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The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | December 15, 2023

No More “Climate Justice!” It’s Time to Share the Losses

Back in 1988, very few people in the activist world were working on the climate crisis or, as we called it back then, the Greenhouse Effect. But I had the good fortune to encounter a group of political visionaries who were working hard, not just to touch the conscience of government but to do something that was even harder back then: convince mainstream environmental groups and their leaders that climate would be the defining environmental issue of our age.

Chief among these individuals was David Lewis, my political mentor, the firewood collector, giant and car repairman, not the retired NDP leader. With the publication of Our Common Future by the United Nations, the results of a two-year commission conducted by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the profile of global environmental issues, ozone depletion, migration, chemical drift and climate, temporarily eclipsed the parochial issues and locality-specific concerns.

The scientific community was quick to make that switch in emphasis because its members could see that ocean acidification, ocean hypoxia, global heating and ozone depletion could wipe out ecosystems and species without there being any direct encounter with human beings. Or, as David put it, “if we fail to arrest the destabilization of planetary life support systems, these trees will die, whether they are cut down or not.”

But David and his group, the FOOLS (Friends of the Ozone Layer), were outliers in the environmental movement, especially in British Columbia. There were, of course, exceptions, such as the future English King Charles, Greenpeace International and its founder, Jim Bohlen, along with a handful of others but, especially in British Columbia, where he and I organized, the hostility with which our message was greeted by the mainline environmental groups nearly matched that of the fossil fuel, disposable aerosol and foam packaging industries. And ultimately, Jim, David’s and my insistence on prioritizing global environmental issues over parochial issues in our analysis, during the periods we exerted substantive control over the BC Green Party (1989-91, 1993-2000) helped to provoke the take-over and purge conducted by the eco-courtiers in 2000.

While I have already written another essay on the institutional hostility we faced from the emerging eco-courtier class, and their corruption and collusion with the fossil fuel industry, I want to re-examine the politics of BC Wild (the name of the Sunoco-funded coalition of environmental groups tasked with suppressing the climate debate in BC) through the lens not of petty corruption, but of class and culture.

The Other David Lewis

David Lewis was not a rich man. A university dropout, he lived in a small, modest home in Krestova, a remote rural community that was once the centre of the Doukhobor Sons of Freedom movement. He took odd jobs fixing cars and chopping wood and, when there was a big construction contract in the region, he could get temporary construction work. The first time the consort of the patrician Swedish Green Party leader, Per Gahrton, Ulla Lemberg, met Lewis during an official visit, she was transfixed by the hardness of his palms, their deep callouses and the dirt and congealed engine oil under his fingernails that he hadn’t managed to scrub away for the press conference. She could not stop talking about David’s hands for the rest of their official visit, noting that there was no one so genuinely working class in her party, even in the Far North.

Within a year, with only me and Jim to defend him, David was pushed out of his spokesperson position in the BC Greens, with Jim forlornly remarking, “I think David Lewis is the only person who has ever truly spoken for this party.” David’s charismatic style had made him a darling of Vancouver live radio and decision to attend Globe 90, the UN conference in Vancouver, selling bottles of “sustainable development” as a nineteenth-century vaudevillian huckster, complete with an antique portable sales counter with telescoping legs, had landed him on the national news as a spokesperson for the party. But his willingness to incorporate Marxian ideas of class struggle into his media statements and emotional style of sharing his fear that humanity would not rise to the occasion were frightening to many in the party and even more in the larger environmental movement.

Pressure began to mount from environmentalists outside the party to give David the proverbial hook. This pressure came largely from environmentalists already in the tank for Mike Harcourt’s New Democratic Party, the obvious government-in-waiting as the forty-year Social Credit political dynasty entered its terminal phase.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, BC’s environmental movement was dominated by wilderness “preservation” groups, comprising local volunteer-run, subscription-based civil society organizations like Friends of Clayoquot Sound and the West Arm Watershed Alliance, as well as organizations that, while technically working on a single area, had gained an international funding base and professionalized leadership, such as Friends of the Stein Valley and the Valhalla Wilderness Society.

These latter groups, along with the branch offices of international environmental groups like the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, dominated the stage and were, largely, staffed by members of the incipient commissar class who were also functioning, at this point, as eco-courtiers within the (since 1987) Third Way government in waiting, the New Democrats.

These groups channeled money from all over the world into fighting to preserve the last of BC’s old growth forest from logging. While groups like WWF and Greenpeace had many irons in the fire, their global temperate rainforest preservation campaigns were invariably headquartered in Vancouver or Victoria and the delivery of “results” in BC affected the finances of the entire organizations and all their campaigns around the world.

Return of the Seekers

While David did not oppose the efforts to fence-off ecosystems from mining, logging and other industrial development—after all, these ecosystems functioned to protect biodiversity and absorb atmospheric carbon, mitigating and slowing the collapse of planetary life support systems—he did object the discourse the Big Green groups were popularizing on multiple fronts.

First, these groups did not merely use terms like “save” and “preserve” when they talked about the stretches of forest and alpine they were seeking to have declared parks; they often amplified these claims by suggesting ecosystems would be held in their present state “forever” by an act of the state. David felt that this was both dishonest, given that his models showed that forests ecosystems would need to move nine times faster than the fastest forests had previously moved in the past to adapt to rapid climate change, and because this discourse of permanence directly undermined our movement’s warnings of impending catastrophe.

Second, the sales pitch for these new parks contained much that ran counter to the idea that areas were being preserved due to an ecological imperative. Organizations like Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WC²) went beyond marketing calendars, posters and other forms of low-end merchandise depicting the threatened ecosystems as aesthetically pleasing. They produced lavish coffee table books, featuring the art of photorealist wildlife artists like Robert Bateman and my father, Ron Parker.

Movement leaders, like Joe Foy, would juxtapose the idea that a place like the Walbran Valley merited preservation because it was “untouched” while at the same time exhorting supporters to “get out there” and camp and hike in the regions. Indeed, Foy’s WC²went beyond encouraging eco-tourism. They use the illicit building of eco-tourist infrastructure as a means of strengthening their hand in government negotiations. The building campsites, trails, bridges and moorages became key activities of big environmental groups, especially those based on Vancouver Island.

In this way, David argued, environmentalists were speaking out of both sides of their mouths: touting the pristine, unchanged and allegedly unchangeable character of these areas that situated them outside the economy, while concurrently seeking to build an industry built around the recreational gratification of a particular class.

In later years, during David’s extended break from political activity (1991-97) I supplemented this criticism with the additional observations that rather than focusing on working class jobs being threatened by the logging industry ecosystem damage, such as the commercial fishery and canneries, and working class recreation, such as hunting and trapping, the economic activity that was touted by Big Green groups was eco-tourism, a passtime mainly of wealthy, educated urbanites that tended to provide low wage, non-union hospitality industry employment in rural areas.

In other words, the environmental movement’s focus on wilderness “preservation” had two pernicious aspects that interacted synergistically. First, it minimized the sense of urgency and impact concerning the Greenhouse Effect.

Second, it caused a reversion in the class politics of the movement to a pre-Cold War state. Prior to the Cold War, the environmental movement, as epitomized in the Sierra Club, was a quasi-religious bourgeois movement focused on the spiritual and aesthetic experiences wealthy urban elites could have in landscapes cleared of their human populations. Its international board of directors included leading lights of the Yankee patrician Republican Party elite of the time, like Teddy Roosevelt and Prescott Bush (scion of the Bush dynasty).

During the Cold War, following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the movement had taken a working class turn, focusing on the health of workers and of low-income communities. It championed farm workers with its calls for pesticide bans and working class neighbourhoods disproportionately affected by industrial disasters and waste. It gained major working class allies in farmworker union leaders like Cesar Chavez and Charan Gill.

But now it called not just for industrial workers to accept less work and lower-paying work but also more socially servile and submissive work as is axiomatic in the hospitality industry.

And when environmentalists faced accusations and criticisms from the industrial working class of the North American periphery, their response was typically not one of acknowledgement or compensation but of denial and obfuscation. Environmentalists denied that there would be any economic cost to what they proposed and instead baselessly asserted that in a green economy, everyone would become more prosperous, a delusion that finally reached its crescendo in the LEAP Manifesto of 2015.

The Rationality and Decency of the Proletariat

David, being a member of the peripheral industrial working class, himself, understood exactly how such assertions would play. Industrial workers would reasonably assume that when the costs of something were being downplayed or denied, it meant that they and not the urban bourgeoisie and commissar classes would be the ones to shoulder those costs on their own.

And so he proposed a radical departure in discourse, one that I am ashamed to say I did not have the courage to follow him on. His master term in the interviews he gave in 1989-91 was “share the losses.” Both climate change and the economic transition necessary to limit it would undoubtedly produce losses. And he felt that the only way to gain the support of the industrial working class was to stop trying to bamboozle them and present them with the cold, hard facts of the high cost of transition and a plan for sharing that cost fairly.

That’s because David believed in a politics that I did not yet understand, the politics that Bernie Sanders brought to the coal towns of West Virginia and for which coal miners voted in large numbers. You see: what liberals call “people voting against their own interests” is nothing of the kind. Working class voters are more altruistic than the bourgeoisie and the commissars. Even though they have less, they are more willing to make material sacrifices to bring about a moral order in which they believe. White working class voters demeaned and denigrated as stupid and ignorant are no more stupid than low-income Woke urban progressives working as baristas. The difference is that their culture contains a greater respect for, and ethos of, personal and collective sacrifice.

The Twenty-first Century Degradation of Climate Discourse

But, as it stands, the environmental movement did not listen to David Lewis and things have only worsened. When environmental organizations decided to become “climate champions,” in the late 1990s, they retired “the Greenhouse Effect” and replaced it with “climate change.” Whereas the former term was one that, by its very structure, educated people about the mechanism by which the climate was destabilizing, the one that replaced it severed the term from any theory of causation, making it easier for climate denialist ideas to creep in.

Whereas disputing the Greenhouse Effect entailed explaining why heavier molecules were not trapping heat in the atmosphere, disputing “climate change” simply entailed offering some half-baked theory offering some other cause of the change, or baldfaced denial that change was taking place.

And because the environmental movement’s leadership now deemed regular folks too stupid to understand how their atmosphere was changing, an appeal to reason was replaced with an appeal to authority, “trust The Science!” And indeed those touting this new approach began to suggest that it was problematic for regular people to educate themselves, examine evidence, etc. and that uppity proles who did that were risible figures, fools seduced by low production value youtube videos into a fantasy world. Best to advise the proles to not even try to understand!

And, as the first decade of the twenty-first century closed, environmentalists hit upon an even more disastrous term in which to encapsulate their discourse: “climate justice.” “Climate justice” packaged belief that carbon emissions were causing the climate to worsen with a set of unpopular, punitive government policies that targeted the working class of the Global North’s extractive periphery for special punishment through increased transportation costs, destruction of the used vehicle market, increased costs for basic heating and refrigeration and the singling-out of agriculture for special financial penalties.

It is no wonder, in our present moment that, even as extreme weather events also disproportionately ravage the property and livelihoods of the rural working class, “climate denial” increases, not just because of reaction formation but because “climate science” has been conflated with a set of punitive taxation measures targeting that class.

We Must Share the Losses

But it does not have to be this way. There is still time. As David would say if he were here, “we cannot lose faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.” And that is why I exhort us all to find a just and equitable plan to share the losses and save the planet.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite | December 11, 2023

Consciousness of Decline, the Afterlife of Oswald Spengler and My Exit From Anglo America

“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

These words by Italian novelist Italo Calvino capture one of the most important superstructural elements in geopolitics, a phenomenon whose study was pioneered by Simon Fraser University’s Paul Dutton in his study of Charlemagne’s Empire, the first Holy Roman Empire: consciousness of decline.

Like all the truly great academics with whom I have studied (a small but not insignificant subset of the great intellectuals I have known), Dutton came to a profound knowledge of the whole world by studying one thing therein comprehensively. Dutton argued that while the Carolingian Empire, which lasted for only five generations, between 768 and 889 CE, was always a dodgy prospect from an economic and logistical perspective, a key factor in its decline was essentially immaterial (my fellow Marxists would likely distinguish it as superstructural but let’s not split that hair here).

Dutton’s argument was that Carolingian courtiers and aristocrats, especially after Charlemagne’s coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE, were intellectually shaped by an emergent historiography that sought to explain the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire between 395 and 554 CE. This caused an excessive vigilance in looking for signs of an incipient decline and fall in their present. What might be viewed as a setback or interregnum within a Chinese imperial historiography, which chronicles multiple periods of fragmentation followed by consolidation, was viewed, in the Carolingian world, as a harbinger of the end.

Dutton began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the role of dreams in the Carolingian court. One such dream of ultimate decline was the subject of an early essay of mine on the nature of hope. The apocryphal dream of Charlemagne was a descriptive composition written at the end of the empire and then backdated and retrojected to the year 813. The dream lives on today in literary form, forming the basis of JRR Tolkien’s “four ages” schema which structured Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.

But this apocryphal dream was one of many dreams, both apocryphal and real, that visited Carolingian courtiers and seemed to forebode the empire’s inevitable decline and fall. The Vision of Charlemagne (the name of the document in question), narrated imperial fragmentation as unidirectional and cherry-picked political events to do so. It depicted only centrifugal forces, when the Carolingian realms were divided, never centripetal ones, when kingdoms were consolidated and division undone.

Consciousness of decline, by conditioning political decisions with a sense of hopelessness and desperation, is not merely able to accelerate and intensify a material decline; it can, in my view, by itself, cause decline in the face of mere setbacks and the anxiety those setbacks produce. And the desperation caused by consciousness of decline is as or more likely to result in a state overplaying its hand, to prevent a temporary loss as it is to produce resignation and apathy. Usually, societies experiencing consciousness of decline will alternate between the two, following acts of grandiose risk-taking with periods of apathy and despair.

One society, so gripped, was the early twentieth century German Empire, a society overlapping and aspiring to the same territorial boundaries as the Carolingian Empire a thousand years before. That society had an eloquent spokesman for this consciousness, the highly influential authoritarian vitalist intellectual, Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s argument was that the Western civilization had reached the stage that the Roman civilization had reached at the beginning of the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar that brought about the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.

Spengler argued, in the binaristic, catastrophist thinking emblematic of consciousness of decline, that because the West was on the same trajectory of Rome and proceeding down the same path, there was only one thing that could delay or perhaps even arrest its fall: the end of democracy and the rise of a charismatic Caesar-like authoritarian militarist leader who would institute “Caesarism.” Needless to say, Spengler’s beliefs conditioned the Nazi movement, not just indirectly through Mein Kampf, which it helped to inspire; it was a popular book among the intellectuals of German authoritarianism, inside and outside the Nazi Party.

Ultimately, the pessimistic desperation we associate with consciousness of decline, we can see in German society thereafter as both the Communists and Nazis saw the libertinism of the Weimar Republic as the equivalent of the putative “decadence” of the late Roman Republic. That desperation, the need to immediately stop the decline, cauterize the supposed wound did not just affect German election outcomes and street battles; it conditioned Hitler’s military strategy, especially in the later years of the war when periods of desperate brinksmanship were followed by abject despair and resignation, culminating in the wanton destruction of infrastructure and murder of civilian populations and then, finally, the murder-suicides of the Nazi leadership.

Ultimately, two material victors of the Second World War were states that, for all their flaws, lacked this consciousness of decline in the generation following the war. The USSR and USA did not begin to experience consciousness of decline until the 1970s and, whatever its profound flaws, the Reagan presidency was successful in dispelling this consciousness at least for a while.

It was not until the American victory over their Soviet rivals that consciousness of decline began creeping into America’s imperial court on a long-term basis. At the same time as the Third Way began downwardly adjusting the material and social expectations of America’s middle and working classes, a debate erupted between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington on the pages of the prestigious American conservative imperialist journal, Foreign Policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that Pax Americana was now global and permanent, that free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy had won the day and constituted the final phase in human evolution. But just as Spengler was no doubt reacting against Georg Hegel, who had made the same argument about the German state, and on whose thinking Fukuyama had based his book, Fukuyama’s claims elicited a neo-Spenglerian response.

Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argued that, contrary to Fukuyama’s theory, the world was about to become more divided and enter a period of multi-polar conflict among fundamentally different and irreconcilable “civilizations” and that America had but a short period of time before it became heir to the long undoing of the enemy sovereigns who had submitted to them.

Soon, Huntington predicted, America would be beset on all sides by civilizations with fundamentally different values, that would grow stronger, demographically and economically and soon outpace America and its vassals. The Chinese, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Japanese, Indian: these civilizations could soon become existential threats to America. To survive, Huntington argued, America would need to retrench; it would need to consolidate its military resources in its core territory and vassal states, reinvigorate American industrial and energy production, fight strategic wars at its margins to slow the loss of territory, especially its loss to Muslim civilization. It would also need to retrench socially by reducing liberal pluralism, a key source of its weakness, and rediscover its identity as a Christian civilization.

Huntington included some case studies in his work. Whatever one may think of the man’s values, the predictive power of his model is evident as the histories of Turkey and Ukraine continue to unfold as he predicted three decades ago. But it is not events in Black Sea states that ultimately made Huntington’s thinking hegemonic among American foreign policy thinkers. It was, of course, the events of September 11^th, 2001.

Whether it is the Trump movement’s focus on internal reindustrialization and energy extraction or the Democratic Party’s and Bush Administration’s proxy wars and military coups in the imperial periphery, America’s elite decision-makers are all gripped with consciousness of decline, of the neo-Spenglerian vision of Samuel Huntington, alternating between episodes of brinksmanship and shows of power and wallowing in self-indulgent despair and decadence.

Consciousness of decline is something that afflicts an empire, a civilization and its imperial culture. So naturally, this consciousness does not recognize the Great Lakes or forty-ninth parallel as any kind of barrier when it comes to America’s crankiest toady, Canada. The Canada-US border has been no barrier to the spread of this consciousness of decline, but that does not mean Canadian decline consciousness lacks a specifically Canadian inflection.

The long-term alliance between elites in the Liberal Party of Canada and in the Communist Party of China, dating back to Pierre Trudeau’s pilgrimages to the tomb of Norman Bethune means that Canadian decline consciousness is as likely to show up as supplication to Chinese power as it is to bellicosity in Ukraine.

Canada’s elites vacillate between desperately toadying to the rising power of China and the declining power of the US. Our country, which has never existed as anything other than a vassal state to one empire or another, now behaves towards the world’s great powers, be they India, China or the US, like a strapster, one of those small yappy dogs that runs up to you and decides, seemingly at random, to either bite, lick or urinate on you.

Certain that they cannot actually improve the lot of Canadians and that our country is in decline, Canadian political debate has been reduced to a blame game. We are a post-political state whose leaders, rather than trying to solve problems, either insist that the problems do not exist and that the people pointing them out are ungrateful liars or explain that the problem were caused by the other team who must now be punished for screwing things up.

So, although Canada is wealthier, more powerful and has the resources to turn things around, I am exiting North American society because it has become consumed by a consciousness of decline, because societies that believe they are in decline are scary, depressing and unpredictable places to live.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite | September 25, 2023

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction? (Part #2)

Forgetting the Centrality of Culture in Drug Use

In 1987, the CBC classic TV series Degrassi Junior High aired an episode about the principal character, Joey convincing his younger classmates that he was a drug dealer and selling them a random collection of vitamins and pain killers under the pretense that they were psychoactive recreational drugs. Much hilarity ensued as the characters consuming the fake drugs acted out in increasingly disinhibited and bizarre ways, based solely on their expectations of how young people on drugs are expected to act that they had learned from watching TV.

The episode was a tribute to a study conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose results were published in Psychology Today in 1981. The psychology department had taken control of a campus pub and lured students into an experiment conducted under false pretenses. The study was marketed to the students as a study of young adult social behaviour but, in fact, it was a study of the scale of the placebo effect with respect to intoxicants. While some students were served drinks with the normal alcoholic content, others were served drinks with no alcohol. Their behaviour was almost indistinguishable. They behaved in increasingly disinhibited and sexually aggressive ways, the more they drank irrespective of the amount of alcohol they actually consumed, but correlated strongly to the number of drinks they had downed.

Brigham Young University, which observes stricter anti-substance use rules than the Mormon Church as a whole, prohibits its students from drinking tea and coffee, as well as alcohol and has succeeded in having the possession of electric kettles prohibited in every private apartment complex that wishes to rent to its students. Nevertheless, if you visit the campus ice cream parlour late at night, on Friday or Saturday, you find young adults behaving not that differently than the kids at the University of Washington. Because Mormons know how to enjoy a sugar high like no other people.

Expectations of the effects of a substance profoundly condition how humans experience the substance and how we behave after using it, especially in social contexts. And the main thing that forms those expectations is the culture in which we are situated.

Once upon a time, the fact that culture, as much or more than chemistry conditions the behaviour of intoxicated people was common knowledge, something to be joked about in the 1980s. But with the rise of crack, an admittedly more immediately intoxicating and addictive way of using cocaine than insufflation, society went a different route.
Differences in cocaine use, abuse and addiction patterns between people living in housing projects and people working on Wall Street were increasingly explained chemically rather than socially. Crack was slightly chemically different from regular cocaine and, all other things being equal, did produce a shorter, more intense high. But wealthy cocaine users had been “free basing” cocaine (i.e. doing crack) for years already, with largely the same social and medical experiences as those snorting it.

Much more important, though, the Reagan Administration and the first Bush presidency, had ideological reasons for suggesting that physical differences, not social differences accounted for America’s diverging cocaine cultures.

The idea that black people were physically different from white people and that this was mirrored in the (actually quite minor) chemical differences between coca-leaf derivatives, brown-coloured crack rocks, and their lighter-coloured cousin, powder cocaine became the sole explanation for the major differences between the cocaine-using community on Wall Street and the one down the road in Harlem. The neoliberal austerity programs ravaging low-income communities and their cultural impact could be factored-out if we removed culture from how we analyze substance use and abuse, as could the massive windfall profits Reagan’s deregulation of the stock market were producing on Wall Street.

We became dumber about drugs in the 1980s and lost a good deal of common knowledge about the profound impact of culture in shaping how people feel and what they will do both to obtain drugs and once they are under their influence. Ultimately, the effects of a drug on a person are a complex dance of culture, neurology and chemistry. And if we factor any of those three things out, we make bad drug policy.

Some Historical Examples

In the nineteenth century, one of the reasons residential schools seemed like such a good idea to social reformers was the rise of the “drunken Indian” trope. Social reformers saw an epidemic of alcoholism ripping through Indigenous communities, destroying their social fabric and sought to act in a variety of ways. But the story was more complex.

While it is certainly true that the virgin soil epidemics, colonization and war had traumatized many people and communities, the reality was far more complex than just addiction caused by trauma. The places where drunkenness was viewed as a dangerous epidemic sweeping Indigenous communities were all places that had no prior history of alcohol use. Epidemics of drunkenness were generally not reported by Spanish colonizers in the Mexico Valley and Yucatan Peninsula were alcohol was already a popular intoxicant.

Instead, the places where epidemics of drunkenness were reported were in North America, where the use of intoxicants was based around very different traditions. In these regions, hallucinogenic plants were the preferred intoxicants and, aside from a small number of holy men and women who used them habitually, their use was generally confined to major bacchanalian festivals that took place just a few times a year, like the Huron/Wendat “going out of your head” festival.

These long term, stable societies were based around seasonal (often centred on the spring and fall wild mushroom harvesting seasons) binge use in which people used drugs in ways Mikhail Bakhtin associated with carnival. Pre-existing North American drug culture was based around habitual use by a small subset of the elite and seasonal binge use followed by weeks or months of abstinence.

When alcohol arrived, it was initially fitted into pre-existing consumption patterns before new cultures of drinking grew up. So, when Europeans encountered Indigenous alcohol use, it was when they witnessed a village-wide or confederacy-wide episode of binge-drinking, a multi-day bender that shut down the economy and society. Rather than seeing this as episodic, they, based on their own drinking cultures, assumed they were watching a horrifying decline of whole societies into drunkenness and abjection.

If there is one particular sort of drug whose consumption we can see as culturally conditioned, it would have to be central nervous system stimulants, such as coca, caffeine and amphetamines.

When colonists arrived in Peru, coca’s primary use was as an appetite suppressant and energy booster for people engaged in seasonal manual labour building imperial infrastructure. It is not simply that Andean peasants consumed coca at a lower molarity than one finds in cocaine, it was seen, in the heartland of the Inca Empire, as work drug of the peasant class. Its recreational use was off the radar, especially for commoners because of its strong association with repetitive toil.

And when coca first came on the scene in Victorian North America, its main uses were as an anaesthetic and as a tonic for stomach ailments and energy drink for the health conscious in beverages such as Coca Cola. Cocaine’s recreational use gradually spread outward from the medical profession as new cultures of elite use slowly, haltingly came into being over decades.

As supplies of coca declined following its criminalization in the 1920s and the destruction of the Dutch cocaine plantations in Indonesia during decolonization, America cast about for new powerful work drugs designed to improve concentration and productivity and adopted the Nazis’ strategy of synthesizing methamphetamine and other forms of speed as a cocaine alternative. Shockingly large portions of the American and Japanese populations were amphetamine users during the 1950s but no recreational culture developed because the drugs were associated with work.

The rise of amphetamines as primarily recreational drugs took place in the 1990s when youth cultures reinterpreted stimulants as disinhibiting, recreational and hedonistic, instead of focusing, study-oriented and ascetic. This happened largely by coincidence as the mass diagnosis of children with ADHD, which was treated with prescription amphetamines, coincided with the popularization of MDMA as a party drug. As young people discovered that their study drugs could function as a cheap MDMA alternative, drug cultures shifted. Now, a drug that had, for decades, made people more focused, diligent and self-controlled now made them flighty and hedonistic without a single atom of the actual drugs changing.

An interesting footnote: in Thailand, local methamphetamine is often mixed with caffeine to give it an extra kick, something that seems risible to North Americans who cannot understand why one would add a work drug to a fun drug.

I would be belabouring the point unnecessarily to provide further examples but those interested might want to look at the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony and the hot chocolate pub scene in early modern Europe for other examples.

The Worship of Self-Harm and Self-Harmers

I want to suggest that if we want to see drug-fueled madness, death and misery actually decline in our society, we need to think about both the cultures of drug use within our society and the cultural views of drugs in society at large.

Our society appears to be going through a secularized version of what was called the Athlete of God phenomenon in early Christianity. Flamboyant self-harmers, whether shooting fentanyl or chopping off their genitals are, on one hand, thought of as oracles, special people with special rights who cannot be obstructed on their special path. Yet, on the other hand, are permitted to live in states of terrible ill health, material deprivation and physical and psychological misery because this is their enlightened choice, a choice so profound that no non-oracle can understand it.

In other words, we have a double consciousness about drug users: they are concurrently infallible oracles with a special path to the truth and, on the other, people whose death and misery we are bending over backwards to facilitate.

We have also effectively made drug-user a full-time job, a vocation that people can publicly proclaim and receive applause and the chorus of “You’re so brave!” that anyone engaged in flamboyant acts of self-harm receives from our mainstream media and community leaders.

I do not have the solution to this problem. The best I can do is describe the problem better. If there is one thing we are learning in the twenty-first century, it is that we need to pay more attention to the writing of Antonio Gramsci and other who remind us that the state is not very powerful by itself, relative to the institutions and culture of the society it seeks to govern. Because I do not believe that, by itself, the state can do much to arrest this tailspin. What we need is a social movement that rejects the progressive turn of worshipping self-harm and self-harmers without returning to the prohibitionist ethos whose failure produced the original harm reduction movement.

Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | September 9, 2023

After Twenty-Five Years, Is It Time for Second Look at Harm Reduction (Part #1)

If you are just here for the actual article, skip ahead of this first section and go to section two, Denormalization Revisited. If you are already familiar with my writing on denormalization and caste-making, skip ahead to the Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars.

Retention Fatigue or Why Drug Policy Now?

There is no doubt that many reading this blog have been faithful readers since before 2020, before I departed from the progressive consensus on gender identity. Since then, my reading audience has shifted and I have had to think carefully about how to manage this shift. Not only do I continue to lose readers who identify with the contemporary left, I keep gaining readers who are identified (often against their will) with the contemporary right. And there is no sign that this shift process is going to end any time soon.

Furthermore, as I continue to exit the left social scene, even as I grow more committed to some kind of Eco-Marxism as my personal politics, distance is allowing me to gain perspective on issues where I have not publicly questioned the orthodoxies of the left. When I discover another issue where I am now out of step with the left, I am faced with a practical dilemma: if I write about my thoughts, how many of my old readers will I lose? And how many new readers will I gain?

For that reason, I have been cautious about raising yet another issue on which I am out of accord with progressives, always worried that my next unorthodox opinion will be the final straw for someone and that I will lose another reader, another comrade or another friend.

But after three years of living like this, I am done. I am sick to death of walking on eggshells, wondering if my next unorthodox view will produce another cancelation campaign that gets me another blizzard of hate mail from people who were my friends until five seconds ago and gets my loyal friends harassed and threatened. I cannot handle this slow process of cancelation continuing indefinitely. For months now, I have actually been exaggerating how many conservative views and conservative associates I have just so that the people who are on the fence about canceling me will just get the fuck on with it. So now, fuck it! Drugs!

Denormalization Revisited

Two years into the Covid epidemic, I departed from the increasingly untenable progressive consensus concerning Covid vaccines, not with respect to their efficacy but rather the public policies concerning vaccination in my article, “Denormalization: From Failed Public Health Strategy to a Path to a Liberal Majority.”

In the fall of 2021, we learned that vaccine passes were not effectively limiting the spread of Omicron and later Covid variants because, while vaccination typically made Covid symptoms less severe, sometimes saving lives and preventing permanent disability, it did not have a significant impact on transmissibility. Governments’ reactions to this news were perverse, to say the least.

Rather than abandoning VaxPasses, our federal and provincial governments rolled out more restrictive policies, further abridging the assembly and mobility rights of unvaccinated or insufficiently vaccinated Canadians. When questioned about the efficacy of these policies in limiting the spread of Covid, our governments were disturbingly frank, largely admitting that these measures’ primary purpose was to stigmatize and punish those who continued to refuse the vaccines. Our leaders seemed eerily okay with just admitting the passes were a cudgel, designed to coerce recalcitrant holdouts.

Except that I refused to accept that this was even what was going on. What anyone with the most basic knowledge of the social science of public health knows is that by de-normalizing something, like smoking, for instance, you actually make that thing more popular with people who are already marginalized, who are already stigmatized and understood to be either at society’s margins or entirely outside society. And, as anyone familiar with the social determinants of health could have predicted, the Vaxpasses intensified and solidified both vaccine hesitancy and opposition to the passes themselves, ultimately culminating in the Freedom Convoy.

Had the government actually wished to promote vaccination among people of faith, manual labourers, rural Canadians and non-Indigenous racialized Canadians, it would have involved conservative faith leaders, popular rural politicians, grassroots labour leaders and small business owners in forestry, mining and oil, in making tailored appeals to vaccine hesitant populations.

But that was not, I believe, their agenda. It was instead, to create a group of pestilent “deplorables,” to engage in caste-making.

The Collapse of Vancouver’s Four Pillars

Canadian cities and those of America’s Blue State Pacific Coast are experiencing not just increases but increasing rates of increase in drug addiction, overdose deaths, homelessness and street violence, an increasing portion of which is disorganized violence of which individuals experiencing addiction and mental health struggles are both an ever-increasing proportion of both perpetrators and victims.

It is now twenty-five years since my city, Vancouver, adopted its Four Pillars policy on drugs as part of our decision to be one of the first cities in the Western Hemisphere to embrace harm reduction as the basis of our drug policy. I was one of the thousands of Vancouverites who chalked this up as a victory. Now, we thought, things will start turning around in the Downtown Eastside. At last, homelessness, prostitution, addiction, disease and misery will stop increasing and enter a slow, steady decline as drug users come out of the shadows and have their problems dealt with in the full light of day

Although these increases have a clear statistical correlation to de jure and de facto decriminalization of both soft and hard drugs, the response of progressives has been that we are just not making drugs legal, accessible and plentiful enough. In my city, purchasing and possession is no longer illegal for any drug, nor is dealing, provided one keeps one’s personal inventory low. Opinion leaders in my community are now advocating that the government get into the business of selling cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs and, when it comes to the most addictive and toxic drugs, my government is literally giving them away.

The thinking of the people backing an amplification of our already-failed policies is based on three main fallacies: (a) that the number of drug users is essentially fixed, that public policy cannot change the number of people who want to use drugs or who do use them, (b) that simply increasing the purity, affordability and accessibility of the drug supply actually is “harm reduction,” and (c) that drug use is not strongly conditioned by material and cultural factors.

To review, the Four Pillars policy Vancouver city council adopted to great fanfare in 1998 were (1) Prevention, (2) Treatment, (3) Harm Reduction and (4) Enforcement. This tetrad of policy reforms were based on a pre-existing model which showed promising results in Australia, Switzerland and Germany in the 1990s. But did Vancouver, in fact, follow the four pillars approach?

Prevention?

Prevention, i.e. policies designed to prevent people from falling into problematic substance use, were of two main types: material and educational. Material prevention policies in the places where the Four Pillars had succeeded included the provision of housing and other basic material supports to people who might otherwise become homeless or enter into survival sex work, given that homelessness, especially street homelessness and prostitution, especially survival prostitution create powerful incentives for habitual hard drug use in order to survive in these extremely damaging and challenging circumstances.

Instead, the provincial government, which provides these services to Vancouverites undertook a series of austerity programs in 1993, 1997 and 2001 to reduce income supports for housing and food. Following a 10% cut in 1993, income assistance rates in British Columbia were capped at 1993 levels for the next twenty-four years, not even permitting increases to keep pace with inflation.

As all federal and nearly all new provincial investment in affordable housing ended in 1993 and did not resume for a decade or more, the effective supply of housing continued to contract, especially as, when provincial investment did start again in the late 00s, it was increasingly directed to what is called “supportive housing,” of which there were essentially two types: (a) housing projects composed entirely of hard drug users and (b) housing projects that summarily evicted tenants for drug use, drug possession, overnight guests, etc.

Furthermore, the “shelter allowance” for those on income assistance remained capped at $375.00 per month from 1993 to 2023. Still dire but not as dire, the minimum wage remained capped at $8.00/hour from 2001 to 2011 and did not exceed $15/hour until 2021. Given that state-subsidized housing was so scarce as to be nigh-impossible to obtain for all but those in the most extreme straits, low-income people at risk of losing their housing saw their incomes decline relative to inflation while housing costs often increased at double the overall inflation rate.

In other words, government policies with respect to poverty did not merely fail to prevent substance abuse and addiction; they actively facilitated it.

Of course, we older folks do not immediately think of poverty when we hear the word “prevention.” We remember the school assemblies, the tone-deaf public service announcements, the awkward classes with our high school guidance counselors. Prevention, for us, conjures up the “scared straight,” “just say no,” and “this is your brain on drugs” after school specials and TV ads, designed to make kids frightened to try drugs, especially the harder stuff.

These traditional campaigns are denormalization campaigns. And that means that they produce perverse effects on people who already consider themselves to be marginalized. Amy Salmon and Fred Bass, the health scientists who made the empirical case studied anti-smoking de-normalization campaigns and found that they functioned like highly effective cigarette adds for young, low-income Indigenous women and girls.

De-normalization continues to be our main form of above-ground public “prevention” campaign but these campaigns are taking place in the dual context of an increasing portion of the population being economically marginalized and an increasing portion of the population receiving strong incentives and “identifying into” identities understood to be marginal, e.g. “trans,” “queer,” etc.

And it appears that both groups, both those materially marginalized by structural factors and those adopting boutique identities they believe make them marginalized, are experiencing the perverse effects of de-normalization and becoming more attracted to street drugs of all kinds. To an ever-increasing proportion of our population, our anti-drug propaganda is experienced as ads for the very drugs that we are supposedly discouraging.

Treatment?

Supposedly, there were going to be a whole lot more in the way of treatment facilities, approaches and services by now. But, as with housing and income, the reality has been escalating austerity and chronic labour shortages, compounded, most recently, by BC’s decision to be the only province in Canada that has refused to hire back its unvaccinated health care workers and, instead, to stand by as the BC College of Nurses and other healthcare syndical regulators proceed with internal witch hunts to deprive unvaccinated members of their professional accreditation, as though losing their jobs was not enough.

When it comes to the medically adjacent caring professions, like social work, the story has been even bleaker. There were mass layoffs of social workers in 1993, 1997 and 2001. And, when it comes to psychiatrists and psychologists, there are almost none remaining in the public system. I, myself, have been trying to obtain a psychiatrist through the public system for the past thirty-six months and have yet to have my first appointment.

The waiting list for detox and drug rehabilitation beds lengthens by the month and those that are available are often situated in neighbourhoods like Vancouver’s downtown Eastside, directly adjacent to the most active drug distribution and consumption scenes in the entire country.

Today, Vancouver has an “assessment centre,” to which one must be referred by a doctor, where one signs up to apply to be allowed to see a psychiatrist. If your case is urgent, the wait to see a social worker there is still two months; if it is not urgent, it is more like four to six. If you convince the social worker you are in serious distress, you wait another month or two to be interviewed by a psychiatrist. And even if you get the go-ahead, it is no one’s job but yours to somehow find you a psychiatrist who remains in the public system who is still taking clients and, if you do find one, your job to get them a referral not just from the centre but from the physician who referred you to the centre.

In other words, treatment options have declined significantly and remain out of reach for all but the most persistent and sophisticated, whereas you’re always just a phone call or taxi ride away from a baggie of heroin, cocaine, fentanyl, lorazepam or methamphetamine any hour of the day or night.

Harm Reduction?

The term “harm reduction” refers to the reduction in harms associated with the purchase of an illegal product, such as conflict with the law, adulteration or poisoning of said product, the need to pay increased costs because criminalization has increased prices, the spread of infection through unsafe consumption practices, and the use of drugs with unsafe equipment or in unsafe settings.

In this area, we experienced early and obvious gains. Our safe injection site did reduce the transmission of AIDS and hepatitis. The addition of a supervised site from crack use also appeared to produce tangible public health dividends generally.

But we have not seen commensurable improvements in public health once the state moved from creating supervised spaces and began to enlarge its own role in drug distribution while looking the other way as non-profit organizations, left-wing political parties and for-profit dealers became more public and ambitious in handing out drugs. Instead, the deterioration of the whole scene has sped up.

To help us understand why this is the case, it may be helpful to begin with Ricky from Trailer Park Boys in the episode where he trains school children to steal barbecues as part of their “Junior Achievers” after school program for aspiring entrepreneurs, “it’s the same whether you’re breaking the law or not. Profit, capital. Supply and command.” Or let me introduce this idea another way: if Canadians are really excited about an issue, the first thing they decide is that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to it.

You will notice that people who are excited about liquefied natural gas (LNG) and believe that fracking more of it will help us save the planet make the following argument: for every joule worth of LNG we produce and export, the country to which we send it will reduce the amount of coal they burn by the same amount. They assert that the quantity of fossil fuels that are burned in the world is a fixed amount and that no matter what the price is or how large or small the supply is, the exact same amount will be burned.

But of course that is not how the market for any commodity works. If you supply the same amount of coal and simply increase the amount of LNG, prices for both commodities will fall and the total amount of fossil fuels consumed will increase. This is the first thing you learn in a first-year economic class. It is called “the Law of Supply and Demand.” If you make something cheaper, more plentiful and easier to obtain, the more of it will be consumed.

This idea that increasing the amount of legal fentanyl or cocaine on the market will lead to precisely commensurate reductions in illegal use is insane. It is stupid. It is contradicted by the evidence we receive every month as overdose deaths continue to climb and it is contradicted by everything basic economics predicts.

Drug users do not have a fixed quantity of their drug(s) of choice they need or desire in a day, after which there are satiated. The more cocaine you do, the more you want. The cheaper the price, the more you can do. The easier to access, the more you can do. The state is actually promoting the consumption of illegal fentanyl by providing free or low-cost fentanyl. Doing so depresses fentanyl prices both by flooding the market and by fixing a low cost with which for-profit dealers must compete.

Enforcement?

In the original design of the policy, new approaches to enforcement were supposed to focus policing on drug production and distribution points, to target major dealers and producers, especially of drugs that can be synthesized in urban settings. In other words, it was premised on the idea that restricted supply was a goal in the policy.

But now that we have adopted increased supply rather than restricted supply as our approach, the police are rudderless in this area, left with a legacy policy functioning in direct opposition to current approaches.

Why would anyone expect to see outcomes in Vancouver in the twenty-first century based on the Four Pillars, if only half of one pillar is even standing? We are not practicing the Four Pillars. We are not even practicing harm reduction. We are just throwing more drugs and easier, faster access to drugs into a rising tide of human misery.

Culture: the Mastodon in the Room

But missing in all of this is a much bigger factor, something that had already walled-off the Swiss, German and, more recently, Portuguese approaches to drug policy, even as we began to consider reform in the 1990s: culture. How you interact with a drug is strongly conditioned by the larger cultural context of your society and by the more local subcultural context of your drug use community.

Anglo America does not have the same culture as Portugal, Germany or Switzerland. How one engages with drugs is about something more than the material and public policy factors I laid out above. But that is for the second part of this short series, where we look at distinctive experience of substance use in a young city shaped by colonization.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite | September 7, 2023

The Omnicide and the Level Boss: Thoughts On A Weekend With Deep Green Resistance

On the last weekend of August, I gathered with a group of two dozen extraordinary people. All of us are members of Deep Green Resistance. Like pretty much every group I join, I like DGR’s analysis a lot but am not sold on their eschaton, kind of like my relationship to Marxism and Christianity. I don’t think we actually have the capacity to make any plans about really big, complicated things, like, for instance the end of the world.

One of the things I like most about DGR is that Derrick Jensen is the Saint Jerome of environmental thought; they have turned a maelstrom of factional arguments and a disorganized, variegated body of writing into a coherent synthesis. Back in the 80s and 90s, during the first generation of Green politics, there were four (as opposed to zero, in the present) intellectual movements that vied to become the dominant Green philosophy: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Social Ecology. Or rather, Bioregionalists were happy to work with any of the other folks and everyone else was having a fight.

Those were heady intellectual times, times that I, in my youthful exuberance, helped to shut down. Perhaps, had those philosophical debates continued into the present, there might have been some intellectual guardrails, some moral scaffolding to prevent the BC and German Green Parties from running brute squads for and handing sacks of cash to the fossil fuel industry. Oh well…

Like Saint Jerome and his associates, DGR has recognized where these philosophies actually reinforce each other and agree, where the power of their analysis has revealed some more predictive and relevant than others. And, instead of engaging in the massive cut-and-paste operation Jerome did, Jensen and his collaborators’ books synthesize these ideas into a single authorial voice as well. There is Dave Foreman’s biocentrism from Deep Ecology, the close connections between male domination of women and societies’ treatment of the land from Ecofeminism, and the belief in valley-scale society from Bioregionalism. And, fortunately, no sign of Social Ecology (our Gospel of Thomas, I guess).

DGR also has the distinction of being the first left organization to be canceled due to Genderwang, way back in 2012, and rendering their campaigns subject to sabotage by genderist-captured environmental groups, who would rather side with the corporations than tolerate non-Woke environmentalists succeeding at saving endangered ecosystems. Seeing the danger these folks pose, Jensen’s co-leader and author, Lierre Keith, spun off the Women’s Liberation Front, now at the forefront of fighting for the rights of incarcerated women.

Anyway, I encountered some amazing people doing amazing work. But, because of the authoritarian turn we are experiencing, many are secret members who, if exposed as DGR members, would lose their jobs, friends and connections to the mainstream of the movement, not because DGR advocates the total destruction of industrial civilization but because they do not believe women have penises.

Those who had come out not as members but merely as associates of members told stories of losing 60-80% of their organization’s volunteers, their funding and almost all of their mainstream media access. And that is not to mention the personal toll. Activists from around the Global North recounted the social carnage that surrounded them, most of their long-term relationships, friends, coworkers, romantic partners: gone.

It was there that I realized two very important things: (1) no one, no matter how brilliant, no matter how organized, has figured out how to either withdraw from or to confront rising authoritarianism that stops the authoritarians continuing to harass and sabotage them (after all, Keith was punched in the face on live video by ANTIFA last fall and not a single word of condemnation was uttered by anyone on the mainstream left) and (2) the first priority of any rational socialist or environmentalist should be to fight genderwang, not, because of facilitating prison rape, mass-sterilizing autistics, practicing FGM, cheering for conversion rape, beating women in the street and the host of other associated atrocities it entails, but because it is the means by which authoritarianism is being enabled. The point is that until you defeat the authoritarians, the only politics that exists is defeating the authoritarians.

Getting politics back is the prize we will win only if we defeat them.

To believe that politics can be carried out when people’s speech, association and assembly rights are being annihilated is simply naïve. Recall that in the early 1990s we were all surprised to learn what the actual political views were of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually were. That is because as long as the USSR existed, as long as any authoritarian regime runs, there was only one political identity an opposition politician could have: dissident.

The authoritarians that ran the USSR and its client states conflated all opposition to party orthodoxy as capitalist stoogery, and contrary to what you hear these days, identities really are social constructions but actual social constructions, not personal fantasies, i.e. you are who society decides you are. You can’t identify out of the social construction in which you are placed.

In Wokeistans like Canada, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, it does not actually matter what you think your political identity is. Everyone at the event who was an “out” DGR member was, like me, understood by the hegemonic ideology to be a member of the “far right,” along with Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and Noam Chomsky.

Until this state of affairs changes, our first priority must be to dismantle the power of the authoritarians who have captured our political parties, news media, law enforcement and educational institutions, so as to make politics possible again. Until that time, society will remain in a post-political state and all projects that assemble broad coalitions that challenge the establishment will be impossible to form. Our only hope of that being possible is to form a coalition whose sole basis of unity is anti-authoritarianism.

In other words, we have to punch our way out of this corner.

This bums me out, obviously because I think there are some rather urgent matters that I have to place on the back burner to deal with this atrocious state of affairs. It is not like any part of our stressed global ecosystems has the luxury of time. This is, after all, The Omnicide. And that is not to say I will not keep doing environmental activism; I just have to recognize that society has placed stringent limits on those activities that I cannot just break out of by an act of will.

I have come to think of this political moment in videogame terms: you want to get up to Level Six where you get back to battling Royal Dutch Shell and its many minions but unfortunately, this is Level Five, the Woke level, where you have to defeat the Woke level boss so you can get back to the fight you came here to have. Of course, you should pick off any oil industry enemies you can on this level but recognize that most are going to be out of range until you defeat the exploding milk demon.

Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | September 1, 2023

The Suicide of Richard Bilkszto and the Erasure of Harriet Tubman

In the days since the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, Canada’s public square has continued down its dark path. There have been no voices coming from the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) sector within the management consulting industry expressing condemnation, regret or even concern for the abuse and harassment that drove Bilkszto to suicide. Nor have voices from within Woke civil society or its political class shown leadership in calling for a re-evaluation of the practices that destroyed his life, the workplace harassment, the social shunning, the public smearing, what the Stasi, East Germany’s feared secret police, called “Zersetzung.”

Instead, our national broadcaster is running stories suggesting that the real harm is that people are questioning the DEI sector and that people having a bad opinion of this industry is a far worse harm than an individual being tormented to death over a period of years. And state-funded activist groups have adopted the talking points developed by the first Bush presidency to defend Clarence Thomas for his sexual harassment of Anita Hill calling criticisms of the DEI trainer who repeatedly berated Bilkszto with false accusations a “lynching.”

Jonathan Kay and other Canadian critics of DEI and the Wokeness it slings are doing a good job of pointing out the ghoulish nature of a media, political class and civil society that is spending its time dancing on Bilkszto’s grave rather than looking in the mirror. In fact, as podcaster Russell Barton has suggested, it seems that the goal of these Zersetzung campaigns is, in fact, the target’s suicide.

Lost in this maelstrom is the actual dispute that led to Bilkszto’s harassment and ultimate death, an increasingly contested question for Canadians: the politics of race in Canada’s past, especially the nineteenth century. The original attack on Bilkszto took place during a session in which DEI trainer Kiki Ojo Thompson made a false historical claim, that Canada’s past was more racist than that of the United States and that Canada was implicated in and actively facilitated the practice of the chattel slavery of black people in the nineteenth century.

I grew up in a black family and many of the stories around our dinner table were not just of racially-motivated discrimination and violence our ancestors experienced in the nineteenth century but of discrimination and violence people at the table had, themselves experienced in the past and present. I would never suggest that Canada was a country free of racism at any time.

But equally important in the stories that were told around our dining room table were those of the struggle to escape slavery, segregation and inequality in America by traveling north and west. My maternal grandfather had migrated first north from Boston to Halifax and then West, to Winnipeg, Prince Albert and finally, Vancouver, to start a new life in a less racist place, without laws that singled-out black people for special persecution. Our family’s participation in the Great Migration was part our larger involvement in the freedom struggle.

My great grandfather’s people were escaped slaves who escaped from the Fugitive Slave Law onto the Sioux Reservation and then migrated across the border to Canada. Our collective memory, damaged by a lack of education, financial stability and the traditions of stable family systems, all underpinned by the legacy of slavery,

That means, unfortunately, that we do not know whether John Armstrong Howard’s people were among those spirited out of the reach of the American federal government by Harriet Tubman, one of the greatest heroes Canada has ever known.

Tubman was a key leader of a system known as the Underground Railroad, a network of safehouses throughout the United States that would hide escaped slaves help bring them to Canada. Tubman risked life and limb; she risked herself being re-enslaved by making multiple trips into slaveholding America and personally leading people like my ancestors to freedom.

The Barack Obama speech that changed the course of the 2008 US Presidential election, “Yes we can,” made reference to those courageous former slaves and abolitionists as epitomizing the fight for freedom.

But in the “narrative” offered by the DEI industry, which is populated not by historians or sociologists but by management consultants, Tubman cannot exist. Or if she existed, she was patsy, a fool, a chump leading slaves not to freedom but to an even more racist hellhole than the one they escaped. Bilkszto’s sin, fundamentally, was in asking a historical question in the implied question, “how do you explain Harriet Tubman?”

What people seem to fail to understand is that, just as genderwang’s apologists are typically selected from groups most harmed by genderwang, i.e. homosexuals and young women, the selection of racialized spokespeople for DEI functions as a smokescreen for its profoundly white supremacist ideology.

DEI’s re-narration of history, in which time is divided between the present, when the first good white people ever to have existed are heroically confronting their sinful past, and that benighted past in which all white people were evil, ignorant murderous racists. Because, the core assumption of DEI is not that gays and lesbians, racialized people, women and the working class fought for and gained freedoms but rather that one day, today, white people decided to be good and gave women and minorities their rights.

At the core of Wokeness is the assumption that white people are amoral supermen and the sole authors of history. Everyone else is a bystander or a victim, a powerless patsy or an ignorant chump. There is no room for Tubman in the DEI “narrative” because she is a black woman who made history, who freed people, who led them to a better life in the past. And, for all its own racism, its own lack of respect for democracy, Victorian Canada welcomed Tubman and applauded her work.

That is why DEI consultants are all over the various Pride months, weeks and days (in BC 71 of the 365 days in our calendar are an official celebration of one minority sexual or gender identity or another) but they are curiously silent during Black History Month because, fundamentally, the belief that black people have made history contradicts the central claim on which the Wokeness on which their industry relies is premised.

The Trudeau government has plenty of heritage money to invest in commemorating the mistreatment of racial and sexual minorities in the past, the church of Tubman attended, Canada’s first black church, founded in 1814, and from which she raised funds from Canadian abolitionists to fund her expeditions, is in danger of falling into disrepair. Designated by a simple, humble plaque, repairs are left to local congregants. Our Woke federal government does not want to draw attention to moments in the past when black and white Canadians came together to fight racism and to recognize the leadership of a black woman in that fight.

Richard Bilkszto’s suicide is an atrocity, a stain on our society. But what got him singled-out for persecution should worry us very much too: the erasure of Harriet Tubman and the heroes of the Underground Railroad from our history.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite | August 9, 2023

Canada Is And Must Be More Than Its Past

I am a Canadian; I have been a Christian; I am a Marxist; I have been a Green. These forms of identity have something in common: they are concurrently descriptive and aspirational. In other words, they are descriptive of communities in multiple contradictory ways.

Each of these groups refers to a community that exists in the present day that has a variegated and complex historical track record. Canadians, as a people, have done some crappy things. We disenfranchised and forcibly re-educated indigenous people. We fought against liberalism and democracy in the American Revolution and War of 1812. We interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We hanged Louis Riel and stamped out his movement. We turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape the Third Reich.

Even if one dodges some responsibility by taking refuge in the fact that the USSR, Warsaw Pact and Communist China can be described as “state capitalist” regimes or “dictatorships of the commissar class,” the fact is that, globally, Marxists have historically cheered for authoritarian regimes and looked the other way when Mao, Stalin, Deng, etc. committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Marxism.

Christians, the oldest community I have been associated with have committed plenty of atrocities too, from the murderous ruthlessness of the Albigensian Crusade to Charlemagne’s massacres in the name of Christianizing Saxony to the conquest of the New World by the sword and the sanctification of African slavery based on the Church’s theory of “just war.” And then of course, there are the multi-generational pedophile grooming rings that have been given cover by a number of Christian denominations.

Even in their short history, the Green Party has, globally, done a number of shameful things from leading the charge to bomb Serbia with depleted uranium in the 1990s, to voting through massive fracking and fossil fuel increases during their three years in government here in BC, to the German Greens current support for the mass eviction of Bavarian villagers so that their villages can be turned into open pit coal mines right now.

But that is not the only way to define these communities.

Many people identify with these communities because they agree with the precepts laid down in their canonical texts. The New Testament, the Communist Manifesto, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Small is Beautiful: these are all great texts that describe a way of ordering society and solving moral questions that are compelling. Also, there are many great tributes to and interpretations of these texts, like the City of God and Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalism, etc. Furthermore, there are great orators who have made compelling, inspiring speeches based on these communities’ principles; and then there are the communities themselves. There are lots of superb groups of people who congregate, meet and organize around these ideas even though their execution beyond the scale of a small group either never happens or goes terribly wrong.

But the most important way people identify as part of communities is based on what that community could be. “Make America great again,” the slogan of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump epitomizes that ethos, that if one identifies, aspirationally with a community, it is not merely a way of experiencing loyalty, hope and solidarity. It is also a way of criticizing the errors your community is making in the present by describing a future that does not contain them. And this kind of loyalty as criticism appeals across all sorts of communities, whether it is Roman Catholic traditionalists praying for the conversion of the pope or Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom lectureporn, “American isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore. But it could be.”

This last example, like “make American great again,” is also descriptive of another aspirational aspect of community identity, the idealization of a half-imagined past, or the presentation of a collage of past events that speak to the best angels of the community. While some of these curated pasts simply point to an ahistorical imaginary idyll, a self-congratulatory fiction under which a community chooses to bury the errors and atrocities of the past, not all such aspirational nostalgia is necessarily dishonest. Sometimes a community simply chooses to shine a spotlight on the moments in its history when it rose to the occasion over those that it failed to; as long as those moments of failure are not denied or blotted out. A community should focus on the moments when it overcame prejudice over those when it failed to; a community should focus on the moments when it made a shared sacrifice to achieve an important collective goal over the times it failed in those efforts.

A final aspect of aspirational identity that merits discussion is what I have termed “incarnational.” Based on the work of Mormon theologian and philosopher James Faucloner, I am using an idea I have previously used to argue against denunciations of “strategic voting.” It is an idea that resonates with my own experience of Pearsonian nationalism growing up as a CBC listener in the 1980s. Back then, I asserted that Canada only existed four hours a day, the four hours of every weekday you could hear Peter Gzowski hosing Morningside on CBC Radio, that Canada only seemed real, only truly existed while Gzowski was describing it; without his voice announcing it into being, it was little more than a legal fiction.

When it comes to any successful big, shared idea of community, one way of understanding being a Canadian, a Marxist, a Christian is that these communities do not exist at all points in space-time or even most; they only exist when they are being ritually celebrated, that one is only Canadian when one is singing O Canada, or celebrating Canada Day, cheering on some CFL team in the Grey Cup, that there is no global Marxist community except on May Day or at a communist meeting or on a pilgrimage to Havana, that Christ’s self-sacrifice, as Faulconer’s argument originally went, is real, not in the historical sense but instead, wherever in space-time the Eucharist is enacted.

It is my view that, of the five different ways we can be part of and assert the existence of big communities with broad membership, communities that have made and will continue to make lots of mistakes, by virtue of their breadth and complexity, the incarnational is most underrated in importance. In other words, much of the work and experience of a nationalism, a world religion a political movement of millions, are the moments of celebration and mutual recognition that occur within it. And the main way to judge whether these movements are pro-social is not to examine their grandiose plans for the future or the trail of mistakes stretching behind them into the past but instead to just how they are shaping the relationships of those participating in them in the present.

It is very clear that the nationalism of Justin Trudeau and the White Consciousness Movement, at this moment, in this country is making all of us into worse people, more isolated, more suspicious, more divided, more alienated, more disconnected, angrier and more confused. We need to fashion a way of being Canadians that functions as a countervailing force, that is collaborative, genuinely welcoming and inclusive, less hierarchical, more participatory.

I was inspired to put off my article about the Waffle movement and publish this because of an experience I had this weekend, attending the convention of the BC Conservative Party. Although I came away from the experience convinced that I am not a conservative and that, while I have many allies and friends among conservatives, they are not my tribe. Nevertheless, the weekend began with a simple yet profound experience: they began the convention not with a land acknowledgement but with the singing of O Canada.

First of all, the irony was not lost on me of a group of mostly rural Anglo Canadian social conservatives in the West belting out an anthem their movement had opposed replacing God Save the Queen, as atheistic, anti-monarchy social engineering by the liberals of the Laurentian elite half a century ago.

But more importantly, it felt so different than a land acknowledgement, which is an inherently hierarchical act of intermediation. A single individual stands at the centre of the room acting as an intermediating officiant in the relationship between an indigenous nation and a group of meeting attendees. Like a Roman Catholic priest administering the Eucharist, the land acknowledger has a hierarchical relationship to the crowd and an immaterial relationship to the nation (not just the nation in the present but concurrently through all of space-time). And its job is to emphasize the distance the acknowledger is covering and the incommensurability of the realities and communities on either side.

The Tory meeting opener, on the hand, was also easily comparable to a religious ritual, in this case more like a Quaker meeting or a small Pentecostal congregation breaking into an acapella hymn, everyone belting out the words slightly off-key from everyone else, slightly out-of-sync but all making a big, joyful noise together. That ritual was about building connection, sharing experience, dismantling hierarchy, reminding people they were starting with common ground, common knowledge.

The ephemeral effect of this was very important, as the room was full of long-simmering resentments and novel suspicions as new people came into the organization, occupying and contesting space, creating new upsets and confusion. But it really did appear that the anthem helped, as individuals being pushed out of leadership positions or forced to share them with new recruits took time present these occurrences as things they had long desired and the fulfilment of their past work and dedication.

And I cannot help but contrast this to how a meeting or a training session goes after a land acknowledgement, how co-workers behave after being forced to do a “privilege walk” to show how socially distant they supposedly are from one another.

It is my view that this imagined community we call Canada and the people with whom we share it will treat us better if we go back to celebrating it and them, if we return to symbols and celebrations that are as broadly shared and universally recognized as possible. Doing that will not change who Canadians have been; it will not make our national project seem any clearer or less absurd; it will not heal all wounds or solve all problems. But I do believe that the Canada we ritually enact, the Canada in which we live in the present and the future Canada we aspire to be will get better.

I am not simply saying that Canada is more than its past; in my view, it must be.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite | June 4, 2023

This Drag Is Not Drag and These Queens Are Not Queens

The Struggle to Publish
I have dithered about putting this post on my blog for nearly two months, hoping against hope that someone else with my knowledge would write an essay that I could just point at. I say this, first, because I try to limit my posts about current debates around gender in our society to guest writing on other forums so that my blog can focus on longer-term writing projects like epistemology, environmentalism and socialism

I say this, second, because I have to disclose some things about myself that I find embarrassing, whether I should find them to be so or not.

But I have decided to break down and make this post here because the issue it is confronting remains highly relevant and because of the way cancelation campaigns against me have escalated in bizarre and new ways, increasing my sense urgency around child safeguarding.

The Redefinition of “Drag”

When you are staring down people who have achieved the power they have by mastering the art of Newspeak, it is important to examine the ways in which they tilt the table, discursively, in any debate they have with you. Those critical of the Gender Orthodoxy and other aspects of Newspeak-leavened Wokeness are better than many at spotting the embedded intellectual bad faith; nevertheless, I think some crucial points about the Drag Queen Story Hours are being missed by my comrades.

Drag is a problematic, arguably misogynistic art form that has existed for well over a century in the Global North. It was part of a larger suite of “impersonation art” that flourished during the Cold War and late twentieth century. While its origins were different than Elvis impersonation, that was the category into which mainstream culture placed it once it began to gain legitimacy as an art form in the late 1960s. Some drag performers were full time “female impersonators,” the polite term for transsexuals during the Cold War but most were gay men who did drag on the side.

Like stand-up comedy, drag acts came up through a raunchy club scene, full of profanity, sexual references and drug and alcohol use. But it must be understood that the way the acts functioned at the clubs was by way of contrast. While most clubgoers might be gay or bisexual men dressed provocatively, or at least economically, for the drag act, the drag performer, himself, would comment on this by way of contrast.

Drag performers did not merely hide any sign of their actual primary and secondary sexual characteristics; they presented in the sharpest possible contrast to their audience. This included hyper-feminized “womanface” mannerisms and make-up, in contrast to the hyper-masculine crowd before them. It also included floor-length dresses, enormous and elaborate wigs and high heels, the sort of ensemble normally associated with respectable female entertainers who performed on the Las Vegas stage in the era of the Rat Pack.

These drag performers perfected mimicry, as distinct from mockery, of the female performers they, as attention-seeking, straight-attracted gay men, aspired to but knew they could never actually be. Precision when it came to dance moves in heels, lip syncing and costume mattered. This tradition held into the early twenty-first century because that raunchy club scene of gay bars that hosted entry-level drag shows could graduate its most proficient impersonators onto the Las Vegas stage, or at least onto the stages of Reno and Carson because of the nature of Vegas. Not just drag queens but Elvis impersonators thronged into Nevada; Rich Little and the great mimics and impressionists also congregated there, in Las Vegas, an extension of the replica city aesthetic epitomized in its great pyramid of Cheops and its own Eiffel Tower.

The audiences for drag queens in Nevada were little different than those for other sorts of impersonators. As an extension of the “stays in Vegas” ethos and replica city aesthetics of the place, straight men and women comprised the vast majority of the audience in top-flight female impersonators, who compared the dance techniques, costuming and vocal ranges of performers.

While some drag show viewers were no doubt also sex tourists to Las Vegas, they would not have understood their enjoyment of drag shows as part of their sex tourism, which was taking place down the road at brothels and strip clubs.

But as the twentieth century finished, a drag-adjacent form of entertainment was on the rise; transsexual/“shemale” strip clubs began to pop up in North America’s major cities for men who missed their stay in Thailand or Brazil and those who could not afford to go. I remember when the first ones opened in the mid-00s in Vancouver and Toronto because I, a sexually ambivalent man, was a patron of these establishments for a number of years.

These were utterly unlike either the drag shows at gay bars or the top-flight drag shows of Nevada; and they did not claim to be like them. Capitalizing on increasingly available and successful cosmetic surgical procedures, these clubs were staffed by full-time sex workers whose main clientele were men like me: straight and bisexual men who were attracted to the both highly feminine and clearly uncanny physiological characteristics of the strippers who, as in most strip bars, made their real money in the lap dance rooms. These cosmetic surgeries were expensive and much of the money made went directly into servicing medical debt. Nina Arsenault, one of the most popular performers boasted a $45,000 body.

As a consequence, instead of minimizing masculine features of their appearances, the most successful of the sex workers there concurrently amplified both their masculine and feminine primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Because, unlike female sexuality, male sexuality has plenty of time for the uncanny or, less politely put, the grotesque.

Because it was so clearly work done by surgeons and carefully burnished by its sex worker recipients that had lured us to the basement of a straight strip club in Mississauga, the “dancing” on stage did not hold most patrons’ attention and was performed in a perfunctory manner. None of the vampish showmanship of drag was in evidence. We were there for the uncanny costumes and bodies and the opportunity to unwrap them to reveal forms every bit as uncanny as those in Nero’s Domus Aurea.

After all, let us remember that Dylan Mulvaney did not rise to prominence on TikTok by making videos of himself in evening gowns singing in a falsetto but by giving tips on how to show off the contours of one’s erect penis in a leather mini-skirt.

Children and Drag

So, I want to contest the idea that the thing we are calling Drag Queen Story Hour is a drag show at all. First of all, the performers are not the straight-attracted gay men of either of those bar scenes. They are, overwhelmingly, autogynephilic men, partaking of a kind of Gold Rush hypermasculine sexuality.

But beyond that, their acts resemble, in every way, the transsexual strip clubs of the 00s, not the Vegas drag shows of the 80s. The problem with these “story hours” is that they are mainly hosted by men in grotesque, hypersexualized sex worker work attire. They are no more appropriate for kids than if a professional female stripper and prostitute came in in her work clothes and did her act for a group of children.

How would we feel if that happened, if a female stripper performed her act with children, shaking her genitals at them, exhorting them to put dollar bills in her g-string and instructing them on fellatio techniques. The woman would be jailed and the town would drive her out with pitchforks and torches, and deservedly so.

So, why, exactly, is it okay for men, who commit over 95% of all sex crimes, to engage in this behaviour with our kids?

More disturbing still, and the events that provoked me to come forward about my own sketchy past to offer some firsthand evidence others might not possess, is the idea that if children watching drag is okay, then it is okay for children to do drag. I lost four multi-decade friendships in the past month because I objected to a CBC TV documentary celebrating the “career” of a nine-year-old boy working as an exotic dancer for adults and a vendor of fetish gear to adults at a sex shop.

Leading the charge in the furious denunciations, threats and harassment not just of me but of my close friends was an individual working for Carousel Theatre, a youth theatre company in Vancouver that puts on summer day-camps with government funding to teach performing arts to kids.

I actually attended such a camp in 1981, put on by a precursor organization to Carousel, when I was nine and struggling with having been interfered-with sexually as a child. And I was naturally appalled, as an alumnus of such a camp, that Carousel was running a state-subsidized “drag camp” to teach seven to eleven-year-old boys the fine arts of sexualized cross-dressing and exotic dancing for adult men.

And if someone thinks that this is something it is appropriate for children who still believe in Santa Claus to be doing, I will say of them, what I said of the ghouls at CBC promoting that Montréal child’s sideline in sex work, and what got me into such trouble a month ago, “anyone celebrating this should be dragged through the streets of Seville in chains.”

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite | May 25, 2023

The Curdling of Pearsonian Nationalism and the Rise of Canada’s White Consciousness Movement

The Slow Decay of Pearsonian Nationalism 1993-2015

I grew up as an enthusiastic participant in Pearsonian nationalism, the theory of Canadian nationalism that the governments of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau carefully designed and built between 1963 and 1982. As canvassed in my last post, this included a new flag, anthem, constitution and, more importantly, theory of what Canada was. Canada was understood to be a bilingual, multicultural welfare state structured by benign elite consensus maintained through brokerage.

This theory of Canada’s nature was embraced Conservative leaders Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, the latter of whom actually sought to amplify most features of Pearsonian nationalism, seeking higher levels of elite consensus, albeit based on a more decentralized model of the federation, with a powerful but less coercive federal government.

But, as neoliberalism increasingly came to structure the global economy, most welfare states began running large structural budget deficits. Consequently, when the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they were forced to modify Pearsonian nationalism and engaged in unilateral cuts in transfer payments to the provinces that funded most social programs.

The kind of elite consensus among the federal government and provincial premiers that had created Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the Canada Assistance Plan (the system of co-funded welfare programs backed by federal legislation proclaiming Canadians’ right to food and shelter) was not sought by Jean Chretien’s government when it radically reduced transfer payments and raided the Unemployment Insurance fund.

With the exception of Paul Martin’s brief stint as Prime Minister from 2003 to 2006, no attempt has been made by any government since the defeat of Mulroney in 1993 to return to the idea that paternalistic elite brokerage and consensus should make nation-defining decisions. But neither has any successor model taken hold. There has existed no broadly shared or coherently narrated agreement about how we decide the big things about who we are as a nation.

Furthermore, one of the primary tools used to describe and instil Canadian values, the CBC has had a rough ride for most of the past thirty years, suffering under waves of austerity, during the Chretien and Harper governments, while, at the same time, being crowded out by a massive increase in Canadian cable channels in the 1990s followed by the rise of streaming TV in the 2010s.

When Canadians returned the Liberal Party to power in 2015, Pearsonian nationalism was in a state of institutional and cultural disrepair, following not just the decay I have described above but nine years of Stephen Harper’s intermittent efforts to propound the alternative 1812 nationalism I described in my previous article, during which time he did successfully rewrite the guide for new citizens and other important definitional texts.

The Post-Harper Liberals

Initially, it seemed as though, following his “Sunny Ways” election night speech in 2015, it was Justin Trudeau’s plan to reunite Canada with the Liberal past. And, although he never suggested it, we assumed that he would seek to restore the nationalism that his father had been instrumental in crafting. But instead, over the past eight years, we have seen a bizarre new kind of nationalism emerge, one propounded by a highly ideological CBC whose funding has been fully restored to function as the megaphone for Trudeau’s new theory of Canadian nationalism.

In some ways, we can see this new nationalism as an elaboration of official multiculturalism structured by a phenomenon I have been calling neo-Ottomanism in my writing over the past three years, a social order and a politics of diversity, best-exemplified in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Or, in the language of the Second British Empire, “a place for everyone and everyone in their place.”

This intensification of multicultural rhetoric and state support and endorsement of the festivals of racialized Canadians and non-Christian religious minorities not, itself a bad thing at all. I welcomed and continue to welcome enthusiastic state support and endorsement of festivals like Vaisakhi, which really brightens up my neighbourhood and is really important to our sense of community here as my Sikh neighbours welcome everyone into their traditions of generosity and celebration. I have no beef with the Trudeau government’s policies when it comes to sponsoring and promoting even nationalist patriotic festivals like Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates not a religious or cultural tradition but a decisive military victory of the Mexican state, something of which the Mexican diaspora remain justly proud. It is the larger context in which these events are now being placed that is concerning.

If one is not a member of a non-Christian religious minority or racialized group, there are two kinds of Canadian nationalism currently on offer:

The White Consciousness Movement, an Elite Nationalism of Self-Flagellation

Among elites, the commissar class and the caring professions, there is a new, muscular vibrant Canadian nationalism, a novel and bizarre way of celebrating a new kind of white racialist nationalism. This nationalism celebrates what one might call a “White Consciousness Movement.” The idea is that Canadians born since the mid-1960s are the very first good Canadians who have ever existed. Our ancestors were, all of them, genocidal, racist, misogynistic homophobes. But beginning in the late 1980s or early 90s, an increasing number of as Stephen Harper might say, “old stock Canadians,” threw off these centuries of cruelty and bigotry and became the first ever good Canadians.

My generation and the Prime Minister’s (we were born the same year), came to understand that the Canadian project and its history were something to be deeply ashamed of and sad about. And, beginning in the 1990s, we began developing new ritual acts to celebrate this nationalism.

In fact, I attended what I believe to be the first ever land acknowledgment in Sechelt in 1992. Originally, as I have explained in other articles, land acknowledgments were performed by indigenous government officials or random indigenous people one pulled off the street and handed $50 or $100. But, as the cultural practice matured into being one of the first displays of this new white consciousness nationalism, ritual acts performed by white Canadians for white Canadians, an opportunity for commissars and caring professionals to perform their white guilt and sensitivity to a receptive audience, eager to show their virtue by crying along.

The Canadian White Consciousness Movement’s nationalism primarily comprises acts of mourning and effacement of traditional symbols. The Maple Leaf flag, which once sat at the centre of the Pearsonian nationalist symbolic order, is still used in White Consciousness nationalism but as an object of shame, humiliation or mourning. It is the lowering, not the raising of the flag that Maple Leaf rituals are about. Statues are toppled by vigilantes or decommissioned by elites. Flags are removed, festivals canceled; sometimes even books are burned.

When there is a real or imagined past event about which the White Consciousness Movement wishes to stage an apology, their preferred ritual act, one of the key ritual acts is flag lowering or flag removal. The only flags it celebrates raising are the geometrically complex, post-rainbow Pharma Pride flags that adorn the windows of every business in a Canadian downtown core and fly above our legislative buildings, military installations and chartered banks.

The White Consciousness Movement believes that Canada was a mistake, which it may well have been. And they believe that it has historically been a stinking racist hellhole. Consequently, it cannot imagine that racialized Canadians would want to celebrate their nation, never mind that many immigrants deliberately chose Canada precisely because they believed it was not a stinking racist hellhole. As a result, White Consciousness nationalism does not make itself available to most racialized Canadians; and even the few who are permitted into White Consciousness nationalist ritual are not allowed to play the same ritual roles as old stock white Canadians in civic ritual. The roles reserved for non-whites are primarily the scold, one available to folks from all racial groups who can scold the White Consciousness movement’s members to help them stage acts of contrition and grief. But the contrition and grief is reserved for whites; and the noble savage, available to Indigenous Canadians who are asked to show up with blankets and drums to sanctify, as opposed to prompting, the ritual expression of white guilt. In this way, the central form of nationalist performance is walled-off from non-whites even if they are invited as participants.

Not only are racialized Canadians disqualified from full participation in this nationalism; so are those who have an aspirational or celebratory view of the country, especially folks who don’t have a lot of days off and really appreciate having a big party weekend in early July when the weather is good. White Consciousness Canadian nationalism is fundamentally an elitist movement that conceptualizes most Canadians is ineligible to participate in its public displays of grief, regret and guilt.

Hoser Nationalism and the Third Northwest Rebellion

The degree to which working class Canadians working and living in the Boreal Forest belt are viewed as outsiders by the White Consciousness Movement became very clear during the 2022 Freedom Convoy, during which the establishment press characterized their march on the capital as an invasion and them as “invaders.” How exactly can one “invade” one’s own country?

What struck me as I read more outlandish denunciations of the convoyists was that it reminded me of something from the past. It took me a few weeks to realize that these denunciations were reflective of the same ideological and class position of the establishment figures who denounced Louis Riel and his movements during Canada’s first generation.

It became clear that the White Consciousness movement believed that, while most racialized Canadians and most members of religious minorities could celebrate some kind of nationalism, as long as they did not attempt to claim full ownership of Canadian-ness and or attempt to equally participate in the White Consciousness Movement.

But for white working-class Canadians and indigenous and Métis people who are not neo-traditionalists, there is no appropriate expression of nationalism, especially if such an expression is joyful, fun or expresses appreciation for Canada in the present or optimism about our shared future, even if the present is dark. Just today, Calgary, supposedly the most conservative major city in Canada, just canceled Canada Day fireworks because watching an entertaining visual spectacle on a July 1^st would be an act of anti-Indigenous racism.

Indeed, the CBC has run stories suggesting that, like the word, “freedom,” our own flag constitutes an “alt-right dog-whistle,” a symbol of racism and hate. True Canadian nationalism must be elite, somber lamenting the existence of the nation. People who want to have a party to celebrate what they enjoy about Canada now or what they hope it could one day become are not supposed to celebrate Canada Day at all because expressing joy on that holiday reveals one to be a deplorable, someone unfit to celebrate the new elite nationalism of our White Consciousness movement.

And the very symbols and traditions that underpinned Pearsonian nationalism are now understood to be symbols of genocide and racism. Indeed, the White Consciousness Movement has attempted to replace “our home and native land” in our anthem with “our home on native land,” something that may sound like an expression of sensitivity or regret but, like so much Woke discourse, is actually a spiteful racist humblebrag, telling Indigenous people not that they are part of our communities and equal citizens but victims of a crime we have successfully committed against them. Healthy sane people want to be part of inclusive communities, not exiled from the mainstream of their society and cast as perpetual victims and dupes.

And this is all part of the social partitioning of Canada, the establishment’s effort to make sure that Canadians do not encounter other sorts of Canadians, and especially not in a joyful context. To keep Canada post-political, the establishment has fashioned an anti-nationalism, one in which recent immigrants are insulted as fools for liking their life in Canada and ignoramuses for choosing to come here, one in which regular people are looked on not merely as public nuisances but as dangerous fascists for having a barbecue, getting drunk, shooting off fireworks and waving the flag of their own country on its own national holiday

It Does Not Have To Be This Way

It does not have to be this way. I am no keen to resurrect Pearsonian nationalism, nor do I think we can return to the alternative vision of John Diefenbaker. Stephen Harper’s 1812 nationalism is not my bag either. But what if we re-considered the nationalism of James Laxer and Waffle Movement that, albeit briefly, took Canadian socialists by storm in the 1970s? In my next piece, I am going to explore the Waffle as a historical phenomenon but also, the possibilities Laxer’s project presents to us today.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race | fusangite | May 21, 2023

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