A Pilgrim's Journal

It reads like a laundry list of the failures of Stephen Harper, and that much I kind of expected. The new perspective that comes across, though, is that when you're running a one-man operation, personal flaws start to actually matter. In such a situation, the flaws of the operation are reflections of the flaws of the leader. If control were not so central, perhaps the group could better compensate for its members' flaws.

The opposition (all parties) so often look like lambs to the slaughter, when trying to stand up to the lies, money, and focus of the Harper machine. The tactics that are used just roll over the opposition in surprisingly effective ways, and the opposition assume that the other side will play by the rules, when that clearly doesn't happen.

Canadians as a whole somehow don't see it, and end up getting manipulated.

Yet in all the carnage, I see hope and Providence. Perhaps a disciplined evil is required to purify and refine a principled good.

Not all of the Conservative's actions are evil. But since when are lies considered righteous? Why treat over 50% of the country as mortal enemies that must be destroyed? We Canadians need to start looking at the facts and work a little harder to find the truth, instead of just letting ourselves get carried away with the emotional propaganda that the Conservatives want us to see.

I think that perhaps our current apathy is due to the lack of any inspired alternative options. I understand that. It is fuelling my apathy too. But I'm sick of the lies. I'm sick of the wedge politics. I'm sick of the morally relative answers in Question Period that make the lowest common denominator look like the best we can ever hope for.

I wish I could listen to some calm reasoning from the Conservatives without the constant verbal jab tacked onto the end of every answer, or weaved into the fabric of every message. I don't want to be treated like a citizen specimen to be probed and manipulated into doing the government's will, but rather like an adult that can handle reasoning beyond the kindergarten level.

I can't be too angry at Harper though. In some ways I feel sorry for him, and in other ways, I can see that I have very similar flaws. Thankfully, I'm not Prime Minister, where my flaws would be exposed for all to see. The book is very enlightening when read with a wider view, including oneself and all humanity. But I sometimes wonder if Harper looks into the mirror at night and wonders what he has become. Does he ever read his old articles and shudder at the path he's taken? (It is a sobering exercise, available to anyone who has bothered to write their opinion down on paper, or on a blog.) Does he remember old arguments he used in Question Period and have a vague unease that they could be used against him now? Surely that can't feel good. That can't feel very inspiring. What an unbearable weight that must be, to have this all out in public, and still try to act like the principled leader.

Or does he think the tactics are all acceptable if the end result is ok?

Until we pull up our socks as a nation, it probably is the best we can hope for. We are reaping the reward of our own apathy, and that reward is Stephen Harper.

I find that while some of the ideology of Stephen Harper matches my own, his tactics reek to high heaven. It is his tactics and secrecy and underhanded methods that make me so concerned. I can actually see some of the logic behind Conservative actions, after having read this book, but the effort required to find that logic is monstrous, and the process distasteful. It feels as if my dog swallowed a precious ring, and I'm trying to find it by going through the excrement.

Lawrence Martin has handled this subject with calm balance. I think that it would be possible to have a Conservative supporter read the book and come out supporting Harper, while a Liberal reads the same book and comes out stressed over the state of our country. This is good in one sense: a reporter should pursue the facts, not vent a spleen. But I wonder if most readers will put the mental effort into this book and think long-term about the actions they see.

Take the controversy that caused the first proroguing of Parliament in late 2008. Harper attempted in the first budget after the election to remove taxpayer support for political parties. This was a reversal of the reforms that the Chretien Liberals did in 2003 that outlawed large political funding contributions from big companies and unions, and replaced it with taxpayer funding of $2 per vote for each party.

Looking at it from the Conservative perspective, I'd imagine the 2003 change would have been a blow to their fundraising system. It would be going against their ideology that supports the free market and big business. Back when the Conservative parties had less support, it would have also distributed a smaller share of the money to them. So from that perspective, turning the tables on the Liberals, at the soonest available opportunity, would make some kind of sense.

Looking at it from the Liberal perspective, it was a strategic move that potentially hurt the Conservatives. But more than that, it put limits on what kind of influence big business had over the government. It also gave some support to the smaller parties, like the Green Party and NDP, who do have some measure of voter support, even though they might not have enough to get seats or win majorities. With a multi-party system, we avoid some of the polarizing splits seen in the United States, where so much politics looks like a choice between only two options.

Taking the long view, and knowing that money talks in political circles and even in political results, who do you want to have in the financial driver's seat of Canadian politics? Should the Green Party have to struggle to get donations from the average Joe concerned about the environment, while the Conservatives get cheques from every major industry that wants a tax break? It's pretty obvious where the financial slant would be there. If you are a CEO, your answer might be different than if you are a single parent living beside power lines.

The book does not go into much detail on this issue or others, which I believe Canadians need to be thinking about in rigorous detail. Instead, the book focuses on the tactics and the panic and the paranoia. This is fine, since this is what the Conservatives bring to Ottawa, and needs to be discussed. But it also means that some of the background work and some of the long-term thinking is left to the reader. It means that any pre-conceived beliefs about government policy won't be very strongly challenged in a book that focuses primarily on government maneuvering.

This falls right into the hands of Stephen Harper. The longer that Canadians ignore the big picture, and ignore the long-term, the easier it will be for Harper to defend his icky behaviour by saying it's no worse than what the Liberals did. Sometimes the behaviour is better; often it is worse. But if the focus is always on who is less slimey, are we really looking ahead, as a captain watches the seas as he pilots his ship? Or are we shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Harper has succeeded in both confusing debate and stifling the flow of information. It is like choking your opponent in a wrestling match while he's trying to figure out why his shoelaces are untied. As long as your opponent is distracted, he will soon lose. And both the opposition and all of Canada are similarly distracted. One corruption after another floats across our headlines, and either we don't care, or are too busy, or something more shiny comes along and we forget the importance of the issue. And Stephen Harper is only too happy to provide Canada with that shiny new thing if he can. And when he can't, he'll gladly use any tool at his disposal to delay, obfuscate, and obscure until we forget. Remember prorogation.

Lawrence Martin has a list of "audacities" at the end of his book, that runs about 55 items long, of the things Harper has done to win during his 4 years in office. Most of these items are not pretty. If you appreciate that Canada is a polite society, that we respect our neighbour, that we respect due process and rule of law, and open government and access to information with checks and balances, these items will be an affront to you.

If you get a chance to read this book, take it. If you only have time to read the last 100 pages or so, do it. Stephen Harper does not deserve your vote until he starts to respect Canada more than his own party.

I encountered chapter 6, where he takes a break from his arguments for Reason and Nature being separate and unsymmetrical to explain some misgivings that may have arisen while reading so far. In the middle of this chapter are two ideas that seemed profound to me.

I'm taking the liberty of quoting this section for others to ponder as well. It is unfair to both C.S. Lewis and to you the reader to drop you into the middle of the book like this, but the topic is isolated enough that it should make sense even without reading the first 5 chapters beforehand.

	... To some people the great trouble about any agument for the
	Supernatural is simply the fact that argument should be needed
	at all.  If so stupendous a thing exists, ought it not to be
	obvious as the sun in the sky?	Is it not intolerable, and indeed
	incredible, that knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should
	be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for which the vast
	majority of men have neither leisure nor capacity?  I have great
	sympathy with this point of view.  But we must notice two things.
 
	When you are looking at a garden from a room upstairs it is
	obvious (once you think about it) that you are looking through
	a window.  But if it is the garden that interests you, you
	may look at it for a long time without thinking of the window.
	When you are reading a book it is obvious (once you attend to
	it) that you are using your eyes: but unless your eyes begin to
	hurt you, or the book is a text book on optics, you may read
	all evening without once thinking of eyes.  When we talk we
	are obviously using language and grammar: and when we try to
	talk a foreign language we may be painfully aware of the fact.
	But when we are talking English we don't notice it.  When you
	shout from the top of the stairs, "I'm coming in half a moment,"
	you are not usually conscious that you have made the singular
	am agree with the singular I.  There is indeed a
	story told about a Redskin who, having learned several other
	languages, was asked to write a grammar of the language used
	by his own tribe.  He replied, after some thought, that it had
	no grammar.  The grammar he had used all his life had escaped
	his notice all his life.  He knew it (in one sense) so well that
	(in another sense) he did not know it existed.
 
	All these instances show that the fact which is in one respect the
	most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have
	access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is
	most easily forgotten -- forgotten not because it is so remote or
	abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious.  And that is
	exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten.  The Naturalists
	have been engaged in thinking about Nature.  They have not
	attended to the fact that they were thinking.  The moment
	one attends to this it is obvious that one's own thinking cannot
	be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than
	Nature exists.	The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is
	a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.
	Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness.  But this
	absent-mindedness is in no way surprising.  You do not need --
	indeed you do not wish -- to be always thinking about windows
	when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes
	when you are reading.  In the same way the proper procedure for
	all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your
	own thinking, and concentrate on the object.  It is only when you
	stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete
	philosophy that you must take it into account.	For a complete
	philosophy must get in all the facts.  In it you turn away
	from specialised or truncated thought to total thought: and one
	of the facts total thought must think about is Thinking itself.
	There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget
	the most obvious fact of all.  And since the sixteenth century,
	when Science was born, the minds of men have been incresingly
	turned outward, to know Nature and to master her.  They have
	been increasingly engaged on those specialised inquiries for
	which truncated thought is the correct method.	It is therefore
	not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the
	evidence for the Supernatural.	The deeply ingrained habit of
	truncated thought -- what we call the 'scientific' habit of mind
	-- was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency
	were continually corrected from some other source.  But no other
	source was at hand, for during the same period men of science
	were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated.
 
	That brings me to the second consideration.  The state of affairs
	in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only
	by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards,
	abnormal.  All over the world, until quite modern times,
	the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the
	philosophers percolated to the mass of the people by authority
	and tradition; they could be received by those who who were
	no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and
	ritual and the whole pattern of life.  In the conditions produced
	by a century or so of Naturalism, plain men are being forced to
	bear burdens which plain men were never expected to bear before.
	We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it.  There may
	be two explanations for this.  It might be that humanity, in
	rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly
	mistake; a mistake which will not be the less fatal because the
	corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable.
	On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our
	species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment.
	Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now
	move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were
	once reserved only for the sages?  Is the distinction between
	wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected
	to become wise?  If so, our present blunderings would be but
	growing pains.	But let us make no mistake about our necessities.
	If we are content to go back and become humble plain men obeying
	a tradition, well.  If we are ready to climb and struggle on
	till we become sages ourselves, better still.  But the man who
	will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her/himself
	is fatal.  A society where the simple many obey the few seers can
	live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully.
	But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are
	no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness,
	ugliness, and in the end extinction.  On or back we must go;
	to stay here is death.
 
	- C.S. Lewis, Miracles, chapter 6, page 63 and onward