View from the Sidelines

Rail Travel. Three engineers were killed when a Via train drove through a switching point at four times the mandated speed. Railroad safety advocates now urge that new safety measures be "fast-tracked". With seemingly indecent speed, fee-sniffing lawyers were on the scene signing up clients for class-action lawsuits, and eager for their 40+ per cent of the proceeds.

Political Correctness. A school teacher in Quebec caused a stir when he censored from a school concert the last line of the classic Edith Piaf song Hymne à l'amour. The line -- God reunites those who love -- Piaf wrote as a tribute to her lover, boxing champion Marcel Cerdan who had just died in a plane crash. The teacher said he didn't want to have to answer students' questions about God. The culture minister decried censorship to a work of art. The education minister called it a lack of judgement. The local school board backed the offender on the grounds that teachers lack guidelines for "reasonable accommodation".

Lottery fraud. An Ontario woman was charged with fraud for writing bad cheques. She did so in order to purchase $80,000 worth of lottery tickets. Her total winnings were $3,600. The report makes no mention of fraud charges against the lottery commission.

Whales' rights. A federal court in California was petitioned by five whales (listed as plaintiffs) claiming their treatment in a theme park amounted to slavery. The petition was signed by people from the Ethical Treatment of Animals who wanted the court to declare the owners violated whales' rights under the U.S. Constitution 13th amendment which abolished slavery. The judge ruled that orcas had no standing to seek the same constitutional rights as people.

Don't laugh. Princeton Professor Peter Singer believes that apes have greater rights than new-born babies and mentally-handicapped humans. This mischief blurs the meaning of human rights, a mischief Singer teaches to his young, likely unquestioning, students.

The rationale of it all. English language dictionaries describe usage, as distinct from their French counterparts which prescribe usage. The Concise Oxford Dictionary informs us that the pronunciation of rationale is ra-shun-al. Its bigger and older brother, The Oxford English Dictionary, describes the pronunciation as ra-shun-al-eh. It rhymes with finale. Is it that little Oxford brother hangs out in coffee houses, while Big Brother sips cocktails with the intellectual elite?

Book burning. There is no need to burn the great books of our civilization. Just leave them unread on the shelf. Our society is doing just that. Scientific knowledge is cumulative. The humanities, as expressed in great literature, great music and great culture must be read and learned anew each generation. Unfortunately, the our current money-oriented ethos rejects this approach to our heritage.
The staged book-burnings by the Nazis were fuelled by books of philosophy, history, religion, culture. I other words, the humanities.  Scientific books were saved.

Book Burning a Western Disease?

A copy sent to The Globe and Mail, unpublished.

The opinions of two novelists on book burning fill a page of the September 11, 2010 issue of The Globe and Mail. Neither seems aware of relevant historical context.

In the longer of the two pieces, Esquire columnist Stephen Marche opines that book burning is "an endemic Western disease with deep cultural roots." This ignores the fact that the vast majority of books were and still are published in the West. Where most books are produced, most books will be read, most books saved, most shredded, most burned.

 By way of illustration, according to the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, "The Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece translates." Population of the Arab world 300 million, Greece 12 million.

The books burned by the Nazis were not those of business, economics, mathematics, geometry, and the physical sciences. They burned books dealing with the humanities: religion, philosophy, culture, history, literature, the arts, that is, the mind-stretching, idea-producing works. The latter are the same areas of study our universities are currently downgrading.

Burning is not necessary in order to destroy a book's value. Just leave it on the shelf un-read. That neglect will have the same result as incineration. Society will have forgotten its message. While the physical sciences are cumulative, and only the latest version need be known, the humanities must be re-learned, from the beginning, in every generation.

The authors of the famous 1066 and All That got it right. "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember," the preface tells us. The authors therefore, did their research in "golf-clubs, gun- rooms, green-rooms, etc." This tongue-in-cheek procedure contains much truth. It isn't what's written in books that counts, but how often those books are read. But I digress.

Elsewhere on the same page of the Globe, novelist Drew Hayden Taylor commits the same error as Marche. He too seems unaware that "white people" (as Taylor terms the West thereby revealing his status) have written the most books, and therefore likely to destroy the most books. A culture with no books has none to burn.

Taylor does not know that Muslims consider the actual physical pages of the Koran as sacred property. Christians do not ascribe the same sanctity to the pages Bible. For them, the message not the medium counts. But he has his own drum to beat (pun intended) in using book-burning as an excuse to drag in the unrelated topic of residential schools.

Now that we're talking about residential schools, Taylor is advised to await the report of the inquiry currently in progress. The commission will show that the treatment of aboriginal students had little to do with religion, and everything to do with government. The religious instructors were forced to implement such policies under pain of financial sanctions from Ottawa.

Taylor's worst deficit is in Islamic history. He writes, "It seems to me far more damage has been done to natives by people following the gospels and by any believing in the Koran." This speculation also evidences a lack of Canadian history. No Canadian aboriginal was ever exposed to Islamic behaviour. But he is free to read the history of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, for example, to learn what havoc it wreaked across the Balkans for almost 600 years, and how many millions of slaves Muslims took from Europe and Africa. (In 1631, Muslims raided and enslaved the entire village of Baltimore, County of Cork, Ireland.)

Taylor is half correct in his belief that books are not evil, only people. But like everything else in our ambivalent world, books can influence people to do evil things, instance Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Neither of these authors mentions Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 415. How can a novelist write about book burning without mentioning this insightful work? It describes an anti-intellectual society where the job of firemen is to burn the great books of the Western world -- the humanities, of course.