The Woodlands Settlement – proof the courts can still get it horribly wrong

The recent settlement compensating some of the children abused at the Woodlands school excludes pupils abused and tormented before the year 1974. Prior to 1974 the crown of British Columbia had immunity from criminal proceedings – in other words the province was above the law. According to this article from the BC government website:

“the provincial government recognized that the special immunity of the Crown was unfair and enacted the Crown Proceedings Act .5 That Act expressly provides that the provincial government is liable in the same manner as if it were a person.”

The act itself, cited from the above paper, calls crown immunity:

“a relic of the mediaeval age when the King could do no wrong. … where the subject had to go on bended knee to seek from Ministers of the Crown the right to sue the Crown… [It] is a relic of the time of the divine right of kings and should have no part in our modern jurisprudence.”

However, we can learn from Matthew Good:

“In the 2005 case Arishenkoff v. British Columbia, the court found the Crown and its agents couldn’t be held liable for any wrongdoing prior to the implementation of the Crown Proceedings Act of August 1, 1974.”

So, according to the 2005 ruling by the B.C. court of appeal, it was wrong for the province to hold crown immunity – but it is not wrong that they held crown immunity prior to 1974. This undercuts the moral arguments for the 1974 decision in the first place. If the only reason why it is wrong to have crown immunity is that a court decides it is wrong to have it, and the decision is not grounded in the reality of what is right, then the only rational thing to do would be to simply grant as much crown immunity as civil unrest will bear (it becomes a tactical question of realpolitik).

This is the worst kind of positive law – the kind which pretends to be natural (that it would be simply wrong for the crown to have this immunity today), but at the same employs the logic that the state had the immunity just so long as it didn’t admit that it didn’t have it. In other words, the state’s words make the moral law, rather than the the moral law dictate the words that it is right for the state to speak and make into law.

The implications of this 2005 court of appeal decision are nothing less than morally despicable. The picture on the left is of a concentration camp in which Canadians of Japanese ethnicity were held during world war two because they were under a racist suspicion of being spies. According to this decision, the state can not be held liable for this racist internment. Furthermore, should B.C. have gassed its Japanese civilian war time prisoners during this time, British Columbia would simply not be liable for its actions, even if it declared in retrospect those actions to be absolutely morally abhorrent. I needn’t mention that it also absolves the state from ever having to repay the goods that were outright stolen from British Columbians of Japanese ethincity during the second World War.
Would we stand for the decision that the state only becomes liable after it passes a law making itself liable for Germany at the end of WW2? For Spain during the decline of fascism? Of course not. The laws that exist at some point do not determine the liability unless those laws are right – if the laws are wrong, they must be replaced with right laws, which will determine liability in the correct way. If we are serious moral actors, we hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others. It greatly concerns me that the B.C. court of appeal lacks this seriousness.

In late capitalism, are surfaces thickening?

An interesting development consumerism in the first decade of the third melenia is the rise of ethics as a sold quantity in consumption based capitalism. While it is not new for companies to enhance their reputation by donating part of their proceeds to charity, this has taken on a new character in that consumers actually expect their specific purchase to have a measurable “good effect” on the world. Now when I buy fair trade, shade grown, carbon neutral coffee rather than regular coffee, I expect my consumption to be both reducing the negative impacts of the production of non fair trade coffee, I am also actively subsidizing the kind of industry I believe to be good.  When I buy the organic option, or the low-carbon option, I believe (perhaps correctly) that I’m supporting the right kind of industry, or reducing harm to the planet. Perhaps the cleanest example of this “active production of good” consumerism is Starbucks’ Ethos Water. The idea is that when you buy this water, an even larger quantity of water will be brought to people who do not have access to clean water. I actually remember the first time I saw ethos water – I thought “Oh, that’s a good idea” – and from a marketing perspective it is. They make a 5 or 10 cent donation from every 2$ bottle of water, and that cents allows them to charge 50 cents more than their competitors.

It’s not accidental that the name Starbucks starts coming up in a discussion about the logic of ethical consumption. If you have any of their single use coffee cups laying around, read the label. You probably don’t (I’m the only one who seems to like collecting used paper coffee cups), so I’ll cite it for you:
“We work with 1.2 million people to grow and harvest even better coffee that earns even better prices. Everything we do, you do. You buy coffee at Starbucks. Which means we can work with farmers to help improve their coffee quality and their standard of living. We call it coffee that is responsibly grown and ethically traded. And thanks to you, we’ve grown big enough to be able to do this kind of good on this kind of scale. Good job, you.”

I did not add the bold type – that is right there on the cup. The logical link between your consumer choice and making a good impact on the world are not left up to the consumers imagination, but dictated!

What becomes clear in these examples is that the ethical implications of our consumer choices are no longer merely part of the information in which the choice to consumer some product are made – but rather that the ethical implications of a choice are being sold to us as a product themselves – a product supplemental to the object perhaps analogously to the way a two six of liquor sometimes comes with a little bottle of something more expensive.

The immediate tendency here is to say it’s all crap. It’s quite obvious that the incentive is for corporations to produce the ethical product as an image for the consumer – to create a belief in the consumer that s/he has produced an active contribution of good in the world. Whether any actual improvement of conditions for the less fortunate happens is of only derivative importance. However, I called the blog entry “are surfaces thickening?” – what do I mean by this? Well, to say that Starbucks only cares about how ethical their coffee “looks” rather than whether it is “actually” fairly traded, is to say that what matters is the surface. This is true for all commodities – all commodities are surfaces. This is actually not controversial – the basic meaning of commodity is a good which is indefinitely replaceable or reproducible – and if something is replaceable or producible it’s existence mustn’t exceed what can be gleaned from the “surface” – only on the surface can form be imbued into an object. Surface means plan, idea, image, concept. Autocad drawings are surfaces. Things produced using autocad drawings, like ikea furniture, are also surfaces. To say “it’s all crap” is to dismiss all greenwashing, all ethical-consumerism as superficial, as dealing only with surfaces – as not being radical (radical means “ Of, belonging to, or from a root or roots; fundamental to or inherent in the natural processes of life” – OED).

But, what are surfaces in the developed internet age? If the ethical “product” consumed by the buyer is his or her idea of the good s/he’s produced, does the internet, and freely circulating information affect the extent to which corporations can put out false-fronts, shiny but depth-less images of how they are making the world a better place? I think the answer to this is “only sometimes”.

I realize I’ve already mentioned Starbucks a few times – but bear with me. This year, the International Labour Rights Forum put out a scorecard (PDF) which judged how ethical the buying practices of different corporations really were. Concerning Starbucks, they concluded:

“Starbucks’ standards, unlike the broader chocolate industry’s “certification” program, include real requirements for their cocoa suppliers such as supply chain transparency and compliance with international labor standards, among other criteria. In the last year, the pilot program has been independently audited and Starbucks has stated that they are committed to independent verification. The company is actively working with cooperatives in the Ivory Coast and has supported a range of social programs in the region, including helping small farmers get access to credit. These steps appear to be very positive developments and we look forward to seeing how Starbucks’ cocoa program develops.”

What we can glean from this is not so much that Starbucks’s CEO really does care about the slave children in the Ivory Coast, but rather that their attempt to maintain and secure an ethical image requires real work on the ground. As the world becomes a little more transparent, it is too easy for a glossy but thin image to be discredited. In response, the surface must thicken to maintain its power as a surface.

Of course, everything Starbucks does, Tim Hortons can do worse. They like to talk about the coffee partnership they’ve started. However, this partnership they talk so much about supply an unspecified about of their coffee (from a PDF of their 2008 annual report). In other words, the vast majority of Tim Hortons coffee is of extremely low grade, and grown by underpaid coffee farmers. And yet, they try to cash-in on the ethical supplement to their product by producing feel good commercials about how well they treat a tiny minority of their farmers. This is an example of a thin surface. The question is, can the thin-ness of this surface by sustained? Or, is Tim Hortons too susceptible to public outcry, to potential boycotts – will they be inevitably pushed down the road of thickening the surface of their ethical supplement?

In the end, I’m not going to pretend this issue matters unduly. The future of the world does not depend on whether easy access to information forces corporations to be slightly more truthful about images they try to attach to their products.  At the same time, it’s always interesting when forces conspire to make word and deed correspond.

What is a Concept?

After grading the first set of papers for my Teaching Assistantship this year, I’ve noticed that a common problem of reasoning can be attributed to not understanding what a “concept” is.

For example, take the concept “Rule of Law”. The rule of law is the notion that everyone is equally before the law. Perhaps better – it means no one is above the law. But the rule of law is a concept, not a scientific hypothesis – it is not “true or false” based on whether it corresponds to reality. The rule of law is not “false” because someone is factually above the law. In fact, it isn’t false or true at all – it’s a concept. But what is a concept?

A concept is something in your head. It’s a notion, a picture, an idea. But it isn’t only in your head – what’s essential to concepts is that they can be shared. I can write a book about a concept, (i.e. “The Concept of Irony”). I can have an opinion about a concept, an opinion others might disagree with. We can even argue about the implications concepts have on the world (i.e. “What is the role of the notion of multiculturalism in Canada’s self-image, law and politics?”). The concepts can really “be” in the world – for example, we can discuss whether Canada is “really” a democracy. We can even talk about what a concept “really means” in terms of what a concepts actual implications are when we apply it in society, or science and technology, and we can do this only because we assume that the content of a concepts application exceeds any person’s intention. What this means is that concepts are not only “in your head”, not only “in shared reality” (between our heads), but they actually concretize in or into the world.

So concepts are in the world, but earlier I said that concepts are not scientific hypothesis – is this not a contradiction? Presumably, if concepts really described the world, they would merely be a kind of scientific description, which is either falsifiable or, if un-falsifiable, mere claptrack. The mistake here is to assume a strong distinction between description and production. Concepts, especially political concepts, are both normative and descriptive – they describe a state of affairs, but they also imply that some state of affairs ought be brought about. What do I mean by this?

Take for example “The Rule of Law”. The rule of law means that the law is above everyone – including the one who makes the law. Like I said before, the Rule of law is not ‘false’ because the rule of law does not exist in every state. However, the rule of law may or may not exist in a state which claims to follow the rule of law. The rule of law is an “ideal”, an “idea”, a notion, or a concept, which can be held up to situations where it does not apply in order to discredit those power structures which justify themselves by way of concepts like “the rule of law”. For instance, Obama can use “the rule of law” as an ideal to justify his ad hawk legal structures for dealing with prisoners  – but at the same time critics can point out that his policies are anything but enactments of the rule of law. Ideals are themselves above everyone – anyone can pick up a concept and use it, anyone can show that someone who claims authority due to some concept is falsely employing the concept and not deserving of the authority.

Furthermore, the rule of law is concept of particular interest because it contains an inner tension in its essence.  Since it does not specify anything about the content of the law, can specify that different groups are to be treated differently before the law. So, the rule of law need not guarantee rights to all – it can guarantee rights to the nobility under the law, and under that same law take rights away from the peasants. This differential allotment of rights can be thought to be consistent with “everyone is equal before the law”. However, the universality of “everyone is equal before the law” conflicts with unequal allotment of rights. If everyone is equal before the law, it intuitively follows that the law should have the same content for all – that the law should not specify rights and benefits specific to one’s station. This tendency towards university unites the Magna Carta, the text which first secures the rights of the nobility against the absolute dominion of the king, with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

On the Value of Communal Living

Last night a freelance reporter came to Toad Lane to interview my housemates and I on our choice to “live intentionally”. Preparing for and participating in the interview forced my housemates and I to evaluate, to take stock of what intentional living means for us.  Being required to explain and justify our living situation was slightly nerve wracking, but the experience on the whole was clarifying and worthwhile.

So what is intentional living? For us at least, it means living with a collective intent, purpose, direction. But certainly we all have many intentions, couldn’t any group of people living together find some common intention which they share, and say they are living intentionally? The difference is people move to this house specifically out of a desire to participate in a group which shares this intention, and which makes this particular intention a theme of their everyday activity. For us, that intention happens to be living with a vegan diet.

The reasons for group intentional collected around three ideas – support, engagement, and fostering values in the larger community.

Mutual support: Any value, no matter how good, can individuating if it alienates you from others. Veganism is a good example of this – holding oneself to a vegan diet can prevent one from participating in community, from sharing food and recipies, from eating out together, etc.  However, living together with a group of people who all share the diet overcomes those obstacles and turns what was an individuating force into a communalizing one. We share food, informally at least, several times per week. This is a boon both to our health (eating a variety of foods is essential to a vegan diet), but also our social well-being – doing things together is good for the soul.

Engagement: While we all hold the value of critique and argumentative discourse, it is not always productive to have discussion after discussion in which you must defend your “position” against those who think veganism is “stupid”. Living with 6 other people who all choose or practice vegan diets for different reasons provides an atmosphere for arguments which, since everyone is coming from a somewhat similar situation, can be more productive and less antagonistic. It’s a mistake to think “the more you disagree, the more critical a discussion is” – there is nothing inherently more critical about an argument between a vegan and a non vegan, than between someone who eats vegan for environmental reasons, and another who does so for animal rights reasons. Simply because we share a diet does not mean we share a common motivation behind the diet – and engagement on those motivations produces a thoughtful ongoing house discussion.

Spreading: All political activists know that organizing is the key to success. In a sense, this house is an “organizing” – it’s a group of people getting together under one roof, to share and organize their ideas. One value (I think) we all share with respect to Veganism is that it is not enough for us to be Vegan – if we think cruelty to animals is so nasty, we have to think of ways to spread reduced-violence diets through the larger community. One way we do this is with our pot-lucks, which are a time every week we open our house to the larger community to share vegan food and ideas. You don’t need to be vegan to come to the pot luck, you don’t need to share any of our values. In fact, you don’t even need to bring food the first time you come. If we can encourage people to eat vegan more of the time, even if that isn’t all of the time, this is still an improvement – part of moving towards a moral consensus on paying attention to the implicit violence in our daily lives.

This year, the house is trying to reach out in a new way, and to a new community, with our semi-academic graduate student sponsored conference. Roughly our idea is to get communities to talk to each other in a slightly more organized fashion – for people to prepare presentations which we can then discuss, and the whole thing to run along a schedule. While we have not received any submissions yet, the deadline is still over a month away (January 15th), and we have received promises from many house members and common attendees from our pot lucks that they will come forward with presentations.

This has been a pretty thin, incomplete, and house-specific account of what intentional living means. If you want to read more, there is an excellent article on Z-Net on “Revolutionary Communalism” which discusses a more radical model for communal, intentional. That article reminds us that communal living is not about, in the end, structures or models – but how we choose to engage with each other:

“It is important, in communal arrangements, to literally set space and time aside for this, taking into account that the lives we lead might pull us in different directions. However, communalism only provides a framework for these types of relationships, and if that space is not filled with a will and desire to share emotions, mediate problems, be open and honest, cultivate good eyes with patience and understanding, trust the other, and both give and accept criticism, this space can quickly be converted to something unfortunately similar to an apartment shared with a heap of sloppy craigslist roommates.”

On Carbon Ethics, Individual action, and the Value of Slow Travel

In a recent post, I tried to start a deeper discussion with Milan about what it means to act ethically in these needful times with respect to climate change.

I’m not sure if he meant this post as a response to my post, or as a response to the ongoing discussion on carbon ethics – but either way, it really does not does not “bring about any clarity to the many discussions we’ve had here about carbon ethics”. It really just repeats what we already know – action must begin collectively and immediately - and from there re-makes the assumption that it is desirable that, in full knowledge that collective action will not begin immediately, that still “we individually [should] want to mirror what the world as a whole needs to do”.

I’ll repeat the argument I’ve made before, and again, I’ll give reasons for my position. (While it makes me sound like a liberal, giving reasons for arguments is a central requirement to dialogue. Without reason-giving, it is not really possible to hold others responsible for what they’ve said.) I do not think it is not desirable that we individually, as individuals, want to mirror what the world needs to do. In fact, I think the notion that we should do as individuals what the world as a whole should do while the world isn’t doing it is deeply misguided. The fact the world isn’t doing it means the actual cuts needed are deeper and sharper – so what justifies someone personally cutting their carbon more slowly when the world’s inaction produces a requirement for even sharper cuts?

In fact, I would not advocate any carbon ethics that remains on the level of individually setting an example where that example is “what is required of everyone”, rather than attempting to demonstrate what is desirable about acting socially, together as a society, to mitigate climate change. However, I would not recommend amending your position to give a different curve of carbon cut-back because cutting back on carbon emissions is largely not something we can do as individuals – it requires investment on the societal level.

Taking into account the importance of the societal, my claim is that it is desirable that we “mirror what the world needs to do” – together. The emphasis needs to be on the “we”, not on the “as individuals”. Rather than acting “individually” – any action to be effective must foster social movements, activism, political pressure, and so on. I don’t think it is particularly virtuous to live a “moral” (pious), personally low carbon life – the relevant virtue here is in spurring and organizing the social transformation we so desperately need if we want our children not to live in a much more violent and hostile place than we. Of course, I do not mean to construct a false opposition between personal and social action. Rather, what I mean to show is that a personal action can either be individualizing or fostering of a social movement.

I think the bus/train decision is an example of where these values diverge in an individual’s choice. I don’t mean to criticize your decision – just some of the logic you stated with regards to the issue. There are lots of reasons to take the bus that are good reasons. However, specifically looking at a comment responding to my post on high speed, overnight, and trans continental rail travel you wrote:

“Arguably, there is little point in getting people onto cross-country trains, until they have a significant climate advantage over air travel.”

I think this is misguided. The real effects of our actions are not only their immediate release of carbon, but also the extent to which they contribute to the societal will to spend to mitigate, to build a world appropriate for a carbon neutral future. Whether you like it or not, taking the bus cross country appears to others as embracing a low-carbon asceticism. In my experience, people seem deeply hostile to this.

We could debate whether it’s good or it’s bad that there is a hostility to asceticism – but the fact is there is a deep and longstanding hostility to it, and having one’s actions spur social movement building means being sensitive to which values one can shift and which ones one cannot shift. There is room for movement, for example, on the value of working 40 hours a week, or 46 to 50 weeks a year – look at the idealization of German Vacation time in Canada (especially our immediate experience of it in the West in the form of RV tourism), and also the strength of the work-less party with their extremely sensible policies.

Looking at the long term ramifications of social choice, I come to the conclusion that the right value to shift towards with respect to travel is slow travel – accessible, utilitarian and comfortable. We should pressure Via to shift away from tourism service towards useful travel service for all Canadians, which means, for transcontinental service, daily departures and restoring the Montreal – Ottawa – Sudbury connection.

Slow travel also endorses more travel by bicycle. There is no reason why trips of less than 100km, when time is not the primary issue, can not be made increasingly by bicycle. What is required to open this up to more of the population is investment in bicycle routes, even dedicated tracks. Despite my love of road bikes, maybe the right value here is unpaved maintained trails, since they can simply be grated when a paved trail would need resurfacing.

Slow travel requires more time than plane travel – so this goes hand in hand with becoming more mindful, more aware, more intentional of our actions. Milan is right that we need to ditch flagrantly needless trips – and switching from air to rail means it is no longer possible to have that quick weekend in Paris, or a day trip to New York for a business meeting. But it also means increasing the value of a visit we do choose to make – since it will not be as quick and easy to move from place to place, we will value those visits we do make that much more greatly.

On Topics for Writing: “Hot Cognition” and Play

Earlier this term I wrote a list of ten topics that I need to write on. These are not topics on which I have complete expertise, but they are issues on which I have opinions which ought be communicated. I thought I could write on one a day, or one every few days, and that this practice of writing would help ground me, help preserve what had already been achieved in my thinking, and keep me on the path towards thinking new thoughts.

However, as it turns out, it is far easier to come up with a topic, and to talk about it in class or at a bar, than it is to actually write a short piece (i.e. 500 to 1000 words). What I envisioned were a set of blog articles, written in a conversational style. And, I have written some (for example, “Carbon Ethics and Future Worlds“, and “Chic-ness and Cheapness – the materiality of the modern aesthetic”). These entries, and “the list”, were inspired by what I felt was a strength developing in my writing/thinking – a strength at communicating difficult ideas to a general audience by remaining alongside examples that are poignant and contemporary (i.e. “Time and Engagement in the Present“). However, those entries were written while I was gripped by a certain situation, a concern, a need to preserve and communicate a thought.

Many years ago in my first year of University studies, Dennis Danielson spoke to my foundations class on the topic of “hot cognition” – the state of mind you are in when your existence is held by concern for a topic, when you literally “need” to find something out, and express it. It’s what makes people enjoy school, enjoy writing papers and presentations and teaching. Like marital love, it isn’t always “simply there”, but must be continually fostered, cherished, nourished. Treating “topics” as a list mistakes concernful engagement for either “work” or “play” or “enjoyable pastime”.

Writing, which is work, is not a pass-time. It is not “play” in the sense of “a way to unwind”. But it is play in the sense of imaginative engagement! Do adults any longer play? Not when “play” is opposed to work – for as any child knows, play is hard work! On “Play” see Derrida’s “Structure Sign and Play“, or James May’s television series “Toy Stories“.

Of course writing, at least philosophical writing, is play. It is a play of concepts, of ideas. But, like building an entire english garden out of plasticine, it is hard work. Topics therefore cannot be treated as something to be completed “at one’s leisure”, but rather must be actively pursued, chased after, struggled with. They can not be “completed”, “in order”, but rather in the order by which they engage the author. Writers do not choose topics – they are chosen by them.

That all said, I still intend on pursuing this “list of topics”, because preserving what was attempted is an essential value for moving forward.

Carbon Ethics and Future Worlds

The Walt Disney company calls some of its imagineers “futureologists”, specifically if they work on Tommorowland or on the Future Worlds Pavilion at Epcot Centre. They are charged with visioning and representing futures. Futures are aspects of the present that project forward in time rather than space, so that we can anticipate what is to-come. We prepare for the future, and we are often wrong about it. Dropping the Disney reference, Futurology is also a study in its own right – an interdisciplinary discipline charged with predicting and helping us prepare for the time that is always arriving.

Climate change is an ethical issue which is particularly characterized by a relationship with the future. The logic of reducing one’s own carbon emmissions is that the carbon we produce literally warms the climate, if only a tiny amount, and contributes to the future devastation which climate warming will have on millions of people, mostly the poor.  So, according to this logic, it might make sense to take a bus across Canada rather than an airplane – since the bus produces less Co2 to do the same journey. Milan has made this argument here, and backed it up with a decision to actually travel between Ottawa and Vancouver by bus. I respect him highly for making this decision.

However, there is another way to look at climate change ethics. One can easily point out that my individual actions, if they remain merely the actions of one individual, will not have much effect on the future. The reason why lone voices can have power in history is only because they do not remain lone voices, but create organizing effects, popular movements, etc… Thus, carbon ethics must be not only about my personal actions and the damage they produce or don’t produce, but how my personal actions are part of a larger community of actors and actions. In other words, how my choice to travel in a certain way will encourage others to make similar choices. Put yet another way, (and I think this is more elegant), we need to choose with our actions the world we want to live in, and in such a way that our actions help bring that world around.

Not to say that Milan is somehow unfamiliar or ignorant of this argument. He has stated that his reasoning in taking the Bus includes “to show that there really are low-carbon, cross-country options – even for those with full time jobs”. He believes this demonstration will have a psychological effect on others making decisions about how to get across Canada, because the “concrete action of someone you know has more psychological potency than the hypothetical action of a stranger”. I agree with him on both of these point – taking the bus absolutely is a way to encourage others to make low carbon choices in situations where they previously might have dismissed the bus as too unpleasant and slow.

Personally, however, I think the train is the best option for slower, lower carbon intensive transportation in a future low or zero carbon economy. Milan has repeatedly pointed out that the existing trans-Continental rail service is more carbon intensive than a Bus. Also, it is much less convenient since it leaves every 3 days rather than daily, and does not travel directly from Ottawa to Sudbury. On these points, he is of course correct.

However, thinking about the future, it is possible to conceive of a future where rail travel in Canada is more convenient – I have recently talked about how in the 1980s when The Canadian and the Super Continental were both still running running, there were daily departures east and west from every Major Canadian city between Montreal and Vancouver, travelling through both the northern and southern prairies. Also in those days the transcontinental rail trip took the same 3 days as the bus trip takes now (the schedule has recently been revised to 3 days 12 hours so it includes an extra night and more cushion time so as to run on time more often). On the other hand, it’s impossible to imagine a future where bus travel is much nicer than it is now. The food could be improved, there could be wireless internet and TV consoles, perhaps there could even be slightly more legroom. But for multi day journeys, you need showers, beds, a coffee shop, dome cars, lounges, bars – the kind of thing a long distance train offers, but a bus never could.

Furthermore, it’s possible to electrify rail, or to build engines that run on hydrogen fuel cells – such as Japan is currently working on. It is of course possible to make a fuel cell bus also – I believe Translink already has some in experimental service. However, since trains have lower rolling resistance than trucks, they will always be more efficient for hauling heavy freight. And even if rail travel is always more energy intensive than bus travel for passengers, we can not only consider “how little energy can you consume”, but also “how great a proportion of the population can you get to switch” (from private automobiles). I believe that encourage train travel reaches out to many more people than encouraging bus travel. To some extent efficiency is less important than adoption because a zero-carbon transportation system is zero carbon whether it is high efficiency or not. Thus, I would say the more important value is encouraging more people to adopt into a system which is potentially carbon-neutral, rather than encouraging some people to adopt into a system which is slightly less carbon intensive at present.

This is really the fundamental point of futurology and ethics – how to we weigh “how good a choice is right now” with “how good a choice might it enable in the future”. My question explicitly is “is it right to do more damage now if you are encouraging something which in the future can do less damage?” Certainly the question, however it is parsed, is about being strategic – I don’t think Milan and I disagree about this. However, we disagree with whether each other is being strategic in the right way.

What I hope we are both opposed to is the blind utilitarian calculus which tries to minimize the damage my actions cause looking only at the effects of my actions insofar as I am an individual, and not affecting the actions of others. In other words, an ethics that ignores the fact our actions msut be directed towards a future world we’d like to live in, and be strategic with respect to producing that world. British Television presenter Jeremy Clarkson rightly points out that the logic of merely reducing the amount of violence I do (in the direction towards zero) logically results in the “I ought commit suicide” conclusion (at the zero point) – because, insofar as I ignore every social aspect of my life, the best way to do the least violence is simply to stop existing. This is of course based on an absurd assumption – that we are individuals and not social beings. In fact, the logic includes a fallacious contradiction, because it is only because we are social beings that we have any moral requirement to care about the violence we do to others implicitly in my actions.

 

 

High Speed Rail in Canada

High Speed Rail in Canada is characterized by being in the past. It’s something that was (the Turbo, the Bombardier LRC), or never was but perhaps could one day be (the JetTrain). It’s also characterized by existing, but not really existing (many Via trains hit 100mph in normal service, but their overall schedules are hardly “high speed”). It could also be part of the future, if certain lobbying groups get their way. It is not the only option, however, for a future, expanded vision of passenger rail in Canada.

The UAC TurboTrain was an extension of 50’s optimism. When development began, private automobiles had not yet achieved their car-culture dominance which, seen retrospectively, appears inevitable. The watchword was “faster without any infrastructure modifications” – in other words, to achieve an average 100mph running speed with the same track and station configurations which limited previous trains to 60 or 70mph. The main obstacles to running faster on existing track was the weight of the train, and the tightness of the corners. The impact a train has on the rail-bed and tracks is a function of its weight and its speed, so to run faster, diesel engines were replaced by turbines which produced the same power but weighed only 300lbs. Also, individual train cars were replaced by a system of permanently connected cars which share boogies (wheel-sets), so as to reduce weight and rolling resistance. Unfortunately, however, this meant that train sets could not be lengthened or shortened as per customer demand – the size of each train was fixed. As for the corners, the Turbo employed a tilting mechanism so the train would lean into the corners, increasing both the safe speed turns could be taken at, and passenger comfort.

The Turbo ran between 1968 and 1982. Plagued by technical difficulties at its outset, it developed a reputation for unreliability. This was somewhat unfair – after their 1973 rebuilds the the Turbos were available 97% of the time.

It’s commonly asserted that when the Turbos were scrapped, this was the end of high speed rail in Canada. This is completely untrue – the Turbo was actually replaced by a Bombardier product called the LRC, which stands for “Light, Rapid, Comfortable”. The name was literally a set of values, the same values emphasized in their advertising of the time. The LRC was initially meant to be faster than the Turbo at up to 125mph. This never happened, however, since the LRC engine’s conventional diesels proved too heavy, and track wear at over 100mph too costly, so the LRC trains remained restricted to the same 95mph service speed as the Turbo. Like the Turbo’s, they employed active-tilt, so both the engine and train cars leaned into corners. Unlike the turbo, however, the cars had their own wheels, so the length of trains was not fixed. Unlike the Turbo, LRC trains could be lengthened or shortened taking into account passenger demand.
The LRC is in a sense a thing of the past, since the engines have been scrapped, sold off, or are still for sale on Via rail’s website. The LRC passenger carriages remain in service, but most have had their tilting permanently de-activated. On straight track, however, they still reach 100mph in normal service when pulled by Via’s new P42DC GE diesels. I’ve actually clocked a Toront0-Montreal train at 165km/h with my GPS, although it reached that speed only briefly and cruised mostly at 130-140km/h.

The JetTrain was the third, last, and most complete failure of high speed rail in Canada. It never went into service, and was never built. It was in essence a continuation of Bombardier’s LRC system which addressed the issue of heavy engines by reverting to turbines, specifically a proven Pratt and Whitney unit which had been in service, mostly aeronautical, since 1984. In the JetTrain the Turbines turn generators to power electric traction motors which are the same as used in Bombardier’s high speed electric train, the Acela. In fact, the JetTrain is really just a diesel-electric version of the all-electric Acela. Train cars would have been the same as on the Acela, which are an evolution of the LRC series. Twin engined JetTrains were to have service speeds of 150mph, with 165mph top speed (still lower than the record set by a US turbotrain of 170.8 mph). Since the Acela is a reality and uses much of the same Bombardier equipment a JetTrain would, it cannot be ruled out as impossible in the future.

High speed rail, however, is only one possible form of time-efficient rail travel. Another is night trains, which take advantage of the sleeping hours to cover distances while using up less daylight, less time where we’d like to be out doing other things. Rather than build a train which can travel between Windsor and Montreal very quickly in the daytime, it’s also logically possible, for example, to leave Windsor at 9pm and arrive in Montreal in the mid morning. By spending the night hours on a train, the voyage need not be as fast to maximize the number of daylight hours at your destination.  Such a service is absolutely a possibility for Via, since they actually purchased the entire railset of the “Nightstar“, a planned sleeper version of the London to Paris “Eurostar“, but which never went into service. Via rail purchased 139 pieces of Nightstar rolling stock for 130 million, a significant discount over it’s original price of 500 million. 29 sleepers remain inactive according to Via’s own website, and are sitting in a Thunder Bay facility. These railcars are also capable of high speed travel, since they would have been required to move at 186mph in European service.

Another option is to simply disregard speed and time efficiency entirely and focus on comfort. This is the route take by Via’s trans-continental train named “The Canadian“, when it recently increased its schedule form 3 days to 3 days, 12 hours. This combined with the fact the Canadian travels only 3 times a week, is priced for rail-destination tourists (the cheapest sleeper fare is almost 1000$), and leaves only from Toronto in the East, means it is hardly a convenient travel option for most Canadians.

This has not always been the case – up until 1990 the Canadian operated in two sections east of Sudbury – one to Toronto, and another to Montreal via Ottawa, and with Daily departures heading both East and West. Furthermore, when CN’s Super Continental was still in service (which also split into two sections in Sudbury to serve Toronto and Montreal), there were actually two trains continental passenger trains in Canada, providing service across Canada though the lower and higher prairies. The Canadian took the Canadian Pacific route through Banff, Calgary and Regina, and the Continental took the northerly CN line through Jasper, Edmonton and Saskatoon. With such breadth of service, one can firmly say the rail travel was a real transportation option for most urban Canadians East of Montreal.

One day it will be time to replace The Canadian’s railset (although the old heavy cars are so durable, this likely won’t be for 25 years or more). At that point, but hopefully before it, we could start building a modern rail system in Canada that meets the needs we need to have as the automobile loses its dominance. Such a rail system would need to take advantage of many possibilities for improved service in Canada – higher average speeds, more night trains, daily departures, and pricing competitive enough to get people out of their cars.

The Canadian

I’ve just booked passage on the Canadian to travel from Vancouver and Toronto, and I’m quite excited about the journey. Having taken Amtrak across America, it will be nice to experience the Canadian equivalent.

I was able to get quite a good deal. While I was happy with taking Amtrak from Bellingham and Toronto for 303$, I’m even happier with the discount I’ve procured on Via. I’ve actually booked a sleeper class ticket, because through the via-express deals website the price was only 331$ plus tax. That means a bed, and all meals included. I encourage everyone to take advantage of this, it’s a truly ridiculous deal, and a chance to experience the luxury of yesteryear at below modern economy prices. (For comparison’s sake, the regular discounted economy fare is 442$ plus tax).
Traveling Sleeper Class is an experience all its own, and one I have not experienced since I was a small boy when we took the Canadian to Calgary to visit relatives. When we took it then, the Canadian was on its traditional CP route through Banff and Calgary – soon before the switch to its current route through Jasper and Edmonton, which is generally considered less scenic.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the thing that excites me most about taking the Canadian, specifically taking it sleeper class, is the Park car. The Park car sits at the end of the train, and has a curved end which is really more for style than aerodynamics. It houses a bar, two lounges, and a dome. Mostly, it is excessive – the train doesn’t need it to function. However, it provides space to move around, space for people to socialize in after the berths have been converted to night mode and the children have gone to bed. And, in the early hours of the morning, according to Stuart Maclean it is a place of peace, of tranquility – where you can watch the prairies go by illuminated by the moon. The prairies are largely what I’m looking forward to on this trip – I believe they will look different from a train than from a car. Especially at night when the car’s headlights prevent your eyes from adjusting to the soft light of the moon.

The Canadian is a train with some history: it is the “Train of Tommorow” of 1953 – a time when the old was being replaced with the new, and everything was chrome and a new Chevrolet. Unlike the Chevy, however, the train still looks new. Not a modern new, more the new of the Avro Arrow – from the fifties, but still fresh and clean. The fact that some things from the fifties don’t yet look retro has to do with the fact modernity itself has positive content.

Maybe I can say the Canadian is like John Locke – factually old, but whose ideas don’t seem dated, whereas the Chevy from the same year is Bach – approximately the same period, but much more dated and explicitly from the past. Or maybe you don’t like this analogy.

Still, I think the Canadian looks new, and that it will mean something when it doesn’t anymore. As for that, there is a Park car at the Exporail museum in Montreal now, and although it is outside with a tarp wrapped over it, its even being there indicates that the Canadian’s railset – most of it a solid 54 years old – will eventually all be consigned the museum and scrap heap. It will undoubtedly be replaced by something new and European. But, will it live up to the iconic status of these cars? It is hard to imagine calling any other trainset “The Canadian”.

 

“Chic-ness” and Cheapness – the materiality of the modern aesthetic

We find today everywhere examples of mass produced luxury. Sitting in a coffee house atop dark wood chairs, next to a floor to ceiling fireplace adorned with an exotic artwork, I am both everywhere and nowhere. Starbucks, or Second-Cup, even the new-look Macdonalds embrace an architecture of bare wood, rock and leather wingback chairs alongside glass panel windows, bare metal, intricate lighting and world music. “Comfort” “Nostalgia”, “Modern”, “Chic” are the values put forth in such a decor – these are “3rd spaces”, like homes (who of us have these anymore in a world of rental housing, difficult roommates, distant parents) without the intimacy. We revel in them, we feel at home in the intimacy of anonymity. Critiquing this modern form of intimacy is a study unto itself, but not the one I pursue here. Rather, I wish to concentrate on the materiality of these places – the role materials play, the way they show up, and the way they might be emblematic of a relationship to matter that is dominant in the present.

The first thing to say about the materials in coffee shop architecture is that they are cheap. The brick and grout in the fireplace have a superficial look – the grout doesn’t sit nicely between the bricks, and though I’ve seen worse bricklaying than this, it feels very much like it’s been built to have a certain appearance (old, nostalgic), rather than with any kind of function or service length in mind. The wood around the the hearth is more explicitly cheap – a place where the finish is flaked off reveals particle board beneath. Of the screws attaching the board to the brick, 3 fit flush, but the fourth sticks out – a telling sign of a job carelessly done.

The seats on first inspection look better – a dark mahogany, and surprisingly solid for coffee shop chairs. But a well used seat betrays the dark finish – it is of course a cheaper, lighter toned wood (possibly Alder), stained to appear like rich, dark mahogany. I could go on and give the same analysis of the drapes, the tables, the lighting, the floor, etc… but it serves no further purpose – the point is already made.

But what is the point? So the materials are cheap, the workmanship a bit shoddy – but isn’t this what we should expect from something like an infinitely reproduced coffee shop? Of course we should – it is not my intention to criticize the coffee shop for not being something I would like it to be. It can be criticized only because it is not something it feigns to be, because its materials show up as one thing immediately, and then quite another upon reflection. The reason I bring this issue to the forefront is I wish to claim this is becoming a basic characteristic of our relationship with materials in capitalism more generally.

It is a cliche now to say capitalism is characterized by turning everything into a commodity – this is to say something infinitely reproducible and exchangeable. This inclines us to think of matter as the raw resources which are tapped, processed and formed into these commodities On this account, matter has no positive characteristics – the only things we “see”, we buy, we come into contact with, are forms – objects, their quality having to do with how they are put together rather than anything inherent about the matter. However, in situations like the fireplace, the “dark” wood chairs, we encounter commodities in their material aspect as false appearances. Traditionally speaking matter can never “appear” – anything that shows up must show up as an image, as something formed, usually something built by a machine that put an order into some disorderly matter. However, what we “see” in the mahogany chair is the false appearance of a matter which isn’t there – we see the mahogany (in a certain sense), and we also see the absence of the mahogany (when we recognize that it is only a cheap finish). W see the absencing of the appearance, the becoming-mere of the mere-appearence of the mahogany. Or with respect to the fireplace, we first see the fireplace “as” old, worldworn – and then immediately that is revealed as mere appearance, we recall we are in a new Second Cup in the JCC at Bloor and Spadina, and that this piece of exotic african art is nothing but a piece of Second Cup, second rate mass produced kitch?

But why is it interesting that we see the matter in this particular way in coffee shops? Is this not a hipster’s hubris to believe coffee shops will reveal the nature of contemporary reality? Perhaps, but this architectural aesthetic, or better this interior design modality, is not limited to coffee shops. We see the same fake rock, false mahogany and photocopied exotic art at restaurants like the Keg, the Olive Garden, the current generation of fake brewpubs, and other examples. What is common to all these locations is a rejection of the old plastic-fantastic Macdonalds model of interior design, and a look to the Whistler post and beam style, and the modern European coffee shop for inspiration. But the problem with simply replicating any of those styles is simply that they are inherently against mass production because they employ local, high quality materials, and sight-specific interior design to create spaces appropriate for the place the space takes in the community. In order to mass produce these styles it could not have been otherwise than to empty the materials of their quality, to use cheap alternatives with thin varnish surfaces. The result of this is a chic-ness characterized by cheapness, an aesthetic of mere appearance, of materials that devalue themselves in front of your eyes, of spaces which appear comforting but then spit you out. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a commodification, a reproduction and replication of particularity, turned out to produce its own reversal.