DISRUPTIVE ESSAYS: There Are No Safe Spaces in This Book!

By WILLIAM D. GAIRDNER and Daniel Crack

WILLIAM GAIRDNER has published a dozen books, a half-dozen journal articles, and hundreds of insightful essays online. As a consequence, many eager to read his work, are not sure where to begin. Disruptive Essays was created to help them. It is what some call a "Reader," offering a fascin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kinetics Design - kdbooks.ca
• Release date: Jun 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988360317

WILLIAM D. GAIRDNER

As a young athlete, Bill competed in the decathlon at the Pan-Am Games in Brazil and at the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, and then in two Commonwealth Games (Jamaica, 1966, and Edinburgh, 1970), in the 400 metre hurdles event. After earning a PhD from Stanford University, he taught English Literature at York University, then pursued a career in business, from which he retired in 1988 to devote his time to writing. In quick succession he produced a string of bestselling books, including The Trouble With Canada, The War Against The Family, The Book of Absolutes, and Canada's Founding Debates - an historical landmark. His most recent is The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. Blog: www.williamgairdner.ca Twitter: @williamgairdner

Book preview

Preface

William Gairdner had a major impact on my life before I ever met him. When I read his best-selling book The Trouble with Canada in 1990, I was already concerned about spiralling government debt and the threat of Quebec separation. Bill’s book convinced me that the source of trouble was much deeper than misguided public policy; it was infatuation with a false public philosophy, then known as liberalism, now often called progressivism. That realization helped me decide to accept Preston Manning’s invitation to go to work for him, which led to 20 years of employment off and on with the Reform Party of Canada, in the name of which Preston became the Leader of the Opposition in Canada’s Parliament.

Although I developed a taste for electoral politics as an exciting game, I soon learned that it had little to do with public philosophy. Bill had already spoken to a half-dozen sold-out Reform Party gatherings, including one of 800 delegates in Saskatoon in 1990, where members lined up down the street to get a signed copy of Trouble. But as his ideas gained purchase, trouble was brewing. I remember recommending Bill as a speaker for a Reform Party event in Ontario, only to have Preston Manning veto him as too controversial (Bill would say too disruptive is the better phrase). I’m sure Preston was right in a practical and political sense, but the fact that he was right demonstrated the gulf between politics and philosophy.

Rather than plunging into politics, Bill has preferred to affect our public philosophy and political culture through his writing. The Trouble with Canada was just the beginning. Since that time he has published book after book on public affairs and political philosophy. They differ in focus but they all have the same theme — how human flourishing and freedom are embedded in the natural order of the cosmos and society.

All are worth reading, which is why this edited collection is such a good idea. It is like a greatest hits album from a tireless musician, although Bill’s melodies are formed with words and ideas, not musical notes. And the most wonderful thing about Bill’s books is that they are not written for specialists. Any educated and reflective person can understand them. That’s true even of my personal favourite, The Book of Absolutes, which was published by a university press.

Which is Bill’s most important book? Perhaps Canada’s Founding Debates. Bill was dismayed that Canada had never published its own founding debates about Confederation. So he created and managed the entire project, found private funding for it, and a willing publisher (after four rejections) and then co-edited the book with historians Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, and Ian Gentles. By pulling together speeches from many sources, the editors make it easier for future generations of Canadians to understand how Confederation was not just a real estate transaction, as it is sometimes caricatured, but the founding of a new polity based on timeless principles of political order as well as centuries of British constitutional experience.

But Bill’s contribution to our political life does not stop with his many books and newspaper columns. He was the founding president of the national political discussion group Civitas in the aftermath of the 1996 Winds of Change conference. Winds of Change tried to bring about the unification of the Reform Party and Progressive Conservative Party, which were then locked in a mortal combat that allowed the Liberals to win every election. The politicians eventually managed to carry out the unification, though not until 2003.

Meanwhile, Bill pulled together the many writers, researchers, and political activists who had attended that conference to create Civitas, a national discussion society whose purpose is to promote and deepen understanding through the exchange of a wide range of political, economic, social, religious, cultural and philosophical ideas concerning the principles and traditions of a free and ordered society.

Bill spearheaded the organizing effort and in his three years as president set the template for success that Civitas still follows 23 years later — membership by invitation, one national meeting a year, presentations kept to strict time limits, lively debates between different viewpoints, and Chatham House rules to create an environment of candour. Among many high points, I’ll never forget the powerful, passionate, yet civil debate between Fraser Institute President Mike Walker and Bill about the ethics of assisted suicide. It’s an organization for conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals, but it routinely invites socialists, feminists, Quebec separatists and other opponents to challenge its members’ convictions.

Civitas has had many illustrious members, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and cabinet ministers Monte Solberg and Jason Kenney (who may end up Premier of Alberta). Beyond that, it furnishes a venue for more or less like-minded people to get to know each other and to share ideas. Like the international Mont Pelerin society founded by the great economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, it takes no political positions and plays no role in partisan politics, but it provides intellectual infrastructure for those who care about the principles and traditions of a free and ordered society.

Bill Gairdner has been a leader in our times in creating a national conservative movement based on philosophical principles, not just a desire to gain office. His books have informed and inspired a generation of Canadian conservatives. After reading this collection, you will see why.

Tom Flanagan

Professor Emeritus of Political Science

University of Calgary

Introduction

After four decades of thinking and writing about the moral and political condition of my country, and of our civilization, and with a dozen books, and a half dozen journal articles now published, I am on occasion asked by interested and curious parties: Oh, you’re a writer? Well, I love to read. And then: What sort of book do you write? Or, Which book should I start with?

Disruptive Essays will in future be my response to such welcome questions.

It is a book of the sort sometimes called A Reader, that offers a broad selection from most of my publications, along with some previously unpublished pieces. The justifying assumption is that a reader who finds sufficient interest in a selection here from, say, The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree (2015), may then want to proceed to read the whole of that book.

Meanwhile, I have found that just to mention a title like Disruptive Essays is sufficient to raise an eyebrow, along with a curious smile. And why is that? I think it’s because most people with a mind free from our prevalent slavery to political correctness get a kick out of having their views either confirmed, or challenged.

Reading such a book is a private way for them to enjoy this experience — one I have always felt is acutely essential to the preservation of a free society — without the inconvenience and discomfort of unwanted knee-jerk censorship. The raised eyebrow, means something like, Way to go! And the curious smile, means Try me!

And right out of the gate, that’s what I appear to have done. I say appear because that was never my intent. I am not a contrarian. Not someone who takes an opposing point of view just for the sake of it, or because he is ornery, or only because I like to draw attention to myself. If the views — the disruptions — laid out in these essays consistently oppose so many dominant public viewpoints, it’s because each is an attempt to get beneath the surface of things to show a deeper reality and truth.

I like to give the example of man standing on a city street on a beautiful day. Suddenly, a huge gash opens in the road, and bricks and rubble start flying around. He tells himself It’s an earthquake! But of course, it’s not the earthquake that he sees. It’s the consequences of the earthquake, which itself is invisible, located in the grinding of geological forces far beneath the surface.

Just so, each of the essays in this book is an attempt to reveal the invisible ideological forces that are grinding away beneath the political and moral life of my country, and indeed, of all the western democracies, while creating lots of political and moral rubble at the surface. Just as the seismologist is practiced at revealing invisible geological forces, it is the aim of Disruptive Essays to reveal invisible ideological forces.

"And what has been the point of that? Or, What has changed over recent decades? is often the next question. By which I think is meant: Has all this revealing of the unseen been worthwhile?" My answer, is Yes. The pursuit of truth is always deeply rewarding for its own sake. Enormously so. I am certainly not the only one to see the deeper truth of things. But if I were, and if the whole world thought otherwise, I would still die happy.

Finally, I am often asked: When it comes to the direction of things in Canada, and in the West as a whole, what is the overall political and moral situation? Do you feel your efforts have been useful? Wasted? I reply that it’s a question of drift. Let me explain with another image. I feel like a man who for four decades has been standing on a rock in a leftward drifting sea. In the foggy distance I see ships, drifting slowly to the left. And I hear faint voices from those ships. They are saying, Look. Look. There’s a man out there, drifting to the right!

My hope is that Disruptive Essays will help readers decide whether they would rather be on the rock, or on one of those ships.

PART 1

On Politics, Society,

and Government

CHAPTER 1

How Popular Illusions Produce Public Ignorance

From The Trouble With Canada … Still!, 2010

If you believe that ideas (when we are thinking clearly) and assumptions (when we are acting, but not necessarily thinking) shape government policy, then you will surely agree that it is of the utmost importance for a society to get its ideas and assumptions right — to have an appropriate ideology. By ideology I mean an autonomous structure of interdependent ideas that serves as a basis for the formation of government policies.

In such matters, however, most people are generally inarticulate, or at the least, disinterested, and this leaves them exposed, if not to immediate political disaster then to gradual social and moral gridlock, so to speak. That’s because in daily life we tend to rely on too many assumptions that when we really think about them are found to be in conflict with each other, or that contradict themselves. Then we are like a ship with no course. But as the folk-saying goes: If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else! In short, if citizens do not equip themselves to see clearly how social, economic, and political ideologies actually work, they will be vulnerable to the processes of decline, and ripe victims of political expediency. Unless we master and direct our own destiny, future generations will read how it mastered us. In this respect, ideology is destiny.

The eight popular illusions described here are extremely disruptive because they embody the unofficial counter-ideology of the whole society. If they are at a long, steady, and unchallenged variance with a founding ideology, they will prevail. They will eventually replace the latter. Policy will be based on them. They will disrupt.

In what follows, each illusion is described as a popular belief without foundation, running counter to some original core principle of the nation. Each in its own way, these illusions play a role in substituting a Statist style for the liberty-based way of forming a nation. All of them are discernible in the ordinary experiences of everyday life and can be discovered with minimal effort in any daily newspaper. Once aware of them, they easily can be spotted — the way a horticulturalist identifies common weeds — in the ideological garden of our country.

The Free-Lunch Illusion

How the government’s sleight-of-hand fools us into believing it really has money of its own.

There is a widespread and unfortunate illusion afoot that the government has its own money, that what we get from government is free. But I always tell my children: It’s not free. It’s pre-paid! Too few citizens understand that government has no money of its own, that the only money government can possibly have (except for the sale of a few services, licences, and the like that we pay government to provide, and then pay to receive) is gotten through appropriation, and comes from only three sources. Government either takes the money from us (creating a tax burden), or it borrows it from us or from foreigners (creating a debt burden, which is just deferred taxation), or it prints money for itself (creating an inflation burden). In this sense, the game of government, once it goes beyond establishing and enforcing the rules for a level playing field, is truly a zero-sum game. What it gives to some, it must first take from others. For example, when a government says it has created jobs, what it has actually done is take millions of dollars from some people (depressing the rewards for their own jobs) to create jobs for other people.

I remember a placard to this effect carried around the malls in Toronto by an old friend named Winnett Boyd, who passed away in 2017 at age 101. He and his friends had fought to defeat national socialism in Europe during WW II, and many of his friends died there. But Winnett got so upset to see socialism sprouting in Canada after the war that he decided to run for political office, donned a placard on which he had printed his thoughts, and started walking. As soon as people saw him, they would stop and stare. Many would nod in agreement. Or mumble: So true! The bold wording on the placard, front and back, said: REMEMBER: ANY GOVERNMENT THAT CAN GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANT, MUST FIRST TAKE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE! Winnett was no taker, he was an ingenious, hard-working engineer responsible in large measure for the invention of Canada’s famous Orenda, and F-86 Sabre jet engines, and also for Canada’s Chalk River Nuclear Reactor, which is still in action.

Winnett’s point can be illustrated to students, or your own children, simply and dramatically. The lesson begins this way. First arrange for two students (Mary and John) to come to class with ten one-dollar coins representing their annual income. Then tell the whole class that you will represent government (you want them to see how it works). Ask both students what they feel is the most important thing government ought to provide?

Mary will say something like, I think a good government ought to provide police and free daycare. John will say something like, I believe every Canadian should be guaranteed free health care and a pension.

Then ask each to come to the front of the class with their money. Hold up your empty hands (to show that government starts with no money) and ask Mary to give you five dollars. Put three in your pocket (the cost of government), and hand two to John, saying, Here’s your health care.

Then take five from John, pocket three, and hand two to Mary, saying, Here’s your free daycare. Repeat the process to fund Mary’s free police and John’s free pension. They will each end up with four dollars, and a firm lesson in government. (You will end up with twelve — six from each of them.)

Properly executed, this will be the most memorable and effective political education of their young lives, for they will quickly see that government money is an illusion; that the government’s power and influence increase only because of the wealth it takes from the people; and that we are duped by the free-lunch mentality. Most of all, they will realize that by demanding a free service from government they are really demanding it from their neighbours, and when the latter do the same it is being taken from them.

It has long and often been demonstrated that government services are anywhere from 10 to 150 percent less efficient than the same services rendered privately, and so the net productivity result is always a loss. But here’s the real moral rub: No government can confer a benefit upon one person or group without penalizing another. What it gives to one, it must first get from another. Even if it prints money for itself, it is virtually taking money from future generations who must pay for the hidden tax of inflation. That’s an iron law of economics. The social-welfare State is therefore a great fiction, by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

The Fixed-Pie Illusion

How misunderstandings about the process of wealth creation lead to resentment of success.

When thinking about government, it is correct to label it a fixed-pie or a zero-sum game. Even when government succeeds in priming or stimulating an activity that might not otherwise have been started, or to save it from bankruptcy (like the American and Canadian car industries after the sub-prime meltdown) it is impossible to do this in a cost-efficient way because stimulus money must first be taken from efficient taxpayers (they have money) to prime the inefficient activities of others (who do not have money), which means the economic power of some will be suppressed to improve the economic power of others. It’s a vote-buying scheme.

As for Government enterprises such as Canadian Crown corporations? They discourage true commercial efficiency and entrepreneurial risk and reward because they are political, bureaucratic entities that lack any basis for economic calculation. Debt that would have bankrupted normal private operators is often forgiven and excluded from the reported financial success of the operation. In short, there may be some good economic or even policy reasons for state enterprises, and these have played an important role in the development of small nations such as Canada from the start. However, whether an operation is run by government or private interests, it is subject to the same laws of economics, and if the return on investment is there for government, then it’s certainly there for private operators, who are at least risking their own funds, and not the public’s. It may be true that some government entities are necessary to safeguard a way of life, or to protect a culture from absorption by a neighbouring behemoth, or because no sane private operator is willing to risk everything to do this or that.

The world of the so-called private sector is just the opposite of government. First, it’s misnamed. It should be called the productive sector, for this is its most beneficial feature. Properly considered, all successful entrepreneurial processes worldwide are growth processes, in which the economic pie is not fixed. It gets larger all the time because new wealth and value are continuously being generated.

So to think of the productive world in fixed-pie terms — which is how people in the middle ages thought about all commercial activity — is wrong. If an individual, such as your neighbour gets wealthier than you, it doesn’t mean that he has taken wealth you otherwise might have had. The same applies to the economic activities of nations.

Despite the calamitous misunderstandings about how growth is achieved, the modern world trend, is growth — slow, but ever upward. The productive pie is increasing in size almost everywhere. In his 1987 book Passage to a Human World, Max Singer of the Hudson Institute wrote that by World Bank calculations the percentage of the world’s nations living in poverty will have fallen from 50 percent in 1960, to 16 percent by 2008.¹ That was a pretty close estimate: the August 26, 2008 Poverty Update of the World Bank had this to say: Poverty has been declining at the rate of about one percentage point a year, from 52 percent of the developing world’s population in 1981 to 25 percent in 2005. This is no small achievement, given that the number of poor fell by 500 million in this period. In a January 2008 on-line discussion for Hudson, Singer wrote that by the end of this century, when China and India will have become wealthy, probably three-fourths of the world will live in wealthy countries.²

The fact is that even very low, but steady annual growth can produce tremendous results. England ruled the world after a steady average annual growth of only 2 percent over a hundred-year period! So the answer to wealth creation is steady annual growth so that investible capital increases. The formula for calculating this phenomenon is: 72, divided by the average rate of growth, which equals the time needed to double net wealth. For example, with a growth factor of 2 percent per annum, a nation could double its net wealth in 72 / 2 = 36 years. Not bad! Of course, net growth means a bigger pie for all concerned — including the government (unless, like the Swiss, we limit government spending by legislation). However, if we don’t grow, government may still grow! It can do this because it knows that all government deficits and debt, as I have said, are just a form of deferred taxation that mostly falls on future citizens who are not here yet to defend themselves against the rapacity of the State, or against the hunger of the current population to benefit from spending that will never be repaid, or, simply are not old enough to fight back. Whereas private enterprise can grow by increasing productivity and through savings, government can grow only by taking more citizen wealth by force from present or future generations. So remember this the next time someone tries to fool you with the fixed-pie argument. It’s true for all governments and tends to be true for socialist states, because their system creates a damping effect on wealth production — but it’s not true for free societies in which all boats go up on a rising tide. The secret to successful wealth production is to create the wealth-producing machine, while being sure to limit government’s ability to paralyze it at the same time. To do the former without the latter is an invitation to tax penury.

The Rights Illusion

How rights become claims against the State for specific goods.

There is rampant public confusion about rights. So let us explore the meaning of this word for a few moments. The traditional, or classical concept of rights as understood in all the countries born of England refers to certain specific rights as set out and protected by common law, and also to a general right of individual freedom within the law. Such specific rights as freedom of thought and speech, private property, association, and the like, are often labeled negative rights because they protect our right not to be interfered with. The general right of freedom under our system means you have a right to do anything you wish as long as you do not break the law. That is quite different from a state where law is so arbitrary and the people accordingly so frightened they correctly fear they can do only what is permitted, and only in the way permitted.

Another traditional conception of rights is so-called natural rights. For example, the American Declaration of 1776 speaks of an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The term inalienable means these things are considered inherent rights that cannot be taken away by any moral or legal right of others, and are part of what we are by virtue of the plain fact that we’re human beings. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists such standard rights said to be equal for all. But in reality, they are all subject to limitation according to what judges deem reasonable in a free and democratic society. In Canada, the Courts have often usurped the right of Parliament to declare what reasonable means, about which much more could be said on the process whereby legislatures operating under Charters of abstract rights end up transferring the interpretation — and sometimes even the creation — of their laws to courts. Neither the American Declaration nor the Canadian Charter say anything about duties, or the rights of the community, however, or what should be done when rights multiply and collide.

Of course, anyone who thinks about the term rights can figure out that much of what I have just said is wish-fulfillment, if not blarney, simply because we can say, or declare that we have all sorts of rights. But if we cannot protect ourselves against harm by others, or by the State itself, a right means nothing at all. Same for freedom. We have as much freedom, and as many kinds of rights as can be protected or enforced by the customary laws of the land, and that is the only guarantee of them. Ever. It sounds good, but does not help much to say that a right is inalienable. That is just an expression of the emotional value you place on that right. And the sorry truth is that certain rights once considered inalienable — for example, the property right, or the right to free speech — can weaken or strengthen according to the times, and according to the political views of judges, as they have in modern Canada and America. Anyone watching the despicable 2017 hounding by media and academics of truth-speakers such as Professor Jordan Peterson, or the Star-Chamber grilling of Wilfred Laurier University student Lindsay Shepherd, will need no further proof of what I say. Courageous Lindsay’s original interview can be read here: http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/heres-the-full-recording-of-wilfrid-laurier-reprimanding-lindsay-shepherd-for-showing-a-jordan-peterson-video.

As for property rights? When I was a boy in the 1950s someone caught breaking into your home in the night was very likely to get himself beat up, or possibly shot, or at the least would go to jail for a very long time. So there wasn’t much break-and-enter back then. In Canada, the maximum punishment for break and enter of an occupied private dwelling is still life imprisonment. But judicial respect for the sacred right of private property is so low now that many homeowners or shopkeepers have themselves been sent to jail for pointing a gun at, or even just for badly beating up, a thief breaking into their home or stealing from their store.

In the same vein, Canada’s Human Rights Commissions have had a field day trying and fining people just for speaking their minds. Usually they are after so-called hate crimes, and I’m sure no one could ever count the number of those that have occurred in the form of hateful and hurtful actions against others. But these HRCs are not after hateful actions. They are trying people just for speech (spoken or written) considered normal by the speakers. For example, a devoted Christian following his own religious teachings is obligated to teach publicly and to his students and children that homosexuality is a sin, or at the least a disorder of the soul. And yet even though we are still a Christian nation (according to our census, about 80 % say they are Christian), some HRCs have tried and fined Canadians for expressing these hateful beliefs in public. This is an example of a collision between the right of free speech (and thought), and the right of religious belief.

My main concern, however, is that recently the term rights has been transformed into one with a very different — and dangerous — new meaning. Today, when we say that someone has a right to something, we typically mean that a person has an enforceable claim to a specific good, service, money, or privilege to be gotten from another person, a corporation, or from the State. Such rights are called substantive or positive rights because the persons declaring them want much more than to be left alone. They want something specific and tangible to be provided.

I submit that this radical change — so common now in welfare states — is a net subtraction from the moral quality of our national life. Why should this be so? Simply because as a free person with the protected right to walk where you wish, think, speak out, and so on, within the law, you are undertaking these actions for yourself. No one is being forced to do anything for you. Others are simply being restrained from preventing you from doing these things. That arrangement is a healthy situation for any society. But increasingly since the mid-20th century this noble idea has deteriorated into the perverse notion that a right is also a claim against others for something to be supplied by them, or a claim that they can be forced to do something for you. By now this has led to a wholesale rights fever in Canada and in many other nations, so that instead of upholding and protecting a right to freedom from government by restricting its intrusive activities, we have encouraged exactly such intrusions. Some will say that this is how we get from liberty to fraternity. But on that score we must take a lesson from wiser folks. When, in 1850, the French statesman Alphonse de Lamartine said that his countryman Frédéric Bastiat’s philosophy of government was inferior because it guaranteed only liberty, while Lamartine’s system included equality, Bastiat replied: But the second half of your program will destroy the first! How? Because if by equality you mean forced equality, equal outcomes, and all that, you have to rob Peter to pay Paul.

That is exactly what is happening in most Western democracies today, which have mutated from nations resting on a foundation of liberty, to nations resting on a foundation of forced legislated equality. The law, an instrument of justice, has been perverted into an instrument of injustice; no longer primarily for the protection of fundamental liberties, but for the spread of egalitarian coercion (often disguised in humanitarian garb); hence, our growing rights fever. Why, I have even heard someone argue that he had a right to marry! I pointed out, to his embarrassment, that if he had a right to marry, then someone else had an obligation to marry him, for a moment’s reflection reveals that these are reciprocal notions. Just so, all modern positive rights considered as claims against the State for goods or services, are really claims against other citizens, now or in the future. (Remember: the State has no money of its own.) The government of the day just happens to be the broker who takes a sizeable commission for arranging all this feasting on each other.

Somehow, as dependence on Statism has increased, a terrible and immoral chain-reaction has become established, which looks like this:

WANTS > NEEDS > RIGHTS > CLAIMS

First, a private want is voiced. Next it is described as a public need. Then a legal right is asserted as a moral claim against another individual, or group, or society as a whole. One look at The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which was largely drafted by a Canadian, John Humphrey, who taught law at McGill University, and was honoured on December 10, 1988, on the fortieth anniversary of the Declaration, you will feel good all over. Who wouldn’t? It reads like a cornucopia of the good life — especially articles 24 to 30, which basically say that everyone on earth has a right to the nicest, most secure, and enjoyable life possible. There is little imaginable to which the individual does not have a right, many of these to be provided free (that is the language in the Declaration!). And all these wonderful goods, services, and benefits are to flow from the simple declaration of these rights (and not, say, from the historical customs, traditions and laws of your particular nation). But this is a misleading fantasy which ought never to have confused the provision of equal protections by the State (so that we can gain these things for ourselves) with the forced provision of goods and services by the State.

Future historians will say the modern welfare states of the worlds gobbled themselves right up by falling for such illusion, because to the extent that such generalized claims for goods to be provided by others are successful, the private sphere of individual and social responsibility is diminished, liberty is defeated by enforced equality, which erodes fraternity, and the wealth of the nation is redirected toward yet another unproductive transaction of decline.

The Discrimination Illusion

About our national fear of preferences.

There is an unfortunate but telling anecdote about a man who goes to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to be interviewed for a job as a radio announcer. Half an hour later, he emerges, downcast, to meet his friend, who says: What’s wrong? You didn’t get the job? The applicant replies: N-n-n-o. th-they d-d-didn’t h-hire m-m-me, b-b-because I’m a-a-an Indian! (substitute: Black, Chinese, Pakistani, Male, Christian, Muslim, whatever).

Of course, anyone would feel sorry for this fellow, who obviously applied for the wrong job. But the telling feature of the story lies in the way it illustrates the discrimination illusion. That is, it clearly separates the difference between acts that should be called a negative prejudice (which prejudges something negatively before all the facts are known) and those that are simply normal discriminating actions, or preferences. The first kind are mindless generalizations based on limited experience or on stereotypes, which are intended to harm in thought or action others of whom we unjustly disapprove.

On the other hand, many stereotypes are positive and extremely helpful, because they spare us a lot of grief. I like the humorous example the well-known U.S. economist Walter Williams uses about a man walking in the jungle who hears a lion roar. Well, rest assured it was only his preconception, or stereotype, about the behaviour of lions that spared him his life as he jumped into a tree before ever seeing the lion! In the CBC story told above, the hiring supervisor rightly discriminated against stutterers, about whom he held a stereotype: all stutterers stutter, and they’re no damn good on radio.

A general problem in our present society is the confusion between negative and positive prejudice and preference — a confusion that is damaging because it vulgarizes meaningful distinctions by equating them with hurtful ones. Indeed, I should mention with a pang of sorrow that the very verb to discriminate once referred to a skill we all hoped to see emerge in our children. Not long ago, to say that so-and-so was a discriminating person, or made discriminating judgements, was a high complement indeed. In judging the actions of others we would often say you have failed to discriminate between (this and that), you still don’t get it!

But once again, feel-good human-rights activists, affirmative action do-gooders, and high-school counsellors with wacky degrees in self-esteem teachings have imposed on us a certain moral terror that makes us afraid to make our ordinary preferences known; and that snuffs out our good judgements along with some of the bad ones. But if the idea behind this is to rid society of bigots, it can’t be done by driving useful distinctions underground. Bigots love such confusion. This problem needs more distinctions, not fewer. When Walter Williams says he fully intends to discriminate, once again, in taking a black wife (because he has black parents, wants black kids, and thinks black is beautiful), well, he’s dead serious, and rightly so. But can you imagine a white Canadian saying publicly that he fully intends to discriminate in taking a white wife? Why, he’d probably be hauled before the Human Rights Commission in record time!

If Canadians don’t want to become an even more sheepish nation, they must learn to distinguish between statements and acts of negative prejudice, and normal and positive discriminating acts; between actions the intention of which is to avoid or to harm others, and those that arise from simple observation or personal experience. I remember being at a wedding once where a lot of women welled up with tears during the speeches. Afterward, I turned to a friend and said, Boy, you women sure cry easily. Another woman who overheard this, by reflex said: "That is soooo sexist! I replied: It’s not sexist if it’s true. It’s just an observation." To which she had no reply.

But what may be called the egalitarian-statist mentality, so eager to erase all legitimate differences, has cowed us into either immediate mental erasure of our normal discriminating thoughts and preferences, or into making only positive remarks about others, which amounts to a childish and servile form of insincerity and false flattery. It’s a form of public lying. Worst of all, such a philosophy suffusing any society has the effect of suppressing bad as well as good and useful distinctions (oops, I mean, discriminations).

The second crucial consequence of the discrimination illusion is the confusion between cause and effect. We have been brainwashed into seeing discrimination where none exists. For example, it is true that, statistically speaking, all Canadian women as a group earn somewhere around 70 percent of the income of all men as a group. The conclusion of the uninformed is that therefore women are discriminated’ against in Canada’s workforce, due to a glass ceiling." But a bit of scrutiny reveals how misleading this is. The fact is that most women and most men get married. When they do so, most women switch to part-time jobs, or reduce their work hours, or quit their jobs altogether to raise their own children. Most men, on the other hand, quickly worry about how they are possibly going to support their family, pay for a home, education, and so on. So they take better jobs, go for promotion, work harder and longer, or may even take two jobs. The result? As a group, the total wages of all married women drop, while the total wages of all married men rise. If all you do is compare the two groups without taking into account this phenomenon of personal choice, or preference, on the part of married men and women, you indeed will always find a large average difference. However, this is a reflection not of discrimination, but of life choices that are obscured by statistical aggregation.

Interestingly, bachelors in all age groups in Canada show average wages about 60 percent of those of married men for the same reason: no family to support. But guess what? Never-married women and never-married men in Canada, at all ages, earn the very same wages, and where small differences exist, they tend to favour women. So the differences we see are real and understandable, but they are a result of preferences. They do not result from negative discrimination. This is a typical example of the discrimination illusion at work. Inevitably, advocacy groups have exploited the public confusion between cause and effect that underlies many policy matters like this. It’s a bit like assuming that because drownings and ice-cream sales are highest in August, ice cream causes drowning. We should all challenge irresponsible allegations of discrimination aggressively before yielding to intimidation. An afterthought: there is also a Bachelor Wage Gap in all nations: bachelors tend to make less money than married men, for the same reasons just given about married vs. unmarried women. There is also an Age Wage Gap in all nations: older men and women tend to make a lot more money than younger men and women. There is also an Ethnic Wage Gap: people of Jewish, or English, or German ethnicity, for example, tend to make more money than those of many other ethnicities. No one is ever going to get into that wage gap!

The Equality Illusion

How the idea of equality is a logically impossible dream.

When I was a child, it struck me as peculiar that whenever the whole school was required to run a foot race, the general result was always the same: the few very fast ones always finished up front somewhere, followed by a growing crowd of runners, which then tapered off into a few stragglers at the end. When we went to watch a regional championship, the pattern, although a bit tighter, was the same. And it held true even for the Olympic Games. In other words, no matter how narrowly-defined the band of measurement, the spread of differences or abilities always tended to show the same pattern.

However, I also felt it a truism that no two things are the same, that everything is in flux and, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, You cannot step into the same stream twice. Little by little, the conflict between these two observations grew in my mind until I realized that although everything in the universe might be different from every other thing, the patterns formed by large numbers of events or things, the laws governing them, might be quite predictable, whether those different things were incomes, sea shells, intelligence, or physical skills. Later in life, I discovered what statisticians call the normal curve or the bell curve, so-called because when sketched, it looks like a bell. It was the pattern of the foot race, on paper. Some universal law must be at work! I immediately drew several jarring conclusions:

Neither does the unit of measurement matter. The 100-metre race, for example, was first measured in fifths of a second, then tenths, and now hundredths — sometimes even thousandths! But with a large enough sample, we always get our normal curve. The law of variation, which predicts this normal curve behaviour of large groups (but not of individuals), is at work, and therefore to the extent that measurement is meaningful, equality is impossible.

Now, how does this fact of life affect social policy? Very simply, it strongly reinforces the idea that liberty and equality will always be mutually-exclusive, if by equality we mean (and this is what social engineers mean) striving for equal social or material results or outcomes (wages, incomes, material resources, intelligence). It means that modern social policy, in striving for State-enforced equality, is striving for an unattainable goal. It means that once, say, subsistence level is reached by everyone in a population, there will still be poverty if we are measuring it in statistical variation only. Indeed, the poor in Canada and many other nations are defined distributionally in this way, so that by definition they will always be here, even if the lowest income group were to earn $100,000 per year. In fact, despite massive efforts to redistribute income in Canada since 1951, the per-quintile share of income (income received by the five groups from lowest to highest) has held steady as a rock over time. According to Statistics Canada, "This means that although each group’s income has increased substantially, there’s been no movement toward greater equality between the groups."

Later in this book I will explain why the phrase towards greater equality is a biased and presumptive wording that assumes all citizens should have equal incomes. But why? No one expects that an apprentice should make as much as a skilled artisan, or a young person to make the same as someone with fifty years experience, or a clerk to make as much as the President. It is weird but true that because we define the poor distributionally in this way, if Canada through some entrepreneurial boom were to have, say, 1,000 more millionaires tomorrow, this would automatically mean we also have far more poor!

The Determinist Illusion

How we are encouraged to blame our environment for everything.

People have argued since the dawn of recorded history over the issue of determinism and free will. These are dry-sounding terms, but anyone used to the history of ideas will always detect this debate overtly or covertly at work in all civilizations. Are we the