their husband's preferences, but men do not have the same freedom to choose? How many men might prefer to stay home every day, and let their wives worry about paying the bills? How many men would prefer, on divorce, to keep the kids and have their wives send them fat cheques every month?

Of course, there is something else about all this that must be puzzling the Afghans. The Westerners came in saying they were spreading democracy. Now they see a law duly passed by Aghanistan's elected parliament and signed into law by its elected president, but which they do not like—and they are demanding it be changed. It seems it is not really democracy that they want at all. You can't blame the Muslims if they throw up their hands and assume it is all just a plot against their traditional culture.

After all, it is.

To the typical Western leftist, they are simply “lesser breeds without the law.”

What Makes a Good Teacher? - A Rhetorical Question

As we have noted previously in this space, the “scientific” approach to education over the last century has produced no significant, verifiable results. I believe it never will, for several reasons: human minds are too complex for all variables to be excluded; science is based on observation, and human minds cannot be observed; and there is an insurmountable observer paradox—the human mind cannot fully comprehend itself any more than one can completely swallow one’s body, or pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. And this is without considering the moral issues involved in experimenting on fellow human beings.

This being so, we are left with three useful sources for developing our philosophy of education:

1.Immediate student feedback (that is, these particular students, and even these particular students on this particular day);

2.Personal experience (what has worked for us in the past, as teachers or, even better, as learners; since only our own minds are directly observable by us); and

3.The wisdom of the ages (the advice or known practice of teachers of the past generally acknowledged as great).

We have already looked at personal experience; let's now consider option three.

We have dealt with the objection that relying on tradition is an intrinsically conservative approach: education is conservative by its nature, and seeking to avoid this only empties it of all content and makes it a waste of student time.

In fact, if we seek advice only from past teachers who have been great innovators—the Platos and Aristotles—we may actually come as close as possible to an education for innovation. For they, achieving great innovation themselves, are surely best placed to advice on how to show others to do likewise.

But it is also true that depending on long tradition is the most “scientific” approach. If a style of instruction has stood the test of time, for a great deal of time, this means it must have been perceived to have generated good results repeatedly, in a clinical context. This is really the best we can usually do when dealing with human beings—it is the approach commonly used in “scientific” medical practice. It is “empiricism” in that term's original meaning.

So, then, before we got involved in the notion of applying science to the classroom, and imagined we could study and understand fellow humans as we might an interesting kind of insect, what was the longest-standing style of teaching?

In a word: rhetoric. From the ancient world—from 500 BC or earlier—right up to the nineteenth century, training and ability in rhetoric was considered the essential qualification for a teacher, in all of Europe and North America. Rhetoric and “pedagogy” were virtually understood to be the same thing. Rhetoric: training in how to speak well; and, especially after the invention of the printing press, in how to write well.

Think about it: this makes perfect sense. The teacher is there to convey information, mostly in oral form. To be able to speak clearly, logically, and interestingly, is surely, next to knowledge of the subject, the most important skill for any teacher to have.
How interesting, then, that this is no part of the training of modern teachers at all. How could we overlook it?

As noted in this space in the past, when the US government undertook a huge, multi-year study to determine which of the various teaching theories produced the best results, Operation Follow- Through, most of the models produced and preached by the schools of education, based on the currently fashionable educational theories, actually did worse than the control. In other words, teachers' colleges test out as worse than no training at all. The one approach that clearly succeeded, “Direct Instruction,” was developed not by a teacher, but by an advertising executive.

But there you have it: experience in advertising is training in rhetoric, in presenting information compellingly. Skill in rhetoric is thereby proven to improve teaching, in scientific terms. Next to subject knowledge, it is the sine qua non, and perhaps only an academic could be foolish enough to think otherwise.

Happily, we have a vast body of thought, analysis, and literature on the subject—that lies in our libraries collecting dust. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Augustine, Erasmus, Aquinas—almost every major thinker in our history has written a treatise. Not to mention other cultures: Confucius, Al Ghazali, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, and so forth. All of their techniques, unlike our own, have been tested objectively. It is not only that they have stood the test of time: rhetorical techniques can be and are proven or disproven daily in the courts and legislatures of all lands, and so the best techniques can be pretty objectively known. On top of this, until modern times, lecturers had to earn their reputations and their livelihoods by attracting listeners to their classes. So these men must know whereof they speak.

Of course, in our high-tech times, and with the Internet, “rhetoric” must be considered more broadly than it has been in the past: to include not just speaking and writing, but the presentation of images, videos, animations, interactive exercises and simulations. But here too, we have some valuable guidance. Magazine publishers, for example, or newspaper publishers, have very clear data on what sorts of illustrations are most compelling. They know, because when they put them on their covers, they sell more copies then the previous month. So too, they must know what sorts of things people like to read—or go out of business. With the Internet, we can test almost anything in terms of media, quickly, by the number of hits it can attract.

This is the direction teaching, and teacher education, ought to take. This is the direction teaching, and teacher education, must take. If not, the profession will simply wither and disappear, because, with the Internet, it no longer can expect a captive audience. The schools at all levels have lost their monopoly on knowledge.

Progressive Education

The scientific study of education over the last century or so has produced no significant, verifiable results. I believe it never will, for several reasons: human minds are too complex for all variables to be excluded; science is based on observation, and human minds cannot be observed; and there is an insurmountable observer paradox—the human mind cannot fully comprehend itself any more than one can completely swallow one’s body, or pull oneself up by one's bootstraps. And this is without considering the moral issues involved in experimenting on fellow human beings.

This being so, we are left with three useful sources for developing our philosophy of education:

1. Immediate student feedback (that is, these particular students, and even these particular students on this particular day);
2. Personal experience (what has worked for us in the past, as teachers or, even better, as learners; since only our own minds are directly observable by us); and
3. The wisdom of the ages (the advice or known practice of teachers of the past generally acknowledged as great).

We have already dealt in this space with point 2; but perhaps one more thing might be added. Anyone who has been a student for twelve or more years has had a very long apprenticeship in how to be a teacher. He has watched teachers, good and bad, plying their trade for more hours on end than any apprentice in any other occupation, by the time he has graduated high school. Attending a teacher's college is not likely to add much—better to spend an extra year or two acquiring knowledge of the subject he will teach.

But now let's look at point 3: the wisdom of the ages.

I know at once the likely objection to this approach: that it is regressive. We live in a brave new world; things are changing faster than ever before. Even granted that there is no scientific progress in teaching practice, the world has changed a great deal over the past hundred years or so, has it not? And hasn't this changed our educational needs? If it was once useful to be well-grounded in ancient authorities, their thoughts may well no longer apply. Isn't it more important today than it was to learn how to think for ourselves, to be adaptable, to be innovative, creative?
I think it is. But this does not mean the education system can do anything about it.
Is our current system really teaching us to be creative and innovative? If so, the schools and academies, or at least their leading graduates, should be where all, or most, of the new ideas, the striking innovations, come from.

Are they? Consider the following list of famous innovators in various fields:

Thomas Edison – inventor of the light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture projector: three months of formal education.

Albert Einstein—discoverer of the theory of relativity and father of modern physics—dropped out of high school, but eventually earned a Bachelor’s degree.

Steve Jobs—founder of Apple computer and father of the personal computer; founder of Pixar and of computer animated films; creator of the iPod, Mac, and iPhone—dropped out of college in his first semester.

Walt Disney—pioneer of film animation, of color in film, and founder of the concept of the theme park—did not complete high school.

Bill Gates—founder of Microsoft, Windows, etc. College dropout.

Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick—commonly acknowledged as the three greatest film directors in the history of cinema—none attended college.

Henry Ford—inventor of the assembly line and, some say, modern industry. Little or no formal education.

Tim Berners-Lee—inventor of the World Wide Web. Made it to a bachelor’s degree.

Nicola Tesla—inventor of the fluorescent light, among 111 patents. Managed to graduate from college after two attempts.

Orville and Wilbur Wright—inventors of the airplane. Neither graduated from high school.

George Eastman—the genius behind Kodak. Never finished high school.

Edwin Land—inventor of polarization and the instant camera, among other things. Dropped out of college after one year.

John Logie Baird—co-inventor of television. Never graduated from college.

Luther Burbank—inventor of over 800 varieties of plants, including the “Idaho” potato. Never made it to high school.

Philo T. Farnsworth—co-inventor of television. One year of college.

Joseph Armand Bombardier—inventor of the snowmobile. Never attended college.

George Bernard Shaw—most prominent English playwright since Shakespeare; winner of both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. Completed high school, became a lifelong hater of schools.

WB Yeats--greatest modern poet in English. After high school, attended art school for two years.

James Joyce—greatest modern novelist in English. Managed a B.A.

Pablo Picasso—generally acknowledged as the greatest modern artist. Dropped out of art school at 16.

Had enough yet? Clearly, our leading innovators are not learning their trade by attending school.

Meantime, what are our universities devoting their time to? In the humanities and social science faculties, primarily, these days, to the theories of Marx and Freud, repackaged as feminism, “queer studies,” “post-colonial studies,” and so forth.
Marx wrote Das Kapital in 1867; Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899. This is hardly cutting edge. Moreover, both have been long ago conclusively disproven; yet even this has not prompted the academy to move on.

While the rest of us are in the 21st century, the academy is still in the 19th.
This illustrates a basic principle: while innovation is probably a good thing, it is not a thing that can be taught. To teach someone to innovate, to teach someone to think for themselves, is a contradiction in terms. It is not, therefore, and cannot be, the purpose of education to do so.

Education is by its nature conservative—it is the passing on to a new generation of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors. To try to make it something else is to make it something less.

This, I submit, is what we often have at present. Especially since the 1960s, teachers and universities have tried to be “progressive,” and to teach innovation. The result has been an education stripped of content, an emptying of education, and mostly a waste of the students’ time. Where once they would have learned the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, or Confucius, now students learn only the thoughts of their particular instructor.

It has, and must, never have been a good trade.

And has it helped us be more innovative? The reverse: it indoctrinates. In fact, it is more likely that our growing demand for educational qualifications is stifling our ability to innovate, and to react to the changing world.

Apocalypse Now?

Two of my students here in the Gulf showed me a rock video after class, curious as to the meaning of the lyrics. It was titled “Europa,” and I had never heard it before. But here are some of the puzzling lyrics:

“Now we face the rising tide

Of new crusades, religious wars
Insurgents imported to our shores
The western world, gripped in fear
The mother of all battles here

…All glory, all honor
Victory is upon us
Our savior, fight evil
Send armies to defend us

Empires built, and nations burned
Mass graves remain unturned
Decendants of the dispossessed
Return with bombs strapped to their chests

There's hate for life, and death in hate
Emerging from the new caliphate
The victors of this war on fear
Will rule for the next thousand years.”

And what, indeed, to make of this?

First, if this is representative of the thinking of young Europeans these days—and if it isn’t, one or two good rock songs could make it so—then the current high levels of immigration are obviously causing growing concern, not to say alarm. The doors are likely soon to slam shut.

But I also hear, chillingly, here, Nazi echoes. For one thing, the music is distinctly Wagnerian. For another, while the song is sung in defense and praise of Europe, it also defines Europe as having been born of the blood of many battles—history as a continuing kampf, a core Fascist concept. The fear it expresses of a foreign threat having infiltrated its gates is identical to the Nazi appeal against the Jews—the “foreign” Jews simply being replaced here by Muslim immigrants. The pseudo-pagan personification of "Europa" is also Fascist in tone.

And then there is that reference to a thousand-year Reich. Surely the allusion is intentional?

The current economic downturn seems the perfect occasion to bring such nativist sentiments out—perhaps in the streets. Just as the Great Depression spawned the Fascists’ success.

Let’s remember that our enemy these days is not just the new Fascism of “Islamism,” aka “radical Islam.” The greater danger is if a parallel movement is inspired in European and “Western” civilization. Fascism itself, after all, rose largely in reaction to the threat of radical Bolshevism. Let this happen again, and we are all faced with a hopeless Hobson’s choice.

Hear "Europa" for yourself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc56moy0poA

The Tragic Plight of Afghan Women

A regular correspondent forwards the following topical gag:

WOMEN WHO KNOW THEIR PLACE
.........A point of view.

Barbara Walters, of Television's 20/20, did a story on gender roles in Kabul, Afghanistan, several years before the Afghan conflict. She noted that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands.

She recently returned to Kabul and observed that women still walk behind their husbands. From Ms. Walters' vantage point, despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women now seem to walk even further back behind their husbands, and are happy to maintain the old custom.

Ms.Walters approached one of the Afghani women and asked, "Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried so desperately to change? The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation said, "LAND MINES."

Unfortunately, the story fails as humour on a fundamental level. Humour works by a reversal of expectations: the punch line must be unexpected, or it is not funny.

But this is exactly why women have walked behind men in all violent countries, from the beginning of time. This is exactly where the custom came from: the man walked in front to protect the woman from attack. This is no doubt also why the man traditionally walks on the outside in North America and Northern Europe: so that, if a carriage veers from the road, or disturbs a mud puddle, or, in older days, an open sewer, or if someone dumps offal from an upper balcony, his body protects hers from harm.

It is, of course, the same reason that, when you have an official procession, the VIP, king, or president, appears at the rear, not at the front. It takes a certain perverse procrusteanism to interpret this as anything but the place of honour.

Nor is there the slightest evidence that Afghan women ever wanted to end the traditional customs of their country. That was always a demand of Western feminists, maternalistically thinking they knew better than native 'savages' what was best for the latter—albeit they might have been joined in this at times by the tiny minority of Western- or Soviet-educated Afghanis.

The same ethnocentrism is shown in the present gag in the reference to the time “before the Afghan conflict.” The author seems to think there was no fighting in Afghanistan until NATO showed up. For an Afghanistan without land mines, you would probably have to go back to 1973—almost before feminism became well known in the West, let alone Afghanistan.

No doubt, if and when Afghanistan becomes a much safer country, women will indeed walk closer to their husbands.

But I hardly think this is the most important breakthrough Afghanis could look forward to.

The British Empire: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

A little while ago on this blog, I was admitting nostalgia for the British Empire.

You know, I might have been premature. The British Empire has been counted out before—when those troublesome American colonists insisted on going it alone. Is it possible we could have a third empire?

Here's why we might: because it is in India's best interests. Given demographics and economic trends, in a few decades, ot looks as though there will be two great powers in the world: India and China. But India's great advantage over China might be this: while China has tended to go it alone, India has an international network of friends. China is scrambling now to make friends in order to secure markets, on the one hand, and raw materials, on the other. But India already has all that, in the Commonwealth. India may want to play up this advantage.

The difference between the present Commonwealth and a new Empire, I posit, would be two things at a minimum: a free trade agreement, and a mutual defence pact.

For many of the former bits of the British Empire, it still makes sense to work together on this basis. India gets it markets and raw materials, just as British manufacturing did a century ago. Canada gets an advantage over its partners in NAFTA: it becomes the portal for Empire businesses seeking access to North America, and for North American businesses seeking access to the Empire. Britain gains the same advantage vis a vis Europe. Myanmar, Malaysia, and Singapore, if they joined, would gain the same advantage within ASEAN. India would automatically gain a free trade area covering all of South Asia: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar. Australia gets a counterbalance to the inevitable pull of China, and a security guarantee.

The Gulf States—Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman—can supply the union with valuable oil and valuable investment capital. It return, they get the right to invest freely, and, crucially, defense guarantees. Being rich, tiny, and in a rough neighbourhood, they can use the same protections that brought them into the British Empire to begin with.

A reconstituted Empire would also, not incidentally, control many of the major sea trade routes—this was most of the point of the Empire for the British in the first place. This would be valuable to India and to the oil nations in securing the flow of trade. And it is a real consideration—we again see piracy in the Malacca Straits and at the mouth of the Red Sea, since the British left.

African nations would probably want in, for the sake of foreign aid—as it is, Mozambique has chosen to join the Commonwealth despite a lack or historic ties to Britain. The small English-speaking nations of the Caribbean would certainly want in. The only question is whether the rest of the federation would be interested.

They might. A generation or two ago, the rich nations feared the integration of the Empire because of a possible mass influx of poor from the less-developed nations. Now, with the developed world facing demographic crisis, this might actually be an advantage. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Britain, and the Gulf nations could probably soon use the immigration flow.

What's in it not to love? It makes more sense than the European Union, or NAFTA--the members complement each other better.

Of course, the British would not be able to dominate this empire as they did the last two. This time, it would be the Indians—though those troublesome American colonists, if we let them back in, might act as something of a counterbalance.

No Canadians Need Apply

This made me laugh.

Canadians have an invincible belief that everybody loves them.

This alone makes them insufferable in international gatherings.

Racists Calling Non-Racists Racists

There was an uproar recently over a cartoon in the New York Post showing a slain chimpanzee—a reference to the recent chimpanzee attack in that city—and one cop saying to the other, “They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

Hysterically, this was branded “racist” by many commentators. No, not against chimpanzees; against blacks. Apparently, all the rest of us are supposed to see a chimpanzee and automatically think of an African American. Even though the previous stimulus bill was in fact written by senior members of congress, none of whom are black; even though George Bush was regularly portrayed in editorial cartoons throughout his presidency as some kind of simian, without anyone calling this “racist.”

Quite obviously and quite literally, the racism in this case is in the eye of the beholder. It must have been precisely those who objected to the cartoom who were racists. We now have the whole thing upside down, the racists in command, and angrily charging anyone who is not racist with racism.

Now comes a second example: the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, now says he will resign, for the crime of sending a few friends an email in which the White House is portrayed with a watermelon patch on its front lawn. And even conservative commentators are objecting to this.

Nobody sane is left.

But how is this “racist”?

Let's consider a parallel with another ethnic group. Imagine, when John Kennedy took the presidency, a cartoon showing a potato patch in the West Lawn. Would anyone have been up in arms? I doubt it—more likely, Irish Americans would feel a swell of pride at the image. I say that as an Irish-Canadian myself. I love potatoes, truly, and am proud to boast that my roots have tubers on them.

Most nations, after all, are rather proud of the food they eat, seeing it as part of their cultural heritage—even if, as with the Irish, it was poverty that led it to that food in the first place. One small town in Alberta, settled by Poles, announces its pride in its ethnic heritage with a statue of the world's largest pierogi. Who there could have thought they were insulting themselves?

Are Italians ashamed of spaghetti? Are the French ashamed of quiche?

No—to object to the association as “racist,” one must first accept the premise that any reference to a distinct African-American culture is demeaning to African Americans. Which is to say, you must believe it incontrovertible that anything done, created, cooked, sung, or made by African Americans is inferior. That there is something wrong, in other words, with being culturally African American.

I have trouble with that.

Now you must excuse me. My corned beef and cabbage is getting cold.

Higgamus, Hoggamus--Woman's Monogamous. Haggamus, Higgamus--Man is Polygamous

I happened upon the website of the Canadian Family Action Coalition recently—actually directed there by a left-wing friend, who cited it as an authority on the right. I had never heard of them before.

But they make an interesting point. They ask why, in the recent actions of the government of BC against the polygamous community of Bountiful, the men have been charged, but not the women?

Is the government trying to claim that the women were in the marriages against their will? That's absurd; if so, the charge should be kidnapping, not polygamy. But how were they held?

Or are they trying to claim that women are not in control of their own actions?

How is that sexual equality; and, if granted, how can women ever be put in positions of responsibility?

You just can't have it both ways.

I Tremble for my Country When I Reflect that God is Just

Every now and then I am reminded of just how bad the situation is for human rights in Canada, and am grateful yet again that I now live in the free world.

Some time today—I can't be bothered to work out the time difference—TVO's “The Agenda” is broadcasting a piece on the new atheist campaign to festoon Canadian buses with ads saying “THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”

Their guest roster features a representative of the Humanist Association, an atheist group; a clinical psychologist; the president of the Freethought Association of Canada, another atheist group; the chair of the “Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity”; and Kathy Shaidle, a prominent Catholic blogger.

This counts as journalistic balance? It might look that way: two avowed atheists, two "Christians" (why not a Muslim or Jew?), and a psychologist who might be either. But there's a Fifth Column here: the “Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity” might call itself “Christian,” as anyone can, but it is not a monotheist organization. The chair's most recent book, for example, is titled With or Without God, and it argues specifically that belief in God is not important. The famous Bishop Spong wrote the introduction.

It seems to me two atheists ought to be balanced by two theists; this guest list seems faked to make the claims of monotheists seem more dubious than they really are.

But that's not all. There is now an apparently full-fledged email campaign to convince TVO to cancel its invitation to one of its guests. Which one? You already guessed it, didn't you? The Catholic, Kathy Shaidle. Christianity is almost beyond the pale of polite discussion now in Central Canada.

The United Church, as well, has done no good by launching a campaign counter to the atheist one with posters that proclaim “THERE'S PROBABLY A GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.”

That, too, is a Fifth Column. As William Blake said, “the person who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing is a knave.” The existence of God is, in philosophical terms, very close to self-evident. And the proper response is hardly to go about your business as before.

“THERE IS A GOD. NOW WORK OUT YOUR SALVATION IN FEAR AND TREMBLING.”

The lukewarm are not with God—he spits them out.

Teacher, Test Thyself

There are not that many people named as “teachers” in the Bible. This is a bit suprising, since the basic term for Jewish clergy, “Rabbi,” means “teacher.”

A full list of the individuals given the title “teacher” in the Bible, Old and New Testaments:

Ezra
The author of Ecclesiastes (by tradition, Solomon)
Jesus
St. Paul
Anne Valikosky

Okay, perhaps not Anne Valikosky. Not yet, at least. Perhaps in later editions.

This is perhaps a measure of the Bible's esteem for the position. After all, in the Quran, only one being of any kind is named as a teacher: Allah. It would seem that it is not that easy to be a teacher.

What does it take? From this list, we can deduce that the Bible considers vast knowledge the prime requirement. For this is what sets Ezra apart from the other prophets—he was believed to have the best knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures since Moses, the gent who wrote them.

And this is even more true of Solomon—for he never was a teacher in the conventional sense. But he was renowned for his wisdom. This, and not the actual act of teaching for a living, was definitive.

Jesus, in being given the title of teacher, joins such founder figures of other religious traditions as Confucius, the Buddha, Nanak, Sankara, Zoroaster, and Krishna. Not a bad group to hang with, in the end.

All this is in flat contradiction to the current thinking in schools of education. There, they believe good teaching is all about process, not about knowing better than others what you teach, and certainly not about ultimate values. As one teacher aquaintance of mine put it, a good teacher can teach anything; because a good teacher is like an actor playing a part.

Chillingly, the direct translation of that concept, “like an actor playing a part,” into New Testament Greek is “hypocrite.”

Unwanted Children

It has been argued that unrestricted abortion is responsible for the decline in the rate of violent crime in the US and Canada. The logic is that most violent crimes are committed by young men from broken homes, unwanted by their mothers. Permit their mothers to simply off them before birth, and we save a problem for the rest of us.

Sounds plausible, doesn't it? Still not morally justifiable: you cannot execute someone because he _might_ commit a crime. But plausible.

As it happens, though, the time lines do not add up. If you look at the statistics for England and Wales, instead of the US, the advent of legalized abortion in fact seems to correspond to a significant rise in violent crime.

And there is another possibility. Could it be that unwanted children are also more likely to be significant contributors to the wellbeing of mankind?

A recent ad by the Right to Life movement describes one particular uwanted child of a single mom who, though coming from a broken home and raised by his grandparents, ended up doing fairly well: Barack Obama.

Now that they mention it, some other names come to mind: Bill Clinton, son of a single mom. Gerald Ford, whose mother left his father sixteen days after he was born. Winston Churchill arrived only eight months afer his parents married. Today the solution would be simpler.

Charlie Chaplin's father was an alcoholic, and his mother was mentally ill. They separated when he was three. John Lennon's parents never lived together, and he was raised by an aunt.

In other words—it seems just as possible that a disproportionate share of our heritage has in fact been contributed by unwanted children. It may be the leaders and the creative geniuses we are currently aborting.

But Adolph Hitler? His Mummy's pride and joy.

Barking up the Wrong Tree

Contrary to envorinmental doom-saying, forest cover has in fact been growing year by year for quite some time in North America and Europe. As these nations become wealthier, people abandon marginal farmland for better jobs in the cities—and the forests grow as a result.

This is now also true in the Third World. Forest cover is not shrinking worldwide. It is growing. According to this New York Times piece, “for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.”

Of course, this is not “old-growth forest”--yet. So what? As Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, has more recently pointed out, new-growth forests actually support a greater variety of species than old-growth; and the cycle of the two is part of nature. Even were it not so, trees grow very fast in the tropics. The subdivision in which we currently live was built and planted just three years ago. The trees are now house-high.

But wait. You ain't seen nothing yet. Most of Canada's forests have traditionally gone for newsprint. It used to be Canada's second-biggest export. This industry is already in decline. The New York Times itself just took out a whopping loan from Mexican businessman Carlos Slim at 14% interest in hopes of struggling on for a few more months. The London Evening Standard was just sold to Russian magnate Alexander Lebedev for one pound.

At this rate, it seems likely that there will be no more newspapers—and no more demand for newsprint—within a decade.

What will we do with all those trees? Make biodiesel?