Now seems to be a good time to write about Hannah Arendt on the public-private distinction, as far as she puts it in ‘The Human Condition‘ (1958, 2e., University of Chicago Press). These are meant as reading notes, and meant to be faithful to the aims of the text. That said, I include a few comments in parentheses and italics where I think a little color commentary might help.
Continue reading “Potted summary: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition”
Free speech has many false friends and straw-enemies. Some of those misapprehensions come from the land of freedom and milk and honey and stars and stripes and things. Some come from inside of the Canadian academy. Some call themselves leftist, some right-wing. The conversation, at present, is all a bit warped. But if you wanted to get things straight, you could also consult the classics if you wanted, right from the horses’s mouth — Mill’s On Liberty.
On Liberty is sometimes mischaracterized as a kind of free speech absolutism, i.e., for whom one cannot limit speech on the basis of content, and/or which is directed only at the proprieties of government intervention and not social justice among individuals. If it were those things, it would be boring and wrong. In fact, though, Mill’s argument has all sorts of nuances and compelling features that, at the very least, make it worthy of continued attention. His endorsement of freedom of speech is not absolutist, since the principle of liberty is a function of his harm principle. Hence, he does endorse limitations to speech, and does believe it is sometimes justifiable to sanction the speech of others. You just have to be sensitive to the qualifications.
The first two limitations on speech worth mentioning right off the bat, and which many people reading this already know:
a) Only applies in modern contexts and between adults. Mill’s defense of free speech is a point about how we ought to design modern political institutions and culture which are responsive to reason. For roughly the same reason, a parent can limit the speech of a child, since children are ostensibly not capable of rational conversation. Or so says the parenting manuals in Victorian era England, presumably.
b) Contextual limits. The defense of freedom of speech does not prevent us from limiting the speech of someone who is inciting of mob violence (e.g., the corn-seller’s case). Plausibly enough, the American Court offered the example of yelling fire in a crowded theater as speech that can be sanctioned. (Implausibly, this was done to justify government sanctions on wartime dissidents.)
So, with those caveats out of the way, the question is: “Can we, people living in relatively evolved political societies, and speaking in non-incitement contexts, ever sanction someone for the contents of their speech?”
The answer depends on who you are — a government or a private citizen. For governments, the answer is pretty much a flat ‘no’. A government needs to lay off imposing sanctions on individuals for the things that individuals say. Hence, Mill thinks that blasphemy laws, and even libel laws, are legislatively wrong. An interesting additional question is whether or not legal restrictions on hate speech — e.g., Canadian restrictions on hate propaganda — are directed at harms based on content or context. (FWIW, my inclination is to regard propaganda as essentially contextual in nature, and expressed hatred as intending incitement, and therefore to see it as analogous to the corn-seller’s case. But this seems to be a matter of interpretation, and reasonable people may interpret it differently.)
Some of the people who call themselves libertarians seem to think that freedom of speech only concerns governmental regulations, not interactions between private citizens. But this is not so; private citizens are obliged to respect freedom of speech as well. It is just that their internal calculations have to be a bit more nuanced.
Consider the fact that there are many kinds and qualities of bad effects that we can visit on others when we target them with speech:
Hurt vs. harm. Suppose there’s a difference between subjective hurt and objective harm. We can distinguish them as follows: an action produces subjective hurt when the act produces a negative effect on the patient, but only on the condition that the patient permits themselves to be hurt; while an action is an objective harm if the negative effect is visited on the patient irrespective of whether or not they recognize it. So, you can’t necessarily be held to account just because a person chooses to interpret a turn of phrase in a way that makes it appropriate to feel slighted. The idea is that you are not necessarily blameworthy if you happen to hurt someone’s feelings, so long as they are not otherwise worse for the wear. In contrast, there is a prohibition on intending to cause objective harm to others. So, e.g., even if libel laws make for bad governmental policy (according to Mill), private citizens are doing wrong if they lie about others and cause reputational damage.
Acts vs. facts. Mill notices that there’s a difference between objective harms related to (a) the statement of facts about the target, and (b) objective harms delivered through the act of speech. For an example of the first kind of harm: by calling a thief “thief”, you might end up causing the thief harm, in a sense; but the harm issues from the facts, not from the act of talking about it. And it is fine to do someone objective harm just by reporting accurately on the vile things they’ve said or done. If a pizza guru says, “I hate gay people”, then I can tell ordinary decent folks what the pizza guru said, and they can boycott him. And if a whistleblower says, “My organization is killing people with drones”, and they can prove it, then that speech is permissible, too, and so they ought not be sanctioned by the government.
On the other hand, you cannot just go around sanctioning people for saying things you don’t like, causing them objective harm through the creative powers of speech. That is, you shouldn’t engage in “vituperative” speech: by which he seems to mean gratuitous vilification, heckling and shaming, character assassination, and so on. He argues that the mischief that arises from these sorts of conversational bludgeons “is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.” Instead, you should engage in the “real morality of public discussion“, which is to say, you should engage in good faith: “giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favour.” In other words, you should not contribute to the ongoing eternal garbage-fire of life on Twitter.
But, once those speech acts are taken off the table, is there any kind of speech left? Is all of our discourse turned into anodyne or inert? No — you are only barred from intending objective harm on the basis of the speech acts independently of the facts, i.e., through vituperative speech. Everything apart from that is fair game. You can speak falsely, and can hurt feelings. What you can’t do is engage in bad faith.
At any rate, this was my reading of Mill. Maybe you have your own interpretation. Either way, I think it is well worth revisiting his essays every so often, because it rewards close reading.
John Rawls was the best kind of programmatic philosopher. This was not a guy whose output could be reduced to a single thought-experiment or evocative illustration; you can’t appreciate him as a philosopher unless you can see his systematic design. But that’s got a downside. The thing is, when you’re a programmatic philosopher, a lot of your output can be difficult for others to follow. Everyone understands a view best when they can see contrasts, objections, and alternatives, yet the programmatic philosopher’s prose is often impassively self-referential. So, for instance, when Rawls talks about reason, then you’d better be alert to the special ways that he defines the terms elsewhere; and woe be to the reader who thinks they can deduce the meaning of any single one of these concepts {“reasonable”, “public reason”, “acceptable”} from the others. (Meaning: intellectually accountable, common reason for the commons, and accords with convictions under wide equilibrium, respectively.)
So, I think it’s easiest to appreciate the best parts of Rawls’ theory of justice once we accept his broader political vernacular, but also to extend his analytical tools in ways which let us articulate conceptions of political justice that he does not accept. I have an ulterior motive for wanting to contrast his approach to justice to others, since I am interested in how theory of justice relates to general jurisprudence and legal theory as such, which means I’m obliged to do a compare-and-contrast exercise between different incommensurate moral and legal theories.
So here’s the shtick. I assume you’ve basically got the idea of Rawls’s theory of justice under your belt. Now, in the next few posts I’m going to tell a dogmatic story about how legal systems are best understood in terms of non-public reasons. To do that, I’ll use Rawls’s seminal “The Idea of Public Reason” (in Political Liberalism) as reference point. The story unfolds in three chapters. First, in this post, I’m first going to offer a sympathetic rereading of Rawls’s idea of public reason in a way that makes the most sense of the idea of publicity. My aim is to do justice to the attenuated sense in which associative reasons are publicized. In the next post I’ll compare Rawls’s theory of justice to a charitable rereading of Thomism. Then I’ll conclude by offering a few idiosyncratic complaints about the Rawlsian outlook.
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Public reason is the expression of a modern liberal political conception of justice, and since liberalism is a relatively new political phenomenon, public reason is a newcomer on the historical scene. In contrast, associative (“social”) reason is as old as rocks, and an enduring feature of societies, i.e., communities structured by status. Because associative reason is more common, it is easier to understand public reason in contrast to it, rather than vice-versa. Associative reason is the clearer concept of the two, easier to grasp as the historical rule than as the exception. (I will use the term ‘associative reason’ here, which is my own term, not his. Instead, Rawls prefers the term ‘social’ or ‘nonpublic’ reason. I do not join him in his usage because the very idea definition of the social is contestable, and his formulation of ‘nonpublic’ reason is something I will take issue with later.)
As I have argued elsewhere, the most plausible mainstream theories of law in the Western canon have all held that law is necessarily promulgated to be law. Publicity is a criterion for legal validity. Suppose that’s so. It follows that, if associative reason is a legal universal, then we should expect it to be public in some sense or other. And indeed it is universal, in the minimal sense that every reason to adopt a policy that is open to view in public discourse is at least an associative reason as opposed to a private reason. A potential for contradiction lurks here, since associative reason is not ‘public reason’ by definition, but is public. But the air of paradox is resolved by noticing the equivocation at work in the word ‘public’. Associative reasons are not public in Rawls’s sense of ‘public reason’, since Rawls’s use of the phrase concentrates only on reasons that are public qua public — i.e., those reasons for policy that are aimed at achieving a reasonable overlapping consensus among the free and equal citizenry. That is why Rawls thinks that associative reasons do not play a just role in legitimate democratic institutions — they are not public in the maximal sense of being common reason for the commons. In this, Rawls is articulating a model of legitimacy as consent of the governed analogous to other well-known social contract theorists — e.g., Rousseau’s sense that civic participation should be aimed at the general will.
I hope you’ll let me rehearse the idea of public reason one more time, because it’s especially important to a guy like me who cares about the importance of publicity to legal theory. Rawls tells us that the aim of public reason is to establish the constitutive features of a democratic system, especially those features related to political and legal standing of free and equal citizens. His way of speaking entails that public reason is public in the pure sense of being reasons directed at the commons, and not in the mere sense of just being public-facing, i.e., mere attempts to resolve collective action problems. In Rawls’s theory of justice, a public reason is an attempt to arrange our plans in a way that is conceived of through the original position — i.e., a device of representation where hypothetical future participants of a society establish the principles of the political order they would like to live in despite being ignorant of their own rank and status in the future order. It is not just reason open to view, but reason that happens in the commons for the commons.
Yet, although we can distinguish between publicity and public reason, we should not ignore the relationship between the two concepts. For Rawls — and for many of us — strong, justifiable rationales are a part of public reason. This is a point that Rawls makes explicitly in his astute formulation of the publicity condition elsewhere in Political Liberalism (Ch.2, s.4). (If we are feeling especially Whiggish, we might even go so far as to say that the teleological point of publicity is to, eventually, recommend that we adopt public reason as a model of legitimacy, and hence that honoring the ideal of publicity in tyrannies shall eventually bend politics towards the cause of democracy, though these speculations are not ones that I am eager to endorse.)
A final word, ending the setup of the discussion of public and associative reason. When we are thinking about political affairs, we are generally interested in two major topics, which are the requirements of practical justice and epistemic justice. Practical justice is made up of a statement of (a) basic rights in principle (i.e., an articulation of the sense in which citizens are free and equal), and (b) the assurance of means to use those rights in practice (i.e., equity and matters of distributive justice). Public reason is political in the sense that it is directed at the basic structure of society, i.e., the society’s main social, political, and economic institutions, conceived of as a single system of cooperation. Epistemic justice sets guidelines for inquiry, e.g., rules of evidence and process at trial and by police. Because these considerations mark off constitutional essentials, they must be justifiable to all citizens with different ideas about how to live the good life.
Well, suppose that’s all good. It certainly seems like an intuitive characterization of justice, as it correctly characterizes the operations of legal systems as we know them as creatures directed to the cause of justice.
It follows that, if the question of what public reason requires of us is pursued sincerely — i.e., by checking off hypothetical opinions of real people in hypothetical situations — then the sense that the basic constitution of the regime is justified will depend on facts we can refer to about how people think about the implicit contract that binds them. Since those facts are known or intuitively knowable, they are accessible; and since they are accessible, they are publicized. In which case, public reason will get away with satisfying the publicity condition “on the cheap”. In contrast, if a legal regime goes about publicity through associative reason, then it will require an activist spirit, swimming upstream against the currents of a community’s considered sense of fair play.
This month I’ve talked a little about conceptual spaces, and a little about genocide, and a little about law and non-classical categories. Now I would like to tie the strings together by showing what use computer models might have in relation to those subjects.
This past week I have been graphing the concept of genocide for the sake of demonstrating the potential appeal of the conceptual spaces paradigm. The hope is to find some way of capturing the information that a person processes which underlie their judgments about how to categorize episodes of genocide, in the absence of classical category structures imposed by definitional fiat. From the jurist’s point of view, looking at concepts in this way is legally obtuse, and hence of at best indirect importance to a court — which, of course it is. On the other hand, if the conceptual spaces paradigm is a worthwhile attempt to describe psychological processing, it is of great importance to a people. And since virtually everybody in the history of the philosophy of law believes that law is only valid law when promulgated, and promulgation presupposes shared conceptual inventory… well, you get the idea.
In the previous post I took a look at Paul Boghossian’s (2011) critique of the concept of genocide. (I could have chosen any number of scholarly critiques of genocide to focus on — e.g., R. J. Rummel — but settled on Boghossian’s paper for the prosaic reason that his paper is available for free on academia.edu.) Boghossian offered a few cases which seemed to intuitively challenge the classical conception — the case of targeted warfare (Dresden), an imagined case of gendercide, and Stalin’s dekulakization. I take it that his remarks are not proposed in an effort to undermine the UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but rather to perhaps complicate and enrich it by making its intrinsic motivations more defensible.
The classical concept of genocide looks something like the Venn Diagram we see to the right. Put succinctly, genocide is the use of atrocious means, against vital populations, with the intrinsic end of destroying at least some of that population (i.e., destruction of the group is an end-in-itself). These strict criteria tell us what the international court would have to say about Boghossian’s cases: that dekulakization and gendercide don’t count (economic classes and genders are not protected populations). Meanwhile, the facts about Dresden and Nagasaki are borderline cases, depending on the intentions of the Allies in charge of the war. But a reasonable person might wonder whether the underlying legislation is a result of political expediency and moral complicity as opposed to the strict and merciless requirements of justice.
To get a better sense of the psychological lay of the land, I decided to create a model of the conceptual space of genocide. The really wonky methods I used are discussed in the next section. For now, I’ll just discuss a few interesting implications from what I found.
One potentially interesting result that I keep running into, at least for the latest iteration of the model, is that American slavery occupies a space relatively close to the Holocaust. (see right) This happens even though no direct analytical links force the two together, and despite the fact that this was not an effect I was expecting. Compare that to the classic categorization pictured in the Venn diagram (above), where slavery is treated as a definite non-case.
This might be worth noting, I think, because if the spatial analysis had any probative worth, then it might be an interesting part of a roundabout explanation of America’s long-standing hesitation to intervene in episodes of genocide worldwide, discussed by Samantha Power. You can tell a story where the American civil war places them on awkward footing with the idea of genocide, because they share the same conceptual space, though are not technically part of the same legal category.
But I should place emphasis on ‘if-then’. The use of the model is questionable, and depends on what you think of the methods behind the model. If you are interested in those, keep reading. Still, even if we think the model has little probative value, I would be satisfied to see more conversation in philosophy about the usefulness of conceptual spaces when thinking about how concepts and categories are received.
This is an interview I conducted with journalist, producer, and talk show host Avi Lewis during 1999. Lewis has had many accomplishments, but at the time I knew him for his gig co-hosting and reporting for The New Music on the Much Music Network (1996-99), and for his role in producing and hosting the CBC panel show Counterspin (1998-2004). During that period, I was in high school, and considering a career in journalism. I was then — as now — an admirer of his work, and he was both very gracious and very generous for letting me interview him for a school project. For those reasons, it is fair to say that the exchange was a defining moment in how I approach life.
I reproduce some of it here, because it meant something to me, and because it’s a delight to read, and also because it captures something about what Canadian media culture was like during the late-90s. Topics run the gamut, from standards of journalistic objectivity to the perils of being misinterpreted, from Monsanto to Leonard Cohen, from Merlin to Spiderman.
Me: When are you afraid, if ever, that your questions will be misinterpreted (during an interview)?
Lewis: Well, let me start by saying that Counterspin is an unusual show. The purpose of the show is to have a host that is opinionated. The traditional idea of a host, especially the CBC idea of a host, is that [the host] doesn’t have an opinion. This is abandoned. The basic premise for this – and I’ve talked to [the head of CBC Newsworld] about it explicitly – is that the idea of people not having a point of view is so clearly bullshit.
Me (laughing): Yeah.
Lewis: It’s just not particularly helpful in doing journalism, and especially during debate. Although a lot of viewers have a connection to hosts that don’t take sides, and that’s what a lot of the audience expects. For a lot of things, that is certainly appropriate. But for a debate show, especially when you see people hosting debates, and they clearly have a point of view but are inhibited by tradition from expressing it… it always comes out in some way. Like, they ask much tougher questions to one side than the other, or cut people off, and are noticeably impatient with the people they disagree with. Those passive aggressive ways that hosts convey their point of view I think are not nearly as helpful as a host that says, “Here’s where I’m coming from, where are you coming from?” Because there’s a key difference between being ‘neutral’ and being fair. I’m certainly not neutral, but that doesn’t stop me from being fair, in fact I think it helps me to be fair.
Me: So, by coming right out and saying “this is what I think, what do you think”, you’re hoping that any misunderstandings will be clarified right on the spot?
Lewis: That’s the hope. However, to finally answer your question: I don’t fear of getting misinterpreted, but I get misinterpreted anyway. There have been a couple of delicious examples. For instance, I’ve been trying to do a show all year on bioengineering of foods, and genetic modification of foods, because it is a topic that I am really disturbed by. I think it’s completely driven by multinational corporations like Monsanto, who are manipulating their vast control over the food industry in, I think, really scary ways.
Me: I’ve not heard of that company. What are they?
Lewis: Monsanto… It started as a pharmaceutical company and moved into the food business. If you search around the web on the topic of genetically modified foods you’ll find that there is a huge international movement against the genetic engineering of various foods that is being spearheaded by companies in America and Canada, but is being fiercely resisted by people in Europe. And even sort of shadowier is a company called “Cargill”, which is fundamentally a grain transportation company. But these companies are so big and sophisticated that they sell farmers seed and fertilizer and buy back their crops, transport them, and move grain and food around the world in such a way to try to change the diet of whole continents. To make Asia, for instance, more dependant on wheat than it is on rice, so that they’d have to import instead of depend on their own basic staples.
Anyway. They do things like make a new genetically modified seed that is resistant to the pesticides that they sell. So you can spray your crops with this incredibly intense pesticide called “Roundup”. But the seeds that you planted, which you bought from the same company that you buy the pesticides from, are the only things within miles that are resistant to this particular chemical.
Me: Sounds like a universal “Monopoly” game.
Lewis: It is getting close to that. And it is all engineered for the company’s profit over the actual well being of the farmers and the population. Because, of course, nobody knows what the long-term health effects could be of screwing with the genetic makeup of food.
Anyway, this is a story that has really been obsessing me for a long time; I really wanted to do a debate about it. But, of course, those companies have no interest in doing debates! They have no interest in facing their foes; like the Council of Canadians or the groups that are concerned about food safety. So, occasionally, they’ll do a one-on-one interview in the news with one reporter where they know that they’ll get their little 30-second sound byte defending their practices. They never actually have to face their enemies. So, we just couldn’t find anyone from any of these companies or any of the industry groups who would represent and lobby for the value of genetically modifying food. So finally we found this one guy who was a farmer who said he was really positive about these things like the hormone that they put in cows that makes them make more milk, and the genetically modified seeds and stuff. So we had him on the show, and we had a couple of people who were really alarmed about the trend. I did my intro where I was just bashing the idea.
But it turns out this farmer was a very sour and resentful person. So he didn’t say much, and was visibly pissed off at these guys who were railing about genetically modified food. So I sort of had to balance out the debate by giving him as much time as I could, and asking him questions by trying to interpret his responses back to the other side, to keep some semblance of a fair debate. I was trying to make sure that both sides got their fair share of airtime, even though I clearly disagreed with his.
Someone wrote us an email saying, “I’m really disgusted and scared by this genetically modified food thing, and was really disturbed to see that your host completely agreed with and defended the farmer who was defending it, and didn’t give as much time to the other side, and it was such a biased debate.”
I was completely misinterpreted in my attempts to be fair, and in the human situation, defending this guy who was doing such a poor job of defending his side.
The same day, we got an email from an environmental activist who said, “I can’t believe that you said that guy was a farmer! He gets all his money from Monsanto. He’s nothing but a mouthpiece for the company, and you completely bought their spin by bringing in a, quote, “typical farmer”. He’s paid to have this opinion. You were hoodwinked.” So, sometimes I get accidentally misinterpreted, but I don’t mind. I have an opportunity to say what I think, and that’s my role on the show.
Me: On The New Music, did you have that kind of freedom?
Lewis: Well… In some ways more and some ways less. The dilemmas associated with doing Music Journalism are a lot heavier than doing a debate show. In music journalism, whether you like it or not, you just end up helping the publicity mill. You don’t get a chance to go to New Orleans just because Much Music feels like spending 5000 dollars to send you. You go to New Orleans because Universal records wants to promote the new Lenny Kravitz album, and they’ve got Lenny Kravitz doing interviews in New Orleans. So whenever we traveled on record company’s money, we always made a point of doing something else in the city that we went to, trying to uncover some genuinely new music.
Me : Kinda like TV Frames?
Lewis: Kinda like TV Frames.
Me: I thought that was a really cool show…
Lewis : That was the coolest gig ever, and if Jennifer Morton hadn’t cornered the market on that, that’s exactly what I would’ve wanted to do. Just traveling around doing “slice of life” journalism in different places around the world. But there was a show that didn’t have a very corporate reason for existing. It wasn’t a part of the game of juggling the demands of various record companies and the commercial priorities of Much Music. So it never had that much commercial appeal. And it had absolutely no constraints on it, except where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do.
Me: After watching TV Frames: Beirut, and hearing about riots or bombings in that part of the world, I would get depressed…
Lewis: Yeah. I think that did what television does best, which is make you feel like you’ve been there. But yeah, music journalism did have a lot of constraints, because I have a determinately anti-corporate point of view. And that was frustrating.
Me: When was the first moment that you ever considered going into journalism as a career?
Lewis: Well, I think that, like a lot of people in the field of journalism, I didn’t fantasize as a kid about being a journalist. I absolutely fell into it.
Me: So, you didn’t look at Clark Kent and go, “Oooooh! I want to be him!”
Lewis: No, definitely not! I was all Spiderman over Superman, anyway.
I went for a trip after university in a typical trip around the world, and I found myself in Nepal for a few months… It’s a very beautiful country which in the south is filled with tropical valleys, which in the north turn into the Himalayas, which are the highest mountains in the world. A lot of people go trekking into the mountains there.
And I had an accident there. While I was trekking around in the mountains I had a really bad fall, precipitated exclusively by my own stupidity and youthful arrogance. It took me like a week to get home. I had smashed my leg to smithereens and I was very lucky not to die in a number of different ways. When I got home and learned to walk again, I decided that I wanted to go back to school, but I didn’t want to do purely abstract stuff. Like Literature and Philosophy, my undergrads. I thought, “Well, I wanna go back to school, but I want to take something that has practical application.” I applied to a bunch of journalism schools. And while I was waiting for the six months to decide whether or not I was gonna get in, I thought, “Rather than going to grad school, this is probably something I can learn on the job.” So I got out and started working my connections to try to get a job in journalism. Basically, because I had to move back home to my parents house, which was bugging the shit out of me! And I was learning to walk again, which took me, like, six months, and I was just going out of my mind. I needed money! And I needed to get out of the house. So I ended up getting a volunteer spot at CityTV, and one of their news writers just happened to quit five minutes after I walked in the door, and I got a chance at the job and I got it. It was just a combination of good luck, good timing —
Me : — Fate –?
Lewis : — and knowing somebody, which is exactly the way you always end up getting a job. And from there, one thing led to another, and eventually I was a news writer working on weekends.
And I had an idea. I always thought that “Speakers Corner” was such a cool thing. And I had an idea that I wanted to do political satire with my guitar. I told the news director that I wanted to be a kind of rock-n-roll Nancy White; she used to do political satire on CBC radio, but it was mostly piano, with a kind of chanteuse style. So I kind of wanted to do that with Rock-and-roll sensibilities. So I told him and he just laughed. Because television producers are so stupid. They don’t understand anything until they can see it on tape… You spin a great idea, and they look at you blankly.
Me (sotto voce): “Well, that’s really not good for our target market!”
Lewis : Right! Exactly. If you bring something in that is obviously cool and appealing, and just show it to them, sometimes they get it.
So that kinda worked for me. I dropped into Speakers Corner, threw in my loonie, and I’d written a couple of songs — making sure that they were exactly one minute long. And I went down into the basement of the station and got one of the techies to give me the tape that I had just recorded on. I showed it to the news director and he laughed, and put them on Breakfast Television.
So I was writing two songs a week. And I had all this material, because of course (as a news writer) I was totally immersed in the news! They were playing them on Breakfast Television in the mornings, and I went in and demanded that I not spend my own loonies. He laughed and started paying me about 25 bucks a song. So I was making 50 bucks a week with my music, along with being a news writer. And I was pretty thrilled with that.
And then they suggested that I try being a reporter, and I just laughed at them, because I thought, “Give up this freedom for the pretense of objectivity? Not in your life! Forget it! What a drag! I’ve got everything right now!” About six months later, the news director pulled me into his office again and said, “Hey, nobody’s ever turned down a reporter audition before. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” And I thought about that, and — I wasn’t sure that I knew what I was doing (laugh).
Then I did the audition, they put me on the air, and I was a news reporter for a few years.
Me: Then you moved onto The New Music, and now — Counterspin!
Lewis: Right. Ironically, I did have to do that neutral “one the one hand, on the other hand” kind of journalism for a few years. But eventually, I had sort of re-earned the right to be a full human being on camera instead of being a kind of robot. Y’know — it worked out really well for me.
Me: We appreciate it, too.
Lewis: (laughing) Thanks a lot!
Me: Who is the one person, dead or alive, that you would like / have liked to interview?
Lewis : Tom Waits… He’s kind of the reptilian and surreal inverted lounge style. He started in the late seventies. The reason I’d want to interview him is — Have you ever read the book, “The Sword and the Stone“?
Me: Nope.
Lewis: It’s a version of the Arthurian legend by a man named TH White. It’s a book I read as a kid, and it blew my mind. It basically told the story of Arthur, somewhat from Merlin’s point of view. Or maybe Merlin the Magician was just a character in the book. I think it was the first Arthurian tale that described in detail the legendary belief that Merlin lived his life backwards — that he was born as an old man… [and] as he goes along until he sort of disappears into infancy.
Tom Waits’s first album was called Closing Time in the seventies, and his first album was like, a collection of truck driver ballads. Totally straight, and very conventional AM radio songwriting. And his albums have gotten weirder and weirder as he’s aged. Which is the absolute opposite of people who do their most avant-garde work at the beginning of their career, as they get more and more commercial or more and more “safe”. He seemed to be going in the complete opposite direction than most artists. His albums were more and more bizarre as he went on. I found that so fascinating! His interviews are totally insane. He never answers a question with a straight answer. He tells long surreal stories that have nothing to do with what you just asked.
Most people try to make him make sense, and I just know that if you just went with it, just got totally disjunctive and surreal with him, it could turn into something amazing.
Me : Leonard Cohen seemed kinda like that.
Lewis: (snickering) Well — yeah. he definitely goes where he wants to with an answer! And, in a way, that’s true. I remember one time during my interview I was trying to push him on the connection in his work on the topic of sex an religion. For so many years, he would write about sex as if it were a religion. They were so mixed up.
So, when I asked him that question, he sort of flattered me and complimented me and said, “That’s a very perceptive way of putting it”, and then sort of went on to something else about religion.
I was like, “Okay, that was a skillful kind of dodge. Answer the question! Do you see sex as a kind of religion?” And he said, “Well, you know, I don’t like talking about matters that I consider private, but since you’re pressing me on this in a very dignified and decent way, I’ll say –” And then the cameraman said, “Shit,” as the tape runs out. And he says, “Well! We’ll save that for another time!” The moment slipped away.
Me : (laughing) Jeez.
Lewis : I kind of wonder whether or not he had a magical power over the technology.
[At this point there is a gap in the record, where I double-check that my own tape recorder is operating properly.]
Me: I’ve heard that some journalists try to develop a rapport with their subjects before they start the interview. What kinds of pre-interview rituals do you go through, if any?
Lewis : [O]n Counterspin, because it is a debate show and we encourage people to really argue, we discourage people from the sort of “mock outrage” and acting all controversial that you see on a lot of talk shows.
Me: Or the debate for Ontario premier.
Lewis : Or for leaders debates, exactly. What I try to do is, I try to establish the tone of the show in the few minutes that I have before the show when we can all talk to each other. And because we are a national show we almost always have someone on satellite in other cities. Sometimes I only have about a minute and a half, or two, when all the satellite technicalities have been worked out, and I can actually get all the guests talking to each other. So, I have a little warm-up ritual that I do with them. I get those guests on satellite to reach behind them and take one of those fake looking books of the shelf and throw it at the camera. And, sometimes they think I’m serious, and then they realize that I’m joking, and then they realize that there’s a sense of humor about television itself.
Then, I remind them that the way that the show usually works is that I ask the first question and people sort of go around in turn. Gradually, as a real human conversation starts to break out, and people forget they are on television because they are so engaged in the subject, we will be interrupted by a commercial. Even though I warn them about it at the beginning of the show, it absolutely happens every single night.
Me : I haven’t noticed this: Is Counterspin live?
Lewis : Absolutely live, all the time. It adds an extra kind of energy.
Me : That pre-show ritual must work pretty well, because — I watched one episode, and noticed that everyone was laughing. They all represented different parties, and were in a roundtable discussion, but they were all joking with each other. It was really something.
Lewis : There’s a value in trying to encourage people not to take themselves too seriously, and recognize where they relate as well as where they differ. I think that serves the conversation well, because people are more honest. They’re not so self-important. And I really like that.
Me : Me too. I think a lot of people do.
— What is the worst part of your job?
Lewis : The worst part of my job is the relentlessness. Doing four nights a week live for forty weeks is a tremendous grind. Because the mandate of our show is to react to whatever the breaking story of the day is, we frequently throw out all the work that we’ve put into a show at four o’clock in the afternoon because something else is exploding, and we just switch topics on the fly. The level of stress and intensity certainly dwarfs anything that I’ve ever experienced before.
AND the fact that it is live. AND the fact that it is a debate show, so it’s not enough just to get people who are smart and have a few good things to say, to represent the various points of view on an issue. AND finding those people across the country. AND trying to have some gender representation, some cultural representation, geographic representation, so it isnít always just a bunch of old white guys. It’s a tremendous amount to accomplish every single day, so I don’t think I can stand this pace for very long. I’m certainly learning a tremendous amount on every conceivable subject!
Me : What is the best part of your job?
Lewis : The best part of my job is the relentlessness. The momentum. The fact that I’m absolutely immersed in the news all the time, constantly having to learn about, and keep up on, all of the debates going on in our culture simultaneously. Not since university have I been so intellectually challenged. And there is a total high in being immersed in so much information.
The fact that it is every day really gives you the opportunity to have the debates that people are actually having around the dinner tables, and in bars, and in restaurants, while they are actually happening in response to the day’s news; to not have to wait until your weekly slot comes along to discuss something that people have already stop talking about. To really be in the flow of this new saturated society, and not to be just giving the news, but to be having the underlying arguments about the core moral, intellectual and philosophical issues that are underneath the news stories. That is incredibly exciting.
But itís a double-edged sword; very exhausting!
Me : Last question! Do you ever think that you’ll stray into producing shows full-time, and if so, why?
Lewis : Well — ironically, I’ve been doing that all along. Partly because of the unique culture of CityTV, which I think is part “rampant exploitation” and part “incredible creative opportunity”. Everybody does everything at City. So, in more traditional broadcasting, the process of doing a finished story will be divided up among many different people. One person who does research, one person who conceives the story and established lines of questioning and supervises the edit, one person who takes all that information into an interview or series of interviews and puts their own spin on it (but essentially only asks questions that someone has already though of), one person who thinks only the visual aspects of the program. At City, you have one camera operator who also does the lighting and the audio, you have one reporter who is also the researcher, the producer, the person who supervises the edits, and the person who controls the content and style of a piece. You have to do six jobs at once. I’ve always produced everything that I did, from The New Music stories to Too Much for Much political coverage, I always produced everything that I was involved in. In the political stuff, I had a partner in crime named Matt Zimble; we sort of dreamed up everything together. We would write the bits, supervise the edits, and just did everything ourselves.
Me : Was he involved in the “Smokes and Booze” special?
Lewis : No, that one was all mine. That was a labour of love.
No man is a one-man-band, really. The original kernel of the idea for the Smokes and Booze special I came up with with my wife who is a writer [Naomi Klein], who is interested in sponsorship and is writing a book about it. I should be careful about taking too much credit!
As producing goes, I’ve always produced everything I’ve been involved in, and on Counterspin, a daily human debate show, there’s just no way that anyone could book four guests a night as well as host the show. So now I have a researcher, four chase producers, and a couple of other producers who supervise the show. But, I still regularly suggest topics, regularly suggest guests, I’m intimately involved in the booking of the show, the devising of the questions, and every part of the show, up until and including whatever happens on air when we just wing it.
So, producing to me is by far the more important element in television. I think a lot of people assume that on air people are just the faces who read a script, and a lot of them are. But to me, the actual power and creativity in television is all about having an idea for a television show, having an idea in your head and being able to realize that on the screen, days or weeks or months later. Having a sort of creative vision and being able to articulate that, is the real fun and constructive part of television; and that is in the producing. So hosting it is kind of an extra bonus and an extra burden. But frequently because it is such an on-air driven culture, if you are a host or on-air person who truly takes an active interest in the content, people are always amazed that you would want to be that involved. They are always very open to it, because it makes for a much better show; being totally immersed in the show, not just putting it on like a suit jacket.
So I sort of used the on-air thing in order to have even more input into any given story.
Itís kind of tempting to just be a producer. Iíve never done it, but I imagine if I could just concentrate on the show, and not be all stressed out about the performance, not having to go on air at the end of this crazy process, maybe it would be liberating.
…[But] For better or worse, I have evolved into this sort of strange animal of host/producer. I just don’t know anything else.
Recently, a constitutional challenge arose in the province of Ontario, as the newly elected Conservative Premier sought to pass a Bill to interfere with Toronto municipal elections mid-cycle to settle a few scores in his old stomping grounds. Problems arose when the judiciary told him he was violating the Charter. Tensions ratcheted up when he invoked the little-used notwithstanding clause — section 33 — in order to overcome the decision of the Court, resulting in widespread dissent from legal professionals and from the official opposition. Just recently, Ford’s party won an appeal, as a stay was placed on the Court verdict that blocked the Bill.
For now, let’s put aside the merits of the stay or the claimed violation of the Charter. Instead, zoom in on Ford’s reason for opting out of the Canadian constitution. Focus on the rationale: “unelected judges”, filed under apparent threats to democracy. Pin this little offering to a corkboard. Put a light on it. Study under glass.
The invocation of section 33 was argued on ostensibly democratic grounds. Compare specimen to encyclopedia of modern conservative thought. The pattern of argumentation that could have been reminiscent of Jeremy Waldron’s majoritarianism, if done thoughtfully. Admittedly, it’s a weird species of argument to us, we the complacent and diffident Canadians. But the world is weird. That’s why we keep reference manuals. Gotta keep an index of all the weirds.
Now turn back to the corkboard. The actual arguments presented were a mixture of Pravda and Powerpoint. Mutant variation. Pull out the red pen.
**
So, a democratic nation of laws presupposes judicial review in two ways. First, because judicial review produces stability that makes it possible to talk about true and false claims of legality. Second, because it provides people with informed consent to past and future rules. You can criticize or condemn the operations of the courts for all sorts of reasons. But complaining they are not elected, is not a good reason. Quite the opposite: by challenging them, you undermine democracy.
In this article, Appiah suggests that the claims of representation that underlie identity politics (“I as a so-and-so say that…”) imply something like “as an (x) am in a position to speak for random person (a), who is also an (x)”. In other words, political representation means ‘speaking for’. On this view, e.g., if I claim to speak as a heterosexual man when I offer some witticism or piece of prosaic advice (“As a man, I don’t care about gender-labeling washrooms”), then I am speaking for men. Meaning, I guess, that I’m saying the sort of thing that other men would also say.
I’m sure some people do talk and reason in that way, but I also think it’s just one way of speaking among others. So, e.g., I think of these claims as usually about how I and (a) both have equal though partial authorship rights over the experiential meaning of (x), as opposed to person (b) who is not an (x). It involves speaking for your role, not necessarily speaking for others who also have that role. So, to use the same example as above: sometimes, if I say, “As a man, I don’t care about gender-labeling washrooms”, I am not speaking for men, but speaking in my role as a man, which may or may not generalize.
Benjamin L. S. Nelson 