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O Canada!

6/27/2025

It’s tough to keep up with the international crisis/hoopla ‘de jour.’ I’ll talk more about sorting these challenges in a few weeks, but before it gets lost behind Ukraine, Gaza, China, tariffs, USAID, NATO budgets, immigration and, of course, bombing Iran, I wanted to touch on a 'borderline' issue.

Repeated recent ruminations by HWSNBN have put the independence of Canada on the table. Of course, the Canadians are having none of it (nor their current formal sovereign, Charles III). On top of the bluster about annexation, they also have to deal with the impact of the current tariff upheaval (we are far-and-away their largest trading partner (~75%)).

At the same time, as a stalwart member of NATO, Canadian forces recently engaged in the regular Arctic wargaming with US forces; foreshadowing the potential mischief from a more hostile and aggressive Russia. Canada is also home to critical radar detection systems that would be as essential in the lately-bruited “Golden Dome” missile defense system (adapted, no doubt, from Notre Dame’s fearsome football defense).

So, we actually have a symbiotic relationship with Canada in economic and geopolitical terms; making the threats to their independence (likely unsuccessful) all the more problematic.

Since I (like most people in Metropolitan Detroit) grew up north of Canada and enjoyed watching hockey and curling on Canadian TV, I have a special connection with our slightly boring and slightly kooky cousins.

As a historian, I have also spent a fair amount of time understanding the ups and downs of Canadian/British-US relations over the past 250 years. The current brouhaha would seem only typically ridiculous for our present foreign policy direction but for a pretty extensive history of the US looking longingly northward and trying to grab Canada into our embrace. However, that history makes them take the threat even more seriously.

Inter-imperial fights between France and Britain in the 18C left the latter in charge in North America, but ensured that relations between the various provinces and the metropole were quite different north and south. In the aftermath of our successful ouster of the Brits, many loyalists moved north to stay under their imperial flag. Nonetheless, in an early example of American expansionism, the post-Revolutionary peace talks in Paris did feature our efforts to get the Brits to give us Canada as part of the overall settlement.

After we got our noses slapped in the War of 1812, we quieted down for a bit. However, during the US Civil War, the British didn’t play fair in terms of their relationship with the (ultimately unsuccessful) Confederacy; so, after the War, the US again sought control of Canada in recompense for British misdeeds. We were again rebuffed.

By this time, the British had come to realize that their heavy-handed management of their former colonies in the 18C should not be replicated in their continued Canadian holdings, so the 1860s saw the adoption of a new model of empire which allowed Canada an increasing autonomy in handling its affairs. Over the past 150 years, this has become more solidified so that by the time of WWII, Canada was de facto independent of Britain, even if formally within the “Commonwealth” and acknowledging the British Monarch (George VI, Elizabeth II, Charles III) as the Canadian Monarch as well.

Indeed, it was not until the 20C that Canadian international relations was actually directed from Ottawa rather than London. During the later 19C, Canadians were only a part (and not necessarily the determinative part) of international negotiations which directly affected Canadian territory and interests. Since a fair amount of those international concerns arose vis-à-vis the US, this repeatedly led to awkward referrals to London or the British Ambassador to the US to handle what would normal have been bilateral affairs.

The late 19C/early 20C saw a large number of border disputes , as well as controversies about pollution and fisheries between Canada and the US. On more than one occasion, the prospect of absorbing Canada was raised by the US, then in full flush of its imperialistic/ “manifest destiny” phase. (The first) President Roosevelt was particularly aggressive in this regard.

The formal annexation front has been pretty quiet since then, only to be replaced by an informal economic and cultural imperialism that continues to this day. A stalwart NATO member and (junior) partner in Northa American defense arrangements, Canadians cherish their formal independence and cultural distinctiveness, even as they consume US brands and watch US media. The vast majority live reasonably close to the US border, speak (pretty much) the same language (Quebec is a whole other story!), and have many of the same cultural and political values.

So, we’ve long been the ‘big brother,’ who (unsurprisingly) has often been a bit of a bully to the kid sibling. The latest bullying has, however, had a more hostile than familial tone. It’s unlikely that it will go anywhere, rather it will join the increasingly long list of erstwhile allies who we are forcing to rethink their relationship with us and their posture in a more dangerous and dynamic world.

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More or Less

6/20/2025

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More or Less

Inertia, Newton tells us, is a fundamental principal of the universe: Objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest unless they are acted upon by outside forces. The world/universe/cosmos he described, with a variety of additions and refinements, was the basis of physics and defined a fundamental epistemology (for the scientifically literate) for over two hundred years until it was knocked sideways by Einstein, Heisenberg, and Gödel in the early 20C.

Now, I have only a general grasp of relativity, uncertainty, and indeterminateness and I recognize that the vast, vast majority of folks couldn’t care less about them. Almost all humans (including particle physicists outside their laboratories) live happily in a Newtonian world where things are as they seem and fancy-dancy theories of modern physics could just as well be metaphysics for all the difference they make in ordinary lives. We might acknowledge that these models of the universe are “true,” but we just don’t care.

I’ve talked elsewhere about the pitfalls of labels and categories (e.g., “conservatives,” “popular,” “empires”); they’re often semi-deceptive approximations of our experiences and interactions with other people and situations. I’ve talked about how our current political discourse is driven not by fact and truth, but by feelings. I’ve talked about how there is real distance between “what actually happened” and what many of us remember as “history.” Whether in science of history, we seem to live by the 80-20 rule. We’re not too concerned with whether our understanding of the world is entirely accurate (or “true”), so long as it makes do for us in our daily lives.

It may seem ironic, but, actually, it’s entirely consistent that the same modernity which spawned all these labels and rubrics and models to help us make sense of the world arose intertwinedly with the increased complexity of the processes, institutions, and piles of information which surround us. Of course, religious beliefs have been part of humanity for thousands of years. Even if simpler, the life of a hunter-gatherer was replete with unexplained phenomena. Our modern world has provided explanations for many of these (e.g., weather, illness), but has, in parallel, built systems, institutions, and mechanisms (e.g., money, bureaucracy, medicine, technology) that remain outside the mental grasp of the vast majority.

So the underlying need for religion and science as modes of understanding the world remain, despite our strides over the past few millennia. They’re coping mechanisms. They may be more refined and precise and characterized by scientific language than the way ordinary people have understood their world for thousands of years, but that’s part of the illusion. Attributing thunderstorms to Odin, or tsunamis to the wrath of Neptune or a person’s illness to a mis-balance of their four “humors” worked for most people even after more nominally rational explanations were available. Even today, religion is widespread and superstition is deeply embedded even among the most modern and sophisticated. It’s not for nothing that Marx referred to religion as the “opiate of the masses.” For many, organized religion continues to serve that role, providing a coherent world-view (including a rationale for fatalism) that enables adherents to maintain a mental equilibrium with the vagaries of a life that remains (for many) still too “nasty, brutish, and short.” Even for ‘modern’ folks, a generic belief in science serves the same purpose: an epistemological system that gives comfort and assurance that, even if it doesn’t provide all the answers immediately, it has a theory of how all will be revealed in due course.

Lately, many have decried the deconstruction of our shared social picture of reality. Political polarization has engendered epistemological silos, from which each end characterizes the other as being built on “fake news” or some other form of mythology. Of course, each is an approximation of reality and it’s quite difficult for folks who espouse one perspective or the other to contemplate that the other folks’ view is no further ‘off’ than the one they hold. One can go back to Plato and other Greeks of that era to see that the question of whether there actually is a “reality,” and whether it can be accurately perceived by humans are not well-settled questions. On top of this philosophical disorientation, we have to add an understanding that interpretation (whether of “reality” or history) is always flavored by the mental capabilities, psychological parameters, and ethical values of the perceiver/interpreter. In other words, we need to tread cautiously before decrying others’ characterizations as definitively false.

At a social/political level, this means (as I have noted previously) that all segments of a political society need to stretch their brains (and hearts) to try to understand the mentality of others without too much judgmentalism. More broadly, it means that if we are to avoid the continued profound differences in human outlooks on the world from hardening into destructive epistemological silos, we need to stretch our imaginations to find new ways of looking at and characterizing the world; acknowledging that neither rational modernity nor religious outlooks are complete and satisfactory.

Alternatively (and more likely), we can continue to muddle along, rather like the famous story of the group of blind people grasping at different parts of an elephant. Newton, Heisenberg, Mohammed, Zoroaster, Aristotle, HWSNBN, and others have each grasped part of the beast and each of us have to construct our own version—more or less.

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Great Migration

6/13/2025

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I recently read “The Warmth of Other Suns,” Isabel Wilkerson’s remarkable study of the “Great Migration” in which about six million Black Americans left the Deep South and moved North and West in the early and mid-20C. They moved to escape the horrific oppression of the “Jim Crow” era and build new lives for themselves and their progeny. It’s an impressive and moving historical study, combining rich personal stories with some overall sociological context.

Virtually every major US city was deeply affected by this demographic shift and the ubiquitous presence of Black culture (and White reactions) makes it all too easy to think that this has always been the case. Nonetheless, across the 20C and continuing today, US music, labor relations, housing patterns, and political issues and participants are all products of this relatively recent change.

The US has always been a society with considerable racism. However, up through the Civil War, the peculiar institution of chattel slavery was its deepest expression and the principal focus of a modernity which claimed some moral foundation based on the dignity of the individual. It was (relatively) easy to oppose slavery and many who did and likely more of those who merely went along with abolition remained profoundly racist. There’s no small mythologizing of the Civil War as a moral struggle, but few in the North fought for treating Blacks as full citizens and social equals.

Of course, abolition was hardly the end of the story. While the formalities of slavery were prohibited, the flourishing of Black freedom in the South (“Reconstruction”) was all too brief and both in terms of culture and economics, the status of almost all Blacks in the South returned to an appalling state. Whether in terms of lynchings, the economics of farm labor, or daily social relations, the lives of most Blacks were hardly better by 1900 than they had been in 1850.

Reading about the treatment of Blacks in the South at this time brought to mind the stories with which I had been more familiar as a historian of European imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples across the 15-20C took place far away from the centers of power (the “metropoles”) in the “home” countries of those empires. While the US was an empire in this sense as well, we can also look at the treatment of Blacks in the South as an imperial project. Rather than leaving the exploited labor ‘in situ,’ we (via the Spanish, Portugues, British etc.) moved them to the work locations in Alabama, Georgia, etc. As a variant in the modes of the projection of power over another people (my definition of imperialism), this seems to fit. Certainly the treatment of the people involved and the motivations were well within the normal frames of imperialism.

All this was quite interesting to me at the “macro” level, and Wilkerson’s writing ensured my deeper understanding of some of the individual stories, but what drew me to the book was a personal, if indirect connection.

I grew up in an upper-middle class household in suburban Detroit in the 1960s. We had a series of household servants—maids and laundresses—throughout that time. They were all Black women. Anniebell Shepherd joined us in the mid-1960s and stayed working for my folks well into the 1990s. I have only fond memories of her warmth, attention, and cooking. At the time (as a child) her presence seemed unremarkable (most of my friends and family had Black household servants). I knew she had been born in the South and had come to Detroit well before I was born.

I never asked her about her motivations and experiences. But later, I came to wonder how her story was part of this broader historical process in the US. I learned she was born in Mississippi in 1912 and moved to Detroit in the mid-1940s. Wilkerson’s book gave me context within which I could place Anniebell.

As the author describes it, the race-based discrimination of America in the North and West was widespread and endemic. It lacked, however, in most cases, the full extent of the physical abuse and legal structures characteristic of the South. Both WWI and WWII brought a sharp increase in the demand for labor and thus created opportunities for Blacks seeking to escape the awfulness of the South. But we should make no mistake: while Blacks were better off and this improvement in conditions was sufficient motivation for the challenges of leaving their homes and families, this attractiveness was only relative to what was left behind. It took the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s to launch another round of legal changes on the road to equality. And, in terms of culture, practice, and attitudes, a lot of work remains to be done (even before the current retrenchment).

I was unaware of all this of course as a child, with little understanding of the history and social practices manifest in our house or, more broadly, that gave rise to the Detroit (and other) race riots of the late 1960s. I didn’t think of myself as racist, nor my parents, nor their friends and families. This book has given me a powerful lesson about the limited scope of my awareness. Just as a fish doesn’t know that its water that they’re swimming in, neither did I appreciate much of blithe assumptions and comforts of upper middle class White life at that time; nor the implicit (even if not malevolent) racism of our situation.

Decades later, I remain a work in progress in this regard. I have to tolerate the discomfort of pushing myself to see how I still act in ways which I find improper/wrong just because of my own history/socialization/laziness—and then change.

(btw, Juneteenth is next week; it’s a federal holiday and a commemoration of the Great Emancipation of the 1860s and a reminder that the legal formalities are often some distance from people’s daily lives.)

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Rudderless

6/6/2025

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When we look at Early Modern Europe, principally in the 17/18C, we can see the roots of many critical aspects of the modern world. Two of the most significant were the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the coherent, bureaucratic “State.” While each of these has many material/ on-the-ground components and practices, they also reflect the development of ideas and conceptions which have continued (and morphed) down to the 21C. In particular, they both represent means by which human activity could be organized outside of the previously existing moral structure of society. Indeed, each developed distinctive and self-perpetuating rationales for their claims to human attention and loyalty that were, more-or-less consciously, amoral. This untethering has allowed for each of these institutions to develop prodigiously, but there has been a considerable cost and only part of the bill has yet been paid.

As noted by Albert Hirschman (see “The Passions and the Interests”), a key part of the rationale of capitalism was that provided a means of social organization that broke away from the destructive sectarian conflicts of the 16/17C which followed the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Focusing on economic “interests” facilitated commerce, regardless of the beliefs (“passions”) of the merchants involved. The nominal rationality of those “interests” was also consistent with the mentality emerging out of the “scientific revolution” of the same period.

At the same time, the theorists of a distinctive, permanent “State” (even if not yet rooted in democratic nationalism), who also rejected religious-tinged morality as the basis of governmental action (Machiavelli is key here), were on a parallel path. The doctrine of “raison d’etat” enabled those in power to base their actions (both domestically and internationally) without regard to Christian compassion, but on the self-perpetuation of the State.

With some centuries of momentum behind them, both capitalism (profit) and the State seem to have acquired some degree of self-perpetuating rationalization; apologists for each claim that their continuation is an important goal in and of themselves, outweighing the costs of that preservation. We can see this in the rise of the national security state in many countries around the world, as well as the vast amount of intellectual and financial resources devoted to corporate profitability (and lower taxes!).

Despite Adam Smith’s championing of moral sentiments (often lost in the shadows of “The Wealth of Nations”), various resurgences of Christian/religious beliefs, and the claims for “social justice” (especially from the political left), the hoped-for constraints of morality on the acts of states and business enterprises have largely evaporated leaving these principal parts of human societies adrift. Relatively recent initiatives (i.e., late 20C), such as the promotion of “human rights” and democracy as the basis for international relations or “ESG” and “DEI” in the corporate world, notwithstanding. Indeed, the current repositioning of both US domestic and international policy under HWSNBN shows that this hard-nosed stance is very much alive, despite decades of the US claiming to “don” (sorry!) moral clothing globally.

More broadly, the stark evidence of economic and social inequality so visible both within individual societies and on an international/comparative basis, speaks volumes as to the tenuous place of moral arguments in our world. Maintenance (expansion?) of privilege and wealth seems to drive much domestic and international policy-making, both here and elsewhere. The aspiration—dating from the 17C—that America should be a shining city on a hill and an example for all finds no place in the current rhetoric.

The risks of this course have hardly gone unnoticed. There is a long line of cultural, religious, aesthetic, and social thinkers who have sought to warn the “West” of its moral peril. Many of these arguments have been rooted in the preservation of the past (conservatives), a disconnect with nature, or a disconnect with humanity (romantics). Actual policies and practices, too, have swung back and forth showing varying degrees of awareness of this challenge. Among the most notable is the critique that arose in the aftermath of the two “World Wars” of the 20C, particularly the rabid destructiveness of Nazi Germany. These arguments stressed that modernity has gone too far in its focus on untethered rationality.

Many philosophers have struggled to find a moral anchor for modernity, once Christianity was dethroned by schism, deism, and rationality; especially since non-Western belief systems have had limited purchase. Without an “author” (i.e. God), it’s difficult to have authority; and, given the vagaries of human nature, there seems to be little firm ground upon which to build an ethical edifice.

It is the human condition to struggle for meaning. Christian nationalists (an oxymoron!) inherently offer little of universal appeal, the Roman Church, too, is saddled with history and scandal, non-Western sources are too much on the defensive against modernity to spark a new formulation. Musk-ean profit is simple and superficially attractive, as is national tribalism; but the former is out of reach for all but a few and the latter rings hollow and superficial in a well-melded and interconnected world.

I have asked in the past whether modernity was “worth it,” but I certainly don’t advocate returning to the 15C. The resolution is not clear. If I’m looking for a response rooted in something other than morality, perhaps I’ll ask ChatGPT for the answer.

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O Canada!

More or Less

Great Migration

Rudderless

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.

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O Canada!

More or Less

Great Migration

Rudderless

Condemned to Repeat It --Musings on history, society, and the world.

Archives

Sign up for alerts when there's a new post

Condemned to Repeat It --
Musings on history, society, and the world.