Are The Gods Happy Yet?

Sometimes unhappily and with difficulty the old man tries to keep up with the rapidly increasing speed demanded by today’s technology. Thirty-five years ago before lumbering near-computers were in common office use and the Internet was unknown, I was still in business working long hours, doing my own bookkeeping by making handwritten entries in bulky journals and ledgers. I walked deposit books to the bank during the then still restricted hours. The manager and the teller both knew me by first name, not just by account number. And yet I had time to attend weekly Rotary Club lunches and otherwise take part in various social activities.

Today all those office chores are automated and bookkeeping can be done with a few key strokes or mouse clicks, banking can be done on the Internet with hardly any manual intervention. We should have nothing but leisure time to give profound thought to the business of improving ways of living, our relationships, of living more frugally, of requiring less money, of improving the troubled parts of our community and so on. Instead, the need and greed for money persists. Technologies are constantly changed, speeded up and otherwise “improved” to feed the bottom lines of those who sell the stuff.

The prospect of the cash-less society bankers talked about that many years ago has not become a reality, but instant transfer of data around the world is possible. We must worry about identity theft, theft of secret numbers, access to bank accounts and on and on. The old man is personally unknown at any of the institutions he deals with, and if he tries to speak on the telephone with a real person, he must first press various numbers, listen to lengthy explanations, and wait while listening to advertising or other sounds for the real person to appear and then to suffer other irritations.

Furthermore, technology operators and governments seem to give little thought to the health and social consequences of providing instant wireless communication, which is obviously quicker, easier and cheaper for the bottom line than any improvement of land lines, and although some independent scientists have warned that exposure to such radiation is the “largest human health experiment ever undertaken without informed consent”, the unwarranted and unnecessary communications revolution goes on apace without any serious study or regulation.

Although I am obviously past the age to have the desire or strength to tilt at windmills, I am reminded of a piece I wrote as sometime editor of our Rotary newsletter back in 1974. Being able to publish The Old Man’s Post in this way is wonderful and mysterious to me, but the total effect of the rapid changes on our communities makes me long for simpler and slower times. As a reminder that the gods are undoubtedly no happier today than they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, I offer you the following short commentary I made to my Rotary Club membership 35 years ago.

Our luncheon speaker last week was erudite and enlightening on the wonders of cash-less banking and other technological marvels. I did consider his subject matter and the reaction of Rotarians to the scientific wonders he revealed worthy of comment, and perhaps a little disturbing.

It seems that Rotarians can hardly wait for the twin goblins of coaxial cable and computer to shower their many benefits upon us.

Take heed then, of the words of John Ruskin, written in the youth of the Industrial Revolution:

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it and to and fro among the pinnacles of the crags. YOU cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash; you thought you could get it by what the Times calls Railroad Enterprise. You enterprised a railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you fools everywhere.

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The Big Potato Caper

After a special day with a visit from a fascinating younger relation, I achieved an unusually long night of slumber. Having had nearly the prescribed eight hours with none of the regular trips to the adjoining chamber, I was obviously ready to be roused. It is in that strange mittelgeist period approaching wakefulness when this old man is never sure what unique creatures or sensations may populate his unconsciousness and leave a stream of its unreality with him when fully awake.

This time there was a rather staid young man of sincere demeanour dressed somewhat in the Edwardian manner of the early twentieth century. He claimed the name of Stirling Hepplesmith and exhibited great pride in achieving the degree of Chartered Public Accountant at the nearby Piddlington School of Business.

Hepplesmith had taken rather longer than his more brilliant contemporaries to complete the prescribed course but the Dean of Accountancy at Piddlington recommended him for what he thought a suitable position with Bishop and Bullard, Accountants, in the small New England town of Hexburg. The firm specialized in offering accounting services to Hexburg’s small retailers like restaurants, shoe repairers, bars, haberdashers, lawyers and other professionals who served Hexburg and its thriving rural area. The dean suggested that Hepplesmith, with his slow but careful attention to detail, would be suited to the conduct of the annual audits ordinarily required annually by the authorities for some of those establishments.

So it was then, that Hepplesmith’s first professional assignment was the completion of a year-end audit for Gino’s Restaurant on Main Street. He was assigned a small office between the eaterie’s kitchen and its pantry and storage room to begin examination of the set of books and statements prepared by one of Gino’s own sons. Thoroughly, as he had been taught at Piddlington, the young CPA went through every voucher, checked out the trail of receipts, reviewed all the supply purchase orders, weight records entered on deliveries, and fresh food supplies from the stock room weighed and transferred to the kitchen by the establishment’s chef; he even sought explanations from staff members for anything he questioned.

Gino’s son the bookkeeper as well as the stock room receiver and maintenance man in his dusty lane-side quarters soon found Hepplesmith with his nit-picking persistence to be tiresome and irritating. The situation came to a head when young Hepplesmith found a discrepancy! His sleuthing discovered that the restaurant’s supply of the huge local potatoes used by the chef for some of his baked dishes were always delivered by a favoured local farmer in one hundred pound sacks as signed for by the receiver. All deliveries were invoiced and paid for by the pound. Yet when the chef’s helper weighed the potatoes when transferred to the kitchen, each sack was lighter by two or three pounds! What happened to the missing potatoes?

Stirling Hepplesmith determined to get to the bottom of it. After all, at the farmer’s price of ten cents a pound the missing potatoes would amount to an extra cost of many dollars in a year’s consumption. The bookkeeper had simply charged the difference in weight to “slippage” but that did not satisfy Hepplesmith. He confronted the stock room receiver who was so aggravated he went to a full sack of potatoes and threw one large spud at the young CPA, crying, “This is what happened to your confounded potatoes!” Hepplewhite dodged the missile, which forthwith smashed against the far wall, but then demanded an explanation. It turned out the man had used up all the lost potatoes to kill a family of rats inhabiting the dark, hidden nooks and recesses at the rear of Gino’s fine eatery.

You must know what happened, of course. Stirling Hepplesmith was nothing if not thorough, complete, and always driven to do the right thing. He immediately made a written report to Hexburg’s reformist health officer. The health officer did his inspection of Gino’s Restaurant and closed the establishment pending proof of a total cleanup and renovation. Gino sued Bishop and Bullard for consequent damages, Bishop and Bullard fired Hepplesmith for incompetence, Hepplesmith sued Bishop and Bullard for wrongful dismissal and all the lawyers in Hexburg were happy for years to come.

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In a Wiltshire Village

Every once in a while, when my supply of current fiction is temporarily exhausted, I return to some old friends of years. Among them are the mid-nineteenth century stories of Charles Dickens. This time I picked up my old copy of Martin Chuzzlewit, in a very small print edition. I can find no date of publication on the title pages, but it is from The Oxford India Paper Dickens, Complete Edition With Illustrations by Cruikshank, ‘Phiz’ &c. In Seventeen Volumes that like came out in the early 1900s. I came by the book in the early nineties when I prowled through my father-in-law’s shelves after his death (with permission), and as it was a Dickens I had not previously read, I apprehended it as my own. I did the same with a few other well-thumbed classics in similar small sized thin paper editions but unfortunately there was no “Complete Edition” of the Dickens.

In the Martin Chuzzlewit I found the cartoons alone worth the price of admission, especially those done by Phiz, being Dickens himself. As in most Dickens novels reading the list of characters names and identities is endlessly amusing. Who can forget Pip, Abel Magwitch, and Jaggers in Great Expectations? It is strange, though, how often one hears of unusually appropriate monikers in our own social setting. You may even have run into law firms called something that might sound like Creep, Fee and Lien, and even Dickens couldn’t improve on the name of recently convicted investment thief, Bernie Madoff, and the cartoon of him downloaded from Google, which I hope to insert above to compare with the Phiz illustration of the odious Seth Pecksniff and his equally impossible daughters from Martin Chuzzlewit.

I think Dickens had fun writing the Chuzzlewit novel published in 1843. Though the book contains many of his social criticisms, commentaries and asides it seems to me it was a tongue-in-cheek exercise. Evil characters are excessively so and virtuous ones are sickeningly so. They are larger than life exaggerations but they get under your skin just as easily as do the characters in some of the good page-turning mystery yarns I am so addicted to. I got unreasonably irritated and impatient with the naïve, money hungry and lovesick hero, the young Martin Chuzzlewit. Still, I have read it through several times and always go right to the inevitable happy ending and vested inheritance.

In the first chapter Dickens goes on at length to set out the claims of the Chuzzlewit clan to higher social and financial status than was apparent in the Wiltshire countryside of the day. He takes the whole second chapter to bring about an introduction to one of the main villains of the book, the hypocritical so-called architect, Mr. Pecksniff, in a peculiar and amusing situation. The slow pace and long paragraphs of description would not likely be tolerated by any editor today. Dickens wrote for a slower time, when readers could appreciate language and its inherent power. Of course even then they may have wondered at times whether the author was paid by the word and deliberately dwelt on such scenes to pad their volume.

Still, many of them are very moving, touching or pertinent even today and as someone who recalls pre-electricity village life in my early days here in the Fraser Valley, I find his second chapter description of the end of a misty fall day in a Wiltshire village both poetic and nostalgic. Without permission I will copy a little of it here:

The wet grass sparkled in the light; the scanty patches of verdure in the hedges—where a few green twigs yet stood together bravely, resisting to the last the tyranny of nipping winds and early frosts—took heart and brightened up; the stream which had been dull and sullen all day long, broke out into a cheerful smile; the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the hopeful creatures half believed that winter had gone by, and spring had come already. The vane upon the tapering spire of the old church glistened from its lofty station in sympathy with the general gladness; and from the ivy-shaded windows such gleams of light shone back upon the glowing sky, that it seemed as if the quiet buildings were the hoarding-place of twenty summers, and all their ruddiness and warmth were stored within.

Even those tokens of the season which emphatically whispered of the coming winter, graced the landscape, and, for the moment, tinged its livelier features with no oppressive air of sadness. The fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance, and subduing all harsh sounds of distant feet and wheels, created a repose in gentle unison with the light scattering of seed hither and thither by the distant husbandman, and with the noiseless passage of the plough as it turned up the rich brown earth, and wrought a graceful pattern in the stubbled fields. On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels; others, stripped of all their garniture, stood, each the centre of its little heap of bright red leaves, watching their slow decay; others again, still wearing theirs, had them all crunched and crackled up, as though they had been burnt; about the stems of some were piled, in ruddy mounds, the apples they had borne that year; while others (hardly evergreens this class)showed somewhat stern and gloomy in their vigour, as charged by nature with the admonition that it is not to her more sensitive and joyous favourites she grants the longest term of life. Still athwart their darker boughs, the sunbeams struck out paths of deeper gold; and the red light, mantling in among their swarthy branches, used them as foils to set its brightness off, and aid the lustre of the dying day.

A moment, and its glory was no more, the sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.

An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to it moaning music. The withering leaves no longer quiet, hurried to and fro in search of shelter from its chill pursuit; the labourer unyoked his horses, and with head bent down, trudged briskly home beside them; and from the cottage windows lights began to glance and wink upon the darkening fields.

In today’s rushing world to somewhere, we demand briefer fare from our authors. I just recently introduced myself to a series of mystery novels set on the central California coast, by Barry Siegel, whom I consider one of the better of the current crop of mystery authors. In his 2002 novel, Lines of Defense, he introduces the whole novel and its setting with the following lead paragraph:

In La Graciosa, ten miles from the sea, the most luminous summer evening can still suggest winter’s chill. The central plaza’s park benches, its bear statue, the winding creek, even the asistencia itself can abruptly vanish behind a low, thick wall of fog. Cars crawl then, blinking futile headlights. Pedestrians step with care, searching for familiar landmarks. Muffled voices blend with the smell of kelp. Invisible feet crunch on gravel.

His characters are introduced and the action begins in the very next line. That is sticking to essentials. Brief descriptions of the county settings are pursued with the action as required. Nothing like Dickens, is it? Still, the old classics are still with us, having survived for centuries, and this Dickens will yet give you days of enjoyment if you tear yourself away for a few hours at a time from the tube and cyberspace. I hope you will.

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Equal Rights?

Back in November of 1982 and still in 1984 I wrote essays arguing against the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the spring of 1982. I had railed against it since Trudeau’s proposal of such a codification of rights first came out. After nearly thirty years of watching it in operation I still feel our tribes of lawyers have benefited more than our citizens from its application.

The critique of the document in my 1982 essay concerned the insistence on the equality clause of the Charter that so many outspoken feminists had insisted upon. Enforcement of that clause by the courts made it almost inevitable that individual rights to the strangest of behavioural quirks would be supported and sexual equality would result in legalization of same-sex marriage as now available in Canada. I felt then, before it had been tested by the courts, that such codified rights would do a disservice to both men and women. I argued that the image of women as subjugated people was misleading, that females of our species were generally stronger in nature (especially with physically active protective males), more aesthetically pleasing, smarter than men, longer living and likely responsible for whatever civilizing influence had persisted over the ages. I put the case that if the feminists were successful in drafting their gender into the competitive dog-eat-dog male world and gained dominance therein, they would rue the day and weaken their dominance. About all they could say then is “Well, it’s our turn!”

When I casually observe the effects of the Charter in those nearly thirty years, I must wonder how many in our population today, even those less inhibited than I by Depression Era standards, can say that relationships between the sexes or family life generally have improved because of this enforced Charter “equality”. Here are just a few noticeable trends that still offend my conservative sensibilities:

• Although women continue to complain that statistically they are paid less than men for doing the same work, the current recession points out the dominance of women in the workplace. Apparently Canada now has more employed women than men. If you watch television regularly the dominance of women in jobs once male dominated has become very noticeable, especially in the last decade or so, particularly on the CBC network. Except for fixtures like Peter Mansbridge, its chief news anchorman, almost all the on-screen faces one sees daily are women. Even the reporting foreign correspondents seem female dominated. The same phenomenon can be observed on the American PBS network and on CNN. Is it economics, or are the ladies simply smarter, better looking and better at the job than guys?
• In competing with men on the sexual activity front, one suspects a trend toward female dominance and male emasculation. Why else would North American males be spending millions of dollars on Viagra pills and their chemical competitors, now so freely advertised. The use of these sex enhancing drugs is increasing by leaps and bounds especially with the advent of new brands such as Cialis and Levitra. A recent report indicates some 5 million users in the States. Unlike some well published fundamentalist American women, I do not attribute the trend in weaker male productivity to a well-financed international enemy conspiracy but only to the everlasting search for affluence in our North American (and European) ever more liberal consumer society.
• The continuing push for equality in traditional male activities such as sports, logging, and the military does nothing to persuade me of an improvement in the feminine mystique. It is simply bringing such women down a peg to the violent and often reckless tendencies of men, and the sight of young women having achieved equality in the armed forces leaving small children behind to join the armed men deployed in Afghanistan still angers me.

I submit the battle of the sexes is an unnecessary engagement in confrontation. All we need is a mutual recognition of the individual humanity of every person, male and female or other. The Charter equality clause has not and will not bring that about. The constitutional mandate simply stresses a pre-existing inequality in our system of justice to no effect. It officially recognizes an end of the traditional grouping of women with men in our particular civilization. Though many would preserve that tradition, political and economic pressures that accompany this kind of feminism now force ever more women into competition not only with men, but with each other. Such “equality” bodes ill for women and for our civilization.

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An Open Memorandum

TO: U. S. President Barack Obama
FROM: The Old Man (in Canada)

As I write just a year has passed since your election victory in 2008. Now as I watch the news coverage of your Asian trip you seem changed from the ebullient personality of your campaign. You appear gray, stressed out, irritable, and I am sorry to say, somewhat unsure of yourself.

I take it as a given that the presidency of the United States is an impossible job. Yet you and so many others seek the power and prestige of that office. What promises must be made to reach there? The public promises are known, of course, for they are delivered ad infinitum, until enough people believe “yes we can” accomplish whatever you promised that each person believes in his interest, and vote you into office. Most, however, forget the “we” part. Once they voted, it did not matter that you reminded them repeatedly during the campaign that it would not be easy and would require their participation and continued support. You would also need the recalcitrant support of a majority of Representatives and Senators. Yet all supporters expected you to do it alone.

Those are the public promises. They raised expectations you could not fulfill. But how many private promises must be made to the power brokers, the big money raisers, the office seekers, the political establishment figures? From President Washington’s time I believe every president has had to deal with them and with so many conflicting opinions from those picked to advise the chosen one, the momentum is soon lost. When that original momentum is gone, real change rarely happens. Even FDR lost his momentum in the first year.

I get the impression that all Presidents have similar experiences. Once in the White House you are virtual prisoners of your own Secret Service staff, and given the obvious anger and the stupid accusations expressed by so many violent sounding people now, I suspect you are even more closely guarded by that staff than were previous incumbents.

No doubt you have an over-abundance of “information” and “expert advice” from generals, diplomats and spies in dealing with foreign affairs as well as from economists and other domestic careerists to pursue your intended program at home. They are at your beck and call but each, I believe, has a vested interest and pressure from others to seek decisions in their favour.

Such conflicting positions cannot always be reconciled by compromise. What would happen I wonder if you listened to “just the facts” and the various suggestions as to how and why and when without too much repetition from each conflicting opinion, then analyzed whatever the situation and decided on something you simply thought was right even if that was considered revolutionary by all your conflicting advisers?

Put the case of your public promise as candidate to close Guantanamo Bay. Certainly it was never just a matter of making a decision to close the prison, which John McCain also said he would do, then signing an executive order and delegating the job to an official. What was really needed was to change the rather nebulous status assigned to the people held as prisoners. Surely they must be released, dealt with under international law as alleged terrorists or prisoners of war, or tried as criminals by their own countries, or as alleged criminals under American law. George Bush would no doubt have closed the base had anyone really known how to deal with them. I doubt if even proposed military tribunal members had any notion about the intended end result. Surely no further useful information could be obtained from any of them after so many years. In the end no matter what is decided will result in angry criticism from all sides as does your Attorney General’s decision to have some trials in New York.

Currently you are still looking at the proposed troop increase in Afghanistan. In the long run it will be impossible to keep that region in the American sphere of influence. Alexander the Great may have conquered the region but even his influence did not last and independent tribalism has prevailed ever since. I doubt if fifty years of occupation by American troops and the influence of American consumerism will forever change that fundamental.

Furthermore, as a Canadian I have a great deal of trouble finding justification for the presence of armed United States military forces in some 175 countries around the world. That was the number announced during the baseball World Series to which the games were broadcast for the benefit of the troops.

As to your Health Plan schlimazel, it seems to me it has been so messed up by members of Congress, that the thousand plus pages of proposed statute will never be enacted. The Canada Health Act contains some 23 sections of appropriate length. Our plan is, of course, operated by provincial governments under their respective Medical Services statutes and both federal and provincial statutes are supplemented by regulations, agreements and so on. Even our single-payer plan is complex, but surely the long initiating statute will do nothing but result in never-ending litigation and expense. What everyone will have to face, of course, is that privately or publicly insured health care will not cover everything. Inevitably some procedures and drugs will be rationed and either free marketers or government will do so arbitrarily.

Mr. President, your window of opportunity is nearly gone. Some of your most ardent former supporters, foreign and domestic, including The Economist magazine, have turned to severe criticism as your good intentions and public promises are month by month overwhelmed and pre-empted by the immediate demands of each day and the still worsening economy you inherited. Let me be just another minor voice to urge you to base decisions on what you deem right and just and “damn the torpedoes”, to discount the voice of the lobbyists, to announce your decisions to Americans and to persuade them to force the legislators to enact suitable statutes.

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Of Truth and Lies

Honesty is the best policy! That moral theme was dinned into me from the beginning of school attendance. From an even earlier age, from the time I was a babe in arms, the sinfulness of telling lies became an even more powerful reason for the primary importance of telling the truth. My parents were strong evangelical Christians and believed literally in the written words of the Bible, though now as I read the Ten Commandments I see only a prohibition against bearing false testimony against your neighbour. There is not a commandment saying, “Thou shalt not lie.”

I always believed in the importance, and yes, the practical benefits of truth telling, and I still do. My constant policy since I was very young has been full disclosure and truth telling and accepting responsibility for my own failings. In spite of that I am sure there were times as a child or even in later years, when I evaded the truth out of weakness and fear of punishment or other undesirable consequences. Telling lies did when I was a child, and in the end always does, I think, invite punishment if discovered.

It is impossible, I think, to have a properly functioning family or community if we cannot trust the word of our relatives, our neighbours, our business associates, our politicians—everyone we constantly have dealings with. Perhaps that is why our community, world-wide, in early times, in great Empires, and today, does not function properly.

So it is moral truth I am here concerned with. If any fundamental rules of ethics existed for any civilized society apart from the rules established by various religions, the first among them should be: Always tell the truth!

Surely we must begin development of such a rule by teaching children at an early age that it is in their self-interest to avoid the endless entanglements falsehoods inevitably cause. One of the better ways to motivate such behaviour is by example. Children must be able to trust the word of their care-giving adults. A sure way to undermine that trust, it seems to me, is to threaten children with consequences that never occur. I have seen such idle control mechanisms often used in families, and I have been guilty of them myself, but surely such idle threats are themselves a type of lying, and give children a bad example. I must say it is easier to criticize such behaviour by other parents than to avoid it personally.

For nearly twenty-five years I was a member of the Chilliwack Rotary Club. Rotary International is a worldwide service club of business and professional people. Rotary’s motto was Service Above Self and members were instilled with the principles of Rotary International. Club founders believed that not only was it the duty of community leaders like Rotarians, to serve their communities, locally, nationally and internationally, it was also good business. A major guide to help members achieve even greater success in both service and business was Rotary’s Four Way Test. It was required reading and periodically members unexpectedly had to recite the four questions of the test at club meetings. New members received a copy of the test printed on a small plastic desk stand, along with their nametags and other paraphernalia. Mine still graces a shelf in my library after these many years away from Rotary. One side of the stand lists the test questions: Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

In debates about the possibility of strictly applying these standards questions of justice, friendship and benefit were less difficult than the question of insisting on absolute truth. Furthermore, it was not always that easy to decide whether or not it was the truth in specific situations.

For example, application of the Four-Way Test in our justice system is always a problem. Take the very simple situation of a person charged with a crime. In the common law an accused is always innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In the result, many accused persons entering a plea in our criminal courts, say they are not guilty, even if they are.

Without going into the legal niceties of that procedure, the chances are that in a large majority of cases brought before a judge, the “not guilty” plea is a lie. Accused, defence lawyer, prosecutor and judge all know the plea is most likely to be a lie, but if any one of them even suggested such a thing, the man would be deprived of what is called “due process.” Everyone knows the procedure fails that Four-Way Test yet in the interest of preserving the safeguards developed against abuses once rampant in the various systems of criminal justice, we bend over backwards in favour of a person accused of crime. Just think of the cost to our justice system of every accused person insisting that every element of the alleged crime be proven. Yet in these days of almost automatic legal aid for every accused person, the alleged criminal incurs no cost by taking advantage of every possible element of that due process. And believe me, today many an accused is more knowledgeable and experienced in exercising his right to counsel and due process than some of the junior legal aid counsel who represent him in court.

In the days of my own criminal law practice I sometimes advised an accused that the weight of the case against him made it unlikely that the cost of a full defence could be justified, suggesting a guilty plea and argument to mitigate penalties could be beneficial in a properly charged offence even though judges are also unpredictable. I felt waiver of full process was not the same as waiver of due process. That process was usually closer to the truth and in the best interest of all concerned including the accused, as a fairer sentence usually ensued. It provided the justice the accused deserved, speeded up the process, saved everyone money and came closer to meeting the Four-Way Test in almost all cases.

In another area, marital infidelity or other breaches of accepted sexual morality often result in offences against the truth. Absolute truth and trustworthiness between spouses is essential to a successful family relationship, yet I am somewhat ambivalent about the wisdom of full disclosure to spouses of even the most innocent flirtation by the other. Spouses of both genders today often lead separate lives in business or profession for substantial portions of each day. In those other lives, uniquely close relationships between associates in those other worlds are easily formed. Sometimes they inadvertently result in “feelings” that could be thought of as treasonous to the spousal relationship. What is the essential truth in that situation? If the so-called guilty spouse blabs every detail of his other world to his family partner, that partner may conclude a hurtful breach of faith has happened. Consequences unintended by anyone could result. They could be terminal to an otherwise solid family relationship and ruin the lives of spouses, children, parents and friends. Does truth and trust always require full disclosure to be fair in that situation? I wonder.

I am left then, with a need to live by the truth when the avoidance of truth becomes ever more common in an increasingly secular society. In the rural and small town communities of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth Centuries, old Western religious values made it more difficult to conceal falsehoods. Major agreements could be sealed with a handshake, for a breach would easily become known and bring down the wrath of the community on the offender. Since then those earlier groupings have dispersed into an increasingly urbanized and fragmented society. Religious sanctions can no longer be taught to children in schools for fear of offending one or other of the many diverse religions to be found in our cities. The rearing and training of the next generation is left more and more to strangers, government support workers, television and the computer. Where then will we find the community to provide the essential ethical values without which a civilization cannot endure?

American and Canadian politicians and government agencies give a great deal of lip service to the question of values. Unfortunately there seems to be little consensus in our diverse cultural structure about what those values ought to be. In 1915, in the midst of the First World War, Sigmund Freud published his Thoughts On War And Death. I agree with the statement he made in that paper, when he said: “… our conscience is not the infallible judge that ethical teachers are wont to declare it, but in its origins is [dread of the community] and nothing else. When the community has no rebuke to make, there is an end of all suppression of the baser passions, and men perpetrate deeds of cruelty, fraud, treachery, and barbarity so incompatible with their civilization that one would have held them to be impossible.”

The answer to our conundrum may well lie in the development of a new supplemental secular religion of humanity. Good deeds and positive values are not restricted to the practitioners of traditional religions. Despite often-conflicting passions among our diverse religions, I have noted there is general agreement among them on core ethical values including truth and honesty. I think every major religion subscribes to some version of what Christians call the Golden Rule.

In the twenty-first century, perhaps well-intentioned urban secularists will commune with the diverse cultural traditions in North America and come up with a compendium of such core values. Once such a standard is generally taught and accepted in every social grouping, our diverse cultural community would have a new common standard; it might again have “a rebuke to make” and thereby “suppress the baser passions” of its population even without the intervention of the politicians and their legislation. The time may be here for a new set of Ten Commandments.

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Greed is Good?

Predictably The Economist’s 20 page special report on entrepreneurship in the magazine’s March 14, 2009 issue does its usual sales job in favour of the new “Global heroes”. On the first page they report on the oversubscribed conference of entrepreneurs in Bangalore, India, mentioning that many speakers “praised entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well.” Then, summing up in the last paragraph of the report, they say, “The revolution for the current generation is the entrepreneurial one. This has spread around the world, from America and Britain to other countries and from the private sector to the public one. It is bringing a great deal of disruption in its wake that is being exaggerated by the current downturn. But it is doing something remarkable: applying more brainpower, in more countries and in more creative ways, to raising productivity and solving social problems.”

Of course The Economist has been trumpeting the wisdom of “free” trade and “free” markets since it was first published in 1843 and in spite of the many changes that have destabilized the creation of wealth and the growth syndrome, its editorial belief in that wisdom continues unabated.

A little more lip service really ought to be given to limitations on the unending idea of “more”, and on the possibility of building sustainable communities on the principle that “small can be beautiful”. Although The Economist has suffered many contrarians through its history on its favourite rocking horses, most have emphasized only other or different objectives of growth. The voices raised on behalf of slower growth, greater stability and less inequality have been weak and small. The entrepreneur is too restless to dwell much on “enough”.

Just a brief perusal of western literature on the subject of wealth reveals to what extent its accumulation has preoccupied our civilization since the beginning of history. Plato, in his Laws stated it was impossible to be good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time. Aristotle preached that money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest itself. Yet by the time of Adam Smith, it was held that a reasonable interest charge is a necessary rent for the use of money in making a profit. Today, most of the unseemly accumulation of excessive wealth is accomplished strictly by using other people’s money and not one’s own. Even the excessive consumerism of the very rich competing for the purchase of the largest homes in Monaco, the largest yachts and the most expensive hotels, is accomplished mostly on cheaply borrowed money while their own wealth continues to make excessive profits.

There is never enough and there never will be until all the ever scarcer bounties of the earth are exhausted. The rich will get fewer, and the poor, who will be always with the rich as biblically predicted, will increase until they too disappear along with the other used up bounties of the globe.

The hungry consumers too, created and managed by the entrepreneurs, will disappear and the rich will struggle for survival and eventually join the ranks of the poor. And that seems to me to be the eventual end of the perpetual growth syndrome indulged in by almost all forms of life on our poorly managed planet. May it then rest in peace!

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The Old Man Takes Stock

One aim of this personal publication is to comment on the ageing process itself and to see how long I can periodically record my own involvement in that process. What will shut down The Old Man’s Post? It could be an entirely external cause such as changes to Internet technology or policies. It could also be mental dementia or physical debility suffered by the old man himself.

Ten years ago, almost to the week, I wrote a lengthy essay on the subject of ageing for another self published printed effort. I did not then talk to any extent about my own confrontation with the beast, as I had not yet experienced the rapid decline now evident. That process is intractable but although I often say to myself about the vexatious physical indignities it presents, “Will no one rid me of these troublesome priests?”, I still feel very fortunate. I have enjoyed perhaps more contented independence in my long retirement than in my busy years. I consider I now have in hand a bonus of at least fifteen years beyond the years I expected when diagnosed with diabetes at about age 44.

Yet though I try to remain objective about my personal ageing process, I cannot escape reality. When I neared 80 I experienced a few household falls while doing normal chores resulting in rib and hand fractures. That brought a diagnosis of bone loss. My daily walks became ever more difficult, shorter and slower and I stopped venturing out during any slippery or wet weather. Just in the past year, and even since I published the first issue of The Old Man’s Post the deterioration has become ever more rapid and noticeable. In spite of valiant efforts with diet and massage by my wife, who is also approaching 83 and has equally serious problems, my decades of insulin dependency and diabetic neuropathy take their toll. I already carry a cane to maintain balance while walking. We can try to laugh at some of the many indignities, but at times the changes in one short year make me think of how Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s tale must have felt when the effects of the sins he had stored on his changing portrait in the attic suddenly descended on his body.

There are so many like me and ageing is now a major social problem. Not infrequently people now live to 100, still reasonably active and mentally alert. The problem lies in the bosom of our welfare state mentality. Traditionally we give up being productive in our sixties. With increasing demographic power seniors demand more and more goodies such as more political rights, housing, health care and government pensions, for rich and poor alike. The cost of all that becomes a charge against still actively employed productive taxpayers. Expanding government bureaucracies need always more from them to funnel goodies to the country’s squeakiest wheels. We seniors are among the squeakiest.

In sterner days of less government benevolence, ageing people had to keep producing enough to look after themselves. When they could no longer maintain a home, that was often the time to pass whatever assets were owned to some younger family members who had become the dominant productive people in the family. In those circumstances the elder still was often required to earn his or her keep in the new family order of things, if only by doing some menial service in the household.

This demographic reversal has been unduly kind to my generation. As social policy it was well intentioned but probably wrong-headed. All through this century a trend towards shorter work hours, earlier retirement, and earlier pension ages was evident and apparently still continues. In France government legislated a 35-hour work week, which when added to an already legislated over-long paid vacation, left economists surprised that French industrial productivity is as high as it is. The tension between the need for enough income for the cost of living and the need to keep productivity costs economical produces constant and continuing stresses in labour relations.

Born in the 1920’s, I consider myself a depression child—a generation that has, since the Great Depression, enjoyed the best of times in this country. My depression psychology and resulting frugality has improved my personal condition in those already economic good times. The post-war Boomer generation did well while productive, but its members were overly taxed to provide for the likes of me.

With changing mores and greater reliance on the welfare state, the Boomers have saved little for a rainy day. They have also produced a much lower next generation population, partly because of the feminist movement and the need for both family parents to work for wages to pay taxes and keep up an affluent life style. Our welfare governments are forced to increase immigration to provide a population to produce more tax dollars to keep providing the welfare goodies, including goodies required by refugees and other immigrants who take time to integrate into our economy and society.

While recognizing the good fortune of my own particular choice of birth date, there is no escape from the negative effects of getting older. The passage of time is relentless as it speeds through space and the rate of its speed seems to increase in direct proportion to the increasing numbers of one’s age.

Improvements of science notwithstanding, our genetic inheritance and our determination when young to ignore all advice to maintain mental and physical condition conspire to accelerate the inevitable deterioration of age. However, the “natural death” that would normally have resulted whenever the time comes, is rarely allowed to proceed without some kind of intervention from modern welfare state practitioners.

They are people who can be found in the state bureaucracies, in the science and medical establishments, and in the families of the ageing person. What is more, people I have known in terminal situations, themselves rarely admitted they would not “get better,” even if they were completely aware of their situation. Some members of the medical geriatric industry go much farther than the Hippocratic Oath ever required of them. In the event they pull out all the stops, often with artificial feeding and elimination, to delay the departure of a tortured but still hopeful spirit living for no purpose but to reach another birthday.

Individuals who live to the ripe age of 100 years, physically able and mentally alert are the pride and example of their community and family. They are still the exception. I suggest their successful longevity is due to a special genetic inheritance coupled with a lifestyle since childhood designed to improve that inheritance. The vast majority of us, without special gifts, are destined to meet our ultimate fate much sooner.

I know of no easy answers to the problems of ageing. I do think that in the condition of our society and economy right now, people of my age ought to begin a trend toward a new mindset. We ought to resign from the Me Generation and be less demanding on the resources made available to us by a generous working population. That population accepts the high taxation we have demanded through lobbying organization and voting power because the income security and institutional care for seniors that taxation provides takes a big load from the shoulders of immediate families. But the load is getting too big for the fewer numbers paying taxes as the Boomers reach retirement. We say we have earned all those goodies, though statistically many seniors today have a larger purchasing power than ever before. Some proudly display bumper stickers on their recreational vehicles bragging, “We are spending our children’s inheritance.” Many could do well without the universally provided welfare of our Canadian system.

No doubt government has poorly organized the re-distribution of wealth required by the welfare state system. Having taken away from individuals the incentive, even the ability, to be frugal, to save, to invest and thereby to provide for their own retirement, government has failed to do that effectively with the resources we ourselves provide. They have forgotten the Keynesian economics taught by the ancient Hebrew, Joseph, to the Pharaoh of Egypt, urging him to store up grain in the good years to provide food for the lean ones. The present system cannot be sustained, nor will more rapid immigration do more than delay the inevitable, for it will cause other stresses on our social fabric to demand ever more from the few who can provide that ever greater wherewithal.

Only a change in our attitude, a break in our Me Generation way of thinking, will gradually develop a self-sustaining welfare system. Why should it not be a change led by the people of my generation, by being willing to give up our search for an impossible security that will never be found in this world?

Ageing is a big subject. No doubt the universe will unfold as it ought, or perhaps as it ought not. In our small part of it, we could organize ourselves as a nation in a way that would permit that small part to flourish for a time more, or we could continue on some of our wrong roads to sink into the decrepitude of other ageing societies of our time.

An Immigrant Tale

Mostly Mennonite is one of those family stories written and published by so many who were of or stem from that group of immigrants often referred to as Russian Mennonites. This one was written by Ernie Harder, who arrived in the then still cohesive religious village of Yarrow in BC’s Fraser Valley in the early forties as a one year-old child. He was about the same age as I was when I arrived there with my parents twelve years earlier. I did not get to know Ernie or his family before I left that village for Vancouver in the fall of 1945 when Ernie was just starting school.

The comparison of our experiences there was fascinating. His growing up was certainly less stressful than mine. Perhaps that was because the war and post war years were much more upbeat than the Depression years. Maybe it was because his family were members of a more liberal sect of Mennonites than were mine and certainly his arrival in the midst of a growing and younger family had something to do with it. By the time we arrived in the village, my parents were nearing middle age and I was the last born after-thought of an already dispersing family. Who knows?

Ernie tells the Mennonite story well and includes a bibliography for those who wish to find out more. He is rightfully proud of his long-lived parents and the way they influenced the lives of his siblings and himself.

The Mennonite branch of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptist movement of the Reformation in northern Europe continued as a distinct communal grouping for some 500 years. Always there were those who stayed and those who went, through migrations from the North Sea Lowlands to the Polish Vistula River delta and into the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire in the 18th century. Though like many growing cohesive religious groups the Mennonites experienced many “awakenings” and sectarian divisions, they all stayed close to the core Mennonite communal settlements as they expanded north and east as far as Siberia to accommodate landless sons and daughters from the early Black Sea area royal land grants. And they continued to communicate, by letter and visits with relations and friends all over Europe and with their American and Canadian cousins.

It seems to me the Russian Mennonites dispersed by the two World Wars have integrated into the Canadian culture more quickly and successfully than most other identifiable groups before or since, including earlier Mennonite migrations. The result, I believe, is that Canadian Mennonites are now simply part of the social mainstream of the country. They have lost the distinct ethnicity, separateness and communal coherence developed in the old country that many tried to recreate in communities here. Now even the more conservative Mennonite Brethren sect of my own background appear to me as just another American style conservative evangelical Christian church and certainly much more Liberal than the one I knew as a child. Fortunately, in my opinion, those changes came about before our current Canadian multiculturalism and double-barrelled nationalities took hold.

This book is really worth a read. I urge you to click here for the author's website.