Report on the Humanities

This is the draft of an article published in Planet S Magazine: May 24 - June 6, 2007 Volume 5: Issue 16

Many Canadian Universities are currently experiencing changes. At one time, members of the Sciences and the Fine Arts, the Humanities and the Applied Sciences, worked comfortably alongside one another. They each felt their field was being respected and given its due. Members of the “less practical” fields felt their work would be valued and accommodated because of an inherent worth – one not dependent on how much money they could bring the University. And it was. But now things are different. An anxious feeling has spread over a large and important part of our Universities.

The seeds of this overgrowth of insecurity in the humanities departments have been around for a while. For a long time now, English and Philosophy students, among others, could expect a certain response upon stating their majors: “So, what kind of job will that degree get you?” But rather than getting better over time, things have gotten worse.

The state of the humanities in Canadian Universities, to put it simply, is not good. Planet S spoke to Len Findlay, an English professor and director of the Humanities Research Unit, about the cluster of fields comprising the Humanities and its condition within the Canadian University system. Exactly what the humanities are and how their importance has been underestimated was a central point of the discussion.

“The humanities are a grouping of academic disciplines with strong historical ties to the liberal arts in the ancient world, to the rise of humanism in reaction against a pervasive and oppressive theology in early modern Europe, and to the development of the modern university over the course of the last four centuries or more. The humanities are usually thought of today as comprising philosophy, history, ancient and modern languages and literatures, and the secularized study of religions. The humanities are strongly text-based and multi-lingual,” Findlay describes.

Of course, most people seem to have an idea of what the humanities are. The problem, though, is that the common view of the humanities is not accurate enough to make it clear how relevant it is to society.

Answering this call for clarity, Findlay plows on. “They focus on the questions and capacities that make us fully and distinctively human: how we reflect, how we express ourselves to ourselves and others, and how we have performed these activities over time and in very different geographical and cultural settings. The humanities are an important part of the human story because they represent continuity with the past and also creative departure from it, to claim new freedoms--as with renaissance humanism—or to assist with understanding new realities. Women’s and Gender Studies, for instance, is often counted as one of the New Humanities which deals with the historical and contemporary consequences of patriarchy and misogyny; and Cultural Studies deals with popular cultural forms often disdained by cultural and intellectual elites resistant to the democratization of knowledge and the expanding access to culture supported by new technologies. The Digital Humanities are another emergent example of rigorous innovation.”

The importance of the humanities lies also in the example it sets. It acts as something that is good in itself, regardless of the kind of monetary rewards, among other external rewards, it may bring. It’s an example we would probably do good to follow in other aspects of our lives.

“The Humanities are important above all because they value enduring questions as well as topical answers, and because they refuse to reduce inquiry to the flavour of the moment, or to reduce value to money. Oscar Wilde was making a quintessentially humanist point when he defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” says Findlay.

Sadly though, Canadian Universities don’t seem to see things the same way. What those in the humanities see as one of its positive features – the fact it doesn’t aim at, or need, much monetary compensation to be valuable – is understood to be a negative one outside.

“The result of this is that in many universities in Canada, the Humanities have been shrunk in terms of tenured faculty, and travestied by academic managers as teaching basic skills with a pinch of cultural luster—the sort of thing that produces a grammatically sound agronomist or a chocolate dipped MBA off to interact with Asia or Africa.”

This trend will decrease the number of humanities students. And as Findlay suggested in pointing out the important role of the humanities in developing our abilities to reflect on ourselves and our ways of being, this would be a great tragedy for us all. And to make matters worse, the fewer number of students that decide to stick around will be confronted with a weakened educational program. Yet, despite this bleak situation, we should not see the humanities as a lost cause. There is, in fact, a lot that can be done to reverse this unfavorable trend.

“Within Canadian universities today, where corporatization, casualization of Humanities labour, and the commodification of all knowledge are rampant, the Humanities need to refuse the reduction of academic value to the ability to attract external funding.” This is where the Humanities Research Unit, of which Findlay is the director, comes in.

Some coordinated effort to disseminate information on the importance of the humanities is needed and the Research Unit continually does just that.

“The Humanities Research Unit gives scholars and graduate students on our campus support in their own individual and group endeavours, both within and across disciplines, while insisting on independence and diversity at a time when integrated planning threatens to produce and reward uniformity of attitude and attribute: integration as species loss, if you will, and planning as picking winners rather than supporting outcomes that must remain for now unclear and indeterminate.”

“The Unit is a very little engine, but it could, can, and will continue to raise questions in order to raise consciousness and enhance understanding of who we are, and why we are how we are,” says Findlay.

The Social Economy

This is the draft of an article published in Planet S Magazine: May 24 - June 6, 2007 Volume 5: Issue 16

There are two kinds of problems, to put it simplistically. One set can be approached with more research and advances in the sciences, or related fields. The spread of infectious disease, for example, is remedied by better treatment and prevention methods. If we need to discover a renewable energy resource, well, that just takes time and research. Some problems are technological and nothing more. The second set of problems is quite different. These problems do not depend on scientific failings, but on the failure of people to cooperate in long-term and sustainable ways. They are, essentially, social problems.

In 1968, Garrett Hardin published an influential paper called “The Tragedy of the Commons” in the journal Science. He described a sequence of events: There are a group of herders that own a large pasture in common. If any one herder gains an extra animal, his profits increase. But with every additional animal, the pasture is degraded for everyone and they all lose – at least in the long-run. So what is the herder to do? Well, if there is no coordination and everyone is left to act in their own individual interest, they will all get additional animals and eventually ruin the pasture for the rest as well as for themselves. Tragic, indeed.

This is a sort of parable on how the free market fails us when the goods are public. A public good like street lighting, for instance, just wouldn’t get produced if all we had was the free market. The reasoning goes: If everyone pays their share of the lighting costs, I won’t have to. The lights will be on at night and I can walk safely, a content free rider. But, of course, if everyone thought this way, the project would never get off the ground. So, the free market, or private sector, is just incapable of producing these kinds of goods. But don’t worry. There is another, growing, sector capable of doing so. And it has done so according to Nancy Neamtan, CEO of the Chantier de l’economie sociale (Task Force on the Social Economy). The Chantier is a network overseeing the work of various projects in the Social Economy, the alternative to the private sector, as well as to the public sector of government-produced goods.

“Social economy refers to enterprises that produce goods and services like any other business but that are run on the basis of very different principles. Social economy enterprises are collectively owned (coops, or non-profits, or mutuals), are democratically controlled and respond to collective needs rather than generating profit for outside investors,” Neamtan says.

Outside investors are much like the herders. They just can’t help but ruin the pastures of cooperative enterprises with their narrow self-interest.

“For all these reasons, Social Economy enterprises can do things that neither the private sector nor the public sector can or will do. In rural communities in the 30's agricultural cooperatives helped save agriculture in communities in many parts of Canada. Today in rural communities Social Economy enterprises are responding to a variety of needs - maintaining local services (food coops., funeral coops, daycare, homecare for the elderly, etc.) and are being used by local communities to develop their economy and maintain control over local resources (eg ecotourism, cultural initiatives, alternative agriculture etc).” This approach would fit well in Saskatchewan. We have a number of rural communities facing an extinction of sorts, and leaving it up to the free market, in the form of private investors and businesses, would only speed the process up. Neamtan suggests the methods of Social Economy enterprises would work here as well as they have elsewhere.

We should remember that the Social Economy is not only critical of the private sector. The public sector, led by government, is also lacking in some places. Although government-led projects generally avoid the tragedy of the commons, by legislating taxes on everyone for the common good, they nevertheless continually miss spots. Some projects need to be led by the people on the ground – a grassroots endeavor – because they, better than a distant government, know how resources should be allocated.

“In other cases rural communities choose collective enterprises because they want to maintain control over their environment. For example, a big debate in Quebec presently is who should be developing renewable energy and, particularly, wind energy: the private sector that gives token returns to farmers to be able to use their land; the public sector through Hydro-Quebec; or the Social Economy through locally owned and managed wind energy coops that would reinvest profits back into the community? The jury is still out on that one.”

Continuing on the theme that the Social Economy solves certain problems even the public sector can’t, Neamtan says: “In the field of daycare, the majority of the Quebec daycare system which is universal and accessible (7$ a day) is delivered through parent-controlled non-profits. International studies show that the quality is better - quality is guaranteed when parents are in control, as it is their kids that benefit from the service. And government gets a better return on its investment because all dollars are invested in assuring quality care and none is skimmed off the top for private profit. Plus these daycares are able to adapt to local realities and local needs.”

Our environment is a shared good, and an obvious one at that. It is our metaphorical pasture, with literal pastures here and there. And, of course, the private sector cannot help but degrade it. What incentive does a company have to be environmentally-friendly when it gains all the profit of negligent waste disposal and shares the costs of a depleted environment with everyone else?

“Social economy enterprises are more able to integrate environmental concerns because they are not profit-driven. The social economy movement has worked closely with the environmental movement to try to assure that environmental concerns are integrated into all aspects of what we do. Many social economy enterprises have emerged in the environmental sector, particularly in the field of recycling, but more and more innovation is going on - for example, the new trend in eco-design where young designers are working with social economy enterprises to produce high fashion from recycled materials. Ecotourism which respects the environment is another field in which the social economy is beginning to flourish.”

The Social Economy also helps integrate people that have been, for various reasons, excluded from the workforce. The idea is that they are resources neglected by the free market just as much as the environment and public day cares.

“Many social economy enterprises have been created to integrate marginalized groups into the labour force, be they youth in difficulty, the handicapped, etc. Though these people are not considered 'productive' in a profit-driven labour market, they have a potential to be active participants in the economy and, through a non-profit structure, we have been able to allow thousands to become productive individuals.”

There are countless movements falling in the category of the Social Economy. They are not affiliated with the public sector, because they are democratic structures composed of regular people with specific concerns. And they are not with the private sector because the goals are emphatically non-profit. But despite the nobility of these various projects, there is a need for some organization to coordinate them all for maximum effect. This is the mandate of the organization Chantier that Neamtan heads.

“The Chantier de l'économie sociale is a network of networks whose mission is to promote and develop the social economy. Our membership and Board of Directors is made up of networks of collective enterprises (recycling businesses, daycare, housing coops. community radio etc); networks of community economic development or local development organizations from rural and urban communities and social movements that share our vision of the need to build a more democratic and equitable economy; the union movement; environmental movement; women's movement; community movement etc. By bringing together these various networks, we have been able to show the important role that the social economy plays in our communities, to build new collective tools such as investment funds dedicated to social economy, to gain strength as a movement and to become an important actor in debates over social and economic development in Quebec.”

We should hope as Canadians that this ethic of cooperation towards goals without a dollar sign continues to spread. We should also hope that more faith – the kind normally given to the private and the public sector – would be given the third route of the Social Economy. It seems very clear now that if many of our social goals are to be realized, we'll have to practice the kind of cooperation the Social Economy advocates.

Global warming and Darfur

Somewhere in The Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume writes about the conditions that make the rules of justice necessary. If human beings were preternaturally kind and generous towards one another - if we treated others like they were one of our relations – we wouldn’t need any principles of justice. Our natural instincts would do the work of justice. Also, if we remained greedy, avaricious, and competitive, but happened to live in a world of plenty, where every one of our needs would be satisfied without much delay and without fear of depletion, justice would once again prove useless. In such an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t need principles of justice to allocate goods and defend property rights.

I was reminded of this when I read an article by Stephan Faris in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly called “The Real Roots of Darfur”. His argument is that the conflict between the African farmers and the Arab herders in the western region of Sudan, the Darfur, is the result of a depletion of resources due to global warming rather than a difference in race and the belief that one is superior to the other.

According to Faris, in the not-to-distant past the farmers and herders coexisted without tension.

“Until the rains began to fail, the sheik’s people lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest.”

But our factories, power plants, and automobiles, have altered this balance.

“Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support both herder and farmer…with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land – even fallow land – for fear it would be ruined by passing herds...In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs began banding together to wrest their own [tribal lands] from the black farmers.”

These developments began a series of of events leading to the killing of over 200,000, and the displacement of over 3 million, non-Arab Africans.

No Rain on Iran!

If I were a protestor, those would be my words. I would scream them and speak them; write them on placards and at the bottom of sticky note memos during work. I would mutter them in a whisper to myself; doodle them on loose-leaf to be left for strangers to find; and send mass emails with those words as the subject line.

They appeal to my economical side. You see, each one of the letters in the first two words was used in the construction of the second two. Recycling is very important to me – what with global warming and all.

But what does it mean? Rain, Iran? Is their a connection? Of course!

One day, the United States may defend an attack on Iran with a certain pretense. “The Iranians,” they say, “are suffering a stifling system and need our help. We are compelled, for their own good, to attack their leaders, their nuclear reactors, and, unfortunately, their cities.” It’s a pretense, of course, because the goal is not really the good of Iranians. But that’s another issue.

For now I’m concerned with the belief – whether genuinely held or not – that an invasion of Iran would help Iranians. It wouldn’t. They don’t need this leadership from above. Your missiles (your rain) will only drown out the voices of dissent they have developed for themselves. You can bring nothing but chaos. So refrain. Go away, for now at least. Come back another day.

Haleh Esfandiari

On a recent visit to Iran, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American Director of the Middle East Program at the Smithsonian Museum's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was unjustifiably arrested. She has been sent to Evin prison where the Montreal photagrapher, Zahra Kazemi, was raped and beated to death in July of 2003.

A Washington Post article says this may be a reaction to the Bush administration's $75 million program to promote democracy in Iran. Perhaps Iran sees this as a prelude to regime-change (specifically in favour of a pro-democracy and pro-America regime).