Society

Melting Pots, Mosaics, and the Body Politic

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

When I first watched this video and listened to our Prime Minister discuss the difference between the ‘melting pot’ in the U.S. and the ‘mosaic’ here in Canada my thoughts immediately went to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians…

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. [1 Cor. 12:12-14]

Politicians spend a lot of time trying to express society and the nation with various metaphors that speak to the unity or solidarity of its citizens. Family is a common one, so is team, which I always thought had a real us vs them vibe. But there is one metaphor that they seem to avoid these days, the human body. As Paul points out when referring to the body of believers, each part of the body serves a different purpose but they are all part of the same body, working toward the same goal, the healthy survival of a whole being.

Now, I need to point out that this idea did not begin with Paul of Tarsus. The idea of society functioning as a healthy human body, as far as we know, is first found in the Hindu Rigveda, explaining the caste system by comparing societal roles to different parts of the human body (e.g., mouth, arms, thighs, feet) about 1500 BCE. Plato refined the concept in Republic and Laws in the 4th century BCE, emphasizing that a state’s well-being relies on all its parts functioning properly, while illness represents societal dysfunction. We call this concept the body politic.

Why would Paul draw on a political metaphor to expound on Christian unity? Simply because using common cultural imagery is a habit of his writing. For example in Titus he quotes the Cretan poet Epimenides: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” Again, in 1 Corinthians 15 he quotes Greek playwright Menander: “Evil company corrupts good habits. So it is no surprise that he uses what, for an educated Roman citizen, would have been a common image of the structure of a society.

So why then, do we so seldom hear politicians today use the body politic as a metaphor in their appeals for unity? I think it’s to avoid the obvious question, “If you think the nation is a body, then why don’t you take better care of it?“

Indeed, regarding the body of citizens as functioning like an actual human body would, quite naturally, imply that one has a responsibility to maintain that body. If your ankle hurts, you try to ease the pain. You might start with a salve or ointment. You might wear a brace of some kind. If the pain persists then you would seek medical attention, but regardless of the strategy, the goal is the same, ease the pain, deal with the issue, restore the body to a healthy condition.

If you’re a politician, using a metaphor that highlights your responsibility to listen to the pain of the parts of the body and actually do something about it, is something you might understandably want to avoid.

That was the point of a publication called The Body Politic published in Toronto from 1971 to 1987. It was a monthly newspaper and magazine that became the anchor for Canada’s gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements, playing a foundational role in queer journalism, activism, and community building. The various columnists and writers that created and maintained the publication were quick to point out that a large part of Canada’s body politic was in pain and needed serious attention for the nation to be whole.

Of course the LGBTQIA2+ part of Canada’s body are not the only ones suffering. The various members of the aboriginal community, immigrants, women, teenagers, we could go on. Governments of all levels in Canada struggle to adequately listen to and address the pain that each of these groups feels, so again, it no surprise that they avoid using imagery that highlights their lack of action, or even acceptance of the responsibility to the nation’s well-being.

But let’s get back to Paul because the church has missed the larger point of the metaphor as well. While an argument can be made that the church, in all it’s various incarnations, has a somewhat better track record than many levels of government, there are still members of the body of believers who are in pain, who are feeling ignored, even criticized and attacked, and are in desperate need of medical attention.

We talk a good game, but have a long track record of finding more reasons to exclude people from the body of Christ than for including them. We shut people out for not living in the manner we think they should, or for being born just a bit different from us. We amputate parts of the body of Christ over points of theology and dogma that, from my point of view, amount to gnat straining and camel swallowing. (I’ll let you look that one up, but a lot of you get my meaning.)

I think we need to revive the body politic as a common metaphor for the society we live in, not just in Canada, but everywhere, because we need to be reminded that we have a responsibility to do better, as a church, as a society, as a nation, and even, as a species.

Some thoughts on AI in Canada

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about AI, like a lot of you, and I’ve come to a few conclusions.

1: It’s not going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too easy to use, and no amount of legislation is going to put this genie back in the bottle. So what does this mean?

2: If we don’t develop a plan, as a society, as a nation, and as a government, to develop and control how and by whom AI is used some other country will do it for us. Likely either the US or China. We’ve made that mistake before, we can’t afford to make it where AI is concerned.

3: Fear of AI is counter productive. The reason Canadians, including our policy makers, are so afraid of AI is because most of the tech bros that control or are trying to control AI are horrendous caricatures of Bond villains. Musk, for example. The ones who aren’t, aren’t in the public eye. We need to focus on them.

4: The thing is those same Bond villains will solve AI’s problems for the same reason they want to own AI to begin with – to make money. Cooling AI is expensive, figuring out how cool data centers efficiently, with as little water as possible, will cost less and thus improve profits. The same with energy usage, size of buildings, everything. Solving these issues will increase profits so they will solve them – eventually.

5: Therefore, the way to control AI is NOT to make it illegal. It’s to speed up that process by making it even more expensive. Make using water to cool data centers expensive enough to encourage R&D into using less but not enough to drive them out of the country. Same with energy, land, and everything else. Just banning it will not stop it. We’ve tried that before too.

Conclusion: As I said before, if we don’t have a plan for AI use and development one will be imposed upon us because trying to make it illegal simply won’t work. We need to make Canada a profitable place to invest in AI that makes doing in a responsible way the most profitable of all.

Where Have All the Monarchs Gone?

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

This morning, as I was walking through Margaret Greene Park with Roberta, we took note of all the little white butterflies that were fluttering around us. When I was a kid at Paisley Road School, we were told they are properly called Small Cabbage White Butterflies, but we all just called them Cabbage butterflies. As we walked, we admired them and enjoyed the cool of the shade along the path.
Then it hit me… those were the only butterflies I had seen all this year, anywhere!
At least in the city anyway. Again, when I was a kid (do I sound old yet) we regularly saw Dustywings (several varieties), Skippers, and, best of all, Monarchs! We used to catch them with homemade butterfly nets and put them in jars to take to school and to put in the terrarium. We’d grab the striped caterpillars as well and place them in a glass case with some milkweed, watch them pupate and form a chrysalis, then finally emerge as an adult, marveling at the transformation. It was pretty much a rite of passage for grade school kids in the 1960s.
Today however, I can’t remember the last time I saw a Monarch butterfly in the wild, adult or caterpillar. You know what else I haven’t seen? Milkweed.
Not a one. Used to see them all the time down at the Bullfrog Pond across from John F. Ross C.V.I. Of course, it’s the Bullfrog Plaza now, along with the Bullfrog Pond Park behind it with its concrete creek. The ponds at the top end (west) of Paisley Rd. are gone now too, filled in and paved over for condos and Costco.
No ponds, no milkweed. No milkweed, no Monarchs.
And no tadpoles, insect nymphs, or the hundreds of other tiny creatures we observed in our science lessons at Paisley Road. We collected all kinds of life at school and at home, examining them with our magnifying glasses and sometimes even microscopes. It was easy to do, what with the culvert at the bottom end of the playground, between the school and Knight Lumber. I first learned to really draw making sketches of what we saw in those simple microscopes.
But now the culverts are fenced off, where they haven’t been buried. (Did you know there’s a buried creek under downtown Guelph?) The ponds are filled in, paved over, or lined with concrete. It feels like we took the Biblical exhortation to take stewardship over Creation and, seeing the word “dominion” decided to focus on the dominate part.
And so we excavate it, clear-cut it, pound it, suck it dry, and bend it to our will despite generations of pollution, and the desperate cries of scientists, native elders, rangers of all kinds, and even Boy Scouts, trying to encourage us to follow a less destructive path.
When we do manage to section off a little belt of green across the landscape, others, more focused on reaping instead of sowing, undo it all with a wave of an administrative hand because, well, they have a “mandate” you know. Which is ironic because ‘mandate’ comes from the Latin root mandare which basically means “to give responsibility for” as in to care for and protect. But again, we chose to focus on the “rule over” aspect of the meaning because there’s more money in that.
Funny how meanings change when we want them to. God gave us a mandate to care for creation and to protect it, and all of creation is desperately waiting for us to fulfill that mandate before it’s too late.

Really?

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

I’ve been avoiding posting about the US election. In fact, avoiding such is why I haven’t posted since July. I have friends on both sides of the equation and I really wanted to avoid getting into it with any of them. My conservative friends say I’m too liberal, my lefty friends say I’m too right-wing, which is why I general consider myself a centrist libertarian (please note the small ‘L’). Personally I want a gov’t that is fiscally conservative, socially liberal, and not one bureaucrat larger than it has to be to get the job done effectively, which in today’s political climate likely qualifies me for membership in the Fantasy Island Party.

Now, I would truly prefer to keep all my friends, even the ones I totally disagree with, because life and conversation is decidedly more interesting with them than without them; so, I have been hoping against hope that there is more to what I have been seeing than meets the eye. I was betting that all the insanity on TV and the Internet was simply smoke and mirrors, setting up the “big reveal”. You see, when you work in theatre, even just community theatre, you soon understand what you are looking at is a thin wall of plywood and paint that hides the real work going on backstage, and a big part of me was sure the American election fell into something of that same category.

I was clinging to that hope because I really didn’t want to believe that what I was seeing was actually real. I still don’t want to believe it; but it’s beginning to look like I don’t have a choice. So here I am, blogging once again.

When I got to work this morning the conversation quickly turned to the “alternative facts” comment and one of my coworkers (who doesn’t blog or even comment on their Facebook account very often so I won’t use their name here) made a very good point; it went something like this.

“I get it, you don’t like the numbers, but it would have been very easy to spin this. You go out there and you say, ‘Yes, the numbers were disappointing. We would have liked to be able to say it was the biggest Inauguration audience ever,but it wasn’t and here’s why. Most of our supporters live in the interior and lower states. They don’t make a lot of money because far too many of them are unemployed. They can’t afford to just skip off for a few days and take a bus to Washington. That’s why we’re here. That’s why they elected us. We’re going to fix that!’ But instead of doing that they do THIS? That I don’t get.”

In less than five minutes they came up with a far better official response than Trump and all his advisers could. Or worse yet, his advisers did come up with it and Trump shot it down and they all said, “Okay fine.”

The one my coworker is really confused by is Sean Spicer, Trump’s new spokesman. They pointed out, and I have to agree, that the conversation in the Oval Office should have gone something like this, “I’m sorry Mr. President. I can’t say this. Bending the truth a little is one thing. Spinning the facts to work in our favour is another, but this is stupid! There’s video coverage, photos all over Facebook and Instagram, we can’t sell this!”

But he didn’t. Instead he walked out there and told what amounts to the biggest bold-faced lie in American politics since “I did not have sex with that woman”, possibly bigger, and in doing so has effectively neutered every press release from the White House going forward. Because if they will tell this lie, how can we ever trust another word.

As so it seems that reality television has become the new reality for American politics. Can’t wait to see what the writers have scripted for tomorrow’s episode.

Je Suis Charlie

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

Yes, I am Charlie! We all are.

The massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo (translation: Charlie Weekly; named for Charles Shultz’s iconic everyman) is not just about freedom of the press; it’s about the right of every person to live free and say what’s on their minds without fear!

It’s also about art; specifically, the art of satire. Since the earliest days of human civilization the number one sign of a tyrannical government, administration, monarchy or any other form of leadership is the suppression of criticism. Even Emperor Nero, for all his many faults would pardon the satirists in advance of their performance so they could present their art without fear of not living long enough to get to their next gig.  In fact, the Muslim author, Al-Jahiz, introduced satire into Islamic texts “based on the premise that, however serious the subject under review, it could be made more interesting and thus achieve greater effect, if only one leavened the lump of solemnity by the insertion of a few amusing anecdotes or by the throwing out of some witty or paradoxical observations. ” [1]

So it affects us all; even more so in our new digital, media-enhanced society because so many of us have become publishers of our opinions. For example; I have this blog. I do not have a huge following (according to the stats my largest audience for any given post was 76— not even enough circulation to get Google Ads interested), but as cathartic and/or narcissistic an exercise it may be, in a free society I have the right to express myself here, in this way, without fear of violence to my person.

So do you when you post to your Facebook page, or throw that inappropriate selfie up on Instagram, or even share you Grandmother’s recipe for pork roll ups on Yummly. We are all publishers in one way or another and it is freedom of speech that allows us to do so.

However, freedom of speech does sometimes bite us in the ass. The same freedom that lets us share what is important to us allows others to share what we would consider offensive. The problem is, if we pass laws that prevent the offensive, idiotic, bigots from having their say then that same law can one day be turned around and used to shut us up as well. It’s why I oppose hate speech legislation. As Evelyn B. Hall expressed on behalf of Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” [2]

Je-suis-CharlieSo for the next few days I’ve changed my profile pic and cover photo on Facebook to reflect my grief at the slaughter of four cartoonists and their co-workers in France. I’m no satirist, or even really an author, but I have an opinion and I value the right my society gives me to express it.

Je suis Charlie.

 

[1] Bosworth, Clifford Edmund (1976), The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banu Sasan in Arabic Society and Literature, Brill Publishers, ISBN 90-04-04392-6.

[2] Right now many of you are fuming, “That was Voltaire!” But actually it was one of his biographers Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote the line as an example of Voltaire’s beliefs. It’s been miss-attributed to him ever since.