Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs
Wedded to Progress: For Better, For Worse
Sunday, August 13, 2006

Canada ’s Looking Forward: Making Progress Happen

MODERATOR: Pamela Wallin
SPEAKER: John Ralston Saul

PAMELA WALLIN

Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here. I feel in my own particular way I have been wedded to progress for better or worse for the last week as I have been setting up shop in New York and moving back to Canada and doing the same. I think yesterday I had 14 conversations with Rogers Cable! So there is some progress on that front, but not too much.

I was most interested this morning. I came for the morning session to hear that, and if the rest of the conference was anything like that, it’s been an extraordinary couple of days. Yes, I am sure you want to thank the panelists!

I loved John [Ibbitson]’s comment that a country is really an act of faith and optimism but I also like Ann [Golden]’s balanced perspective, which is that we also need a reality check about that because we are longer too often, it happens in our personal lives and in our intellectual lives as well, that sometimes there are these elephants in the room which we decide not to talk about because it could cause too many problems. I think so many of the issues that you’ve heard, and I know our guest today will talk on a lot of these, but is progress itself is even defined as economic security anymore and if that is so, is it individual or national or regional. Some of the things you’ve touched on, the cost of progress in the age of terrorism, it’s much higher, we all know that, and it’s forcing us to debate, which is what I have been witnessing in the U.S. for the last four years, it’s really forcing us to debate the rights and the freedoms and the responsibilities and how the proportionality of that discussion has to change. When you have long-held civil liberties and freedoms and you have to forfeit some of them, as we were just talking about at lunch about getting on airplanes these days and, you know, can you take your Blackberry, and why are they taking lipstick and hair gel away — they seem like trite, trivial matters until you get that next stage and it forces you to realize why we’re dealing with this.

I was joking about technology, of course, and we know that it frees us in many ways but it’s also forcing us to become our own intermediaries and our own filters. We used to sit down and watch the news at 10 or 11 at night and someone would tell you what was important and what you had to think about. And now with all of these choices and the access to technology, that’s a force that is increasingly in your hands. Are we up to the task, are we willing to do the task of surfing through all that information and trying to sort out what matters, and at the end of the day when we are doing that all individually what happens to a collective sense if we don’t have that common fact that we have seen or witnessed or agreed upon at night, then what we do at the water cooler the next morning. And that really is getting at the very heart of what countries are about and how we define ourselves. I also, and this is one my little hobby horses, while I love technology and use it endlessly, it also does tend to rob you of a sense of serendipity — you know, the accidental book that you find or idea that you come across because technology allows us to be so focused and can zero in and that we can just go on Google and find out the actual facts we want without any context.

So all of these issues are very central now to how we define ourselves as a country and what our roles and responsibilities are, because we are not some unique body that exists separate from these international forces. These are technological forces. And so it’s great that we have John with us today because this is a guy who has spent a lifetime thinking about these issues. Life, it’s said by, well, by someone I respect, “Our lives are lived as a series of conversations.” And I have had many with this man, of course on camera and off, and it is the very essence of Couchiching as well. It’s about conversations that you have with one another in here. And he’s a man with a very interesting perspective which I respect increasingly daily as someone who has now had the opportunity to live outside my own country and look back in — it’s a very different vantage point, and he’s done that on many occasions. It’s the army brat turned philosopher, the political scientist and economist turned novelist and thinker.

It was back in the early 1970s that John began working on his first novel, Birds of Prey, and in his novels, I am sure many of you have read them, you will see themes, despite the interesting and dramatic stories, you will see these other themes in their individuals and power structures, when and why they clash, who manipulates, and who seduces whom, the effect of corporatism and the corporate structure in our lives. Most of you, of course, know his non-fiction as well, the original trilogy, Voltaire’s Bastards, The Doubter’s Companion, The Unconscious Civilization — the latter really part of what our discussion is today, to a plea that we can recognize and react, to the profound diminution of democracy and individuality that we’re dealing with in the New World. In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, again examining the complexity and contradictions of our modern incarnation as a western world and as a country, and again the inevitable clashes with elites and power structures and individuals and that description of Canada as a “soft” country — many of the ideas that have been talked about here.

He stirred quite a controversy with the collapse of globalism: globalization was collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. And in each of these works John chronicles our story, our confusion, our self-deception, our growth and how we cope with change. He has been declared on various different occasions one of a hundred visionaries in the world. He is a patron of PEN, he is Chair of the new Institute of Canadian Citizenship, he works with people with disabilities, and he has been involved in the Canadian Landmine Foundation, just to name a few. He even won the Governor General’s Award for Literary Non-Fiction, but that was long before it would have been a conflict of interest! He was our Vice Regal Consort from 1999 to 2005, and again he broke ground there, changing the idea about what the partner was, assuming that they are allowed not only to have a life, but a point of view, and I think that was a progressive and healthy change.

Today, he will harness the forces that he has long written about: common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason to discuss Canada, and our freedom — that’s what it says in your little book, that he’s going to talk about freedom. He’ll probably talk about many other things, but his definition of freedom, “an occupied space that must be occupied by every day,” which is what this discussion is all about. Canada, he says, is either an idea or does not exist. It is either an intellectual undertaking or it is little more than a resource-rich vacuum lying in the buffer zone just north of the Great Empire.

Ladies and gentleman, please welcome John Ralston Saul.

JOHN RALSTON SAUL

Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here with Pamela who, although they say that she was Consul General, you should really know that a Consul General in New York is actually an ambassador because the United States has several consulates, and it is a place where we have a very important ambassador and she was not only important but extremely successful in the momentum that she got going for us in New York, and I hope that the person who follows her will keep it going the way you did.

I also want to say how nice it is to see Eric Koch again,who reminded me that last time I was here I was in his hands, which is about a dozen years ago, I think, and he looks the same and I don’t! And I am sure he hasn’t changed at all.

I would like also to say that it’s interesting: one of the things I am involved with is something called the LaFontaine-Baldwin Lecture Series and Michael Chong is one of the people who is involved in putting it together. Ann Golden, who is here, is fantastic — I heard the end of her talk this morning — is central to Bernie Lucht, and, of course, Laura Baldwin who through marriage is a descendant of the man himself. So, it’s great to be in a group where I know a number of you. A number of you I don’t know, but I know that you’re here to talk out ideas. I feel guilty about arriving near the end — there was no other possibility. But I have just actually driven over from our island on Georgian Bay where we don’t have any hydro. We basically live with a bit solar, some oil lamps, outdoor toilet — a recycling toilet, you sort of turn the drum every couple of days, quite interesting; you put it on the tree. The reason I raise this, of course, is that for those of you who live in this area, you will have, in the last couple of weeks, as you do every summer, once or twice, lost your electricity, and you will have had to throw out all the meat and empty your freezer and worry and, of course if you weren’t there, worry even more, about what you’ll find when you get back! We just sit out there on this island and we never even know that there are any crises unless we turn on our wind-up radio. You can laugh at that, that’s sort of a … not that many people have wind-up radios unless you’re a very unusual group. But the point simply is that I am not saying that we should close down hydro. There are other people who think that, or that solar will replace hydro, but in a way it’s just one of those funny little reminders of other ways of thinking about progress. Here we are sitting really very close to the essence: You want to get clean, jump in the water, you know. And people living in a much more progressed, sophisticated way are desperate because of course it doesn’t work because they have no control of it.

Now not everybody lives the way we live, nor should they. Then we wouldn’t be able to, but uh … but what it reminds you of though is that a society dominated by, if you like, managers, engineers, consultants, people who, whatever their qualities, tend to confuse reason with utilitarianism — and they are not the same thing; and confuse ideas with methodology — which is not at all the same thing; thinking with administration — not at all the same thing — and therefore are very confused about what progress actually is when you come right down to it. So that if you say to them, locked as they are, in a false idea of progress, you say to them, “Well, what about progress?” They’ll say, “We you know, we have X needs, gigantic, and solar can’t handle it,” and they will have something which will be a big solution to a big problem and, you know, we need 30% more and nuclear can do it, or coal can do it. Big men want big solutions. You know, men like big things. Um, thank you! [Laughs.] Size, they think, is extremely important.

The reality of course is that solar could be 4 to 6% and you add wind, you know, and that’s another 4 to 6%, and then you put pipes in the ground and that’s another 6 or 7% and then you burn up waste and that’s another 6%, and by the time you’ve added up all these little miserable things real men aren’t really interested in, you find yourself with somewhere between 25% and 35%, and you’ve solved your problem. And, of course, you’ve also solved a great deal of your problem relating to global warming and so on.

But that approach towards thinking which is actually thinking not about the big solution which comes from a kind of managerial, utilitarian approach, but rather, “How clever can we be? How smart can we be today? What specific problem can is there we can solve in a specific way?” as opposed to calling in the consultants, and calling in the people with the big plans and doing a royal commission, and coming up with a big solution, which we’ll then have an election on or will sell a company on or whatever. So in a way that little wonderful experience living out on the island is sort of a reminder of where we’re stuck in our society, western society, when it comes down to real ideas of progress versus false ideas of progress. Technology can be a fantastic support for progress. I heard the questions at the end of this morning — people were talking about that, you’ve already talked about it, we all know that technology can be an enormous support for progress but it isn’t progress.

Why isn’t it progress? It’s very simple. Whether technology, and I am not going to do one of my long numbers on whether technology is progress or not, starting with the Luddites, in which I would prove to you that the Luddites were right and we had 100 years of civil war in western civilization because we didn’t listen to them.

But just take the death camps of the Second World War. Always remember, always remember, it was only possible to round up the Jews in an efficient and modern manner and get them into camps and run the camps thanks to the Hollerith counting machine of IBM, the predecessor of modern computers. Every big camp had a Hollerith counting machine and that as the war ended, these machines were taken out, given back to IBM through the American army, and recycled into putting together things like healthcare programs. Technology has no content. It is only methodology so it cannot be progress. It is what you make of it and if you make nothing of it, if you wait for it to make something of you, somebody else will make something else of it. And it may be okay, it make be absolutely horrendous, or it may be a mix of the two.

That’s why the 20th century is an incredible contradiction. On the one hand, it is unprecedented, we all know that. Technological advance or change. Is change progress? Not necessarily. Which produced these astonishing healthcare systems, people now living to be on average around 80? People born today they say will live to be 100 whereas life expectancy in 1900 was 50. Astonishing changes in communications and so on, but it’s in the same century. The two clichés aren’t usually put together; that’s what’s so interesting: the two clichés are clichés — the other cliché is the same century, which was the most violent century in the history of the world by most accounts — in fact, almost all accounts — unprecedented violence of a new specific and specific sort, mass murder, tens of millions of people, and the interesting thing about life expectancy in the 20th century is that the numbers that are done don’t include the mass murder. So if you actually put in the First World War, the Second World War, Stalin, Mao, Rwanda, and so on, you’d find, you might find, because nobody’s done the numbers, that actually life expectancy in the 20th century dropped, but nobody has ever done those numbers. We only do the numbers of, if you like, the beneficiaries of the technological changes as opposed to the whole society and the way in which it lived with progress.

So, you have been talking about progress. We can talk endlessly about what progress actually is. I would just throw three small things on the table at the end for you to take home if you haven’t already thought about them, but I would put them this way. One is what you would call a kind of, what is it worth watching out for, to know whether you’re going forwards or backwards, and really I talked about it a little bit in The Doubter’s Companion, is water. Historically, about the only thing that tells you whether, for sure, whether civilization is going forward, stalled or going backwards, is the state of the water. Is it drinkable, is it poisonous, are the dams breaking, are you drowning, are you dying of thirst? And you can see it. There are three great cycles: Rome, fabulous water system, clean drinking water, draining of the marshes, you can still see those water systems in various places, right out into the provincial parts of the empire — you know, sort of like the equivalent of Canada — you find these pipes are still there running underground distributing the water and the decline of Rome paralleled the decline of the water system. The rise of the astonishing Islamic Empire in the last part of the first millennium and the beginning of the second millennium, exactly the same thing, an obsession with how to deal with water. Fantastic water systems in the cities of northern Egypt. You can still see exactly what they put in place in the 11th and 12th century and as though water systems polluted themselves by people, if you like, defecating at the wrong end of the river, misusing them, not keeping them up, so the Islamic Empire declined and the universe just declined.

And this is an unusual group, so when I ask this question, probably I am going to get a zero. How many people here have a small plastic bottle of bottled water? Anybody? Very unusual group! Oh, there are! How many? Just put up your hands. Oh well. About 15%. A normal group would have 50% minimum. Think about it. You’re right next to a lake in the beginnings of non-urban Canada, in a country with approximately 50%, I forget the number, of the world’s — no, it’s more than 20% of the world’s fresh water, the last numbers I saw, I am sure. Anyway, more than anybody else! And most of it’s still clean, although there are more and more problems in spite of what was said about the lake just around here. And most of you are carrying bottles of water which were imported from France from a valley which is among the most polluted valleys in the world, Evian and so on, where there is endless industrial and nuclear waste and so on.

But really what you’re demonstrating by carrying these bottles is it’s sort of a child’s blanket. Your insecurity, your sense that there’s something desperately wrong — you have to carry this water around with you because the world is in deep trouble — and indeed what you see around the world is that we have in general fouled our own water, we have a non-toilet-trained civilization! In order to eat, we foul our drinking water, so we can’t even get the digestion process right! You know, that you actually have to drink as well as eat, so if you ruin the food with the water or the water with the food, you haven’t actually gone anywhere.

And if you foul the water so much that you then have to clean it up chemically in order to be able to drink it, now you’re moving into what they call “degeneracy” — which is to say you can’t go backwards to clean up the water, so you only clean it up as it goes into your mouth, so to speak, as it comes out of the tap. That’s not actually solving the problem. That’s admitting that you’re going to live with your own indiscipline.

And at the same time, you look around and you have this desertification, not simply in Africa, but in California and various parts of the world, the Darling River Basin in Australia where they’re moving into a water crisis in Australia which will be a very major water crisis which will have an effect on their agriculture, including their wine industry which is dependent on far more water than they’re going to have in the long run.

So, it’s just an interesting thing to think about. We’re about two thirds of the way down the slope that Rome and the Islamic Empires came down on their way out of being successful civilizations. Just, you know, it’s a way of thinking about it.

I think the other two things that are interesting to keep in mind in terms of progress: One has always been — and it’s in Plato, it’s in Erasmus, it’s everywhere, which is how many of your fellow human beings do you kill. That’s always been a way of judging how you’re doing in terms of progress, and I already answered the question just a few minutes ago, talking about the 20th century — we haven’t been doing very well, and we’re not doing very well in the new century. It’s worth noting that our close friend to the south who is the leader of the world — and therefore must be our close friend — you know brought back in 1976 the death penalty, which is one of those, whatever your views on it are, one of those very interesting decisions that takes you back through the philosophy of humanism in society and progress, which is we will progress by killing fewer of each of us. We will find ways of tolerating “the other” and not kill them.

And, as you may know, since 1976, they’ve executed 1038 people, I think, and the high point of those executions came under the governorship of then Governor Bush because he approved so many executions in the state of Texas, taking them up to a high of 99 a year. Now those are peanuts compared to what’s happening elsewhere. But again it’s like the bottle of water. It’s an interesting indication of whether we’re going forwards or backwards, that within the heart of western civilization, the most important player steps backwards into the idea that the way to solve certain problems was to actually execute people, which is to say kill them. I am not talking about whether they’re nice or not; I’m talking about whether they’re killed or not.

They also made, if you like, a subsidiary decision which was to multiply the number of people in prison by an astonishing number so that today 25% of the world’s prison population is in the United States, putting the United States, astonishingly enough, ahead of China (#2) and Russia (#3). Now maybe they are lying about their numbers, I don’t know, but it’s very hard to talk about progress when you look at numbers of over 2 million people in prison in a single western country.

The third related element takes you back to every philosopher but it was probably best said by Adam Smith, which is, “What is our capacity to imagine the other?”

If you’re able to imagine the other, then you’re able to live with the other, you’re able to imagine what the circumstance of the other is. If you can’t imagine the other, whether it’s a person in your house, the person next door, the person in the next city, the person in the next country — if you can’t do that, well then quite logically you will move towards killing them or putting them in some sort of prison, dealing with them economically in an unfair way, not worrying about the effects of your economic policies on them, not worrying about the effects of tax policies, which we talked about a little earlier. You worry about them for yourself but not worrying about the effects on tax policies for the person down the street whose kid can’t get decent services in a public school, because under the extremely unfortunate provincial government of Ontario of Mr. Harris, most of the services deemed to be “soft” were cut so that only middle and upper middle-class people could afford to make sure that their kids got full services in those schools. New Canadians without too much money were cut out and so on.

So that ability to imagine the other is really the third element. The progressing society is the society which is able to imagine how people live together. And having decided that they can live together, either in a country or in a city, or in several countries, then they can imagine how they can do things: identify the problems and deal with the problems.

But if you can’t imagine the other, you can’t come up with progressive policies or progressive ideas — not necessarily government, it could be business, it could be NGOs, it could be anything, schools — progressive policies in order to make us live better together, to have better societies. If you can’t imagine the other then the other isn’t real, and what do I mean by that? Well, just look every day in the paper at the war dead numbers coming out of, for example, Iraq or even Afghanistan, or anywhere, and you’ll see that only the really regular numbers we get are our own dead. Nobody’s real who isn’t one of us. So we don’t actually know, someone in this room might know, but most people would not know how many Iraqis have died. They would only know how many westerners of their particular country died. Now, I understand that. I understand that we identify with our own and all the rest of it. But still you can’t actually think about what’s happening and whether it’s working, whether it’s right, what it means, what the effect will be, unless you can imagine and know the effects on the other.

And the other example I would just give you is that you will have seen about two weeks ago in some of the newspapers in Canada the revelation that a bill passed in Canada which was designed to go around the intellectual property laws relating to AIDS drugs. I believe it was just AIDS drugs but it may have been others. In order for those drugs to be able to be exported cheaply into countries in crisis, that that bill was put through two years ago and as of that date two weeks ago not a single pill had left the country. The explanations that were given were that the law was badly written and the law was too complicated and no one could figure out….

Those are what I would call the utilitarian, managerial explanations. The real question is: why was the law written like that? That’s the question. It’s not to identify that the law was written badly, they knew that in the beginning. Why was the law written badly? What was the intention of writing the law badly? Why were we unable to do what we said we wanted to do? We said we wanted to send drugs cheaply to the countries where there was a crisis and then we did something which made it impossible for us to send them. So there was no relationship between our progressive idea, our idea of progress, of helping and imaging the other, and the reality of what we did.

So, part two.

I think that with that last little explanation, what I am trying to tell you is that I believe, this is the most pessimistic part of what I have to say, that western civilization, in particular, and Canada, very much in particular, has talked themselves, ourselves, into a state where we are almost incapable of doing anything. We have become basically a non-operating civilization. Oh, I mean, we’ve got so much structure and goodwill among individual citizens that actually we still go along and do quite well in a number of areas and hold it all together. But if you actually start analyzing our specific needs and problems, you discover that we are incapable, absolutely incapable, of dealing with them. You can find a good story here and a good story there. You will usually find a small group of people who actually went against the grain, and I think it was John Ibbitson this morning who talked about people just getting so mad that they made things happen. But you can’t run, I don’t actually agree with John on that, in desperation you have to run civilization on the basis of people becoming so angry that they make it happen. But that’s not a satisfactory way to run Canadian democracy.

Let me just repeat what I always say: this is, depending on how you do the numbers, the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world or the second or third. But I make the argument for the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world, which is to say since 1848. Why would we want to run ourselves as if we were sort of selfish little children who can only do things when we get really mad? As if nothing functions at all? We’re incapable of facing the concept of progress; we can only face the concept of disaster. That’s a description of a dysfunctional society. And I think Canada, more perhaps than any other of the 20, say approximately 20 western democracies, has become dysfunctional, unable to actually face of its problems and solve its problems. I am not saying it isn’t a wonderful country, I am not saying I don’t love it, I am not saying I don’t know. In fact, I think I’ve been in more places in this country than almost anybody else except my wife, and seen more citizens of more types who are doing more exciting and wonderful things in small communities, in big communities, unnoticed, all over the country. But as a country, we are floating, and it has nothing to do with specific political parties, at federal or provincial or municipal levels, it has to do with somehow the state into which we have driven ourselves.

But I think it is in addition true of western civilization that we have reached at different levels, a stage of being unable to face the real problems that we have before us. On the one hand, we’re self-satisfied and, on the other hand, we’re very insecure, and the two together are rather peculiar. This sort of thing has happened before in history. I suppose the last time you could argue that it happened was probably about 1900 to 1914, when there was an enormous amount of money around, a very self-satisfied elite, somewhat different from the elite of today, but a very self-satisfied, highly sophisticated, beautifully educated elite. At that time, the biggest elite probably per capita of any civilization in history, much smaller than today, but probably the biggest for the time. And somehow as the century began it just was unable to deal with the real problems facing it. There were a few breakthroughs in 1902, 1904, with some education bills in France and Britain and so on, but it just ground down, unable to face, if you like, the reality, the real necessities of progress.

It’s kind of calm despair with a lot of distractions used to distract us from the fact that we are in despair. I think one of the keys to it, to our situation, which is quite different from the other one, the earlier one, is that, and I think it’s very particular, I don’t think it’s ever happened before, the heart of our problem is the confusion, the growing confusion, and now almost inseparable confusion between the social contract and commercial contracts. If I go to a senior judge anywhere in this country and talk to him — interestingly enough, I don’t know what I am talking about in terms of law — I have to say, you know, “Well, what do you think about social contract, commercial contract — are they inextricably confused, and is this a major problem?” And they would say, “Absolutely, we can’t make decisions separating these two.” And it is a big problem because the social contract is not a commercial contract. That’s how we ended up a few years ago calling citizens clients. Because we were so confused that we started talking like senile, a combination of infantile and senile at the same time — that we just couldn’t tell what a citizen was and what citizenship was and what citizens’ rights and obligations were. So we started talking about citizens as though they were going to their government to buy shoes and that they were going to be mad if there weren’t the right choice of shoes around, and that a profit had to be made or something.

So that confusion, I think, lies at the heart of our inability to deal with real needs and therefore with progress. And that confusion pushes us towards ideologies. What kind of ideology? Well, an ideology as I said at the beginning which is managerial, specialist, linear, structured views, structured views of how society functions — so further and further away from the idea that the stuff we do is intentional. And I think Canada is the oldest continuous democratic federation in the world. You listen to what most people are saying we’re a new country, we’ve created the country because we were worried about the United States, we’re so lucky that we had some riches here — it’s all reactive. It’s all defensive. It’s all accidental. There is no intellect, there is no intention. Nothing was done intentionally, nothing was pulled together. And in the end, when we actually pulled it together, over the next 25 years the historians ran out and rewrote what had actually happened so they could say that it was the British who did it for us, if you go and re-read most of the books that have been written about the British North America Act and how we came to have it, when in fact the British really had nothing to do with it, and got in our way most of the time.

So, we end up in a situation where intentionality is looked down upon, everything is inevitable. Technology, we’re running to keep up with technology. Society is moving fast. Borders are coming down. We are just running to keep up. So the idea that progress could be the intelligent, conscious, intentional action of citizens is pushed to the margins — to the margins of the NGOs and so. It is not something that a responsible, I don’t know, tenured professor or minister of the Crown or head of a corporation would enunciate — that we’re doing this on purpose because we believe it needs to be done and that we can actually shape technology and shape an event. So you start hearing about “invisible hands” and market romanticism becomes the order of the day. And the worship of speed, a very interesting thing, more and more this idea that you’ve got to keep up, things are going to fast, we can send a message to the other side of the world in three seconds. So what? Between three seconds, three minutes, three hours, and three days, and three weeks, there may be a difference in some circumstances and I am not against it. It’s very handy, for an author sending manuscripts around and all the rest of it. But it isn’t actually at the core of the way a civilization works. It’s just a handy thing if you know how to use it properly. Speed has never been — there is no philosopher in history that I know of who argued that speed was a characteristic of civilization, and if it isn’t a characteristic of civilization, it isn’t a characteristic of progress.

It doesn’t mean it should go dead slow. I am not making an argument in favour of Kafkaesque bureaucracy, you know, or inefficiency or ineffectiveness. What I am saying is that the worship of speed is actually worshiping something which means you don’t have to take the time to be conscious about what you want to do in order to intentionally act in order to solve problems. It is actually a way out of thinking and a way out of questioning and consciousness. It’s a barbaric idea that speed should be a concept of civilization, and as result of this and the preceding things, I think that we all as speak end up sounding more and more like consultants. You know, we’re always talking about all sorts of things — the sorts of directions that we perhaps ought to be going on, as opposed to specifically what’s wrong and what needs to be done.

The last few years gave us, thanks to speed, global warming — no time to think about what the implications might be, can’t take the economic risk, mad cow disease. Up until very recently the Toronto Harbourfront could be described as being the product of the idea that the economy demands speed. We have no time to think about the way in which the citizens are going to live in Toronto, so let’s just build all these really, really awful buildings on the waterfront because money will be made, and money will cause other things to happen, which of course it didn’t. And so now that we have slowed down and started thinking about — this is an interesting example of a breakthrough, we’ll see if we might be able to put together a Harbourfront that looks like a place where people could live. But it has taken 25 years of errors to get to the point — actually I suppose you could say Ibbitson’s point, the point of anger and frustration produced it. It’s the wrong way to do it because half the Harbourfront is already ruined.

But what lies in back of all of that is this confusion between methodology, materialism and so on and leadership. They are not the same thing. Often they are opposite things. But we are confused about them just as we are confused about the social contract and the commercial contract. What comes out of the whole that I am describing, the society we live in, is that we get certain highly personal freedoms, there’s absolutely no question about that, we could make a long list of the personal freedoms that we’ve all got and many of them are wonderful, some of them are pointless, but pointlessness is okay too. You know, there is nothing wrong with doing some pointless things. Life is not meant to be entirely serious. In fact, it’s not even meant to be serious if we can get away with it.

But we get certain highly personal freedoms and that produces a kind of personal optimism while we are very pessimistic about the society. I think people have talked about that here already, a sense of where does the pessimism about society come from. To some extent it comes from the sense of methodology, linear, shapelessness. Things are happening but never do we draw back and look and say, “Look, that’s the problem, how are we going to do it, how are we going to change it? What is the strategic way in which to change it?”

And as a result of that kind of pessimism about the society, you get the rise, the return of Manicheism, good and evil, there is only good and evil, there is only right and wrong, there is only morality and immorality, there are only good guys and bad guys. I mean, who would have thought that the civilizations with the largest elites in the history of the world, with the most education in the history of the world, would revert in the late 20th, early 21st century, would revert to one of the most uninteresting philosophical ideas which was that there were only two possibilities: the right one and the wrong one, which is where we are today. It’s right or it’s wrong. We have the answer, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, as opposed to the capacity to look at things and say, “Well, in this particular case, this is very complicated, this is what we think we should do.”

And yet I think underneath all of that, we have our desperate desire, witness is the subject of this conference, a desperate desire for a sense of progress, a sense of problem-solving. But because we don’t have the focus, the consciousness, the belief that you can actually solve problems, we end up focusing on false problems that take up enormous amounts of our time, solutions to problems.

So, to summarize the second part of what I was saying, I am always very careful to say, for example, that civilization has died. You know big things don’t really come to an end, they just lose their central power or whatever and I am always thinking in the back of my mind and I have said this a number of times about Nietzsche who declared that God was dead. And, you know, a few years later he turned up running the United States! And, you know, the point is that the we’re dealing with essential issues which are very difficult to come to terms with and when you see Manacheism coming back, when you see Romanticism coming back, when you see ideology taking a central place in our society. You know, “The world is flat.” No it isn’t, it’s round! You know, the whole premise of Thomas Friedman’s argument is nonsense. And he doesn’t even seem to know that in order to make his argument, he has to fall back on pre-modern argument which was that if you leave where you are, you are going evil and will fall off the edge of the world and go to hell. That’s the image of a flat world. The world is round! In fact, the Haida describes it far better than anybody has described it since, which is, “The world is as sharp as a knife. If you don’t watch out, you’ll fall right off.” It’s not flat, it’s a kind of edgy place which requires you to be conscious and to think about what it is you want to do.

So, what does all this look like. What does it mean? Well, let’s just talk a little bit about Canada. I have already mentioned the fact that in Canada, in spite of our incredible standard of living and in spite of the success of the country, and in spite of the remarkable immigration and citizenship policies of this country, which I think worked largely because the citizens wished them to work, not because the policies are particularly strong. There is a desire among the citizens for the policies to work but we’re running so far ahead of the policies that we have in place. Everybody know this. I am not criticizing anybody. Everybody knows that we’re running ahead of the policies that we actually have in place.

But in spite of all of that, there is a growing loss of the idea that Canada is an intentional project, and an intentional place with intentional purpose, and that it always was from the beginning, from, and I happen to choose often Lafontaine and Baldwin because they stated it intellectually so clearly for the first time, and we haven’t had a break since 1848, intellectually speaking. If there ever was an intellectually constructed, a progressively constructed idea of a nation-state of the 20 western countries, this is the number one. The others are the results of conquerings and natural borders and single racial groups or languages or religions and so on, or the elimination of competing groups. This is the only one which is intellectually composed. From the beginning, you can see the bits and pieces working up to 1848, and then from 1848 on, actually the statements being put in place in order to build a country. And yet here we are talking about ourselves as if there is nothing we can do: world forces are stronger than us, we can’t shape our country, we can’t make policies about purchases of corporations, sale of corporations, we can’t go too far ahead on global warming, we can’t do it because, and there is always this idea that we’re just part of this global thing.

The funny thing is, when you actually go to other countries who are supposed to be the reason for which we can’t do these things, they’re not saying that. The United States isn’t saying they can’t do anything. They may not do very much but they are not saying they can’t do it. Australia isn’t saying that. Britain isn’t saying that. Germany isn’t saying that. New Zealand isn’t saying that. We’re the only ones of the 20 western countries who are regularly, every day saying, “Oh, well, you know that would be nationalistic. Oh, that would be economic nationalism. There is absolutely nothing we can do about Inco. Oh, there is nothing we can do about global warming unless everybody went with us.” The sort of hopelessness, sort of directionlessness and non-intentionality, and therefore a refusal of the ideas that progress could actually come out of a country like this, unless of course we are dragging absolutely everybody with us. Even if the matter in question is only, or is largely an internal matter.

So, I am just going to go through, boom, a series of things which are major problems, easily solved, and we’re sitting on them. We could solve them in a week, two weeks, get the things in place to solve them.

Homelessness. Thirty years. Food banks. Thirty years now. Put in place for a six-month crisis. We now have three-storey brick homeless shelters in Calgary, you know. In other words, institutionalize the problem. For that money they could have built housing for half the homeless in Calgary. Very easy, small budget stuff to, on the one hand, build the housing for these people in a way which does not marginalize, or does not seem like charity. It’s not a big deal! It’s a very easy one. It’s the sort of thing, you know, some people could actually put together over a weekend, like it’s already put together.

And instead of that we walked away from the housing. We know over half the people on the streets in Canada are the same people or the descendants of the people who were taken out of the health wards, mental health wards. We know we made a mistake. Not that we should put them back in the mental health wards but that they can’t take the pills without somebody to help them. That can be handled through very cheap, very simple housing. That would be progress. That would be getting a sizeable percentage of “the other” off the streets in our middle-class society. And we can’t do it! We cannot bring ourselves to simply do it! We’d rather walk by them on the streets and say isn’t it a pity, isn’t it awful, isn’t it terrible. It’s astonishing and I take that as the most obvious and easiest.

I am sure you know this but shelters are filled with men and women who go to the office in the morning or the factory in the morning. Why? Because their salaries are so low that they can’t afford to put the money down to rent an apartment. Sizeable percentages depending on the town of Canadians living in homeless shelters have jobs. They are not paid enough to actually have an apartment of their own. A sizeable number of the people going to food banks are single mothers and children. You know a large part of this problem could be easily solved at provincial levels with food in schools without making it a matter of charity. There are many ways of dealing with these things. It’s peanuts. It’s not billions of dollars. It’s a few million dollars. It’s not a big deal.

Healthcare. We can do healthcare in about three minutes! You’ll laugh, but you know. Waiting times. We’re now going to have sort of, it’s forbidden to, if you have a heart problem you shouldn’t wait longer than X months. That’s about the equivalent of saying, “In the driving test, we’re going to teach you how to start the car and drive in a straight line, but that’s it.” And then when you see all these accidents, you say, “That’s scandalous, all these accidents! We’re going to forbid accidents!”

Let me just tell you something and I am always surprised at how few people know this. We have a system in Canada of medical schools where you have to go into residency for I guess it’s two years afterwards. There is one residency spot per graduate of medical school in Canada. One of the principal, probably the reason, responsible for 50% of the waiting times is the shortage of doctors. We need a surplus of doctors, not a shortage. We need a surplus. They may make a little less money, but that’s not such a big deal. I mean, writers don’t make that much, so we don’t mind if they make a little less. What is stopping us from increasing the number of residency spots? You go to the hospital system and they say, “Oh, well you’d better and go talk to the CMA.” You go to the CMA and they say, “Oh, you’d better go to talk to the universities,” and the universities say, “Oh, you should go talk to the government.” And the government says, “Oh, why don’t you talk to the hospitals?”

Because they don’t want to put the money into producing more doctors. Because they’ve done their math in a linear manner so that they have a section which is the cost of doctors. And they only have so much for that. They don’t the math so that you say, “Well, it we actually had 50% more doctors, yes, that column would be a lot bigger but we’d save all the money over here.” But we have all this other money over there. They can’t do the math that way. So that is actually going backwards and it’s a refusal to come up with a very simple way to solve the problem.

I have heard that many of the universities in Canada are willing to take four times more, if you like, immigrant doctors who have the credentials into a resident system which they need to go through in order to practice which is normal. And the provincial governments are basically saying, “No, no, no, we don’t that many because it would be too expensive.” So that actually the waiting lines are created by an unwillingness to deal with a very specific, very identifiable problem that could be dealt with tomorrow morning. The provincial ministers and the federal government could say, “We’re going to increase the number of residency spots by 10% a year for the next 10 years.” Period. Just do it! Don’t talk about it!

And if it turns out that a lot of people like me are wrong, do something else. You have the right to make mistakes but I don’t know a single serious person in the medical profession who disagrees with what I have just said. And I am not even talking about the natural barriers to people coming into the country, who do have the credentials. Not all do. I spoke to an older doctor the other day who has been very involved in what are the credentials required, and he said, “I went on a committee for two years. I got a bunch of the barriers down. I went off the committee, looked back two years later and the barriers were back up again!” So that is a profession protecting itself. That’s what that is. That’s not about public health care. That’s a failure of the doctors to be realistic about what’s needed in the country, which is to say, more doctors.

Let me add to this on health care since very few people know this. Out of the total healthcare budget in Canada, what percentage of it is spent on prevention? 1%. 1%. And I believe you had somebody, a health officer here, there you are, and you said, and I believe you said, and I agree with you 100% that some astonishing percentage of the breakthroughs in life expectancy and so on in the 20th century came actually from things like clean water and so on. Basic things, i.e., prevention. What stops us from putting the budget of prevention from 1% up? What is it that prevents us from … couldn’t we get to 2%? How about 3%? I mean, it’s lunacy that we’re coming through the back. We have a healthcare system that only treats sick people, as Bob McMurtry always said. I am sure you know who I mean.

So, and let me add last point to this. You’re told endlessly that we have a problem with obesity with kids and a problem with obesity is a health problem. It’s a big health problem in the short, medium and long term. So what do we do? First of all, under the Harris government in Ontario, but the same thing happened across the country, we cut sports. In Ontario, it’s one credit which is a half a year to get a high school diploma in Ontario for sports. One credit. Can’t think how that happened! And we serve junk food in the schools. It would take provincial governments in Canada one meeting, one meeting, to ban junk food in schools. That’s all it would take. It could be done by tomorrow morning across the country. And it wouldn’t cost any money. Why aren’t we doing it if I am so wrong about our incapacity to act?

Gambling. I mean I have to mention it given where we are. You know, this gradual move away, as was mentioned earlier. Can people take more taxes? What are appropriate taxes? First you cut taxes over a period of 10 to 15 years and then you get the money back, but not from the same people. You get the money back from the people, actually, who weren’t paying income taxes in the first place, which is to say the working class and the lower middle class, by spending millions of taxpayers’ money in advertising to get those people specifically at the poor end of society. Get those people to go to the gambling casinos, to spend the money so that the money can come in to the government. If you look at the numbers across the country, you will be horrified at what percentage of the budget it represents in province after province after province.

There is an ethical question, there is moral question, there is a democracy question, there is a citizenship question, and on top of that there is an astonishing question in terms of our long-term series of mistakes with the First Nations, which is to say, “You know, let’s give them some money. Why don’t we give them a poisoned chalice?” Give them a poisoned chalice! Then we can actually have contempt. And then just in case we get criticized by people like you, why don’t we take a percentage of the money we raise from gambling and give it to all sorts of people with good intentions so they can run their organizations. That will shut them up.

Here you have a sign which exists right through western civilization of corruption, of degeneracy, of backward movement, which is so dangerous for our democracy that I am actually flummoxed by the inability we have to make this a serious debate in the country. And when I hear provincial premiers saying, “Oh well, we’re addicted to it, so there’s nothing we can do.” That’s an answer? Or we’re going to give some money to helping people not commit suicide, having used taxpayers’ money to get them to the edge of suicide? I am not talking about a non-functioning civilization.

Completely other sort of topic.

We have this fantastic program. I am involved with a bunch of other people. Gordon McIvor — I don’t think is here — but he was your president I think and he was just recently president of French For the Future, which is a thing a number of us set up 10 years ago. It’s really to take this very successful French immersion program and francophones, an incredible program. Incredible. We’ve moved to a half a million kids outside of Quebec, bilingual. Incredible in the history of Canada. We’ve done it in 30 years. And yet the program having gone like that, is sort of like this. When you actually examine it, there are about five reasons, but one of them is worth mentioning. One of them is that there simply aren’t enough French teachers. Why aren’t there enough French teachers? Because they won’t train them. That’s all. They don’t want to train the French teachers. Why? I don’t know! Is it because they’re against bilingualism? It is because they don’t want to spend any more money on that part of the education? I don’t know why it is. But we have a real problem, which is the country is still together today to some extent because we have actually created a critical mass of bilingual Canadians who could deal with the issues and I see them all over the country. They’re fantastic. We don’t need everybody. We need a critical mass. We’re not quite there; we’re getting there. And suddenly, just when we’re starting to do pretty well when you look at it from a certain distance, we start squeezing it and making it difficult and causing negative things to happen. Why can’t we solve that? We just need to train more teachers who can teach in the two languages.

The levels of Lake Huron. The water levels of Lake Huron are falling. All the facts are in. The data is in. The American corps of engineers has agreed essentially with the Canadian group doing the work in the Georgian Bay Association. We all know that there maybe two or three causes but one of the causes is that St. Clair River is the only place in the whole Great Lakes system where it was seriously deepened and no counteracting factors were put in: locks, baffles or whatever. So, in fact, that much more water is going out than was going out 25 years ago. All you have to do is build the baffles. They have the drawings, they have the plans, they’ve been there for years, they know how to do it, and we’re just grinding our way, slowly through this, sort of, “Oh, well, you know there are some people on the shore of the river who really like having big beaches because it means they have more property.” That’s actually where the argument is today. It’s astonishing. That’s a society which has difficulty acting.

Land claims, you’ve already talked about. There is very little that stops us from solving these land claims really fast. And when we do it, it works really well. Why can’t we do it? Why don’t we want to do it? Are we jealous? Is it actually the last real bastion of Canadian racism that we don’t want the aboriginals to have a real stake in the country? I mean, does anybody here want to move to the Arctic or up to northern Canada? If you don’t want to move up there, shouldn’t you be grateful that they want to be there and look after it for you?

You’re worried that you’re going to lose, you’re going to lose Canadian sovereignty in the north. The best way to assure Canadian sovereignty in the north is to have a functioning north. The best way to have a functioning north is to have people who want to live there, functioning. Not to tie them down for 25 years in 2,000 different negotiations, wasting their money, and your money, trying to make up you mind about what the solution is going to be, when you already know what the solution is going to be. And if you think that I am exaggerating about that, you only have to look at other subjects. For example, there are three colleges in the Canadian arctic: Whitehorse, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit. We are the only northern country, and there are five or six northern countries in the world, we are the only one that doesn’t have a university in the arctic. The professors in the south say, “Oh, I hope I am the last generation who has to go up there and do the research. I want northerners to do this.” They have been saying this for half a century. They go off, they go into their camps, they leave no money in the north, they don’t train anybody, and they come back, with few exceptions. All it would take is for the federal government to work with the three territorial governments and make the three either one university or three universities and put three or four research chairs in each one of them that is appropriate to the places, and you would start building something in the Canadian arctic which would be about sovereignty and would be about the North being real. But, oh no, we can’t actually do something. It’s a million bucks! It’s peanuts.

Fisheries. Nobody understands what’s going on. Fewer and fewer fisherman, fewer and fewer fish. We’re still dragging. As long as we drag, we won’t have the fish. Stop dragging, you can have more fishermen! It’s really simple. The Icelanders do it perfectly around Iceland. Of course, when they come to our waters they don’t do it perfectly! But it can actually be done. You can actually make more money. You don’t have to fill tins for dog food. You can actually catch in an intentional manner and fill them for 10 to 20 times more money. And therefore have richer fisherman for longer periods of time without fishing out the biomass or destroying it by dragging, just stop dragging.

Softwood lumber. We’ve known for half a century that knocking down a whole bunch of trees, that’s those men lugging big things again. Knock down a bunch of trees, that’s what a man does. Cut down a really good tree, you can sell it for enormous multiples at a high-quality level for a great deal more money. But it takes thought, it takes imagination, it takes a certain kind of training, a certain kind of consciousness.

Mad cow disease. I won’t go through what produced it, but the interesting thing was the Americans closed the border, and everyone said, “Oh my god, we devoted our whole industry to feeding the United States.” But of course what we were doing is taking the highest quality beef in the world and shoving it into the freezers of cheap American supermarkets — a total contradiction in terms. So suddenly when they closed the border, through anger, that frustration that we heard about, people started saying, “Well, wait we should have more of our own slaughterhouses and we should sell our beef as the high-quality beef it is, package it properly, so it says, you know, Ann Golden Ranch, dah-dah-dah, you know, done on so-and-so date and sell it into the most expensive stores at the highest possible price,” which we could do. You know, natural beef from the Rocky Mountains and so on.

As soon as the border opened, our governments, our bureaucrats, etc, stopped talking it, and said, “Oh, we can get back into the cheap business again. Get the hewers-of-water-drawers-of-water phenomenon, back into functioning again.” This was a chance to do something. I know the ranchers are very upset about this. They saw finally an opportunity to move to another level, but this country could not bring itself to act in an intentional, sophisticated manner which would match the quality of the beef that we produce. And on the top of that, the money that was given by the governments to the industry went to the slaughterhouses which were in fact the problem, not to the ranchers to a great extent. And let me just finish this Canadian conversation of problems.

I reminded that you that we talk about ourselves as if we are no longer the old Canada. You know, if you look at Statistics Canada numbers, it will say that something like 6% of Canadian GDP comes from commodities. That’s because we redid the way we do the numbers. If you take oil out of the ground, it’s a commodity; if you actually refine it, it’s industry. If you cut down a tree, it’s a commodity; if you put it in a pulp and paper mill, it’s industry. So, we actually convinced ourselves that we were an industrial nation when 30% of our GDP, at least, is commodities. If you take that 30% away, we’re a third world economy. We’re like a Latin American economy, but not as good as Brazil. Right? And we can’t have that conversation about the importance of the commodities and how to go downstream. We have been having these discussions for so long, and the proof that we can’t have it, was the attempt the other day, the instant the other day, where two of the three largest Canadian mining companies, Inco and Falconbridge, thinking defensively, because we’re not an intentional place, right? They don’t have power so the only thing they only think defensively, said “We need some more money. Why don’t we go to a not-very-healthy American company and get them to come in?” They go in to one meeting with this company and come out saying, “It’s great, they want to buy us!” You don’t know, of course, what kind of options program the presidents of the two Canadian companies are going to benefit from when the buyout finally happens, but my guess is it’s somewhere, I am guessing 40 to 50 million per person, which, since they’re only going to retire and go and play golf, I really don’t know what they’re going to do with all that money. You know?

So why is it that we couldn’t have the conversation, a really serious conversation about if we are the key place in the world for commodities, which we are, which is why we’re in the G8, why can’t we have a serious conversation about ownership? Every other country is! The big companies in Australia, they all talk about that. The Australian government talks about that. We can’t bring ourselves to say, “We’re a place, it’s not about nationalism, it’s not about closing our borders, it’s about intentionality.” We can’t bring ourselves to do this. We just left the stuff drift away and say, “Oh, they’re going to give us some jobs. Oh, they say they’re going to leave some jobs here.” They’re going to have some executives here, you know the vice president, sales, and so on. It’s because we’ve slipped so deeply into utilitarian romanticism.

So, I’ve probably gone over and I haven’t got to the international. Shall I take a few more minutes? A few.

All right, I mean it’s up to you.

International level. Federal debt. In 1980, people, and I don’t say people like me, but a whole bunch of us starting writing about the fact that the best way to get out of a Third World debt situation was to rip up the debt. Really simple. Been done dozens of times before in history. It took 25 years for the G8, John Kirton is here somewhere in the room, there he is, to actually for the G8 to get to the point where it did what it could have done for an enormously smaller amount of money in 1980. Because they simply had to believe that mattered was the contracts, what mattered was the sort of the linear management delusion, when in reality all you had to do was take those debts, write them all down on a piece of paper, open a drawer, and you all gather round, you put them in a drawer, and you lock the drawer. You say, “We won’t open this for 1,000 years.” I am joking, but I am not joking. That’s what you do and that’s what they did! That is exactly what they did. But it took 25 years for six, seven, eight men to actually get themselves to do it. Meanwhile, countries were destroyed, people died, opportunities were lost, progress was not made.

We’re caught up, as you said, in more and more intricate versions of what we call terrorism. Terrorism is a small outcropping of what I would call irregular warfare. For a hundred years, people have been describing precisely the direction in which warfare is going. As the western countries become more and more, if you like, technology-laden, no matter how fast they move, so the others move off and, you know, ride bicycles with bombs on the back of them. And so there is a whole range of what you would call types of irregular warfare undertaken by filthy, awful people, really interesting people, deluded people, unhappy people, etc., people without cause, people with cause. Meanwhile, we have returned to, I think, a world arms budget of I believe, a trillion? I think that’s right. I think it’s a trillion, yeah. Fifty percent to the U.S. and 50% to the rest of the world. We’re back to the Cold War budget and somewhere around 95 to 99% of it is being spent on warfare which does not relate to what we’re actually involved with.

Much of which could be dealt with by taking peanuts out of that to deal with, for example, the drug question in Afghanistan, which is really a question of alternate sources of income, it’s not a question of warfare. But we are so locked into, we cannot progress, we must be technology-laden that we can’t actually solve a problem which is not actually that complicated.

Global warming. An enormously complex process which the NGOs made the mistake of being involved in, leads to Kyoto. I am not saying don’t do Kyoto, what I am saying is Kyoto is a miniscule, bureaucratic step of the sort of the Canadian law on the cheap drugs to the developing world, when was actually required was that the West step back and use its imagination and make an astonishing leap into a new world. Just as it did when we created public health care, public education, did a whole bunch of things. We didn’t move forward in that sort of way. We actually stood back and said, “We’ve got a problem. How do we solve it?” Well, you know if we give everybody education, we could solve a lot of our problems.” Then we just did it in Canada in the 19th century when we couldn’t afford it. And today we pretend we can’t afford anything even though we’re so much richer than anybody had ever been, but it’s that lack of an ability to stand back and look at what is regression, what is progression.

Intellectual property. And this is what I am going to end on. Intellectual property is probably the make-or-break issue at the international level today. Intellectual property was put into the WTO in 1995 because of the lobbying of the pharmaceutical companies and others. Even the economists, who are 100% fanatics of every globalist argument that exists, were furious. Baghwati said at great lengths that if intellectual property remains at the WTO, the WTO will break apart. It is a major flaw, because what it essentially is is allowing lazy managers to not take risks, capitalist risks, but to live off royalties, to live off coupon clipping by having incredibly long control over drugs but far more than drugs. And the money just keeps rolling in. And in the process they get increasingly in the way of what our civilization needs to do in order to fulfill those three things that I talked about at the beginning.

The pharmaceutical area is the most pernicious area, the most backward area in terms of progress being made by our civilizations and those big companies come out of our civilizations. The current system, supported by the WTO will bankrupt any national healthcare system in the world within a few short years. We all know that, we all say it. It will bankrupt individuals who do not have national healthcare systems. It is an unsustainable proposition which we have locked ourselves into. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, “The purpose that any new law or regulation of commerce arises from the merchant class, therefore ought always to be listened to with great precaution.” Harold Innis, a conservative, and the greatest thinker and economist we have yet produced, “The shell and pea game of the country fair has been magnified and elevated to a universal level.”

The AIDS health crisis is to a great extent, not entirely, but to a great extent in the state that it is in because we feel that progress requires us to act in a managerial manner and respect intellectual property. None of which is true. There is no reason to respect intellectual property when people are dying. Patent law does not trump health. It doesn’t trump health. It doesn’t trump life. It doesn’t! And it can’t be argued in any book of economics, which is why I quoted Adam Smith, in any book of ethics, in any book of morality, in any book of democracy. Patent law cannot trump life, and at the moment it is. Which is why, to a great extent, a whole continent is in the state it is in. One could say the same about malaria, one could same about a series of other areas. We don’t seem to be able to get a clear view of this, this is partly because the pharmaceutical companies spend $60 billion a year on PR, and only half that amount on research. You wouldn’t know that. If you asked them, they would give you very different figures. But the Financial Times of London, I think a pretty reputable sort, is not considered to be on the left, even though it’s on pink paper, you know, uses those statistics on a regular basis and believes them to be accurate.

It’s as if as a result of our desire to obey the law, respect intellectual property, even though it kills people, we are therefore driven further and further into this romantic utilitarianism. And that leads us into a confusion between rights on the one hand, and charity on the other. We are drawing further and further backwards into the 19th century and the whole concept that citizens’ lives should be saved through charity as opposed to rights. That is what intellectual property is about. And when you look out and see, I don’t know, astonishing things being done in Botswana by Bill Gates, in cooperation with the drug companies, I don’t criticize Bill Gates, except to say that it draws our attention away from what is actually happening in far bigger countries with far more people. Just there next door, South Africa — millions of people in danger or dying but our eye is drawn in the way of the old charitable model, pre-democratic model, our eyes drawn to where the good is being done and away from where the evil is being done, which is to say, nothing.

And I will tell you a very short patent story. I was in a shantytown outside of Capetown and talking with people who work on AIDS, and they said, “You know, we’re handing out condoms to the men in the bars, etc.” And I said, “Well, that’s great.” And then they said, “We go around to their houses and shacks and we hand instruction booklets to the women.” And I said, “Gosh, wouldn’t you be better to hand the condoms to the women? Right? Better chance of them being used.” And they said, “Oh, well that would be very embarrassing, I mean, for the women.” And I said, “Well, okay, why don’t you give them female condoms then?” They said, “Oh, we can’t do that. They’re five times more expensive. There is a patent.”

“Break the patent!” The Canadian ambassador of the High Commission was with me and I am sure she agreed and it’s not her job to say if she would or not, but she is a wonderful woman. I said, “Break the patent!”

Can you imagine an international law case in which they argue in favour of a patent on female condoms which will directly cause the death of women? That company is going to withdraw pretty fast. But you see we can’t get ourselves to act in that way, to get beyond this sort of problem. Brazil did, South Africa got itself partway, the European Court of Justice has made some interesting judgements which cut back a little bit on the power of property, but we have made those big progressive intellectual leaps.

So, where does that leave us? Am I being too pessimistic? Well, pessimism is better than utilitarian romanticism. Optimism is all about being conscious. If you are not conscious you can’t be optimistic unless you drop into romanticism. Right? Consciousness is the first element in building up the courage to act. So progress is about doing real things, intentionally. They are easy things to do in general but they have to be done and you have to be conscious about why you are doing them. In other words, you have to be conscious about who you are, where you are, and what these real things are. Why are they the strategic steps? All I have described to you are some of the strategic steps that could be easily undertaken in order to lead us into different directions, in order to produce, I think, real progress. Strategic change for improvement.

You take these things I said at the beginning: commodities, intellectual property, technology. If you don’t shape them, someone will shape them on you, and you will be the victim or the beneficiary, but you will have been passive in the process. But everything that happens in terms of real progress is based on an understanding of who you are, what you are, where you are, what it is that you want to do. Consciousness, and at the core of that, an ethical sense, because if you know who you are, if you know where you are, if you know what you have to do, you can’t get there without an ethical sense at the core. And that ethical sense is an understanding of “the other,” of the public good.

Thank you very much!

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