Response to Readers
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 at 11:55AM Visitors to this site sometimes make comments, which should stand or fall on their own merits. And I thank them for engaging. However, on occasion and when time permits (never seem to find enough of that!), and if I have something further to add to the topic, I try to respond to comments that have directly addressed or debated arguments in my posts.
Marc Gregoire (March 9), faults me for describing Senates in theory, rather than in practice, and also questions the Roman origins of that theory. Then he remarks that in practice modern Senates are “organized into partisan groups,” and ends by suggesting that if we can avoid a deadlock of legitimacy (I presume he means of the kind I warned against) then “the right reforms could improve the ‘moribund’ body, attracting more statesmen and fewer placeholders."
Response: I am mostly interested in the political and moral theory because until it is forgotten by a people, it is always what guides the practice. Someone has said: “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” I stick to the historical fact that one of the strongest guiding influences on modern Western political history was the Roman ideal of balancing power. My source was Polybius, who is widely quoted in American documents and whose theories were developed by Montesquieu and found their way back to North America. But there were at least fifty very popular roman authors relied on by our ancestors. My point was that the choice as between Greek direct democracy and Roman balanced and filtered democracy, was distinctly Roman. In his engaging book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U Press, 1967) Bernard Bailyn writes that “what gripped their minds, what they knew in detail, was the political history of Rome…” and then, that for the makers of America the “earlier age had been full of virtue: simplicity, patriotism, integrity, a love of justice and of liberty; the present was venal, cynical, and oppressive.” Readers who wish a more full treatment of this Western repudiation of Greek democracy and their preference for the Roman ideal will find it in Jennifer Roberts, Athens On Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (New Jersey: Princeton U, 1994).
Mark Wickens (March 20) remarks correctly that lung cancer is “a disease that could be practically eradicated by changing behavior…” and I respond by saying, again, that AIDS in North America could be eliminated by changing behaviour. In his second comment that day Mark takes me to task for writing that “there can be no common good for civilization in mock sexual behaviour that by definition must be forever barren of offspring” and that homosexual behaviour “can easily kill you.” He believes I have contradicted myself by arguing it can easily kill you, and then stating that “the threat of AIDS is overblown” and showing Statscan predictions that only about 60 people will die of AIDS in 2006. But that was after showing that almost 15,000 Canadians have died of AIDS since 1979, and over 80% of those have been homosexual males. His point is that over 99% of gay people are not dying of AIDS. Well, that is a good thing. I didn’t write that gayness would kill you. I wrote that the HIV virus in combination with specific homosexual behaviours as co-factors seems to produce AIDS - and that can easily kill you.
Alex Corbett (March 21) thinks I missed the point of the film Tsotsi (“Thug”) which for him lies in the fact that the central character (I resist calling him a hero) is not like most young men of his type: he did not run from the crying baby he found, in the car he stole, after he tried to murder the baby’s mother. What a sweetheart! Are we supposed to believe he had a heart of gold all the while? My point was that this is where the film-maker’s ideological position inserted itself, at least for me, because I simply did not find it a believable hook, or motive, for the rest of the story. On that, we must simply differ. And I leave you with a nice distinction I once was taught for how we can tell a good story from a contrived one: A good story attempts to convince you that the improbable is possible, not the other way around, and it does so in a way that causes you to suspend your disbelief. I was simply not convinced, and so I could not suspend my disbelief. You were convinced. I think that makes you gullible. A more subtle characterization of Thug might have worked for me; or perhaps if Thug had been a murdering and vicious-minded woman longing for a child of her own, instead of a vicious-minded man, then I might have believed a baby’s cry could begin to turn a bad life into a good one. But the vast majority of frightened young men on the run from the law who know they have just become the object of a police manhunt for murder and theft, and will likely be hanged if caught, do not suddenly decide to cart a crying baby with smelly diapers around in a shopping bag.
Reader Comments (2)
I have no doubt that Roman ideas influenced the creation of senates, and such ideas certainly deserve consideration. But to discuss reform of the Canadian Senate, we must consider how things are, as well as how they ought to be.
In any case, it's kind of you to take notice of my remarks.