You will only make it worse

 

A curious counterintuitive thought: is it possible that reforms -- legislation, laws, things that liberal people believe -- have ended up worsening rather than improving society? Did progressive legislation end up worsening more than it helped? To paraphrase John Cage, don’t try to improve society, you’ll only make it worse. 

———

Is what we have now, a divided society, with homeless encampments in every major city as well as in smaller cities, towns, and rural Canada, an increase in drug addiction and mental illness, the absence of rental units so that rents have increased and renters live in fear of both rent increases and losing where they live, the inflated cost of food a constant worry to average people, hospitals collapsing, is this what reforms have ended up producing; we plug holes in the dike and bigger new holes appear a few feet away.

———

Consider our present dysfunctional, divided society, and the future dystopia, did anyone envisage this future for Canada? Things seem worse; "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". The government and well-meaning people find the answer to social ills in more government intervention in people's lives, they want to keep us "safe", a favourite word of Justin Trudeau; Justin always wants to keep us safe, but for one group to be "safe" another group is oppressed. 

———

Surely the 1950s must have been much worse than today. But were they? Remember the film The Hours in which Julianne Moore played Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife; she hated her life, she was a prisoner of that life, but reflecting on the character Julianne Moore played, we see her as a very unpleasant and selfish person, not someone to feel sorry for. We sympathized with her feeling entrapped by her life, conformity weighed heavily on society; she must have been oppressed by an angry and abusive husband as feminists have portrayed men. It was the 1950s so it must have been the way Hollywood portrayed it; Hollywood doesn't lie. But we also see that the cause of Julianne Moore`s character's anxiety was herself, she placed herself first, not her husband, not her son; nobody came first but her. What about Laura Brown's life was so bad? She had a house in suburbia, only one child, a young son who loved her, a husband who loved her and who wanted to please her, a next door neighbour who was supportive of her. And what did she do? She ran away one day, she deserted her son and husband, to the applause of many people watching the film; Laura Brown claims she chose life over death. Too bad for her son who was traumatized by her abandonment of him. (Did one or both of your parents abandon you or said they were leaving you when you were a child? Consider the depth of trauma abandonment, or death of a parent, causes in a child.) Then she lead a life of her own, maybe in a room of her own, probably reading Virginia Woolf's novels, maybe she read Mrs. Dalloway, and her son, who became a poet, committed suicide, he jumped from his loft window. His mother showed up for his memorial service. The perceived judgement, promoted by Hollywood films, is that the 1950s were deadly to the soul, to the spirit; the homogeneous society, the suburbs full of boring white people, the houses like little boxes "all in a row", were soul destroying, as Pete Seeger sang. 

———

And then we turn to today's society. Christianity is laughed at, rejected, or hated; the Bible is said to be hate literature and the progressives want parts of it censored; values are laughed at; marriage as an institution is being abandoned; our prime minister and others want school boards to have more authority over children than the parents of these children; medically assisted suicide has become another part of our health care system, the Hippocratic oath and the moral authority of our physicians is of little importance; freedom of speech has been compromised or limited; we live in a cancel culture society; meanwhile, there are encampments of homeless people in every city and town, in every state and province; an increasing number of these homeless people are dying of overdoses of fentanyl, mental illness is common; legalized gambling is a source of income for a money hungry government; we can’t house our own citizens and we let in millions of immigrants, does the government do any research before acting, do they ever think anything out? Is this what we wanted when we tried to improve society, piecemeal, with endless legislation? We forgot that what you change may not necessarily improve society, it may make society worse. We forgot that when the old is discarded it will never return. It is our collective hubris writ large. 

———

After eight years of Justin Trudeau's time in office Canada is in worse shape than it has ever been; this is what happens when someone is elected based on appearance and not on substance, when someone's progressive and woke values trump common sense legislation and frugal management of taxpayers' money; whatever Justin has done will eventually be discredited, it has already begun. Justin Trudeau's legacy will be that he was a wrecking ball, he is the Miley Cyrus of Canadian politics, he wrecked the country; we are now a society of debtors, a society without common values, a society where our politicians are always expedient and rarely insightful (look at them in the House of Commons, it is embarrassing, they are like braying accusatory children who have been spoiled rotten by their parents). 

No More Progress!

An old 78 RPM recording from my father's record collection

Progress is a mug's game, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot's comment on writing poetry. Some people think that society is improving, that it is evolving to some greater state of generosity, kindness, and wealth. It is more likely that it is devolving into all of us being captives to isolation, loneliness, and being defined as consumers. Change is not progress, it is just change, and in our consumer society change is often the replacement of one consumer item for another more expensive item. Change is buying more stuff we mostly don't need. There are other, probably better, examples but for now let's take a simple example of this, about listening to music. 

Long, long ago people listened to music on wax cylinders, then we moved on to single sided 78 RPM records, then two sided 78 RPM records, then to 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums, then to 45 RPM records and then cassette tapes and then CDs, and each time we had to replace our record collections with recordings that worked with the new technology; and then our old records, tapes, and CDs were discarded when we (the editorial we) began buying digitized music--we were really just renting it--and this music (our virtual record collection) was streamed to what we now call our device, farewell record players, tape decks, and CD players; farewell to my grandmother's large wooden console record player with a little box of steel needles and old magazines stored on the shelves below the turn-table. Farewell to scratchy recordings, vinyl recordings, and hello to digitized music so evolved that no one can hear the attraction of listening to digitized sound. Farewell to the human dimension of things. 

Did technology really improve so much that we should care to buy into the next latest technology? I don't think so. We could have stayed at vinyl records, and there seem to be enough people who agree with this as 33 1/3 RPM vinyl recordings are making a come-back. We discarded our old record collections when they became obsolete, meaning that the machine required to play this music was no longer being manufactured and new vinyl recordings were also not being made. I always liked to collect certain things, for instance books and old postage stamps, 33 1/3 RPM vinyl albums and compact discs; I listened to my father's 78 RPM records, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Glen Miller; I bought CDs of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Van Morrison and Jim Morrison and others. This music was a part of my life.

The last music I wanted to buy were the complete Glen Gould recordings of J.S. Bach, but the technology changed before I could begin; so, farewell to me as a consumer of music. I stopped buying any music when CDs became obsolete; at the most, now, I listen to some music on YouTube. I put all of my CDs onto my computer thinking I would listen to them as I sat writing, I've never listened to any of these copies of my CDs. Human nature hasn't been factored into the mania for "progress". Some of us like to collect things, to have an album cover to look at and liner notes to read, to have something an album or a book that we paid for and then to put it on a shelf; it seems this desire to collect things has been forgotten.  

It is possible (or is it wishful thinking) that a failed technology is the digitized book, while they are still being sold the demand for digitized books seems to have plateaued (except for text books). The paper book, two covers containing pages with printed writing on each page, is among the the greatest technological inventions, it is also inexpensive,  and it will not be replaced; the world of learning, spirituality, and entertainment is available in books, whether a poem, a detective novel, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, or the King James translation of the bible. The replacement of paper book technology didn't work because digital technology could not compete with the older paper format, a book is tactile and people like to hold a book, write notes in the margins, fold a corner (God forbid!) as a book mark, write their name and date when purchased or read on the cover page, give books as gifts, own a copy of the book, and buy books used or second hand; of course, Amazon and others tried to replace books with Kindle, etc. But books are still among the greatest technological inventions in history. For a while book stores were closing, replaced by Amazon, who wanted to sell digitized books that you could read on your Kindle that they also sold. They wanted to sell the device and then sell the customer a digitized book; it was a means to divert profit from the publishers to, in this case, Amazon. 

Digitized books peaked and paper copies of books are now selling more copies than ever. It used to be a sign of learning and intelligence to have, in your home, bookshelves filled with books and some of us enjoyed browsing at the titles of a friend's home library. Your books reflected who you were, what kind of interests you had, even your education. Not the best example but a fun example, remember the old Dell detective novels, they were purposely designed to be small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans; some people used to walk around with a book in their back pocket, reading was that important to people. Remember the map on the back cover of these books? Remember buying second hand copies of these Dell books just for the cover art? They are still worth collecting and the Dell novels are still worth reading. We have fond memories of these and other books, we don't have fond memories of Kindle books, browsing Amazon's website, storing music in the Cloud, or what have you. It hasn't quite worked out as they had planned. People still enjoy visiting book stores, not just shopping online. But the damage is done regarding music, I doubt I will ever visit a record store again, I don't even think there are any left in Montreal.