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Leah, Leah, Leah.

26 Jul

Leah, Leah, Leah. The only way I can think to respond to your column on Saturday is as if you are a befuddled 18-year-old in a first-year university writing class. So – that’s what you’re getting.

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Hi Leah! Good start with the column on Saturday. I like that you’ve made reference to a specific study (from the University of Leicester), and I think that you raise some interesting questions. There are, however, still some issues I’d like you to consider.

First, you need to provide much more information from that study. You paraphrase and comment as follows:

Researchers at the University of Leicester recently examined the stated values of 136,000 people in 48 countries and found that well-educated people are most likely to misplace themselves on the political spectrum. In particular, there was a tendency for educated, upper-middle-class respondents to identify as and to vote left wing despite holding views on wealth distribution that place them firmly to the right.

An interesting point, to be sure! But you need to consider these ideas of “left” and “right” or “liberal” and “conservative” with a bit more caution. It sounds like the respondents in this study might perhaps be socially liberal, yet fiscally conservative. When you say that they vote “left-wing”, can you be more specific? Does “left-wing” refer to centre-left parties, or does it refer to a more radical left wing?

Second, based on the information you’ve provided, I think that you need to reconsider your analysis. Is it terribly surprising that, for instance, you would find a substantial number of educated, upper-middle-class Canadians voting for the Liberal party (i.e. centre-left) and identifying as ‘liberal’, yet still holding fairly conservative views about taxation and social programs? To me, that’s 100% predictable, and not in fact evidence that supports your “conclusion” that “[t]he more brains you have, the less likely you are to admit to being conservative while privately holding right-wing views.”

To clarify your thinking in general, you might consider the possibility that wealth correlates to fiscally conservative views, while advanced education correlates to socially liberal views, and ask how those correlations might work together. Rather than thinking of political allegiances or preferences as existing on a single-axis spectrum, like this:

you might think about these allegiances or preferences as existing at least in a system of two axes and four quadrants, like this:

This way of thinking might help you to avoid a lot of the ambiguity you create by using terms like “liberal” and “left-wing” interchangeably. I know you’re trying, because you say later that politics is more complicated than you’d seem to have previously believed:

That’s the trouble with politics: It is much more complicated than politicians would have us believe. Politics would do much better on television, I think, if it was more like hockey. With hockey, you choose a team and you root for it, win or lose, no matter which bunch of overpaid thugs are playing, until the franchise gets sold, goes bankrupt or you get old and die.

By comparison, politics is difficult, not only because it isn’t just a brutish game that people play for money – although, more than often, it can be that too – but because, no matter which team you decide to support, someone will end up calling you a hypocrite in the end.

But you still need to consider these terms with a better eye to historical context, and to be more precise in the way you use them. This attention to context and precision might let you avoid, for instance, making a claim that it’s a “huge relief” to “some” to realize that it’s “okay” to be a conservative who “can meet [his or her]  friends for sushi after yoga class, roll [his or her] eyes at the morons at BP and not feel like a total jerk for driving Range Rover and sending [his or her] kids to private school”. Here, you’re very clearly confusing “liberal” and “left-wing”. A committed left-winger would likely not choose the lifestyle you describe, but a social liberal with a high income very possibly would. Again — it’s not a surprise.

Third, if you want to bring your personal feelings of relief into your writing, that’s fine, but you need to make it clear that you’re talking about personal feelings. (I always tell my students that it’s best to own up to a bias, rather than pretending to be neutral…) More problematically, your later comments about “champagne socialism”, “chardonnay socialism”, and “mojito socialism” are very confusing. These terms could be part of an interesting set of metaphors, but at times you fail to control the comparison, and it ends up seeming suspiciously like you are actually talking about champagne and chardonnay. There’s nothing wrong with talking about alcohol consumption in your writing (we’re all adults!), but you need to be more clear.

Finally, I take issue with your argument about “the way to approach politics”:

No, the way to approach politics is to take a stand you believe in and stick to it, whether it makes you popular or not. If you are smart, you will read all sorts of books and magazines and newspapers and blogs that reinforce your particular point of view so that, if anyone disagrees with it, you can shoot them down with pre-prepared diatribes on why, say, Muslim head scarves promote Islamofascism in schools or how factory-farmed chickens are systematically melting the polar ice cap.

Do you really think that the “smart” approach to politics involves picking a single perspective and sticking to it? That the best thing is to read arguments on  a particular issue from only one side? That’s probably a sure-fire way to avoid the accusations of hypocrisy that you discuss, but it’s also intellectually irresponsible. What does it say about the strength of your political convictions, if you’re not willing and able to study and consider different political convictions or positions?

I suppose if you’re mostly concerned about avoiding appearance of hypocrisy, your advice is solid. But is this a fashion and lifestyle column, or are you providing political comment? You need to choose.

All in all, I give this draft a tentative B minus: as a first-year effort, it shows promise, but still needs work.

Leah McLaren makes me sad, but she doesn’t make me depressed.

20 Jun

Leah McLaren writes this week that depression might not in fact be a disease: it might be a diagnosis manufactured to allow drug companies to sell more medications to more people. Her arguments are pretty standard among those who question influence of Big Pharma on diagnostic criteria.

In [the view of Gary Greenberg, author of Manufacturing Depression], the game is rigged. As he told me in a phone interview, “the disease was invented to justify the cure.”

[...]

As a clinician he takes issue with the methodology used to determine depression. He points out that answering “yes” to questions like “Have you been feeling depressed lately?” and “Do you ever wonder if life is worth living?” may be evidence that you are a Prozac candidate or simply a natural response to watching the latest news on the BP oil spill.

“With clinical depression, the symptoms justify the disease,” he says. “There’s an infinite regress and no bottom. Don’t forget they used to be able to scientifically ‘diagnose’ homosexuality the same way.”

To some extent, these are important points. Uncontestably, the desire for drug-company profit drives a lot of diagnosis; uncontestably, we live in a culture that prefers quick solutions to complex problems; and uncontestably, there’s a lot of potential danger in defining traits of behaviour or character as medical problems. (I’d recommend Frontline’s documentary, The Medicated Child, for an interesting critical perspective on some of these issues. Or you could read Foucault.)

But there are still major problems with the argument. Let’s take this statement to start:

While Greenberg believes depression is over-diagnosed and anti-depressants are over-prescribed, he sees nothing wrong with experimenting with pharmaceuticals in order to alleviate sadness or mental suffering, which are of course as old as human consciousness itself. He just wishes we would understand that that’s what we’re doing, rather than convincing ourselves we’re suffering from a mental illness and in need of a cure. Such behaviour brings to mind my temperance worker grandmother who used to allow herself a thimble of whisky every night on the grounds that her doctor had prescribed it as “medicine.”

If by “wishes we would understand what we’re doing”, Greenberg means, “wishes we would understand the cultural and economic forces that drive medical practices”, then I’m on board. But if, as McLaren suggests, he means that we should understand that we’re simply dabbling with drugs in a nearly-recreational, physician-endorsed way when we medicate depression or anxiety, then I can’t agree.

There’s plenty of stigma about mental illness and psychiatric medication: talking about medication as something people take because it’s the ‘easy solution’ to problems that everybody has diminishes the courage it takes to seek help when one really needs it. This is the kind of thinking that makes people suffer without medication that they legitimately need, and the kind of thinking that makes people feel like mental health problems should be secret and shameful. They’re not. And if you’ve seen what happens to people who don’t get help they need because of this shame — well, you know why we need to get past this particular stigma.

Second, I am always irritated by discussions of diagnostic criteria that ignore the full list of criteria. In the excerpt above, McLaren focuses on symptoms that, indeed, everybody has from time to time. But not everybody experiences “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning”. “Clinically significant distress” might sound like a nebulous term — and it probably is an unsatisfactorily flexible term — but it’s a meaningful part of the diagnostic criteria for a lot of mental illnesses. In the hands of a responsible practician, it means that you don’t get diagnosed as having clinical depression when you’re bummed out about current events. And, frankly, the DSM-IV doesn’t require that a patient answer yes to the questions outlined in McLaren’s column: it lists symptoms of pervasive, most-of-the-day, most-days, can’t-eat-or-sleep-properly sadness.

People who have been in the throes of that kind of sadness know how different it is from regular variations in mood. Speaking from experience — the kind of experience that may cause you to dismiss everything I’ve said here — I know that there is a huge qualitative and quantitative difference between the way I feel when I’m anxious in a way that’s part of regular life, and the way that I feel when I’m anxious in a way that means that I need help. The former is unpleasant, but never unbearable; it’s usually focused on a quantifiable concern; and it’s something that I can forget with a bit of distraction. The latter sits very differently in the body: it’s always there, no matter what I do; it’s loud and cold and painful; it wipes out my appetite; it makes me shrink, queasily, from music I love; in public, it means that I use every ounce of my energy in the conscious performance of normalcy. In other words, the former is characterized by the brief appearance of symptoms that might irresponsibly be read as indicating some kind of anxiety disorder, while the latter is characterized by more symptoms, felt more intensely, and crosses into “clinically significant distress”.

It’s a position of enormous privilege to believe that these two things are interchangeable, and it’s irresponsible to speak as if they are. I’m all for cultural criticism of the medical and pharmaceutical establishments, but not when they’re simplistic, badly informed, and unsympathetic to individual experience.

Margaret Wente on coffee cups and plastic bags

15 Nov

Margaret Wente has written a column for the Globe and Mail in which she criticizes Toronto’s recycling plans as “not based on economics, or feasibility, or anything that resembles common sense, but on the simple belief that the more we recycle, the faster we will go to Heaven.” Her major objection is to a proposal that would have retailers give a twenty-cent credit to customers who use reusable coffee cups. Saying that “[i]t never occurred to [her] that choosing a coffee cup for my double-double is an ethical decision”, Wente goes on to argue:

I have now spent many hours researching this matter on your behalf, and I have found entire websites, engineering reports, and university student subcommittees devoted to the environmental impact of coffee cups. The classic of the genre seems to be a study called Reusable and Disposable Cups: An Energy-Based Evaluation, by former chemistry professor Martin B. Hocking, who, I am proud to say, comes from our own University of Victoria.

To perform a proper lifecycle analysis of coffee cups, Prof. Hocking began by calculating the embodied energy (MJ) in each type of cup. Not surprisingly, he found that it takes a great deal more energy to manufacture a reusable ceramic cup than it does to manufacture any kind of disposable cup. For every paper coffee cup you use, you’d have to reuse your ceramic mug at least 39 times to break even, energy-wise (assuming that you wash it once in a while). For every polystyrene cup, you’d have to use your mug a whopping 1,006 times to break even.

I trust that clears things up.

Well, no, not really. First, it’s not so unreasonable to expect to reuse a ceramic mug 39 times. That’s a little over a month of once-daily use. Using the same mug 1006 times seems a bit less likely — but then, that’s less than three years of once-daily use. Shouldn’t a ceramic mug last for three years? Further, the numbers that Wente gives address only the energy costs of production. Recycling and waste disposal both use additional energy. I’d like to see some numbers that take into account the differences at both ends of use. And of course, there are other issues to be considered: landfill space, pollution from production, etc.

Wente also objects to actions dedicated to reducing the use of plastic bags, on similar grounds:

Everybody likes to point to Ireland, which slapped a hefty tax on plastic shopping bags a few years ago. Voila! People practically stopped using them. But then they started buying plastic doggie poop bags and plastic kitchen bags and plastic wastebasket bags to replace all the plastic shopping bags they had formerly recycled.

Here’s the thing: I don’t use plastic liners in my garbage baskets, except for the large bin in the kitchen. They’re actually not necessary. (The dog issue is different, but I don’t have a dog). So the argument about shifting around waste doesn’t really make sense for me. I also *like* my reusable bags better. They hold more, and they have sturdier, more comfortable handles. Of course, I notice this difference because I carry them myself when I walk back home from the supermarket, or sling them on the handlebars of my bike. I’m betting that Wente still throws her plastic bags in the trunk of her much-loved SUV.

I don’t want to make this a virtue contest. Wente is probably correct that plastic shopping bags are not going to push us over some kind of ecological tipping point. But the bigger issue, the one she overlooks because it’s the thing she really doesn’t want to confront, is the issue of attitude. Why on earth should we defend our ‘right’ to generate more waste than we really need to? Superficially, Wente is defending single-use coffee cups and plastic bags; dig a bit deeper into this argument, though, and you’ll find that she’s defending her right to overconsume. Focusing on individual bits of garbage might allow us to justify a wasteful lifestyle. Considering a really different lifestyle, however, makes ours (mine included) seem simply absurd.

My grandmothers would never have thought twice about reusing anything reusable. My mother, for instance, tells me of her mother making aprons out of flour sacks. Why? Simply because you wouldn’t waste a perfectly good flour sack if you’d grown up in pre-Confederation Newfoundland. I remember my father’s mother reusing Red Rose tea bags through cup after cup, because it was the economical thing to do. (I also believe that she never bought a car she couldn’t pay for outright — on a teacher’s pension.) Perhaps instead of defending our ‘right’ to generate garbage, we could start questioning why we allow ourselves to look at unnecessary waste as anything but a mistake. Perhaps rather than splitting hairs about whether or not we use more energy by buying a ceramic mug than a paper one, we might simply accept that it’s decadent, and a bit obscene, not to make the best possible use of everything that we’re lucky enough to have.

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Of course, my current irritation with Margaret Wente might have something to do with her recent column about “savages”.

Near the end of a long social studies unit about the Miq’Maq, my sixth-grade teacher used that word, too. She only let it slip once that whole year, and mumbled it a bit — but I can still remember her glimmer of satisfaction, and her apparent relief. I have no doubt that she’d been saving that slur for weeks.

Does it surprise you, hearing that, that my sixth-grade teacher was a truly awful woman? She was nasty and smug and more than a bit stupid, though somehow able to keep a lot of people on her side. The sliver of hate that pushed through to the surface in that mumbled slur was an absolutely integral part of this woman’s nasty, smug stupidity. It was not some coincidental bit of ignorance.

Even though a full fifteen years have passed since the sixth grade, I still wish that I’d spoken up in that moment, instead of swallowing my discomfort — so I’ll speak up now. Wente’s column doesn’t have the bluntness of a simple slur. It pretends to be reasonable, and it pretends to rest on fact. But — it doesn’t. It simply asserts something that Wente believed before she started her research, and pretends to back it up with some selectively gathered bits of information. (Two of the authors that the cites have since written in to object to her characterization of their work.) It also assumes an unsettling degree of intellectual authority, and rests on an incredibly uncritical appraisal of value and reason and truth. Today’s column, not coincidentally, does the same thing.

Perhaps the ugliest utterances are also the most revealing.

No really, what the hell IS wrong with Russell Smith?

5 Oct

From today’s Globe and Mail: “Ladies, Don’t Pad Your Resumés”

The column is full of Smith’s usual hooey, exhorting women to dress for male pleasure. In particular, he’d like us to wear skimpy bras that allow for “natural sway” and — oh joy, oh bliss! — the breathtaking possibility that one might see the natural shape of a nipple, “surely the most erotic sight in clothed humans”. Part of me wants to commend him for celebrating the female body. That part of me is far outbalanced by my queasiness at the (recurring) suggestion that a woman who does not dress to please men is somehow not doing her job.

Which brings us to the headline. I don’t know if Mr. Smith writes his own headlines, but this one is simply nasty in its implications. If my breasts are my resumé, am I in fact applying for the ‘job’ of being sexually attractive to men? And being sexually attractive to men is my job, then are my breasts my primary qualification?

I can’t help but take this kind of thinking personally. I realize so often that in this culture, it is my failings as an aesthetic object that define me for other people. And yet, there is so much about me that simply can’t be seen.

(Can you hear it, at least?)

What the hell is wrong with Russell Smith?

14 Jul

I’m often unsettled by Russell Smith’s fashion columns. There’s something incredibly creepy about the way he discusses women’s wear — and really, I can’t be alone in thinking so. Take his most recent column, “Footwear for slave girls is oddly appealing”:

Do guys like those strappy gladiator sandals for women?There is something oddly sexy about a lower leg bound in leather straps and buckles. Perhaps it’s their suggestion of confinement. Perhaps it’s that they remind us of all the impossibly beautiful “slave girls” in the series Rome, or mad Cleopatra and her smoky sexuality.

The problem with so many of these elaborate harnesses is that they can get a bit gaudy – they tend so often to metallic colours, to sparkles and spikes and studs, that they can look a little bit brassy, as if to suggest that the wearer should also have a pack of menthol smokes, platinum blonde hair and her house upholstered in leopard skin.

Luckily, most Canadian men aren’t as sensitive to aesthetic connotation as this. All they are going to notice really is whether your shoes are flat-heeled or high – and even this we tend to register unconsciously, as a vaguely different shape to your leg.

Now the high-heeled variety of gladiator sandals are extremely flashy, indeed overtly fetishistic; they just scream high-maintenance, expensive gifts and uninhibited sex. We will certainly notice these.

No, really. I couldn’t have made this up if I tried, could I? I’m sure that Smith thinks this kind of discussion of desire is a sign of enlightenment, a sign that he has transcended his provincial small-city Canadian past. I’m sure of this because I read his columns with faithful distaste, and because I too am a Haligonian expat. Clever as Smith always obviously thinks he is, knowing where he’s from I can only see his attitude as the typical smugness of an Eastern Canadian who wants to sever all connection to his once-home. So much more sensitive to aesthetics than most men? Of course! So cutting towards women who dare not dress to arouse, and so vocal in his declarations of lust for those who do? How liberated he is from the backwards bourgeoisie of Nova Scotia.

I’m sure Smith is clever; obviously he’s well-read. That makes his evocation of vague Orientalized objects of desire all the more offensive, because he should know better. And it makes his discussion of women — arousing or not — all the more tiresome. If he’s so clever and liberated, why is he so desperate to prove it?

In response to his imagined retorts:
1) I have also lived in Paris. I live in New York now. Shut up.
2) I was very badly treated in Nova Scotia through much of my youth. I was also bored senseless. I’m quite sure I know what you felt. It’s still home, even if I never live there again.
3) I’m sure that you’d be appalled by my summer footwear of choice. I pick it for the arch support, not for exotic sex appeal. Whatever. I make delightful company, even if I’m not fetching drinks for bulimic men in sheets, and even if there’s no chance that I’ll off myself with a poison asp.

Pfffffft.

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