Wherefor Tomorrow?

An occasional reader of The Post responded to one its efforts from a nom de plume email address that included a combination Latin phrase “carpediem”. Curious, the old man found that the phrase used came from a poem by pre-Christian Roman poet, Horace (65 BC to 8BC), often considered the most accomplished lyric poet of that era. Apparently the verse in question extolled the virtues of living for today without worrying about the future, thus “seize the day” for Carpe Diem.

The phrase reminded the old man of an essay he published some twelve years ago on Time and Ageing. Those were years when I had already realized, much too late, how sadly I had sinned in letting time pass me by. My thoughts of that time are perhaps even more valid today when I hardly dare contemplate the future at all, while many of my succeeding generations often appear to do little else but “seize the day” and spend but little time thinking of tomorrow. I noted in 1999 that the Boomer generation saved little for a rainy day, produced a lower next generation population with both parents working to pay taxes and keep up an affluent lifestyle. Governments increased immigration to make up the difference. Ever more welfare goodies, ever more rapid “growth” was necessary to sustain the system.

Philosophers and poets have long thought of the nature of time and its passage. Augustine in the early days of the Roman Church suggested that past and future do not exist at all and the present has no “extent of duration”. Pascal, in the 17^th Century thought we were so dissatisfied with the present that “we anticipate the future as too slow in coming … or we recall the past to stop its too rapid flight. … For the present is generally painful to us. … Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the present and the future. … The past and present are our means; the future alone is our end. … So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

Since my early retirement now nearly 30 years ago I spent much time examining my thoughts as Pascal suggested. I have been dismayed at the rapid disappearance of my more youthful “present”. As a boy I could not wait to be bigger, more powerful, better off, more successful, more this, more that and preferably someplace else. As a teenager I doubt if I ever knew what I wanted, either in the present or the future but I could not wait until I finished school, became “independent” and found a mate of my own. That stage finally came about through some effort and a lot of help but without taking any real advantage of the great scope of resources that “present” freely offered. I could not wait to be “successful” so I could provide for mate and offspring. So I kept looking, thinking of the future, of security for me and mine, of retirement, of everything but what was there for me to enjoy in the here and now. Before I knew it, the children were gone, the years consumed with nothing but efforts to get them into their “future”.

Time since the old man’s retirement seems to have gone in a flash. My “present” has lasted much longer than anticipated and though my physical assets have deteriorated more rapidly in recent years, I still have the ability to “contemplate” the present sufficiently to be able to prepare an occasional issue of this journal. Often the result turns out a contemplation of the past, largely because the scope of my social present gets more limited all the time. All my speculations have done nothing to solve the mysteries of time and ageing. Perhaps after all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in this fragment from the famous soliloquy, said it as thoughtfully as anyone:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

The Power of the Hoi Polloi

Once upon a time before he was old, the old man read a book and saw a movie called The Razor’s Edge. It was written in the first person by Somerset Maugham about a young member of the wealthy American socialite elite who had experienced the horrors of the 1914-18 Great War. After returning to the socialite scene he told his possessive fiancé he needed time to travel and find out what life was all about, urging her to join him in that pursuit. She refused. He searched for the rest of his short life. Before it ended he came near to some meaning with some fatherly guru in the high Himalayas. Periodically Maugham himself would run into his hero (strangely, shortage of money never seemed to be a problem for Maugham or his heroes) and bring the reader up to date on the fascinating adventures of the man’s search. One scene of the movie seemed to be at a social function on the French Riviera. It provided the only line of dialogue from the movie I remembered ever after, when Maugham, looking around the cocktail party scene, told his protagonist “I hate the propinquity of the hoi polloi!” From time to time since then I found occasion to steal that line for my own purposes.

            I was reminded of the scene when I got a copy of Linda the Activist’s (see my recent post Portrait of an Activist) latest letter to the Catholic Teacher’s Association. The letter compliments the Association for being among increasing numbers of “intelligent advocates … taking steps to be proactive” about the wireless-in-schools issue. She followed that up, however, to take a stab at the hoi polloi with this: “Negative public and corporate reaction is, to me, astounding, as it tells us how very far behind the majority are in their awareness of this issue, and how far we have to go.  Also, how strong an ignorant stance can be, and how powerful money is in the big scheme of things.”

In her causes Linda has never been afraid to call a spade a spade, although she certainly knows that whatever her cause, calling the ignorant opposition ignorant is unlikely to win many of them over to her side of the issue. Still, I sympathize with her feelings and admire the strength of her commitments. There must be hundreds of examples of the ignorance of the powerful and the power of money and position in today’s current events. It has been so since the early days of recorded classical history and before, even among the ancient Peloponnesian gods!  A few current examples can be cited in this issue of the Post as they come to mind.

I cannot match Linda’s certainty as to the truth of facts or the righteousness of causes. She knows my disposition, age and condition prevent even a limited career of tilting at windmills. I think she still accepts me for what I am. I have considered my brief appearance on the planet a bit of an accident of nature. Often it is been a lonely struggle for survival and a search for kinship. For my puny efforts I got an overflow of good fortune in achieving that survival well beyond expectations as to quality and duration as outlined in a memoir appropriately called A Minority of One. I still claim to live in the best of times and the best of places on earth though my examples of current stupidity make me wonder how long they will last. At no time, however, did the old man have the strength, the chutzpah, the manipulative ability, the desire for prominence or the lack of inhibitions almost every teenager in today’s world seems to have. They perhaps can sustain such ongoing struggles for change.

Still, through this medium, the old man can sometimes release his inhibitions in spite of the possibility of post-publication ridicule! For me, the most obvious examples of stupidity among the rich and powerful can be observed on CNN almost daily in this American election year. Specifically, the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the endless primary election process are almost frightening in their competition for the right to lead the world into the next one hundred years of war and destruction. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to call each other names, to spread lies and rumours about each other and to call the current commander in chief a complete disaster and worse. It is a wonder that some even more stupid religious nut of the ultra conservative right has not found a way to assassinate Obama in spite of his tight security! The only one of the four to sound half reasonable is the old man running on a libertarian anti-war platform. I agree with the man’s ideas of personal responsibility and freedom from government intervention in every aspect of life. Unfortunately, people are not ready for such freedom. The result would be anarchy even if ever achieved. Common sense tells the old man that whatever their intentions each candidate knows in his heart that he will have no better chance of “changing Washington” than did Barack Obama after his 2008 campaign.

A few more examples of what I consider ignorance in power can be seen in the Canadian political environment. I have generally supported the conservative right side of our broad spectrum in the hope of weaning an ever more demanding and dependent population from the notion that any particular government in power, federally and provincially, is somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong in the life of any individual resident. Whatever party rules, however, each insists on the righteousness of ever increasing rapidity of growth. Whatever happened to Small Is Beautiful? Harper’s new Conservative majority is no different than any of the more leftist parties. None believe it would be good to “conserve”. If global warming is accepted as a fact, we must exploit, use, extract, develop, and sell all the goodies revealed by the rapidly receding ice. Thus we must dig up all the miles of muck known as the Athabaska Tar Sands to make oil so we can supply the world with ever more pollution.  To do so we must use more and more fresh water, a resource much more precious and critical to life on the planet than the few re-usable hydrocarbons gleaned from the oil sands. Wars may well be fought this century over access to potable water.

A related Canadian example of stupidity in power has to do with the current environmental assessment hearings on the viability of the Harper government’s proposed pipeline to send the half treated oil sands product through the mountains for shipment by sea to China. After the staggering financial cost of extracting and treating the product in Alberta, the investors must have their pound of flesh whether it gets sold to Americans or Chinese. From my own less than scientific assessment, both options south and west are undesirable. Furthermore, it seems to me inevitable that the combined pipeline and tanker option will be the cause of any number of monumental environmental disasters, whatever the government eventually decides, environmental hearings notwithstanding.

All I have left to say is, Let it be in the hands of the gods and not in the hands of the hoi polloi!

Aging Security

In his dim and distant politically active past the old man has variously supported the Conservatives (of whatever name) and the Liberals. In Canada that has really meant a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as our Socialists (of various names) have charged. In our parliamentary system my reason for the variety had more to do with what I considered necessary periodic changes in the ruling dictatorships than any real hope of changing the national trends and goals in our country’s practice of the art of the possible.

     Since the advent of the first of our species during and after the glacial periods, the developing body politic of this continent, including the part that became Canada, has been fractured. The arrival of the French, the English, the Scots and the Irish, not to mention the earlier Iberians and later Africans and Asians, encouraged more tribalism and division. Electoral policies since World War 2 have catered to that division in Canada's large national area to make it even more ungovernable that it was in the century before.

The old man has been known to rail against multiculturalism, against the codification of “rights and freedoms”, against multiple citizenship possibilities, against capital punishment, and against many of the equalizing policies that have created so many dependencies in Canada, Europe and even in the United States to the point that they exceed government ability to collect and pay their costs. The most nonsensical part of these policies is the universality aspect of them.

     In this piece the old man’s contrariness again rears its head because of the furor caused by Prime Minister Harper’s casual comments at the Davos economic forum in Switzerland that his government would have to take steps to change our pension system. I assume he did that deliberately from the European context to get the furor started at home early in his new majority mandate. If one listens to the talking heads on television and reports from pension recipients and the parliamentary opposition, it is apparent that Harper is now exercising his Machiavellian secret agenda to eviscerate the “poor” for the benefit of his banking and oil company friends. God knows what other secrets may be found out before he completes his four year majority.Perhaps even some of his back benchers are worried lest their overly-generous pensions after retirement or defeat should be tampered with?

     I say such an overhaul is long overdue! Take the Old Age Security Pension, which is sufficient to express my contrariness here. First let me confess in retrospect that throughout my working years I expected that by the time I retired all the contributions I made to the welfare programs in taxes and assessments would be exhausted by payments to those already retired, and no pensions would be available for me. However, when I did retire at nearly age 57 for health reasons, I took into account the various programs then still available including Old Age Security at age 65 for  both my wife (25 days younger than I am) and me. The monthly CPI indexed cheques have been hitting our bank account for 20 years since then!

     Now I know the government did not force me to apply for OAS when I reached 65, but at the time we felt sufficiently insecure to apply. And how many who are already millionaires at 65 do you know who fail to do so? It is also true that our stay-at-home life style and depression born frugality has stayed with us. We could manage for the rest of our limited presence here without that pension. Perhaps we could terminate the entitlement before we die but when we consider the consequences of opening that particular can of worms, we decide to leave it closed.

     There is absolutely no reason why the already wealthy should be entitled to the extra windfall. Though it may never be politically possible and will not be in Harper’s time, the old man has always believed such payments should be means tested, not universally awarded.

     Furthermore, extending the eligibility date from age 65 to age 67 is simply a matter of keeping up with the times. Life expectancy has increased more than 2 years since the age 65 retirement date was set. Most healthy individuals at age 65 would actually prefer to keep on working as long as they can and many do so even after applying for the pension entitlement. Others strike out in new and perhaps even more strenuous undertakings and sometimes start new businesses. Most of us would prefer to continue with an expertise in regular work environments and routines. There is no reason why we should not continue to contribute for two more years to make the funds available more viable for pensioners getting in line at 67.

     It is a fact that the universality principle has already been tampered with by establishing Old Age Security Supplements and other adjustments for the poor and some manner of clawing back the taxable OAS from the wealthy, though I have not looked into the status of that in current tax law. Why not simply use the tax returns to index the amount of the pension cheque at both ends of the spectrum, sending a larger amount to those below a certain proven income and sending none at all to those above a maximum proven income? Surely some computer whiz civil servant could design a program to simplify the tax form and accomplish that result.

- 30 –

The Poisoned Apple

"And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

Thus it seems that God already knew his wilful creation would undoubtedly eat of it for he said "when", not "if you eat of it" and so it has been. Man (and woman) has taken bite after bite ever since, until now the fruit of the garden is nearly exhausted, leaving little alternative to the promise of the biblical myth that we "will surely die".

A similar lesson is produced in Greek mythology when Prometheus is warned by Zeus about the dangers of stealing the fire of the gods. In a recent interview on the last broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal author-ecologist, Barry Lopez, translated the myth to mean that technology can be your undoing if you do not deal justly and with reverence for all things to make it work.

Yet in spite of all the efforts of the thinkers, writers, activists and revolutionaries scattered among its still increasing numbers, our species continues to ignore those ancient lessons. In spite of the now obvious damage we continue to inflict on the flora and fauna that supports us, we insist on succumbing to the demands of the post-industrial money machine to consume every fleeting and untested experimental new technology touted in the now global market place, possible dangers to ourselves notwithstanding.

The risks known and unknown are legion; our responses to the few generally covered by our media only when they have saleable news or entertainment value, are sorry and indifferent. What can we do, after all? Witness community and government responses to a few of them:

• Rapid polar climate change. The response seems to be, "We must take advantage of the opportunity to claim national ownership of the newly accessible land and water and exploit its natural resources for our benefit;


• The recent offshore oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that is turning that entire body of water into a toxic and potentially lifeless sump. A well intentioned president can do little but order a drilling moratorium bvut indications are that the old barons will persuade authorities to expand offshor drilling with promises of doing better and abiding by regulations more strictly enforced.


• The recent speech of U.S. President Obama to college graduates warning of the dangers of new technology, while at the same time he has and continues to advocate the rapid and unregulated spread of broadband Internet channels so every person, especially children, across America has access to it, likely by the spread of wireless towers all over every city and village in the place. Furthermore the president uses his personal Blackberry constantly with no apparent thought of its health risks.


• The recent release in Canada of a report on the cancer risks of cell phone use, four years after obviously incomplete and tainted information was collected, according to critics of the report, which is nothing more than a down-playing of the dangers, particularly to children.

We are all guilty of indifference and apathy, cheering on the "green" industries seen by business as new sources of capital. Many such ventures turn out upon further examination to do more harm than good and are mere costly experiments. A group called Citizens For Safe Technology has collected a great deal of information and collated many online resources on the dangers of radio frequency microwave radiation and related matters and I urge all readers to check out their website at http://www.citizensforsafetechnology.org/ .

The dire warnings of the gods of those early myths may already be beyond remedy. In time there is no doubt we and our progeny "will surely die", though some of them "may ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species" as Darwin thought possible in his Origin of Species. In the same paragraph he did warn, however, that "of the s;pecies now living veery few will transmit progeny of any kind to a distant futurity; .... the manner in which all beings are grouped shows that the greater number of species in each genera, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterl extinct." May we all rest in peace.

- 30 -

The Way It Was

After my last issue, titled Vigilance and Vigilantes, I did get some reaction from a few people who are still active in preserving the Yarrow Mennonite story. I thank them now for communicating with the old man. There comments and recollections brought home the fact that my family was not the only one with community relationship problems then.

From the late twenties through the forties and into the fifties in what I have icalled the Village Theocracy of my youth the strains and conflicts between the generations that are always in evidence seemed even more extreme in that place.

They were more difficult because of the congregational effort to remain separate, apart, different and unworldly—a really tough job for first generation kids like the old man, always exposed to the surrounding community culture, if only through the public school. They were further exacerbated by the approach and start of World War II.

I was still with my family in the hop harvest, living in one of the Golding Farm cabins at Sardis when Hitler invaded Poland at the beginning of September 1939. Later that month I started bussing to Chilliwack Central School with all the other Yarrow kids. There we suffered the slings and arrows of being squareheads. Many of my bus mates still reverted to their Low German on the way to and from home and Sardis kids picked up on the way from Yarrow complained about that to the teachers. I can still visualize my classmate, Peter Ewert (later an eminent horticulturist), and me waiting for our bus after school, when Ivan Wells, a particularly aggressive logger’s son from Sardis, came up to Pete, saying, “Well, squarehead, wanna fight?” Pete answered, true to his non-violent heritage, “No thank you, not today”. Well, we were only twelve years old!

A visit to the Elmer Wiens yarrow.ca web pages also reminded the old man that he is not kidding when he calls this website The Old Man’s Post. It took me a whole evening to go through that site’s list of deaths to read the short biographies of just those whose names I thought I remembered from my Yarrow days in the thirties and early forties. I found that far too many of the kids I associated with in grades 1 to 6 in Carl Wilson’s elementary school at Yarrow until 1939 are listed among those obituaries, though I remembered them as stronger, more athletic, more popular and more aggressive than I ever managed to be.

After reading the Johannes and Tina Harder story and reading the current views of those who responded to my review, I was particularly struck by the fact that the young children of MB Church members who were shunned at congregational meetings, were also shunned by other children at school. If that instruction went out to my school acquaintances, I never became aware of it. Perhaps that was because I was basically a loner by nature and had simply refused to attend most church functions by the mid thirties.

What does surprise me, however, is that none of the church elders or preachers or Sunday school or German school teachers, including Preacher Harder, ever followed up on my spiritual welfare or lack of it. Many of the boys I knew experienced conversions, temporary or otherwise, though I never observed much change in their behaviour after the event. That reminds me of a comment from my older brother when he was manager of the Haas Hop Company at Sardis in the fifties and sixties. As foreman and manager he had hired many Yarrow employees for various seasonal field work jobs in which they used company tools and supplies. A percentage of that seemed to disappear as workers borrowed the stuff for personal use at their homes. Not infrequently, when MB members were converted, they approached him in his office to beg forgiveness for taking things that didn’t belong to them. They got the forgiveness but he didn’t recall once that any of them offered to make restitution.

So much for nostalgia! It is altogether too much with us old men, when our association with the current world and community events becomes almost non-existent. I am hoping that with this issue, I can leave those Yarrow days behind, and concentrate more on what is going on around me rather than re-live those long ago days, both the good ones and the not so good ones.

- 30 -

An Old Man's Happiness?

Another recent article, perhaps a book review, in my weekly newsmagazine referred to various views about the philosophy of human happiness. Apparently a thinkers’ consensus stipulates that humans who live in and for the present, with little thought of past or future, are the happy ones. Those who continually review past experience or worry about the future are generally unhappy.

The proposition leaves this old man in a conundrum of sorts. In earlier years I was often fearful of the insecurities of the present, unhappy with my past performance and worried about the future. I spent much too little time enjoying the few peaceful and enjoyable moments and relationships when past, present and future all merged into one.

Now, after several rather sad and fearful personal and world tragedies of the first few weeks of 2010 I have very little to feel happy about in the present, and not a great deal of time left of my future in this world. The result is that I spend a great deal of time on what amounts to nostalgia. I find myself going back to events that happened at various times from childhood to the recent past, often jumping at random from one period to another completely unrelated circumstance, both in sleeping and waking hours, generally looking for those moments when I found myself at peace and feeling happy about something, shuffling away from those other times when I may have disgraced myself in some way.

Shakespeare’s character, Antonio, says in The Tempest, “Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge.” Shakespeare’s prologue to the play has taken the characters to their present state of affairs, so that they can now decide where to take the drama from that present. That may have been well and good for plotting that drama with characters still upwardly mobile but is hardly helpful to the old man now, with but few options to determine what is to come, which is not really “in my discharge”.

Among the many philosophical comments about past and future are those of Blaise Pascal, a brilliant mathematician and philosopher of the seventeenth century, who died at 39 leaving an extensive body of work. He said in his own version of Passing Thoughts that “we anticipate the future as too slow in coming … or we recall the past to stop its too rapid flight. For the present is too painful to us. Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the present and future. … The past and present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”

I am still somewhat dismayed at the ever more rapid disappearance of my “present”. As a young boy I could not wait to be bigger, more powerful, better off, more successful, more this, more that and preferably someplace else. As a teenager I doubt if I ever knew what I wanted, either in the present or in the future, but I could not wait until I finished school, became “independent” and found a mate of my own. That stage finally came about through some effort and a lot of help but without taking any real advantage of the scope of resources that present freely offered. I could not wait to be successful so I could provide for mate and offspring, hopefully in a way that was better than had been my experience. So I kept looking, thinking of the future, of security for me and mine, of retirement, of everything but what was there for me to enjoy in the here and now. Before I knew it, the children were gone, the years consumed with nothing but efforts to get them into their future.

A few consolations are left for me. First, the disabilities of age make it necessary for survival to focus more on the present, to stay alert enough to be able to deal with those disabilities independently and in order to do that I must be able to see the joke of it all and furthermore enjoy the comfort and security my age also makes possible. Thirdly, I am no longer concerned about my personal future either in this world or the next, knowing that I must accept whatever that future provides, with a little help from the bit of steering power I have left.

It is also true that I happily contemplate what I consider a bonus of many happy years in retirement, and grieve for childhood friends and contemporaries who were stronger and much more active than I ever could be who have already suffered early dementia or death. I will keep on looking for better things in 2010 and beyond!

- 30 -

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.

- 30 –

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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