The All-too-convenient Indian

There has been much discussion of the Thomas King affair in my circles. I don't think it has gotten much coverage outside Canada and, even in Canada, only a few people seem to care that Thomas King turns out not to be Cherokee after decades of claiming otherwise. 

 

I don't know that King himself requires much more comment and, even if he does, I'm far from the best person to do so. But it seems to me that a lot of people starting with me should be taking a good look in the mirror. The thing that spurred me to this are the following comments:

'Hayden King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ont., and is not related to the author, says the fact that Thomas King was one of the first Indigenous writers to really “break through” in Canada should compel some introspection from Canadian publishers and universities.

'“The foundational writers on Indigenous issues in Canada, some of the first were actually not Indigenous people,” he said. 

'“And I think that that provokes questions of the institutions that curate the public discussion on Indigenous issues, and which authors get platformed and which don't.”'

I'm a tiny fish who never had the power to platform or deplatform anyone. That said, I embraced Thomas King enthusiastically when he came along. I read and enjoyed Green Grass, Running Water and I tried to never miss an episode of the The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour. I was more than willing to accept the vision of Indigenous life and culture that Thomas King was peddling.

 

The thing is, I should have know better. I grew up knowing Mi'kmaq people. There was a significant contingent of Mi'kmaq boys and girls in my classes at Saint Dunstan's School. They were by far the largest visible minority at the school, with anywhere from six to ten kids per class in a school where all the classes had fewer than thirty students. I went to class with them, ate lunch with them, played hockey and baseball with them. 

 

I didn't think about it one way or another because it was the only world I knew so it just seemed normal. I noticed that Mi'kmaq students, like Acadian students, had a tremendous resistance to schooling. Looking back, I can see both groups had very good reasons to distrust authorities. Authorities treated them horribly. I can also say that while I understand, I wish both groups hadn't had that resistance. I say this because I think they would have been better off. That said, people used to say the same of my Québécois ancestors in the first half of the twentieth century. It's not surprising that people tend to ignore advice coming from people who treated them like shit in the past.

 

The Mi'kmaq boys I played with all had two first names; that is to say both their first and surname were what a typical English speaker would consider a first name. For example, one of my classmates was named "Peter Paul". Even at the time, the suspicion that wasn't his real name occurred to me but I never asked and he never said.

 

He and I talked a lot because we both loved fishing. We never managed to go together because we both came to school by bus from opposite directions and it was too long a bike ride to manage it. He told me he could catch brook trout with is bare hands. Could he? I doubt it but I knew it was possible because I had an uncle who could do it and I suspect he did too.

 

"Peter" also told me he was only staying in school until his sixteenth birthday, at which point he would be legally entitled to drop out and he planned to do that the second it was possible. If you'd asked me, I would have claimed to not like school and lived for vacation but the truth was I couldn't imagine my life without school. Looking back I have nothing but fondness for Saint Dunstan's (which, alas, has been converted to condos for many years now).

 

My family moved away after Grade 6 so I have no idea what happened to him.

 

So why did the highly romanticized stories that Thomas King pushed have such resonance with me? Well, I think to ask that question is to answer it. "Peter Paul" lived a life that was utterly foreign to mine and he liked it that way. Thomas King craved the acceptance and admiration of people like me and used his claimed Cherokee status to achieve it and we gave it to him.

 

And, let's not kid ourselves, that romantic vision was morally and politically validating for us in ways that the real life of Indigenous people in Canada is not. We so this over and over again. We take an interest in marginalized groups when it suits us and then drop them when it doesn't. Elijah Harper was a hero when people needed him to stop the Meech Lake Accord and then utterly forgotten five seconds later. All indications are he had an unhappy life but no one cared about the actual man; they cared about the seemingly heroic figure holding an Eagle feather onto whom they could project their romantic vision.

 

A lot has changed since then. My experience working in Ottawa has made me more cynical about authorities and whatever vestiges of respect I might have had for them vanished with the Covid shenanigans. I don't listen to the CBC anymore and when I visit their website it's only to see what they are saying. I can't trust the CBC as a source of news anymore—they've lied to me far too often. As a consequence, I have no idea who the likely replacement for Thomas King as official peddler of Indian lore is and I have no inclination to find out.

Two blunt moral truths

 The first is that there is no more dangerous and self-deceiving move in moral thinking than to try and act according to basic decency and common sense. As Wittgenstein might say, it's such a simple move that the conjuring trick is made before we know it. It seems harmless but it blocks all possibility for moral discussion before we even get started. If we tell ourselves we act according to basic decency and common sense, then what does that necessarily imply about anyone who disagrees with us?

The second is that seeking the approval of others is unavoidable. We all nurse a fantasy that we can transcend this by basing our moral decisions on abstract moral principles. The problem with that is that the giving of moral reasons is not a private activity. I mean, you could, in theory, sit down and quietly work out what you are going to do in terms of moral reasons but you don't. Even if you were to do so, it would be on the assumption that someone else will learn of this, that you will be giving reasons to someone later.

Don't try and act as if you don't care about others' approval. Try to act so as to seek the approval of someone whose approval is worth seeking. God is an option. 

"... that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling"

 Marcel Proust died 103 years ago today. 

Famous Blue Raincoat — the album

 "Smoky sax on the title track? It's a meditation on betrayal and revenge, not a lounge song."

That put down is quoted on the Wikipedia page for Jennifer Warnes album Famous Blue Raincoat.

Sneering at that album has been a thing since the day it came out. But I love it.

Let's start with put down quoted above. It's from Peter Gerstenzanga writing for The Village Voice. I've never heard of him and would never have heard of him were it not for Wikipedia. I'm not likely to bother learning any more about him. He plainly doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Betrayal and revenge are classic lounge music themes. (They are also classic country music themes, classical music themes, rock and roll themes ... .)

His criticism would be a stupid even if betrayal and revenge were what the title song was about. But that's a stretch because it's a song in which Leonard Cohen addresses, wait for it, Leonard Cohen. The guy who "planned to go clear", that is, embrace Scientology, was Leonard Cohen. The guy who owned the famous blue raincoat was Leonard Cohen. The guy who went to the station hoping to meet Lilli Marlene was Leonard Cohen.

Who, then, is the guy "who treated my woman" to a flake of his life and left her apparently dislodged, nobody's wife? The temptation is to read this, as Gerstenzanga did, to read this as sexual betrayal. But how to do that, given that all the references up until now have been to Leonard himself? Why would Cohen attribute things from his own life to the man who supposedly betrayed him by having sex with Jane, whoever she is? 

One possibility is that Cohen is the one who seduced Jane when she was in a relationship with another man and here he is putting himself in that man's shoes and imagining how this man might forgive him. And, oh yeah, the song ends with what is at least an attempt at forgiveness, not revenge. I find that reading awkward and presumptuous on Cohen's part but go ahead if you want. Another reading is that Cohen was in love with Jane and treated her in ways that destroyed that relationship so the song can be read as Cohen betraying Cohen. 

Leonard Cohen's big themes are love, sex, betrayal and redemption. And they are all in this song and it works really well with Warnes' loungey interpretation. It's only a problem if, and I suspect this is Gerstenzanga's problem, you're only willing to allow the original any validity. And I can respect that to a point. He has a perfect right to say, "I only like Leonard Cohen's songs in their original versions". But when he says that with his critic hat on, he needs to back it up with good reasons and Gerstenzanga doesn't. 

Gerstenzanga's objections to Warnes' version of "First We Take Manhattan" are also flawed. He first says that he thinks Cohen's voice is more suited to Cohen's songs. Which is another version of the "I prefer" line. But then Gerstenzanga slips up in a way that is very revealing:

"Also, his original arrangements—from solo-guitar bare to brass-band ironic—are more fitting than the slick stuff here. Stevie Ray Vaughan playing processed blues licks on "First We Take Manhattan"? Inappropriate"

Here's the thing, Warnes's version of "First We Take Manhattan" is the original arrangement! And Cohen took part in the recording. 

I'd add that the slicker version works in a different way than Cohen's later, more austere version. And I prefer this way, although you don't have to. The challenge this song presents for me is that it, on the most obvious reading, it's about the mind of a terrorist and I don't think Leonard Cohen is a terribly credible commentator on this or any political subject. In this slicker version, the song has Warnes assuming the role of a deluded, self-aggrandizing person who projects their own moods onto the whole world, not a terrorist, but someone who sits in their parent's basement imagining they might be one.

Warnes achieves this by emphasizing the bridge. She sings most of the song in speech-like diction. Then she just soars on the lines:

"I'd really like to live beside you, baby
I love your body and your spirit and your clothes ..." 

 This has the effect of making the song into a dialogue with a single (probably imagined) interlocutor. This interlocutor is the lover that the protagonist has never had. In Cohen's version, those lines are given to the background singers. (Although it is possibly only one singer, a multi-tracked Anjani Thomas made to sound like a chorus). Warnes also only sings the bridge once, which further emphasizes it. Either way, Cohen's version is cold and inhuman, intentionally so. Warnes's version is a damaged human-but-still-very-human protagonist. Both are valid. I think Cohen's lyrics overall work better if you associate them with Warnes' protagonist. 

Warnes' version of "Ain't No Cure for Love",  also the original arrangement and written at Warnes' prompting, is actually quite similar to Cohen's in sentiment. Both versions are full of longing for someone who doesn't long back. The difference is in the singers and here we have to confront a blunt fact: Warnes is just  better singer than Cohen. Warnes sings better than Cohen the way Shohei Ohtani plays baseball better than I do. She has more resources, more power, more range and more control. Cohen's version is compelling and beautiful and, as he often managed, does incredible things with a limited instrument. That said, Warnes is really, really good.

I could go on and on but get a really good pair of headphones and just listen to her album. The good headphones are important: Warnes' album is amazingly well-recorded. This is a true audiophile record, which is not something you could honestly say of any of Cohen's albums. You want to savour every nuance. And there are fascinating interpretative touches all over it that demand close listening. For example, the opening of "Coming Back to You" features a quote from the Christmas Carol "Joy to the World". It's the line "let earth receive her King". 

 This is not just an album of Cohen songs, it's a deep interpretation by an amazing musician who sang with Cohen for years, that Cohen participated in as well as many other incredible musicians that is incredibly well-recorded. You don't have to like it but, before you reject it, give it and the people involved the respect they deserve.

Leonard Cohen

 Tomorrow, November 7 is the anniversary of Leonard Cohen's death. 

I can't think of any reason why anyone else but me should care but Leonard and I go way back. We never met. I wasn't even much of a fan before 1984. There was one song and it's a pretty clichéd song to pick.

 I was eight years old the year "Suzanne" came out. I doubt I even noticed it that year. I should be ashamed to admit this (I'm not ashamed) the first version I ever heard may have been Neil Diamond's, which came out the year I was twelve. Then again, it's one of those songs that feels like it's always been there.

I never owned a recording of the song until I was in my twenties. You used to be able to count on the radio playing certain older songs every once in a while. Suzanne was one of them and it would come on and I'd turn it up.

I remained a Catholic because of these verses:

And Jesus was a sailor 

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower.

 

And when he knew for certain 

Only drowning men could see Him

He said, "All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them."

 

But he himself was broken

Long before the sky would open

Forsaken, almost human

He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.

 That may not make sense to anyone but me. It's our fallen condition. Jesus came to save sinners. 

Anyway,

There was a time I went to Montreal because of an interview he gave in which he described the writing of that song. He said it was a simple description of what you see if you to the sailor's chapel in Montreal. The sailor's chapel is Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours.  I went. Leonard didn't let me down. It is a simple description of what you see. 

The most troublesome aspect of "empathy" for me

 Sometimes I meet "foodies" for whom the experience of eating good food is really narcissism. They talk, endlessly, about themselves and their experiences. The point is not the food but to demonstrate how devoted they are to this pursuit and how good they are at discerning minor differences in taste between, for example, one wine and another.

Supertasters are real. I have no doubt that, for example, James Hoffman really can taste the difference between coffee made in the sometimes incredibly labour-intensive ways he advocates and less serious cups. I have even learned some lessons from him that have enabled me to make the coffee I make at home better. But here is what I really like about Hoffman: he readily acknowledges that not everyone is going to want to go all the way with him. I'm not a supertaster like Hoffman so there is a point where I get off the trolley and say, "This good enough for me," and that is just fine with him. And he doesn't act like he is a morally superior being because he's a supertaster.

Shifting metaphors a bit, I did once have to sit through a public discussion that was dominated by a woman who is a mediocre musician who insisted on telling a famous conductor that she could hear tuning inaccuracies in the chamber orchestra he had just conducted. She didn't think this was a problem for others and said she was glad others were able to enjoy but she wanted everyone to know that she had philosophically endured the concert that her superior sensibility had made it impossible for her to enjoy. The famous conductor smiled and nodded along and then said sympathetic things because the woman was the head of a foundation, endowed with money her father had made, that funded the music festival where all this took place. She was being abusive.

I think a lot of "empathy" talk works like that. I think some people who are just emotionally unstable and some others who just seek power abuse the notion to make themselves the centre of attention. People are allowed to obsess over bullshit. Fantasy fiction is just fine. But if someone comes into the room and insists that the rest of us have to fund fantasy fiction or that her deep love and knowledge of fantasy fiction entitles her to lecture the rest of us on politics and morality there is a point where the appropriate response is to say STFU. A lot of "empathy", frankly, deserves the same response. They're just being abusive.

Empathy, feeling good about yourself and virtue ethics

 The church I go to has a serious problem with crime and vandalism. The source of this crime is people who beg for money outside the church. For forty years now, successive rectors have pleaded with parishioners to not give money to the panhandlers outside the church. For forty years now, parishioners have not only ignored these pleas, they've rained criticism on the clergy for making them.

 The panhandlers fall into two classes. There are people on social assistance, mostly the Ontario Disability Support Program. They use the money they collect to pay for vacations and other things that there disability payments do not cover. These people are largely harmless. They are often victims of violence at the hands of the second class of panhandlers: people who have substance abuse issues who use the money to pay for drugs. These people are sometimes harmless and sometimes violent. They are sometimes violent for practical reasons, that is to scare off other panhandlers. Other times they are violent for no obvious reason at all. Even if harmless to others, they are harming themselves. More importantly, giving them money supports crime.

Why do people continue to give money? It's not hard to figure out that none of the money collected by panhandlers is used to pay for food. The people who continue to give largely know this but manage to ignore this. They give because it gives them a good feeling to talk to these people and then to give them money.

 I don't think there is anything wrong with that. Meaning, I don't think there is anything wrong with doing good things in order to feel better about yourself. For me the issue is that I don't think people should feel  good about themselves for giving money to panhandlers. In doing so, they are actively making life worse for others. It's not a good thing to do.

I connect this to virtue ethics because too much of modern ethics is driven by duty. The technical term for this is deontology. It is the belief that you should do things based on duty and rules rather than consequences. Fans of this approach will sometimes say that a moral act is one that is done for moral reasons, meaning not for practical reasons. More bluntly, they will sometimes say that we should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Giving money to people on the street is a quiet rebellion against this. You can pretend you're following some moral teaching, which is why people beg outside churches. It's relatively easy to make Jesus's teaching sound like it validates this choice. The truth is, though, that there are many charities that it would make much more sense to give money to if you actually wanted to help. And I know for a fact that very few parishioners avail themselves of those opportunities. What giving to an actual human being does that giving to a charity does not do, is to give you instant feedback. And that's what people want. The only feedback doing something out of duty gives, is the relief of not being thought a bad person. It's like remembering to floss. Giving money on the street, gives a person positive feedback and nothing else in the current moral sphere does that.

 Problem is, that's not empathy. We call it empathy but anyone who thought the issue through would realize they aren't actually helping anyone.  

The solution, I think, is to adopt a virtue ethics viewpoint. Why do good things? Answer: because it will make me a better person. The problem with people who give money to street people isn't that they're selfish; it's that they're not nearly selfish enough. If they thought more of themselves, they'd be more helpful to others. 

What mechanism(s) drive(s) empathy?

 If you have a tuned guitar in a room and you sing, or otherwise produce, a note on the same pitch that one of strings is tuned to, that string will begin vibrating. This isn’t just true of guitars. Lots of pitched instruments will do it. Any stringed instrument, or tuning fork, for example, is capable of this.  (If you’re curious about the phenomenon, go to YouTube and search “sympathetic vibration”.) 

I think some people who place a lot of value on empathy, or who call themselves “empaths”, imagine something like this happening. A person over there has an emotion and they feel the same emotion. Some people have even go so far as to invent a technical language to describe this. “Somatic empathy” is one such term and it’s a telling one as “somatic” means “of the body”. Just like sympathetic vibration, the response is imagined as physical. It’s a reasonable hypothesis but I am not aware of any credible research supporting the existence of somatic empathy.

Otherwise, there has to be some sort of judgment for empathy to work. I judge that Cathy is unhappy and I respond to that. That judgment can be either conscious or unconscious. In the invented technical language of empathy, that is called affective empathy. And it’s important to note that there is an assumed criterion here. I have to feel the correct emotion in response. If I see that Cathy is sad and I respond by cruelly teasing her, that is not empathy.

But notice that my judgment of the other person’s feelings is assumed to be correct in both instances; that is I correctly judge what the emotion is and I respond appropriately What is ‘incorrect” when I tease is the emotion I feel in response to the correct judgment of what Cathy is feeling. There is a moral assumption hiding here that could be spelled out as, “Anyone who sees a sad person, will respond with the appropriate emotion.” 

What is the appropriate emotion? Well, that’s a bit tricky. It can’t be sympathy because we already have that word. To justify a new word, we need empathy to be something different. I think the issue here is that “empathy” is a synonym for “sympathy” but so is “pity”. That is to say, they don’t mean exactly the same thing but they are close. To feel sympathy or pity, you have to set yourself above the person you are responding. You feel sorry they are hurt but you don’t necessarily identify with them. Empathy requires that you be connected with the person you feel it for, which is why it worked with inanimate objects like paintings. 

I could feel sympathy for Cathy because her heart is broken following the failure of her latest relationship while simultaneously believing that is her own bad habits that have gotten into this plight. I might think, “When is she going to realize that she keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.” Empathy seems to require that I not only feel for Cathy but that I also feel for her plight.

I take it that the moral and political implications of this are obvious. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. Where there is a problem is when it is obvious that it’s the morality or the politics driving the empathy and not the other way around. The person who feels no empathy with people they disagree with is a fraud. 

Let’s return to the issue of the judgments associated with empathy. I said above that it is not empathy if I correctly judge another person’s emotions but respond by being cruel to them. That’s, well, that’s interesting because it suggests that a person could be really good at assessing other people’s feelings without responding to them in the way that seems “natural” to us. And there are people capable of reading others’ emotions very accurately but who don’t feel any kinship with others. The most conspicuous example being psychopaths.

But that raises another issue. Is the opposite mistake possible? Can someone incorrectly judge another person to be suffering and then respond in a way that is deemed appropriate to that imagined suffering? Well, yes and this happens regularly. We’re actually pretty good at judging other people’s emotions but we’re not 100 percent accurate at it. We’ve all had the experience of expressing support for someone else only to find out they’re just fine.

(We’ve all also had the experience of having someone offer support when there has been nothing wrong. And that’s worth mediating on. I don’t like that experience. Sometimes I think it’s just an honest mistake but other times I have had the distinct impression that someone has tried to diminish me by claiming I must be sad, bitter, angry, jealous … .)

One reason we get it wrong is that judging an emotion is not only a matter of judging what a person is doing. It requires us to judge the response in a particular context. The facial expressions that go with orgasm and extreme pain are indistinguishable. It’s the fact that your partner is having ex with you when their face contorts that justifies your concluding that it’s pleasure. (You can still be wrong and you could, for example, be busy congratulating yourself on being a good lover only to be humbled when they announce they’ve just had a muscle cramp.)

Empathy is like any other emotional response. It should be always open to questioning and criticism.  I can be angry and be justified. I can be angry for no good reason. I can lack in anger, letting people abuse me. I can also be justifiably angry but overreact and assault someone. Empathy, to the extent that it is useful, requires secondary judgments. 

It’s worth noting in passing, by the way, that the most common reason we judge others’ emotions incorrectly is that we want to know what they think of us and it is very often the case that other people aren’t thinking about us or particularly interested in us. Jack sees that his wife is unhappy and wonders if he has done or said something to upset her. She, meanwhile, is wishing she’d handled an issue at work differently. 

Origin of empathy

 Empathy comes into the English language as an equivalent for a German word used in art criticism. Empathy, in this regard, is a skill. Someone who had this skill could not just respond emotionally to a work of art but could feel into a work of art.

“Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung; there is nothing curious or idiosyncratic about it; but it is a fact that must be mentioned.” [Edward Bradford Titchener, "Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes," 1909] 

Look at the girl in that painting. If it’s not familiar to you, don’t worry about it; in a sense that’s better. Do you see her not just as a representation, a form, but as the presentation of a human being? Can you feel for her?

The point is to not simply respond intellectually but emotionally. 

And not just the persons in a painting. The same room, with no one present, could provoke a response.

The obvious point here is that the painting does not have feelings. That doesn’t invalidate empathy. Speaking only for myself, I like this original notion of empathy more than what it has become. What we need to notice, though, is the difference. This original sense is not a way of connecting with someone else’s plight. 

I can imagine situations where this kind of response would be desirable abut also of situations where it would not. The most jarring example would be psychopathy in surgeons. We think of psychopathy as scary but many psychopaths are harmless. In some cases, surgery, it can be a benefit. So long as the psychopath sees their yearning for high social status and money a desirable outcome, they will do a. Good job and, because they are not terrified of cutting into another human being, they might be better at the job than someone who could be paralyzed by emotion. 

In other cases, empathy would be desirable. I think it’s telling and very important, that the original application as in art criticism. For you can enjoy art with feeling anything into the art.

The thing is, an empathetic response to a work of art is different from simply having an emotional response. If yellow makes me happy, then an abstract painting with a lot of yellow in it will probably make me happy. To feel into is something else and that something else would require an effort of my part. It’s very much an intentional act and that’s not the way people mean empathy when responding to another person.

Questions about empathy

 Like many others, I was deeply moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I don’t know that I’d even heard of the guy before. If I’d ever encountered him online or in the media, I’d forgotten all about him. 

I didn’t see the video and I don’t intend to. What I saw was people I considered to be friends respond with visceral hatred towards the man. They were at best, not sad, and at worst, gleeful, to see him dead. They cared not one little bit about his wife or family.

I don’t dump friends rashly. I decided to give them an opportunity to explain themselves. Various things he was supposed to have said were given as to why this guy was so horrible. It’s interesting that only things he had said were mentioned. No one could mention a single action. And the things he had supposedly said all turned out to have the usual problems in that they were quotes taken out of context or altered to make them seem hateful.

The weirdest thing though was the empathy argument for hating him. People said they hated him and he deserved to be hated because he had said empathy was not morally valuable. Weird, first of all, because it’s perfectly reasonable to have doubts about empathy. Lots of good and reasonable people both on the left and the right have questioned the value of empathy. Second, it’s weird because the people advancing this argument were obviously incapable of feeling empathy for Charlie Kirk. They hated this man, whom they didn’t know, and they had no feelings for his wife and his children.

So, I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into empathy over my next few posts. It strikes me that the term is not at all clear. Just for starters:

1. Is empathy an emotion or is it the capacity to feel an emotion?
2. The term has only been around about a century: how essential can this capacity be to live a moral life given that human beings managed to survive and live moral lives for centuries without needing to name it?
3. Why is empathy only used with the kinds of emotions we already associated with the term “sympathy”? Meaning, we speak of empathy in response to other people’s suffering. No one ever says they empathize with someone else’s rage or jealousy or hatred. Empathy seems to have been custom designed to replace sympathy. Sympathy, however, is an ancient word. Why would it need to be replaced or supplemented? 
4. What is the mechanism that makes empathy work? Usually, we have to figure out someone else’s emotions. We look at their expressions and consider the context and then determine whether this is pain or happiness or boredom or whatever. Like all such judgments, we can be wrong. People who use the term “empathy”, however, seem to imagine some sort of direct sense that involves no cognition. Some of them even use the term “superpower” to describe empathy. They do not consider or admit the possibility that someone could feel or not feel empathy based on judgments that turn out to be wrong. This smacks of magical thinking.

Celebrating my being betrayed

"It ain't the knife in the heart that tears you apart

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone sticking it in, sticking it in." Graham Parker

That's a quote from an old song, the chorus of which is, "Just can't get, just can't get no protection." And I guess that's the moral of the story if you prefer not to read all of this. What follows is a kind of Christian Stoicism, a position that a lot of people will find contradictory but that has deep roots in saints Paul and Augustine.

Twenty-five years ago I was subjected to the worst betrayal of my life. What made it the worst was the person who did it. The actual betrayal was something I was always going to get over; all it needed was time. (I don't mean by that that it was a trivial matter.) The shock that could have killed me inside was the person who stuck the knife in. And it is a bit of a blessing that this was all I had to face; there are, after all, people for whom being stabbed in the back is not a metaphor.

Before I get into it, a little bit about what I mean by betrayal because not everyone means the same thing by it. Last fall, I shared on Facebook that the anniversary of the this betrayal was coming up. I said I was not going to share details, what the betrayal was or who did it. I could not have been more vague about it. Shortly after the post went up, someone contacted me and said, "I think you should know that there are people mocking you for that post in groups you are not part of." I thought that was an interesting response. Two of the people who were doing this mocking separately got in touch with me and expressed concern about how I was feeling, apparently unaware that I knew about their cruel remarks elsewhere. They were also apparently unable to read; I had quite clearly said that not only was I long over the betrayal but that it had actually proven to be a very liberating experience in the longer run.

They also both thought they knew who the betrayer was but they were uncertain as to what exactly the betrayal was. They respectively speculated it might have been the time a particular person forgot a promise or the time there was an argument. I have more to say about that but I think the first thing to note is that neither of those two things is a betrayal. A betrayal is when somebody who was on your side openly or secretly works against you. They do this with the explicit understanding that what they are doing will cause you to fail. They don't just fail to come through in some spectacular way. I can understand why being letdown by someone you love can feel like a betrayal. When something really hurts, that intense pain can blind us as to other person's intention. And it does seem that in common usage the meaning has gotten fuzzy. A lot of people use "betrayal" to mean something that made them feel betrayed regardless of whether they actually were.

But that's not, as I say above, what betrayal means. Betrayal requires that the betrayer deliberately chooses to work against you with full knowledge of what they are doing. I had planned something and I had asked others to help, including my betrayer. And she had enthusiastically said she would and even helped me to plan the particulars. And then she secretly did things that guaranteed my plans would fail. Even as she said she loved me and would support me, she was planning to hurt me.

The odd thing was that, when my project did fail, it was painfully obvious what she had done. She either hadn't thought that through or she just didn't care. I don't know because I can't read minds. There was a particular thing that had to be in place for my plan to work she had made sure it was not in place. I couldn't have doubted what she had done and that she had done it deliberately even if I had wanted to because she made it clear she'd done it when I confronted her. And we had a moment. I remember her defiant, even triumphant expression. And then she said things.

"It took a long time coming

That big over the shoulder statement

But when it came, it flowed easy as poison." Marianne Faithfull

The experience brought moral clarity even before I was able to process all the details. The first hint was that someone else who was involved figured out exactly what had happened without being told and he immediately set about trying to make it better. It didn't work. At the time, I couldn't say why. I could see that he genuinely felt awful about it. He even acted like someone who had been complicit in it and he could not have been. The act of sabotage necessarily required that she keep the whole thing secret from him. If he had known, he would have stopped her.

The reason, I know now, that his immediate and absolutely genuine grief and guilt at what happened didn't comfort me at the time was that he'd figured it out so quickly. Imagine you're with someone when you hear a news report that someone has been assassinated and they immediately know who did it. There has been no arrest, not even a hint about who did it, yet they instantly know who did it. He felt badly because he knew, and had long known, what this person was capable of. He didn't expect this particular act of cruelty but he wasn't at all surprised when it happened.

That other shoe didn't drop until last fall when I shared that the 25th anniversary of this unspecified betrayal was coming up and that, because it had proven to be a very good thing for me, I planned to celebrate it but I wasn't sure how best to do that. And that led to the incidents I described up at the top of this post. But here's the really weird thing. As I said, two people thought they knew who had betrayed me even though they didn't have the vaguest idea what had been done, where and when it had been done, or how it had been done. That isn't surprising, this happened twenty-five years ago. What is surprising is they were, however, both absolutely correct about who had done it. And that's stunning. And neither had any doubt. They didn't tentatively guess about who my betrayer was the way they had about what she had done. They didn't even ask me to confirm. They knew! I'm in my mid sixties and I've known dozens of people who might have betrayed me over the years but they knew, without knowing any other details, who my actual betrayer was.

Here I have to admit to my own blindness. The man who figured it out at the time and the two others who figured it twenty-four years later were all able to do it because this betrayal was absolutely in character for the person who did it. My betrayer was not a trustworthy person and they always knew that she wasn't. I didn't. I didn't miss it for lack of evidence. There had been other betrayals of other people and I'd seen those happen. And here I'll stop explaining for their is a secret here about another betrayal of another person from years earlier that could still bring incredible shame on others were it come out. I think I'm the only person still alive who knows the details and I plan to take those secrets to my grave. The important point is, I should have known better long before that day twenty-five years ago and the fact that I didn't is entirely my fault.

Which brings me to forgiveness. I resolved that I would forgive my betrayer this year. It stopped hurting long ago but I had not forgiven. A big part of my not having done so is that she never asked to be forgiven. And I set out to do that this past Lent. I think I succeeded but nobody else has to believe me.

And now to celebrate ... well, to celebrate what? I think the thing to celebrate is my deliverance. I came out the other side of this experience without bitterness. I was angry, very angry, for a long time. But I'm past it and I've gotten over it. And I think I deserve zero credit for that. If it had been up to me, I would be bitter and I would have done resentful things in retaliation. But I didn't and I think that was because God was working in me.

What happened after the betrayal was hard. I've said this before but disillusionment is a difficult experience. On a purely linguistic level, that's odd. Having illusions is a bad thing and yet no one uses the word disillusionment in a positive way. It hurts like hell. There is massive cognitive dissonance when we are disillusioned.

You can't be betrayed by an enemy. Everybody expects their enemies to try and hurt them. When you're betrayed, someone who is supposed to be your friend turns out to be your enemy. Your entire moral universe is upset. You don't know whether anything was ever true. Every relationship you've ever had, every kind thing anyone has ever done for you may have been a ruse.

My betrayal disillusioned me and it would have, as I say above, been very easy to respond with resentment. The thing about being betrayed is that I was deceived. The whole thing happened because I trusted this person and I did so even though there was lots of evidence that she was not trustworthy. How had I allowed that to happen. This sort of thing had happened over and over again. The crucial difference twenty-five years ago that there was no blurring the matter. The illusions had to crumble at some point. I was blessed that they did at a a time when I was well-poised to deal with them. I was a in a good place in life and I had someone in my life who really did love me.

I'm going to celebrate by going to mass at a particular church in a particular place that means a lot to me and then I'm going to go out to dinner with a particular person who means a lot to me.

 

Sing Along WIth Connie and some memories of my mother

Connie Francis died yesterday, July 16, 2025. That got me thinking about my mother.

My father was an early Hi Fi buff and almost all of the records in our house up until 1970 were his. There were four records that were my mother's. There were three that had been in the house longer than I could remember: 1) The Three Suns, a group consisting of guitar, accordion and organ but whose main things was harmony vocals, 2) Jerry Murad and His Harmonicats, and, most prominently, 3) "Silvikrin Shampoo Presents Sing Along With Connie Francis. Later, there was an album she purchased on impulse one day at K-Mart called "the World We Knew". It featured the then Sinatra hit from which it gets its title and a few others of the same ilk.

My mother's taste in art was perfectly summed by Paul Simon (in one of the few records I bought for myself that she loved):

"Kodachrome

They give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world's

A sunny day, oh yeah"

That was the feeling my mother wanted songs, movies and paintings to give her. She would often say that there was more than enough sadness in real life. She didn't need more from art. She loved, for example, Anne Murray's version of "Snowbird". If you pay attention to the lyrics, which my mother tended not to, Snowbird is a very sad song. But Murray didn't sing it like that. She sang it like all the world was a summer's day. Doris Day was also a favourite for that reason.

In Doris Day's case, it was all a charade. She'd had a brutally hard life and had clawed her way to the top doing what it took, whatever it took. One of the many ironies looking back on things is the sometimes extraordinary contrast between the actual lives of the people my mother admired and their public images. Doris Day and Grace Kelly, for example. I won't go into details but a little research and you'll see what I mean.

Anyway, when we were very young, my sisters and I listed to, and sang along with, Connie Francis all the time. There was a family named the Gormans we were close to and when we went to parties with them, there was always a moment when someone sat down at the piano when we were inside or someone pulled out a guitar when we were outside and songs, many of them the same songs that Connie sang on that album, were sung. Every Christmas we would host a carolling party and, again, every one sang along.

Group singing is a wonderful thing. Some people still do it. I live close to a large university and sometimes I will walk by a student house and hear a group of them singing together. Mostly, though, it's a lost art. To be honest, much as she loved group singing, my mother wasn't very good at singing.

I mentioned about that when I bought "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" the year I was fourteen, it was a rare instance when she actually liked my music. As a consequence, I tend associate the whole album but especially this song with her. It's fun to sing along to.

 

No Canada. Who and what are we really?

"Canada does not have, did not have, will not have writers as specifically and identifiably Canadian as Whitman and Hemingway are specifically and indentifiably American. Our leap from colony to nation was accomplished without revolution, without a sharp cultural and ideological break from Europe, without the fission and fusion of Civil War." Malcolm Ross

 

 

I think Ross was onto something really important about Canada when he wrote those lines. I'll leave aside, for now, where and why he wrote those lines. The question that intrigues me, though, is what did it take for Canada become a nation? Assuming we ever did and I'm not sure we have quite pulled the trick off. Ross was only pretending to describe Canada. He was actually one of the more important creators of the idea of Canada. And he wrote the above in 1960!

 

I think any honest answer to grasp the Canadian question has to include the possibility of a negative. Traditionally, people ask what sort of nation are we and when did that happen? I think any honest approach has to ask whether we are a nation. The real question is: "Did Canada become a nation?" Contrary to popular Canadian mythology: it didn't happen in 1867; it didn't happen with the last spike; it didn't happen at Vimy Ridge. No amount of pretending otherwise will change that.

Canada declared war for the first time on September 10, 1939, a few days after Britain did. We did not declare war in 1914, the UK did it and we were automatically included. A geographic designation that has no say as to whether it is at war or who it is at war with, is not a nation. We were not yet a nation 1911. The move we took in September 1939 had been made possible by the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931. But both of these were acts of the British Parliament. To really be a nation, Canada had to assert itself as independent. And it never really did.

The declaration of war was meant to be something like an assertion of independence but it was poorly chosen for the job. Why? Because we were going to declare war one way or another. If the only option is "Hell, yes!" then you aren't really acting independently.

That we ultimately separated from the UK was a consequence of the collapse of the British Empire following World War 2 and not of anything Canada had done for itself.

To get back to Malcolm Ross, he managed the trick of being too young to fight in the First World War and well, not actually too old to fight in the Second. Now forgotten Canadian novelist (although born in Scotland)  David Walker was the same age as Ross and he enlisted with the Black Watch in 1931 and served during WW2. Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh were both older than Ross and they enlisted and served. Orwell tried but was declared unfit because of his poor physical  health. Of course, they were British, not Canadian. On the other hand, Marshall McLuhan was born in Canada the same year as Ross and; like Ross, was too busy with his academic career to enlist in 1939. Pierre Berton, not particularly intellectual but definitely a Canadian nationalist, was conscripted rather than enlisted. George Grant, the intellectual whom most Canadians associate with the birth of Canadian nationalism, doesn't seem to have enlisted or served. Most notoriously, Pierre Trudeau opposed the war and went for midnight rides on his motorcycle wearing a German uniform. The big exception is Jack McClelland, the publisher who did more than any other to promote a Canadian national identity, who broke off his studies to enlist and served in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Ross was twenty-eight the year the war broke out in 1939. That's only two years older than the average age of Canadian soldiers. I don't mean any slight by this. If anything, I think we can see something important here. The Canadian intellectuals who created and promoted Canadian nationalism after WW2 weren't on board with the war. In their own way, they, unlike their country exercised their independence.

Do I think that was a good thing? I don't know. In retrospect, WW2 is clearly a war with a good side and bad side but I don't know what it looked like to Canadian men in 1939. After WW1, there was a widespread and understandable resistance to wars. Trudeau clearly came to the point where he felt it was necessary to at least say he regretted not having taken part but there is good reason to doubt that as the man never came clean about his past. There is pretty clear evidence that he had some deplorable views as a young man and it is not clear that he repudiated them entirely.

Canada punched above its weight in WW2 but the men who made that happen weren't Canadian nationalists. The intellectuals who drove the nationalism that springs up in the 1950s weren't driven by or for WW2. And I think that tells us that the story of Canada as a nation doesn't start until after that war. If the British empire hadn't collapsed, it might never have happened.