Why Plato Was Right: Those at the Top Should Be Paid No More than Three or Four Times What We Pay Those at the Bottom

Through the 1950s and early 1960s—considered by many to be a golden age of corporate well being and of growth for the economy generally—CEOs of large businesses typically made about 20 times what the average worker in those organizations made. But the seeds for the explosion in executive pay that followed had already been sown. As Duff McDonald has detailed in his book The Firm, Arch Patton, an executive at the management consultant firm McKinsey & Company, had in 1951 developed a survey of executive compensation that compared executive pay not with the pay of others lower down in an organization, but with executives at other organizations. Understandably, the survey came to be closely followed by executives, and the results were published annually in The Harvard Business Review. Patton expanded on the ideas underlying the survey in an influential 1961 book, Men, Money and Motivation, arguing that corporations would be well served by knowing how the pay of their top people compared with the pay of other corporations; “when compensation of executives is above the industry average, above-average demands can be made on the executive group.” Boards of Directors listened, and compensation levels for those at the top increased significantly through the 1970s and 1980s. Much of that compensation, though, was opaque; it was difficult to assign a monetary value to deferred payment schemes and complicated stock option plans. The 1992 decision by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to require full and transparent disclosure by corporations of the compensation paid to their top five officers changed all that. Often described as an attempt to “help investors keep compensation in line” (as The Globe and Mail put it in a 5 December 2015 article), the move was in fact designed merely to increase transparency, with no judgement made as to the desirability of reining in executive wages. The previous system of providing information as to what companies were actually paying their top people was described by SEC Chair Richard Breedon described as “impenetrable”; he complained that it “insulated management from accountability to shareholders.”

Whatever its intent, the introduction of the new system became a landmark in the history of inequality. Suddenly boards and shareholders could see clearly the value of total compensation packages, and compare them to the packages other companies were offering. Far from choosing to rein in compensation, boards became ever more determined to ensure that compensation for their organization’s top people was “above the industry average.” With everyone continually striving to be above the average, the result was not hard to foresee. Average executive levels soared ever further beyond those of the average worker, and further still beyond those of workers at the bottom of the wage scale. We are now faced with unprecedented levels of inequality—inequality that is not only unfair in itself, but also undermines the cohesiveness of society, and undermines the economy itself, as more and more capital is devoted to savings socked away by the rich, and less and less to expenditures that drive further economic activity. (That such expenditures have continued at relatively high rates is largely attributable to many people carrying debt loads that are, in the long run, unsustainable.)

In such circumstances it seems obvious that we should return to measuring compensation for people at the top by comparing them to people in the middle or at the bottom of their own organizations—and that we should aim to set maximum multiples. But just where should those maximums be set?

In the fourth century BCE Plato suggested than in human societies governments should “permit a man to acquire double or triple, or as much as four times the amount [that is deemed to be at poverty levels]” (Plato, Laws V, sect 744). In the early twentieth century the financier J.P. Morgan—the epitome of American business establishment values of the day—is said to have recommended that those at the top should be paid no more than twenty times what the average worker made. In 1940 George Orwell called for “limitation of incomes, on a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one” (“The Lion and the Unicorn,” Part 3, Section 2). In the 1970s management guru Peter Drucker argued in The Wall Street Journal for “a published corporate policy that fixes the maximum compensation of all corporate executives…as a multiple…of the lowest paid regular full-time employee,” and suggested maximum multiples ranging from 15 to 1 for smaller businesses to 25 to 1 for large multinationals. Also in the 1970s, Manitoba premier Ed Schreyer (later to become Canada’s Governor General) aimed “to bring about greater equality…and reward the dignity of work,” proposing that the ratio of incomes for those at the top of the income scale to the incomes of rank-and-file workers be no more than 2.5 to 1. (Errol Black and Jim Silver, “Manitoba's NDP: time to return to its social democratic roots, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 15 August 2012).

A proposed multiple of 2.5 between the highest and the average might translate into a multiple of 3.5 or 4 to 1 between the highest and lowest paid—or, after tax, a multiple perhaps closer to 3:1. That range has always felt intuitively appropriate to me, but I’ve never seen any attempt to present an extended argument for the appropriateness of that or of any other multiple. That’s what I want to do here.

I should preface the argument by making clear that such multiples should, to my mind, apply to all organizations—not just to corporations. Given the extraordinary multiples at many large corporations, it’s understandable that they have been the focus of most discussions. University professors or hospital administrators may think of their organizations as being relatively free of inequality. Yet the levels of inequality in those organizations are now typically greater than were corporate levels of inequality in the 1950s and 1960s. A hospital cleaner in America makes $11.19 an hour or $22,380 a year, while an orthopedic surgeon working in the same hospital may make well over $400,000. A cleaner at an American university working 40 hours a week makes, on average, $10.76 an hour or $21,520 a year, and at some universities an adjunct instructor working full time (teaching 8 one-semester courses per year) will make barely more than that—$22,000-$28,000 at institutions where adjunct professors are paid $3,500 or less per course taught. Meanwhile, the average for American university presidents has reached $500,000 a year.

So why a multiple of 3? Why that number specifically?

Let’s start by thinking of a normal work day of 8 hours, and two salaried workers. Perhaps one of the two may worker harder than their colleague—perhaps even twice as hard. So to provide fair compensation, arguably, she should receive an additional eight hours worth of pay. Suppose on top of that she doesn’t just work harder; she also works longer. Let’s say she always works twelve hour days, compared to the eight hour days worked by her colleague. In my experience (now more than 40 years in the workplace), there are in fact very, very few people who actually put in twelve hour days as a regular practice—and most of the ones who actually do so are not working flat-out for the full twelve hours. But for the sake of argument let’s say this person is one of those very, very few; let’s allocate to her on that basis a further 4 hours worth of pay.

We’re now up to 2 ½ times the level of the fellow worker. But perhaps that’s still not enough. Maybe the person in question manages somehow to work more than twice as hard as her colleague, or somehow does manage to put in more than 12 hours of flat-out work per day. As compensation for this extraordinary individual, let’s arbitrarily allocate to her a further amount equivalent to 50% of her fellow worker’s pay, bringing her up to three times what the fellow worker makes.

But surely that’s still not enough, you may say. It’s not just that this person—let’s say she is the CEO or the President of the organization—it’s not just that she works much harder than others and much longer hours; it’s also that she bears much more responsibility. Another argument for paying more to heads of organizations is based on weight of responsibility: the larger the responsibility, according to this argument, the higher the rewards should be. Most of us feel intuitively that there is something to this argument, and to some extent I think so too; if I didn’t think so, I would not have felt it reasonable for the company that I have headed to pay me about 2.5 times as much as our lowest paid employee, when I am sure that I have not worked more than twice as hard, or more than a twelve hour day (an average of something like 9.5 is more like it). But there’s far less to the argument that greater responsibility deserves greater pay than is commonly assumed. The CEO or President of any organization bears substantial responsibility, of course—but that responsibility is arguably less than the responsibility borne by many ordinary workers in everyday occupations. Someone who heads up a company that manufactures Kleenex, or that processes accounting information shoulders important responsibilities—but are they any greater than those shouldered by a day care worker or a camp counsellor—let alone those shouldered by a pediatric nurse? People working in those sorts of capacities constantly shoulder life and death responsibilities involving small children. If weight of responsibility is to be the basis on which pay differentials are determined, surely a pediatric nurse should make far, far more than the CEOs of a great many companies. And let’s not just look to jobs with obviously important responsibilities. Consider for a moment the job of hospital cleaner. If these workers don’t do their jobs very thoroughly and very well, the consequences to human health are almost incalculable; the spread of c difficile and other deadly “superbugs” becomes far, far more likely. Yet these are among our lowest paid workers. (Over the past generation they’ve become even lower paid than they were, as hospitals have outsourced jobs such as cleaner to companies that will pay the workers less than the hospital would be obliged to; instead of being valued members of the hospital team, such workers are now as marginalized as they are poorly compensated.)

What about the unpleasantness of the job, and the stress? I think there’s a lot to be said for the idea of paying more to people whose jobs are very unpleasant to compensate for that. But again, if we truly believed in that principle, the extra rewards would go to those who clean the toilets in airports and hospitals, and who scrounge the garbage dumps of the developing world for a living—not to the CEOs of large corporations. And stress? Yes, it’s stressful to lead an organization—but numerous studies have shown that the sort of stress that damages health and shortens lives is far more common among those who struggle to make ends meet than it is for those who head large organizations.

But wait, many of you may say. Those who are paid large amounts often have far more education than the average worker. Surely they should be paid more in recognition of the level of education they have attained.

But should they? Let’s think the matter through from first principles. Higher levels of education typically enable the beneficiaries to have much more interesting jobs than do those with little education. Should they benefit from their education both by being able to obtain more interesting work and by being paid much more for doing it?

Doctors often argue that they deserve very high levels of pay because they suffered through (and paid for) so many years of school. But by far the greater part of the expense of their education is borne by the taxpayers—most of whom make no more than a fraction of what doctors make for the rest of their lives once they do finish their education. Does a doctor really deserve to make more than three times what the average taxpayer makes?

What, then, of one’s ability to do a job effectively? It’s fair to point out that those who are paid huge amounts often have huge talents—and as a result do indeed work more effectively than many others. But why, precisely, should humans be compensated for ability? No doubt some people are able to achieve considerably more than others, but let’s set to one side that part of their achievements that has resulted from their education and that part of their achievement that has resulted from working harder than others. What we’re left with are the abilities one is born with, and the opportunities one’s family was able to provide during one’s upbringing. To be sure, genetic difference and differences in family background create large differences in the levels of ability of different individuals. But such differences are surely a matter of good or bad luck, not of desert. Does someone who has had the good luck to be born with an extraordinarily high level of intelligence (or with extraordinarily good hand-eye coordination, or with extraordinary talent of any other sort), or someone who has had the good luck to be born into a wealthy family that is able to provide for them a privileged upbringing, deserve to be paid more because of the higher level of ability that is the result of those genes and that upbringing? To pay such people more on those grounds amounts, in essence, to paying them more for having been lucky. What possible justification could there be for building luck money into our system of compensating workers? Arguably, it would be at least as fair in the other direction to compensate people for having been disadvantaged in the talent they were born with, or the upbringing they had—or the opportunities they never had.

What of what some will call the “practical argument”—that, regardless of the rights or wrongs of it, one will not be able to attract and keep top talent unless one pays top dollar?

Those who make this argument overrate three things. They overrate, first of all, the importance of financial incentives to human beings. There will always be many talented individuals willing to try for interesting and demanding jobs, even if they are not paid astronomical sums for doing so; if that were not true, countries would have no one willing to serve in Cabinet positions, or in the senior levels of the bureaucracy (where most people make only a fraction of what they could make with large corporations). For most people—including most talented people—money is not everything. It’s not even the most important thing.

Those who make the so-called “practical argument” overrate too the degree to which talent is scarce; in any large organization there are almost always many individuals capable of filling the top jobs. Finally, they overrate the degree to which organizations owe their success or failure to one individual (or to a handful of individuals) at the top. During the start-up phase, to be sure, many organizations are disproportionately reliant on the abilities and the vision of the founder(s). But the evidence suggests that, in the case of large, established organizations, who the CEO is usually makes relatively little difference to how the organization performs.

Does a company, then, really need to pay its CEO tens of millions of dollars a year? The facts of the matter simply don’t bear that out. Many North American companies have done exceedingly well without ever paying their CEO at anything like the multiples that most large institutions offer their top people. And in the other direction there are many, many companies that have seen their fortunes decline drastically despite paying the CEO tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And again, North American corporations thrived in the 1950s and 1960s despite far, far lower multiples of CEO to average worker compensation.

One should also look to outside North America. American corporations may have gotten into the habit of paying their CEO a fortune every year, but that’s been much less the case in other countries. In Japan the head of a large organization can expect to make ten or twenty times more than what those lower down the ladder make—not four hundred times more, as in the United States. But no one I’m aware of has suggested that Honda or Toyota would be far more successful if those organizations paid their top people in the way that American companies pay their CEOs.

* * *

Many of the above numbers are multiples of the average worker—not of the lowest paid. What is the rationale for referencing the lowest paid rather than the average? About that there can be no mystery. Western societies have become far too much in the habit of focusing on the incomes of the middle class—and far too little on the incomes (and the wealth, or lack thereof) of those at the bottom of the ladder. If we focus only on a comparison of the highest paid with those in the middle, it becomes ever easier for society as a whole to keep forgetting about its least fortunate members—and for inequality between the middle and the bottom to keep growing, even as inequality between the middle and the top begins to shrink.

* * *

I have been trying to put forward a case for 3:1 being an appropriate multiple. Is it possible to prove that this is precisely the appropriate number? Of course not. By their very nature these issues will always involve a large subjective element. But I cannot believe that something in the range of two and a half, or three or four is not a more appropriate multiple than J.P. Morgan’s 20—let alone than the 350-400 that has become common among large American corporations.

Apparently I’m not alone in my intuitions. Psychology professor Kevin Payne’s book The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (the subject of a 4 June 2017 Nicholas Kristof column in The New York Times) reports on surveys as to what members of the general public feel to be appropriate pay multiples. Interestingly, there is no great divide between left and right: “liberals said CEOs should be paid four times as much as the average worker, while conservatives said five times.”

A multiple of three (or four, or five) is still a very long way from Marx’s “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A multiple of three or four does not eliminate inequality; it still accepts the value of monetary incentives for people to work hard, to strive to succeed. But a multiple of three or four would mean the end of “luck money” as a guiding principle of compensation. It would be the basis for a far fairer, far more livable society. Let’s go there.

CEO Compensation

(The following is the full version of a letter to The Globe and Mail that was published in slightly edited form on June 1. I have been developing a longer argument on this topic; I will post that shortly.)

I may be unusual among CEOs in entirely agreeing with Mark Roberts (letters, May 30) that CEO compensation should be limited to a certain multiple of the compensation of a corporation’s lowest-paid employee. I remember that many years ago a Manitoba premier suggested this idea—and suggested that three would be an appropriate multiple. That sounds about right to me—and it’s a multiple that I don’t think our corporation has ever exceeded in its 32 years. It’s just about impossible to work more than three times as hard as someone else; there are only 24 hours in a day. Should one be paid more for having more ability or education? Perhaps, but arguably it’s at least as fair in the other direction to compensate someone for having been disadvantaged in the talent they were born with, or the upbringing they had, or the educational opportunities they never had.

A Party That Calls Itself Green

Where does the Green Party stand on the network of issues related to factory farming? An enormous body of evidence has shown that the consumption of animal products by humans is a huge contributor to global warming; that growth hormones, antibiotics and other drugs used in factory farming pose dangers to both human health and the non-human environment; that the ways in which factory farms use pesticides and herbicides (not to mention the issues surrounding excess manure) pose dangers to the water supply; and that many practices that have become routine on industrial scale farms are unspeakably cruel to farm animals. One would naturally expect the Green Party to take a strong stand on all these issues. And in Canada that's just what happens--at the federal level. The Green Party of Canada has adopted a long and highly specific list of good policies in these areas. (It’s largely for that reason that I’m seriously considering switching my allegiance to the Greens in federal politics.)

The Green Party of BC? Not so much.

Incredibly, the BC Green Party’s platform includes no mention whatsoever of these issues. Their agricultural policy does not even mention animal welfare. Their climate change policy does not even mention the damage done by agriculture devoted to the production of animal food.*

To my mind, such a party is simply masquerading as Green.

Is the BC NDP any better? On these issues, sadly, not one bit better. But given that, on other issues, the NDP is clearly more progressive (the New Democrats are committed to a $15 minimum wage, for example, whereas Andrew Weaver’s Greens are committed only to appointing a commission to study the issue), the best choice in BC on Tuesday seems to me to be clear.

*Both agriculture and the environment are areas of shared responsibility between federal and provincial governments.

Nanaimo's downtown

Great that the "No-to-the $80-million-arena" side won Nanaimo's referendum yesterday--and won so decisively (80% against!).

But what should we do with that downtown site--and the downtown generally? The idea that City Council had shelved of a Granville-Island style market, plus a fair bit of housing, plus waterfront walkway would be a great start. So would a foot ferry to Vancouver--that's definitely something worth the city subsidizing to at least some extent. Persuading someone to re-open a downtown movie theatre (with cafe and bookshop attached) would help. And beyond that? Make (well advertized) extended free parking available a couple of blocks away from the downtown on some of what are now vacant lots. Invest further in live theatre and live music. To the extent that we emphasize tourism, encourage visitors to come over from Vancouver and buy antiques and works of art (including native art!) --not cruise ships that people get off of for a few hours to buy trinkets. Carry through with the idea of extending the waterfront walkway to Departure Bay. Have a little shuttle bus constantly going back and forth between the centre of downtown on Commercial and the old railway station in the Old City Quarter--and a similar bus doing the same between Commercial and the university, to bring the students downtown.

The downtown currently has far more plusses than people give it credit for--real character along Commercial and the Old City Quarter, some decent shops and and restaurants (and cafes), decent live music. And great views too!

If we invest in making the downtown more livable, more people will want to live there--and that's a better investment than cruise ships and conference centres that bring one-time-only visitors, or none at all. Plus, as Richard Florida showed decades ago, investing in the culture of a city draws new business more effectively than anything else.

So far as hotels go, let's encourage modest-sized proposals for this modest-sized city--not out-sized projects that would depend on a continual stream of package tours from overseas. A good example is the one that's just been put forward for a six-story hotel at Front and Chapel (http://www.nanaimobulletin.com/news/410163745.html)--and I love that it includes a top-floor bar that would be open to locals who want to take in the great view over a beer, not just to hotel guests.

Investing in the culture of a city can include sports too--but let's do that smartly, and within our means. As the example of the Vancouver Canadians has shown, the experience of a sports event is at least as important as the level of league play. The Canadians play in a Single A short-season league--i.e., at the lowest minor league level. But because the stadium has character and the experience is made fun, people love it--and it really does add to the character of that city. We already have a decent hockey arena and a team in a league at a decent level (for our sized city); we really don't need the WHL. But what about investing, say, $5 million or $10 million to upgrade Saurauxmen Stadium so we could get a Single A baseball team in Nanaimo? That stadium already has real character--and a history (Mickey Mantle was there at the opening). Portand built a brand new Triple A baseball stadium for $15 million; we could do an awful lot to improve Saurauxmen with $5 or $10 million, attract a low-level minor league pro baseball team--and have a better sports culture year-round (not just in hockey season). Sports venues don't need to be in the centre of downtown blocking the view--and they don't need to cost $80 million!

Obituary: Daniel F . Vickers

The Globe and Mail is publishing today a slightly edited version of this obituary, which I sent in to them shortly after Danny died. I'm grateful to the paper for not trimming much, but I thought I would post the full thing here for those who may be interested. There's no way to express fully how endlessly sad it is that he has died.

In one of the best-known scenes from the acclaimed 1997 film Good Will Hunting, Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) defends a friend who’s being ridiculed by a pretentious Harvard graduate student. The topic is early American history: as the grad student starts to argue that, in his view, historians have greatly underestimated the impact of inherited wealth in early America, Will interrupts to suggest that the idea is not in fact the grad student’s own: “You got that from Vickers, "Work in Essex County," page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us?”

The academic being referred to, Daniel Vickers, was then on the way to becoming, in a quiet way, one of the most respected historians of colonial America. In two landmark scholarly monographs (Farmers and Fishermen and Young Men and the Sea) as well as in numerous other publications Vickers drew a picture of eighteenth century New England that emphasized the importance of class and of capital, and provided an extraordinarily vivid sense of ordinary people’s lives during the period. Vickers made a somewhat unlikely figure as a leading historian of America: a Canadian, he lived and worked north of the border for most of his life. But he was as widely loved when he taught in the States as he was in Canada; as one UCSD student expressed it, “Vickers is awesome…. He teaches American history, and he is Canadian!!! He has the coolest point of view, and doesn’t teach about stupid crap...we learned the interesting side of history.”

Vickers died February 8 in New Westminster, aged 64. Born and raised in Toronto, Vickers was the son of art historian G. Stephen Vickers and community service volunteer Elizabeth Hannah Smith Vickers. Danny sometimes joked that he might hold the record for consecutive years being educated by institutions associated with the University of Toronto; primary school at the Institute of Child Study was followed by high school at the University of Toronto Schools, and then a BA and an MA at the university itself. It was during his university years that he met Christine McManus, whose own Masters research work was in neuropharmacology; before long, the two were married.

Vickers went to Princeton for his PhD. It was there that he began what became his life’s work academically, but he found Princeton itself stiflingly elitist, and escaped as often as he could to Toronto or to New England towns such as Salem and Nantucket, where he would spend long hours poring over local records.

After two years as a post-doctoral fellow in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a year teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Vickers was appointed to a permanent position at Memorial University in 1984. The family flourished in Newfoundland, but in early 1999 Vickers was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The high reputation of the doctors at the University of California, Dan Diego was a factor in Vickers accepting an offer to join the UCSD History Department later that year.

By this time Vickers was well known to historians throughout the States. His award-winning 1994 book Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex Country, Massachusetts, 1630-1830, had delineated through painstaking analysis of archival records of entire communities the extent to which the development of New England had depended on labor that was largely unfree—with workers held in check not by slavery but by onerous burdens of debt. It had been hailed by reviewers as “one of the best works yet written on the early American economy” and as a book that explained “the deepest inner workings of New England society.”

This was followed in 2005 by Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail, in which Vickers challenged the long tradition of treating a young man’s decision to go to sea as an inherently momentous one, and the life of a seafarer as inherently exceptional; again through painstaking archival research, he demonstrated that that most young men who went to sea did so with a sense of inevitability—and that not until the late nineteenth century did seafaring life begin to seem exceptional. Maritime history was somewhat out of fashion with the general public when the book appeared, and it sold less well than its publishers had hoped, but reviews of Vickers’ work by historians were again extraordinarily enthusiastic; the book was praised as “a masterly work,” and “the most original American maritime history ever published.”

As with his first book, Vickers was aided greatly in his research by his wife Christine. He credited as well research assistant Vince Walsh for a substantial contribution to the project.

In a third book, a 2006 scholarly edition of The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813), Vickers made available to a wider audience what is believed to be the earliest American maritime autobiography extant, and provided, in the words of one reviewer, “an excellent introduction that places Bowen in the larger context of Atlantic history.” A fourth book, A Companion to Colonial America, a large edited volume, appeared in 2008; it was praised as “an indispensable survey of a generation of scholarship on early American history.”

Vickers served as chair of the UCSD History Department for much of his time there, and was well respected for having helped to unify a distinguished but sometimes fractious department. The family found the suburban lifestyle and sunny consumerism of San Diego less congenial than the rocky insularity and dour humour of Newfoundland, however; in 2006 Vickers accepted an offer to return to Canada to chair the History Department at the University of British Columbia—where he was again credited with having done much to bring together a large department with often divergent interests.

Throughout his life Vickers was devoted to family—to his parents and his sister, to Christine, and to their three children, all of whom remained close to their parents, even as they put down roots thousands of miles apart.

During his time in San Diego and Vancouver Vickers managed to live life more or less to the full—but lived always with his cancer. In San Diego he was at one point near death and required a bone marrow transplant; his insurance would not cover the hugely expensive treatment, which his doctors managed to provide only by including him in a research study for which participants’ costs were covered.

At UBC Vickers started work on what would have been his most ambitious project, exploring multiple strands in the history of early capitalism. Weakened by the lymphoma, he was forced to scale back the project to a more focused study of the borrowing and lending habits of Matthew Patten, a New England farmer of the eighteenth century who left behind unusually detailed records. It was to be a work that, in Vickers’ own words, would use Patten’s “personal diary and accounts to examine the distinction between commercial and neighborly obligations in the pre-industrial world.” That project remains uncompleted at his death.

Everywhere he taught Vickers was praised by both faculty and students as highly intelligent, warmly collegial—and extraordinarily funny. Though not known for witty remarks, he was unsurpassed as a raconteur; his speaking style could be both lively and droll, and he had slow but impeccable timing.

Tall, thin, and ungainly, he had a surprisingly good singing voice, and an extraordinary memory—for baseball facts and figures as much as for the details of maritime history. Even during his final days in hospital, when he was having great difficulty speaking and breathing, he was able to respond with enthusiasm when someone said “You can probably even remember who played third base for the Detroit Tigers of 1941.” The words came loudly if not clearly through Vickers’ oxygen mask: “Higgins. Pinky Higgins!”

Vickers was known throughout his life for his generosity of spirit, and his utter lack of acquisitiveness. When the letter came from Mirimax in 1997 asking Vickers’ permission to have his work quoted in a forthcoming film starring Robin Williams, he thought it was all very funny—and never thought for a moment of asking the Disney subsidiary for any money.

In the fall of 2016 Vickers’ cancer took on a more aggressive form, and he was forced to take a leave from UBC. He leaves his wife Christine, his sister Hannah, his children Sarah, Simon, and Tim, and his grandchild Teddy.

Say No to Nanaimo's $120 Million Arena Proposal

Something local this time: I posted a shorter version of the following earlier tonight on the "No Event Centre for Nanaimo" Facebook page. After the $20 million expenditure on a cruise ship terminal that's used by four ships a year, and the many millions spent on a conference centre that is barely used and that is a continuing drain on city finances, the last thing the city needs is another downtown white elephant. The referendum to decide this issue is Saturday, March 11.

I've just been reading up on this issue. Some numbers, and some thoughts:

The interest on $80 million over 20 years might well be another $80 million. It's almost certain to be at least $40 million (assuming an average 5% interest rate over two decades). That's a total of at least $120 million, even if interest rates stay low. Plus, there is likely to have to be an annual subsidy. See, for example, the Guelph Storm; Guelph ended up spending $40-50 million some years ago to build an arena that was supposed to generate an annual surplus; instead the city subsidizes it to the tune of over $200,000 annually.

The Clippers have a perfectly good arena that already seats more people than the WHL franchises in Kootenay or Prince George attract (which is fewer than 3,000 a game). But because the WHL has told Nanaimo it would only consider us for a WHL franchise if we build a new arena, it's now proposed that we spend at least $120 million. Imagine what that amount could do to help the city's culture--and sports-- facilities, or the many other good causes in the city that need help.

Frank Crane arena in Beban Park can seat 3,000--but it's never full. Why is it supposed that junior hockey of a very slightly better quality could attract 5,000 fans regularly in the future, when currently junior hockey attracts an average of fewer than 2,000? By comparison with a hockey arena, try this number: even the state-of the art baseball facility in the Portland area (seating 5,000) cost only $15 million. How about a baseball park that would allow for a franchise of that sort (Single A) to compete with the Vancouver Canadians? That would be a great rivalry--and it would cost one eighth of what this attempt to get a WHL franchise would cost. At the very least, Sarauxmen Stadium could use an upgrade. And that would still leave an awful lot left over out of $120 million to help the homeless, help the theatre, help the ballet, help the schools, help the Clippers if they need it. Help build a movie theatre downtown. Help build more small rinks for the average citizen to use. Or extend the trail along the waterfront. There are so many things that would benefit the city and that wouldn't be white elephants!

Why kill the Clippers? They are good hockey franchise with a long history in Nanaimo, and they would surely leave or fold if a WHL franchise came to town.

A copy of "Nanaimo City Updates" arrived at our house today. It seems to me to be a totally disingenuous document; it describes the "events centre" as "a community meeting place catering to all and promoting community wellness," with no mention whatsoever of how the WHL has driven this proposal. The document also assures us that "the proposed events centre ... will be paid for through current revenue streams, causing no property tax increase for residents or property owners." How can they be certain in advance that over the next 20 years this massive, massive expenditure will not cause any tax increases? I may be putting it too mildly when I say "disingenuous."

Canadian Values, and the Oath of Citizenship

Controversies over immigration tend to produce more heat than light, and surely there is nothing enlightened about either the anti-immigrant hysteria fueled by Donald Trump or the Trump-lite version propounded in Canada by some in the Conservative Party. “Kellie Leitch,” we are assured on her campaign website, is the only candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party “who will ensure that those coming to Canada believe in the equality of men and women, freedom of religion, and equality of all under the law.” At one level this assertion is of course absurd: no one could possibly “ensure” anything about the beliefs of potential immigrants, any more than they could ensure anything about the beliefs of native Canadians. But that’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate questions to be raised on this issue. Are we doing enough to make the Canadian values that are enshrined in the Constitution plain to prospective immigrants? What are prospective immigrants being told by our government? Is the oath of allegiance that new immigrants must affirm worded appropriately? These are legitimate questions that deserve to be explored.

Leitch, of course, does not stop at the principles enshrined in the Constitution (the sort of principles enunciated in the sentence quoted above—“equality of men and women, freedom of religion,…equality of all under the law,” and so on). Her website asserts that a much wider range of values are central to the Canadian identity:

• Equal opportunity – We must strive to ensure that everyone has as much of an equal opportunity to succeed as possible, especially our youth

• Hard work – Everyone must work hard and provide for themselves and their families

• Helping others – Once people become prosperous, we all are expected to give back to our communities to help others

• Generosity – Canada is a place that shows what is possible when hard work and generosity come together

• Freedom and tolerance – A Canadian identity that is based on freedom and tolerance to allow each of us the chance to pursue our best lives and to become our best selves

We all hold these values in common and they make our country great. If we want continue to grow and develop that identity, we need to make sure that those who want to come to Canada share those values.

Every one of this additional set of principles that Leitch claims we “all hold in common” seems to me to be in one way or another problematic.

• Why should the principle of equal opportunity be qualified in the way that Leitch does ("as much of an equal opportunity…as possible”)?

• Much as I value hard work, I see no reason why “everyone must work hard and provide for their families” should be made a universal principle. Were we to make it a universal requirement that Canadians adhere to this value, those not qualifying would include the young Pierre Trudeau (whose family wealth enabled him to live for decades without much by way of regular employment) and the young Leonard Cohen (who spent years as a young man dividing his time between writing and drug taking—“I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God. … Generally, I ended up with a bad hangover.”)

• I would happily endorse “helping others” as a value worthy of support—but not with the apparent qualification Leitch attaches (that the obligation to help others kicks in only once one has become prosperous).

• How much should we be patting ourselves on the back for our “generosity”? Decades ago we committed ourselves to devoting 0.07 of our GDP to helping the world’s less fortunate nations; since then, the percentage we actually give has declined to 0.024. (Meanwhile Britain, Denmark, Sweden, and several other developed countries have exceeded the UN’s 0.07.target.)

• Most Canadians today do indeed tend to value freedom and tolerance, and that's a good thing. But Leitch shades her endorsement of these principles. When you think of freedom only in terms of the freedom to become “our best selves,” you open the door to arguments that would restrict freedom—that would call into question the freedom of those who do not seem to be using it to fulfill their potential. (People like the young Cohen and the young Trudeau? Tell them to get a proper job!)

I'm sure not everyone shares in the complaints I have about the Leitch long-list of values--and I'm sure others would want to add to my list. The point here is not only that Leitch's list of values is poorly thought out and sometimes contradictory. It is, more importantly, that any such list of values will be entirely subjective--no matter how loudly we may assert that it expresses values we supposedly "all hold in common."

The narrower concern prompted by Leitch’s agenda, though—are we doing enough to try to ensure that those coming to Canada accept principles such as the equality of men and women, freedom of religion, and equality of all under the law—deserves serious discussion. Unlike Leitch’s broader list—her subjective grab bag emphasizing the value of hard work—this short list names values that are enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. I suspect that it is this sort of screening that Canadians have in mind when they say they support “screening immigrants for anti-Canadian values”—as a large majority of Canadians have said they do (in various polls taken by the Toronto Star, Nanos, and Forum Research). It’s not just Conservatives who say they support such screening; one poll reported that 57% of Liberal voters and 59% of New Democratic voters joined the 87% of Conservative voters who supported the proposal. The idea of trying to screen immigrants on this basis has intuitive appeal to many Canadians who are aware of cultural practices in some parts of the world that are horribly cruel on a systemic basis to women, or to gays and lesbians. And it may have particularly strong appeal to those who are aware of Immigration Canada having entirely abandoned in-person interviews. (Such interviews were an important part of the process until early in this century, when they were abandoned as too costly.)

Any discussion of these issues should begin by acknowledging that there have been relatively few cases over the years in which immigrants have committed horrendous acts--so-called honor killings, for example--that are clearly linked to their holding values antithetical to those enshrined in our constitution. Certainly there have been far more such acts committed by native Canadians than there have by immigrants. From the systematic brutality practised against First Nations Canadians over many generations, to the Montreal massacre of 1989, to gay-bashing (and murder) in places such as Vancouver's Stanley Park, to the Quebec City killings of January 2017--this list only scratches the surface. Doing everything we can to dissuade native Canadians from adopting values that disparage other groups (and that spawn hate crimes) should be a much higher priority for us that worrying about immigrant values.

Moreover, there's plenty of evidence that, in cases where immigrant families do arrive holding, for example, deeply embedded prejudicial feelings against women, the next generation tends to acquire mainstream Canadian values.

We should not, then, be overly concerned at the prospect of immigrants subverting the values enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. But to say that immigration-related issues should not be given a high priority is not to say we should ignore them. It is surely entirely appropriate to ask if we are doing all we can to make clear to prospective immigrants what values are enshrined in the Constitution--and to make some effort to dissuade those who hold views antithetical to those expressed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms from immigrating.

Let's ask, then, if bringing back interviews could in fact come anywhere close to ensuring “that those coming to Canada believe in the equality of men and women, freedom of religion, and equality of all under the law”? Let’s listen to what former Immigration officials have to say on this point. They deserve to be quoted at length:

When I worked at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, we seriously considered whether a values pledge for permanent residents or new citizens would be effective, or even just a useful symbolic statement. After looking at examples from Australia and the Netherlands, we concluded that, while they may have an intuitive appeal, such pledges are ultimately empty exercises. Even assuming one could agree on a list of values that newcomers would pledge to uphold … it would be about as meaningful as clicking “accept” on a computer program’s ‘Terms of Use’ and, in practice, probably even less enforceable.

Nor are the experiences of Australia and the Netherlands — both of which have similar or worse integration problems than Canada — a compelling endorsement of such “screening.” … People will sign or say almost anything to come to Canada (or Australia, or Europe). Just ask the officials charged with immigration fraud detection. The tens of thousands of people who submit fraudulent education and employment credentials, marriage licenses and language test scores along with their Canadian permanent resident applications every year will hardly balk at signing a values pledge that is neither verifiable nor backed by a credible threat of enforcement.

An in-person interview is a [good] idea — but not for the reasons [Leich] proposes. Face-to-face interviews, which were the rule for most immigrants until the early 2000s, are much more effective at catching all sorts of fraud than a paper file review that is often conducted half-way around the world by people unfamiliar with the language or culture of the applicants. Former immigration officer James Metcalfe’s description of what was lost when Immigration Canada abandoned interviews is typical of what many older officials in the Department of Immigration will tell you:

There are all kinds of things that tipped me off about the veracity of an applicant’s claims. For example, I have never met a chef or cook who did not have burn marks or cuts or scars on their hands or arms. I have also never met a mechanic who had lily-white hands with no cuts or split fingernails … (O)fficers … could assess the individual’s ability to communicate in English or French right there, because they were in the same room together.

But note what Metcalfe doesn’t talk about: abstract values or beliefs. The criteria that an in-person interview can confirm are the objective and verifiable traits of language ability, education, employment history and criminality. Leitch is quite right that in-person interviews absolutely should be required of permanent resident applicants — but as part of the existing vetting process, not a new “values” screening process. (Howard Anglin, “Leitch is mostly wrong — but also right — about immigration,” iPolitics Insights column, January 24, 2017)

To me at least, Anglin and Metcalfe’s arguments are entirely persuasive: re-instituting screening for immigrants makes good sense—so long as the aim is to stop fraud, and not to screen for values. As a byproduct, it’s hard to imagine that the process of catching fraudsters would not also result in entry being denied to a number of applicants who do not in fact share the values of most Canadians. But trying to design a system that would directly screen for values—and do so effectively—would be futile.

If we don’t screen for some subjective set of values, what (if anything) should we be doing in this area that we aren’t doing now? Two things, it seems to me.

First of all, we should make the Canadian values that are protected under our Constitution far more plain to prospective immigrants than we do now. Currently, the wording used emphasizes the protection accorded to the new immigrants themselves—and downplays the protections provided under the Constitution for others. It makes no specific mention of the principle of gender equality, or the prohibition on discrimination based on sexual orientation. Here is how the Government of Canada “Apply to Immigrate” web page presents our values to prospective immigrants:

The Charter Protects Your Rights The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of Canada’s Constitution and protects you from the moment you arrive in Canada. It sets out the values that Canadians live by and describes the kinds of personal human rights and freedoms we can expect in this country. Some of those rights and freedoms include: The right to life, liberty and personal security; Freedom of conscience and religion; Freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media; Freedom to hold peaceful meetings; Freedom to join groups; Protection from unreasonable search or seizure and unjustified detainment and imprisonment; The right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty; The right to retain and instruct counsel (a lawyer) without delay; The right to a fair trial, through due process of law; The right to equal protection and benefit under the law, without discrimination.

Rights come with responsibilities People who live in Canada are expected to understand and obey Canadian laws, allow other Canadians to enjoy their rights and freedoms and help preserve Canada's multicultural heritage. It is also important for Canadians to become informed about politics and help to improve their communities and the country. Citizens of Canada have other rights and freedoms, such as the right to vote in elections. To learn about these rights, see the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Surely it would be appropriate to give stronger and clearer guidance right at the outset to those who are considering applying to immigrate to Canada. Rather than simply referring applicants to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, let’s include Section 15 on Canada’s official “Apply to Immigrate” website:

Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.

And let’s be explicit as to how our judicial system has interpreted Section 15—making absolutely clear that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sexual identity is as much against the Constitution as is discrimination on the basis of gender, race, or religion. Let’s make clear that, in Canada, men can marry men and women can marry women. And let us add, politely but firmly, that those who are not comfortable with the values enshrined in the Canadian Constitution are strongly advised against applying for Canadian citizenship.

Might not some people who are misogynistic or homophobic still apply? Certainly they might. But at least some who are so inclined would surely think twice, and consider applying elsewhere instead.

Making the values that are enshrined in the Constitution far more plain to prospective immigrants than we do now is one thing we should do. Another is revise the Oath of Canadian Citizenship. Leitch’s “Canadian values” campaign has paid little or no attention to the wording of this oath—and that’s more than a little strange, given that Canada's Oath of Citizenship (like that of any other nation) in some very real sense already constitutes a "values pledge." The difference between an oath of citizenship (or allegiance) and a Leitch pledge "screening for Canadian values" is simply that an oath of citizenship or allegiance typically references objective, fixed criteria rather than subjective ones. Again, it would to my mind be folly to think of adding any reference to values to the Canadian Oath of Citizenship beyond the objective criterion of those values that are enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But here's the odd thing: currently the Canadian Oath of Citizenship makes no mention of the Charter. Here is the current wording of the Oath of Citizenship:

I swear [or affirm] that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada, and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

That’s 23 words about the British monarch and her heirs and successors, and only 17 words about anything clearly Canadian. Even dyed in the wool monarchists might agree that this is disproportionate.

Not only is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms not mentioned in the oath; there is no mention of the Constitution of Canada at all. Now you might say that “faithfully observe the laws of Canada” implies adherence to the principles of the constitution. But the two are, in a very real sense, different things. To be sure, the constitution of a sovereign state is often defined as its “supreme law”—but it is law of a different sort from the laws that one “obeys” or “observes.” It is as much a set of principles governing the interpretation of other laws as it is itself a law. It is not in ordinary laws but in the Canadian Constitution—and, in particular, in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—that core values are most clearly expressed.

Those who have paid attention to the wording of the oath have not infrequently argued that the prominence it gives to the British monarch is entirely inappropriate to modern Canada. As Joe Killoran has pointed out, it’s not only her status as monarch of another sovereign state that makes Elizabeth an unsuitable candidate for modern Canada to swear allegiance to. It’s also the restrictive religious status that goes with the job. The British monarch is head of the Church of England, and must always be a member of that branch of Protestant Christianity. So long as we retain the British monarch as our head of state, Canada is part of a hierarchy in which the head position is not open to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or atheists. If a monarch wanted to leave the Church of England, she or he would have to abdicate.

For the foreseeable future Canada is stuck with the British monarchy. But we are unlikely to be stuck with it forever—and we need not foreground it in the Canadian Oath of Citizenship. Let me propose a change, then—a change that, to be sure, is at some level merely symbolic, but that another level would be truly a change of substance. Let us adopt the following wording for the Canadian Oath of Citizenship:

I faithfully affirm that I accept and will abide by the principles set out in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that I will observe the laws of Canada, and that I will fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

While we’re at it, we might consider requiring non-immigrant Canadians to take a citizenship course before they turn 18—at the end of which they would be given a chance to themselves affirm the same oath of citizenship. Given a chance, only. Not compelled.

And the oath itself? We don’t need a requirement to be willing to “bear arms,” as you’ll find in the American Oath of Allegiance. And we don’t need any long-winded guff about the monarchy. Just something modest and to the point. Canadian, you know.

Animals and Plants, Pain and Suffering

When omnivores ask vegans why we’ve chosen not to eat animal products, many of us are likely to say, first of all, that we want to do what we can to reduce the suffering of non-human animals. Omnivores will often then put forward the following argument: But plants are living creatures and feel pain too; if you vegans were consistent in your views, you’d have to consume nothing at all except water.

That’s not as ludicrous an argument as at least a few vegans have suggested. Gary Yourofsky, for example, ridicules such notions in this Facebook post for the Evolve Campaign:

The second inanity of meat-eaters is attempting to indict the vegan lifestyle by claiming that plants suffer and die to feed the vegans of the world. Yet, I am still searching for People for the Ethical Treatment of Carrots, Last Chance for Broccoli or Apples Deserve Absolute Protection Today and Tomorrow. … People for the Ethical Treatment of Carrots doesn't exist because everyone knows the difference between taking a carrot out of the ground and slicing a pig into pieces. Everyone also knows the difference between mowing a lawn and tossing a live baby male chick (egg industry) into a rendering machine. If one does not understand the difference, then that person is disingenuous, irrational and illogical. (“The ridiculous ‘But you're killing plants’ argument,” March 6, 2011)*

Yourofsky's ridicule seems to me to be unnecessary and unfortunate. Along the way, though, he does come close to making one reasonable argument. Almost everyone does surely sense there to be a “difference between taking a carrot out of the ground and slicing a pig into pieces, [or] between mowing a lawn and tossing a live chick into a rendering machine.” But do we know that the carrot and the blade of grass do not suffer? Do we even know that the carrot and the blade of grass do not suffer to the same extent as the pig or the baby chick? Do we know those things with absolute, 100% certainty? I think if we are honest we probably have to answer no to that question.

For some years a small minority of scientists and philosophers have been suggesting that plants should have moral standing (see, for example, University of Victoria philosopher Thom Heyd’s interesting article, “Plant Ethics and Botanic Gardens,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, Issue 9, 2012); and that plants possess some form of sentience and should be granted rights (see, for example, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, co-authored by neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, 2015**).

I’ve been a bit nervous in the past about giving credence to such arguments—primarily, I realize now, out of a fear that, to the degree that those of us who are interested in reducing animal suffering accept them, we open the door to just the sort of reductionist anti-vegan argument outlined above. The more I think about it, though, the more I’m persuaded that we should in fact welcome the sorts of arguments that Heyd, Mancuso, and others put forward. We should welcome them, first of all, as we should welcome all disinterested inquiry. But we should welcome them too because, if anything, they strengthen the arguments for adopting a plant-based diet.

A key consideration here is that we need not have absolute proof that plants do not experience pain in order to argue against the practice of inflicting what is obviously extreme suffering on farm animals; we can readily enough deal in probabilities. Scientists such as Robert Elwood have spent a good deal of time investigating the degree to which creatures such as lobsters and shrimp feel pain, and concluded that they do in fact experience something closely akin to what we call pain; in many cases exhibiting “prolonged and complicated behavior, which clearly involves the central nervous system,” as Elwood puts it. We know from our own experience under local or general anesthetic how important our nervous system is to our ability to experience pain. Even if plants, which of course lack a central nervous system, can feel something akin to the pain that vertebrates feel, it seems fair to conclude that the overwhelming weight of probability is that killing and eating animals entails causing a great deal more suffering than does the killing and eating of a carrot. For this argument based on probability to constitute a sound ethical justification for a vegan diet, we need not claim that we know with 100% certainly that plants do not feel some form of pain less extreme than that of the screaming pig—and we certainly need not claim we know that plants lack any capacity whatsoever to experience pain.

But what if it were true that the carrot and the blade of grass suffered just as much as the screaming pig? The ethical argument for a plant-based diet would in that case become even stronger. That’s because “food animals” do not arrive on humans' plates ex nihilo; they consume vast quantities of plant matter over the course of their lives. Indeed, as the film and associated book Cowspiracy make so dramatically clear, “worldwide, 50% of the grains and legumes we’re growing we are feeding to animals. … In the United States, it’s closer to 70, 80%--about 90% of the soybeans.” (Dr. Will Tuttle, as quoted on page 244). So if killing plants does in fact cause pain and suffering in itself, we are still minimizing suffering by eating a plant-based diet. By eating meat and and dairy products we cause more pain and suffering to plants than we would if we ate only plants--plus, of course, we cause vast amounts of pain and suffering to be inflicted on non-human animals.

From any angle, then, in order to reduce pain and suffering we should adopt a plant-based diet. But arguably, we should emphasize certain plant foods over others. One of the interesting points Heyd makes is this:

[W]hen we obtain food from plants we need not kill the plant, as in all the cases in which fruits, seeds, nuts, or ‘spare’, non-essential, leaves are consumed. This is the case with most staples, such as wheat, rice or the various sorts of beans (legumes), which are seeds normally harvested after maturity of the plant. It is also the case with regard to all the food items that, in common parlance, are called ‘vegetables’ but really are fruits, such as tomatoes, squashes (such as zucchinis and pumpkins), cucumbers, or tubers (such as potatoes).

I would stop well short of suggesting there is any moral imperative not to eat carrots. But Heyd, Mancuso, et al. give us plenty of food for thought—and even more reason to stick to a plant-based diet.

*In fairness to vegans as a group, Yourofsky's tone does not seem to me to be typical. More representative, more measured in tone, and better reasoned are the arguments on this point put forward by Free from Harm: ("Eating Animals: Addressing Our Most Common Justifications," by the Free From Harm Staff Writers, March 27, 2014). **I’m indebted to Rhona McAdam for pointing me in the direction of this book recently.

What is "Real Food"? The Case of Vegan Mac & Cheese

Maureen and I ate at an excellent vegan restaurant in Victoria yesterday (Be Love); their cashew/coconut cream macaroni rivals that of The Sneaky Pickle in New Orleans for the finest macaroni dish I’ve ever had—far, far tastier, to my mind, than the macaroni and cheese dishes I used to love for so many years. Be Love calls this dish Mac & Cheeze (similarly, they call their delicious cashew-cream-based dessert Cheezecake). Such dishes are often referred to (including by those of us who are vegan or vegan-friendly) as “fake mac & cheese.” When we use a phrase like that, we are of course acknowledging that, however much they may differ from (and be an improvement on!) the macaroni and cheese we enjoyed as children, such dishes are created with reference to (or in memory of) “real” macaroni and cheese. But we don’t for a moment think that there’s anything fake about them in any broader sense.

Sad to say, not everyone thinks of “fake” and “real” in this way. A case in point is Alexandra Gill’s snarky review of two new vegan restaurants in Vancouver in today’s Globe and Mail, which concludes in this way:

I get it. It’s not really cheese. And for some people, these processed reproductions are a godsend. But if you can’t fake it, why even bother trying to make it? There is so much better to be found in its natural form.

Let’s leave to one side Gill’s extraordinary incomprehension (“why even bother…?”) of the many reasons other than taste for people to want to eat a plant-based, whole food diet (far better health, infinitely less damage to the environment, eliminating the appalling cruelty that farmed animals are routinely subjected to); I’ll keep the focus in this post on the nexus of real, fake, natural, and processed.

To begin with, Gill evidently assumes vegan dishes that reference familiar cheese-based or meat-based dishes to always be designed with the intent of slavishly coping the features of those dishes. That may be the case with some such vegan dishes, but a good vegan “mac & cheese” is no more a copy of a traditional mac & cheese than Manet’s Olympia is a copy of Titian’s Venus of Urbino—or Shakespeare’s King Lear is a copy of the anonymous play King Leir that he drew on for much of his source material. In such cases the later works resemble the earlier, but it would be entirely wrong-headed to call the later work a copy of the “original.”

But Gill doesn’t just assume that all vegan “inspired by” dishes represent attempts to copy slavishly; she also assumes that such dishes are less “real” in other senses. Here she is writing about the vegan mac 'n cheese served at Meet in Gastown:*

The mac ’n cheese does a better job of faking it [than do the restaurant’s vegan burger offerings]. The yellow cashew sauce is thick and melty, and the nutritional yeast sprinkled over top adds crumbly, gratin-like texture. But honestly, the green side salad is the most satisfying part of the meal because it’s real food.

So which is more real—traditional mac & cheese or vegan mac & cheese? To Gill, the latter is a “processed reproduction” of the real thing. But let’s give the matter of processing a moment’s thought. Cashew cream—the main ingredient in the sauce of most vegan “mac & cheese” recipes, is minimally processed; all you do is grind the cashews until they become smooth and creamy. What about cheese—which is of course the main ingredient in the sauce of traditional mac & cheese? Because humans have been making it for so many centuries, we tend to regard cheese as natural, and as unprocessed. You may well be unshakeable in your belief that it’s “natural” for one species to take the milk of another (and take the babies of that other species away from their mothers in order to do so). But you can hardly maintain that cheese is not a highly processed food: from the heating and fermentation of the cow’s milk through the manipulation of lactic acid levels, the addition of enzymes produced in the stomachs of ruminants, and the separation into curds and whey, to the inducing of mold and the complex aging and curing process—it’s all highly complex. The twentieth-century creation of industrial products known as processed cheese—which of course are even more highly processed—has no doubt helped foster the sense that “natural” cheese is an unprocessed food. In fact it is by far a more processed food than the cashew cream that’s the basis for vegan “cheese” sauces—and a less natural one too, if it comes to that.

What’s more real, then? Traditional mac & cheese or vegan mac & cheese? What’s more natural? Perhaps it’s better simply to ask this: what’s better? Alexandra Gill and I will no doubt differ as to what tastes better, while she chooses to simply ignore issues such as what’s better for the environment, what’s better for human health, and what’s better for non human animals. For many of the rest of us, though, such “side issues” matter a lot more than does the matter of taste. It’s simply a wonderful bonus when dishes such as vegan mac & cheese also offer better taste—as is the case these days in many, many restaurants, as well as in many recipes that you can google and easily make for yourself at home.

*I've not eaten at the new Meet in Gastown, but (thanks to my daughter Naomi) I have eaten more than once at its sister restaurant, Meet on Main, which shares the same menu; I highly recommend it.

Margaret Wente on the Radical Left "taking over our universities"

In her Globe and Mail column this past Saturday, Margaret Wente tries to argue that, in Canada and indeed North America, "radicals have taken over” our universities. It's worth a closer look.

Perhaps her most striking piece of evidence concerns the percentage of self-described Marxists who supposedly inhabit today's universities. In her column, Wente uses the present tense in asserting that, according to “studies of US universities, 18 percent of social science professors say they’re Marxists.” But check out the study in which the 18% figure appears; “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” by Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University is readily available online.

It's clearly a carefully researched (and well-written) study. But it turns out that the study was conducted in 2006; it's a bit of a stretch for Wente to present it as evidence of current trends.

Secondly, the study consisted of a questionnaire that was filled out by roughly half of those to whom it was sent. The authors themselves write that the results were likely somewhat skewed, under-representing conservatives and over-representing those on the political left; a series of follow-up phone calls by the authors indicated that, for whatever reason, those on the left seemed to have been more likely to fill out and return the questionnaire than those on the right. It would seem, then, that even in 2006 it would have been misleading to conclude that 17.6 percent (the exact figure in the Gross and Simmons study) of academics in the social sciences in North American universities were self-described Marxists.

But what of the overall trends? Wente's column suggests that there's been a huge growth in the radical left presence on North American universities in recent years. Is she right? What did the "18 percent" study have to say about overall trends? As it turns out, Gross and Simmons were very far from concluding that professors were becoming more radical. On the contrary, they said, “the number of moderates in academe appears to be growing.” (p. 40) Radicalism was then a somewhat common (though still very much a minority) stance among professors who had “come of age in the 1960s,” but the researchers found that it was far, far less common among younger professors.*

In Wente’s hands, in other words, Gross and Simmons’ evidence is twisted to suggest exactly the reverse of what they said.

It should readily be granted that Wente is not alone in distorting the results of this study; you can find the 18% figure on a variety of right-wing websites, cited without qualification as if it represented today's reality. But in a supposedly "post truth" world, surely we should expect more from our major, mainstream media.

*For what it's worth, my own experience in calling at a great many North American universities from 1975 onwards absolutely supports the conclusion that Marxists are far, far less common on campuses today than they were 10 years ago--and less common still than they were 30 or 40 years ago. It also supports Gross and Simmons' 2006 conclusion that the group that has been growing most is political moderates. Center and center-left political views seem prevalent in social sciences and humanities faculties, center and center right political views in business and engineering faculties.

Cats and Humans, Eating Birds

Margaret Atwood is perhaps the highest profile figure in what has become a widespread North American campaign to restrict cats to the indoors. In "The Case Against Cats" in the December issue of The Atlantic, Britt Peterson reviews Peter Marra and Chris Santella's Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, and asserts that cats are "bad for us, and for our planet." Reviewing the same book in a piece this fall in The New York Review of Books ("The Killer Cats Are Winning," September 29), Natalie Angier insists that it's a no-brainer that all cats should be forced to stay indoors, so that they will not be able to kill birds:

This is a ridiculous point to waffle on: pet cats should no more be allowed to roam around at will than should pet dogs, horses, pythons, or pot bellied pigs.

The reason is that domestic cats are alleged to be responsible for the deaths of "up to 4 billion birds" annually in the US.

That figure comes from a 2013 Smithsonian Biology Institute study, conducted under the direction of Marra. Previous estimates had been in the range of 500 million birds; Marra's study put the range at "between 1.3 billion and 4.0 billion." Marra is clearly not impartial on this issue, and so far as I'm aware, neither the 1.3 billion nor the 4.0 billion figure has subsequently been given credence by other scientific studies. But let's say that his numbers are accurate--and then let's ask where our efforts to save birds and other animals should be concentrated.

On the one hand we have a species--the domestic cat--that is by nature carnivorous. The digestive systems of cats, biologists tell us, are such that these animals cannot choose not to eat the flesh of dead animals. If a domestic cat does not catch and kill its own meat, then it must be fed meat from animals that we humans have caused to have killed. One way or another, it must be a carnivore.

On the other hand we have a species that can choose to abstain from eating other animals (and that will be perfectly healthy if it does so--indeed, much more healthy than if it consumes animal products). Yet most members of this species choose a diet that involves the wholesale killing of members of other species. Moreover, in order to minimize their own expenditure, they confine the animals whose flesh and milk they will consume, keeping them in horrific conditions throughout their lives.

The species that must eat meat is said to be responsible for killing between 1.3 and 4 billion birds in the United States annually.

The species that can choose not to eat meat or other animal products is quite certainly responsible for killing more than 18 billion birds annually in the United States--plus hundreds of millions of cows, and pigs, and other animals. And virtually all of those 20 billion or so animals are subjected to horribly cruel treatment through their lives before the humans have them killed.

Is there a priority here? Of these two species, which should we focus on if we are trying to reduce suffering for other species?

The issue of cats killing and eating birds is not trivial. But it pales beside the much, much larger issue of humans killing and eating birds and other animals. Before we blame humans who choose to keep cats who will sometimes kill and eat birds, let's put the larger share of blame where it belongs--on humans who choose to kill and eat birds themselves, and to kill and eat other animals, all of it cruelly, and all of it utterly, utterly unnecessary.

New Canada Food Guide - Input Needed

For the first time in many years the Canadian government is revising the advice it offers to Canadians on what we should eat. In the current food guide, two of the four food group categories are consumed by animal products. Mercy for Animals and other organizations working to improve the lives of animals (human and otherwise), and to improve the life of the planet, are asking us all to go the the Health Canada website and provide our input. They have provided one template for answering some of the key questions. I'll provide another below in the hope that it may be useful. But please act now; the website questionnaire is open only until December 8.

To find the questionnaire, google Canada Health Guide Questionnaire.

You'll find the following among the questions:

Would healthy eating recommendations based on the level of processing of foods be helpful to you?

Yes

Why do you say that?

There is now a huge amount of evidence that a whole foods, plant-based diet is the best way to go. The "plant-based" part is vitally important; as the scientific evidence which nutritionfacts.org and pother sites are continually presenting and analyzing clearly indicates, eating animal products is bad for our health in myriad ways (increased risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and on and on). But the "whole foods" part is important too; processed foods tend to be less nutritious in many ways.

To what extent are the current food groupings (vegetables and fruits, grain products, milk and alternatives, meat and alternatives) useful to you?

Not at all

Why do you say that?

The current categories are absurdly weighted in favor of foods that are bad for our health, bad for the environment, and horrendously bad for our fellow creatures. Two of the four categories foreground eating the flesh or the milk of non-human animals--the consumption of which has been conclusively shown to be associated with increased risk of myriad health problems, from cancer and diabetes to heart disease. (Plus, the factory farming methods that produce today's meat and dairy products are horrible for the environment and endlessly cruel to cows, pigs, birds, and so on.)

If animal products are to be included at all, they should be included in a single category of foods that may provide some nutritional benefits but that have huge health risks and other negatives associated with them.

The recommended categories should be as follows:

vegetables (possibly sub-divided into leafy and root vegetables); legumes (or pulses); fruits; nuts and seeds; grains

Rather than including things such as soy milk as "alternatives to milk" or such things as tofu as "alternatives to meat," they should be presented in a category of healthy foods that is separate from any category of animal product.

What else can Health Canada do to help improve the uptake and use of its healthy eating recommendations?

Don't presume that it would be "too extreme" to tell Canadians the truth about the damage we are doing to ourselves by eating animal products, when we'd be so much healthier if we didn't.

Help to make being vegan a mainstream concept, so that (to pick just one example) restaurants would start to be embarrassed if they didn't offer vegan options.

Vitamin information should be included: Anyone over 50 should take a B12 supplement; anyone in Canada should take a Vitamin D supplement; anyone over 50 should either eat plenty of goji berries or take a multi vitamin that includes lutein and xeaxanthan to help prevent macular degeneration; those who eat little or no citrus fruit know should know that vitamin C supplements are not a sufficient substitute; vegans should take Vitamin B12 supplements, etc., etc.

[Much as I was tempted, I did not suggest including beer as a separate, recommended food group. It's under the grains, I guess.]

Reading Animals and Eating Animals:A Micro-Study of the Capacity of Literature to Spark Change

Many thanks to those who responded to the questionnaire posted on this blog a few months ago. The results are reported in the paper below (the full version of which, including footnotes and appendices, has been posted on SSRN as well).

Reading Animals and Eating Animals:A Micro-Study of the Capacity of Literature to Spark Change (Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Hartford, March 18, 2016)

Don LePan, with Maureen Okun, (Vancouver Island University)

To what degree is the experience of reading literature capable of affecting humans in ways that have ethical implications? A very substantial body of research in this area (by both literary scholars and psychologists) has focused on empathy; does reading a work of fiction tend to enhance our ability to relate emotionally to the lives of others? Some studies suggest it may well do so in certain circumstances—but some studies have also suggested that any such effect may be transient.

But what of literature’s capacity to bring about social change? To what extent can fiction change hearts and minds about real world issues? And can the effects be long-lasting? It has often been said that novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle caused significant changes in many readers’ attitudes—and in many readers’ behavior. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that this is so. There can be no doubt that such works helped to bring change, but studies of their impact sometimes suggest that they did so not so much by directly changing attitudes as by providing encouragement to the already committed, and by heightening the level of controversy.

One recent novel written with the explicit purpose of helping to bring about social change is my own Animals: A Novel (Véhicule Press edition 2009, Soft Skull/Counterpoint edition 2010); that book aims to engage readers imaginatively over the issue of cruelty in factory farming. In the seven years since the book was published, dozens of people have reported in conversation that they found the experience of reading the book quite powerful; several have reported in writing that the experience helped to change their attitudes, their behavior, or both.

The present study seeks to broaden the range of respondents, and also to go beyond the anecdotal. I contacted as many readers of Animals as possible, and asked them to complete a survey concerning the effect the experience of reading the book has had on their behavior, and on their attitudes. All responses were provided anonymously. The hope was that the survey results would quantify in a somewhat more scientific fashion than the anecdotal responses had done the degree to which the experience of reading this literary work has contributed to specific changes in attitudes (and/or behavior) on the part of readers—and also the extent to which any changes have been lasting.

Let me turn first to what the respondents say on the question of attitudes—the eighth and last question on the survey. Here the results seem unequivocal: 65% of those answering this question (and 59% of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed either “to a considerable degree” (35%) or “at least to some slight degree” (30%) to an increase in their level of concern for the welfare of non-human animals.

Attitudes are one thing; behavior is quite another. One may come more and more strongly in one’s belief system to be in favor, for example, of ending slavery while still—until the day that happens—remaining a slave-owner oneself. And one may be in favor of ending the cruelties of factory farming while continuing to consume the products of that cruelty every day. But it would seem from the answers to questions 5 and 6 that the experience of reading Animals had just as much of an effect on behavior as on attitudes: 70% of those answering Question 5 (and 64% of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed either “to a considerable degree” (15%) or “to at least some degree” (55%) to this change. Moreover, 65% of those answering Question 6 (and 59 % of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed to a lasting effect on their behavior.

“Lasting for how long?” one may fairly ask. Here too the survey results provide a fairly clear answer. The vast majority of respondents were people who had read the novel at least three years before responding; fully 90% of respondents read the book either when it first appeared in 2009-2010 (73%) or in the years 2011-2012 (18%). The survey is thus able to provide useful information as to how lasting the effect may have been—as would not have been the case if, for example, 90% of respondents had read the novel less than six months before responding.

Questions 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are designed to explore with more precision first, the question of how long lasting any effect on behavior may be; and second, the question of the degree to which respondents’ behavior has actually changed. Questions 2, 3, and 4 ask the same set of questions for different times: before reading the novel, six months to a year after reading the novel, and today (which, for 90% of respondents, is at least three years after reading the novel).

What is perhaps most striking in the answers to these questions, given the high percentages of respondents who reported changed behavior, is how little actual change in behavior is reported. Particularly given that the sample responding to the survey is almost certainly skewed towards readers who were strongly influenced by the book, one might have expected there to be a more dramatic shift. The shifts indicated here are relatively modest. In percentage terms, the reduction in those describing themselves as in one of the two categories least concerned about animal welfare may be striking—the number drops in half—but when the absolute numbers are from 6 respondents to 3 respondents, it’s hard to portray the change as earth-shattering. Nor is the change at the other end particularly dramatic—the number reporting themselves to be either vegetarian or vegan increasing from 7 to 9, or from 31.82 to 40.91 per cent of the total. Those in the middle—omnivores who “to a considerable degree” limit their consumption of animal products “for reasons relating to the treatment of non-human animals” continue to constitute the largest block. The composition of that block has presumably shifted over time, with some of those who have moved out of the lowest two groups entering this larger middle group, as those who become vegetarians or vegans leave it. But there is also, of course, a good deal of space for movement within the large, middle group. One may move from eating free-range meat frequently to eating meat only if it is free range (and from a farmer one trusts to treat the animals well before they are killed), and still stay within that broad, middle category. One may move from very occasionally choosing dairy products that one knows are from organic farms where the cows are treated well to consuming dairy products only if those conditions are met—and again, stay entirely in that broad middle category. One respondent emailed me after she had completed the survey to comment on this sort of nuanced point:

The survey is lacking some possibilities, as you probably know. For instance, I experimented with vegan products, but I couldn't develop a taste for some of them. Nevertheless, I try to make more vegan choices in my diet, and buy only organic products (particularly milk) approved by Natural Grocers. … [I]t was not solely reading your book that caused these changes, though it is very powerful.

The answers to Questions 2, 3, and 4, then, are consistent with the responses given to Question 7. The reported changes in behavior are not always large, and the degree to which the experience of reading Animals contributed to those changes is not always great. But for most respondents there was a change, and for most respondents the experience of reading the novel did contribute to that change.

That is to put everything in the past tense. We should look too at the responses to Question 7: might the experience of reading Animals contribute to some future change in behavior for readers? Very interestingly, 6 people—some 30% of the total number of respondents—thought it quite possible that the experience of reading Animals would contribute to some future change in their behavior—and a further 7 did not rule out the possibility entirely. In total, then, some 65% of respondents did not rule out the possibility that the experience of reading a book could influence their behavior in the future. If we recall here the results of Question 1, we realize that of those 13 respondents, at least 11must have read the book in 2012 or earlier—at least three years before completing this survey. And a number of those people had clearly been altering their behavior already, in part at least as a result of the experience of reading this text. Even three, four, or five years after reading a book, in other words, many think it still possible for the experience of reading a novel to exert a further effect on their behavior.

This may seem implausible—I would have thought it implausible myself many years ago. But in fact it accords entirely with my own experience—with both fiction and non-fiction. It was I think in 1991 that I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. This was my introduction to the atrocities of factory farming; I was shocked, and I am sure deeply influenced. But to what extent did I change my behavior? At first, not at all. And when changes in my behavior did come, they were very gradual; beginning in the late 1990s, I began to eat free-range meat and free-range eggs when I could, and dairy milk from cows who I believed to have been relatively well treated. In the early years of this century I became more and more passionate about the evils of factory farming. In 2005 the outline of a story that could dramatize those evils came to me, and I began working on Animals. When the novel was published in 2009 I still believed that the novel’s essential argument was against factory farming—not against eating animal products. A number of readers suggested that in fact the afterword I had written went against the grain of the story—that Animals constituted an argument not just against the evils of factory farming, but against the human practice of consuming other animals. Over the years since then, I have come to agree with them. (When the next edition of Animals is published, it will carry a very different afterword—or no afterword at all.) Both with my experience of reading Animal Liberation, then, and with my experience of writing Animals, I found that experiencing a book could continue to affect my behavior many years afterwards. * * * For most of the past two centuries the tide in literary criticism and theory—indeed, in literary circles of all sorts—has run heavily against didacticism. Interestingly, even those who have endorsed the notion that all literature is political have been carried with the tide; if a book is described as a powerful political statement, that may safely be taken to mean simply that the book embraces a world view broadly critical of establishment values—not that the book aims to prompt us quite specifically to change our behavior (to devote more time and money than we have been to helping the homeless, for example, or the poor in the developing world, or young women who are being denied an education, or gays and lesbians who in so much of the world are still denied any rights whatsoever).

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, on the other hand, or Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, are political in a very different sense; like Animals, they were written with the intention of changing readers’ attitudes–and behavior—in quite specific ways. They are examples of literature that is not just political, but didactic. There are some signs that the tide in literary circles is beginning to turn. Black Beauty and The Jungle now appear frequently on university courses—as works of aesthetic as well as historical interest. And some of the leading lights of literary criticism and theory have begun to openly acknowledge the possibility that didactic literature can also be good literature. Here, for example, is Terry Eagleton, writing in 2012:

That even a touch of didacticism is distasteful is as received a judgement for the literary establishment as is the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote some pretty impressive stuff. But it is surely not the case [that didacticism should be regarded as inherently distasteful]. “Didactic” simply means a matter of teaching and there is no reason why all teaching should be hectoring or doctrinaire. Brecht’s Lehrstücke, Lancelot Andrewe’s sermons, and William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are didactic works which are also potent pieces of art. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not an embarrassingly second-rate novel because it has a specific moral purpose—so does Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and Orwell’s Animal Farm—but because of the way it executes it. (The Event of Literature, 68-69)

Yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin is widely assumed to have succeeded in its didactic purpose at least as well as did any of these other works. Is Eagleton wrong about Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Is it, as some others have suggested in recent years, a far better novel aesthetically than the twentieth century took it to be? Or, if Eagleton is right, does bad literature work best when it comes to doing good? Those are some of the larger questions that seem to me to be worthy of discussion. But to do so in an informed way, it seems to me that we should try to find out more about what literature can actually do by way of changing human attitudes—and human behavior. This paper represents a very small step in that direction.

Student Protests and the Media: Why Have Trigger Warnings Trumped Tuition Fees?

The latest New Yorker carries a long article by Nathan Heller entitled “What’s Roiling the Liberal-Arts Campus.” Unlike the widely-read Atlantic article by Greg Lukanioff and Jonathan Haidt published last September (“The Coddling of the American Mind”), this one takes a largely positive view of campus unrest over a wide variety of issues, ranging from trigger warnings to college administrations’ treatment of people of color, people with disabilities, and people with sexual orientations that may not fit traditional categories. Whereas Lukanioff and Haidt, focusing largely on the trigger warnings controversy, fret in the Atlantic over whether students are too “coddled” and ask if calls for trigger warnings might spark a threat to academic freedom, Heller suggests that the “Firebrands,” as he calls today’s crop of protesters, are re-setting norms and may be “shifting the default settings of political culture.” But both articles seem to agree that what’s happening represents something fundamentally new—and something that’s becoming very widespread.

There are indeed some new and interesting things happening in many of these student protest movements (and perhaps some worrisome ones too, not least of all insofar as a seeming rise in anti-Semitism at many campuses is concerned). But how widespread are these sorts of radical protests over new sets of issues? Read these articles closely and you’ll see a very few campuses mentioned again and again. Repeatedly, it’s suggested that “America’s colleges and universities” generally (Lukanioff & Haidt) are being greatly affected by a new movement—or at the very least “the liberal-arts campus” (Heller) is undergoing something of a revolution. But the evidence provided is almost entirely anecdotal, and the same fifteen or twenty colleges—Oberlin, Amherst, Northwestern, and so on—crop up again and again in the examples. Fifteen or twenty out of well over 2,000. Maybe they are indeed representative—but where are the numbers? How widespread is all this?

Heller tells us that “when Wesleyan’s [student] newspaper published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some hundred and seventy people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper.” So there’s a number—170 students. Quite a few, perhaps, but to put it in another way, a little over 5% of Wesleyan’s student population of about 3,000.

In the previous paragraph Heller gives another number: after mentioning various controversies “in mid-November” of 2015 over racial and cultural issues at Yale, Claremont McKenna, and Ithaca College, Heller asserts that “more than a hundred other schools held rallies that week.” That number seemed surprisingly large to me. Granted, it would still be far, far smaller than the 500 or more campuses at which there were sometimes simultaneous demonstrations in the Vietnam War era. But my sense (as someone who spends a fair bit of time on a number of American campuses each term) was that, rightly or wrongly, the protests over these racial and cultural issues had been nothing like so widespread.

I googled, of course. There had indeed been that at least that many “mid-November” student protests—but the great majority of them had nothing to do with racial or cultural issues. So far as the number of protests are concerned, here’s the key November 12 news item (as phrased by the Reuters report): “Students hold demonstrations on university campuses across the United States to protest against ballooning loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges.” A worthy cause, I’d say, but not one that most people would automatically connect with protests about insensitive treatment of racial issues or inadequate trigger warnings—and not one that Heller focuses on in his article (though he does touch on the effects of economic hardship for some students).

One can argue, of course, that everything is connected—that every issue of class and education and race and sexual orientation and culture and the economy can be linked with every other issue, including high tuition fees and inadequate student loans. (Interestingly—and to their credit, I would say—the Million Student March of November 12 also called for an increase in wages for campus workers.) Arguably, though, explorations of the issues start to lose focus if they are trying to deal simultaneously with movements as disparate as the push for trigger warnings and Black Lives Matter. And certainly such explorations will leave a misleading impression if they reference the total number of student protests at a given time but neglect to mention that the majority of these protests were over an issue that the writer has not listed.

Heller is not alone in giving short-shrift to the issue of economic hardship for students. The New York Times carried several articles on culture-related and race-related student protests that week (including a November 15 1,600-word feature article on how a dean at Yale had been “Racked By Racial Protests” at that university), but—so far as I could see—no coverage at all of the large countrywide protests Thursday, November 12 over student loans and tuition fees. The Wall Street Journal seems not to have covered those November 12 protests either—though they too carried articles on culture and race-related student protests that week, and an op-ed feature with a predictable slant: “The Rise of the College Cry-bullies: The status of victim has been weaponized at campuses across the nation.” Elsewhere too, those November 12 protests seem to have received relatively little coverage in the media—though at least brief reports did appear in the Washington Post, USA Today, and Newsweek.com, among others. Overall, though, it would seem that the largest cause of student unrest in America is also the one that the media is giving the least attention.

I certainly wouldn't want to argue that protests over Black Lives Matter or gender issues or sexual orientation issues deserve any less coverage than they've been getting; all are important. But I would argue that the protests over the issue of the cost of higher education deserve more coverage. And if Hillary Clinton wants to improve her chances of getting young people out to vote and defeat Donald Trump, one would think she'd be well advised to pay a good deal of attention to this issue herself in the coming months.

Reading and Writing and Work

Last year I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to edit John Bart’s novel Middenrammers, which has now just been published. I should say at once that it required very little by way of editing—and that it was and is a very great pleasure to read.

It’s easy to forget the virtues of simplicity in the world of today’s literary fiction—a world that tends to place a premium on certain forms of literary stylishness. At a sentence-by-sentence level, striking metaphors are often disproportionately valued, as are sentences designed to impart vividness through every verb, every adverb, every adjective. We are assured that such work will repay slow and careful reading, that it is worth taking the time to reflect on the poetic qualities of what we read.

At the level of narrative structure, complexity is often disproportionately valued—flashbacks, flash-forwards, and various other devices that often force the reader to spend a good deal of time figuring out what happened when, and to whom (or perhaps I should say what happens when, for the historical present has largely taken over between the covers of literary novels). Again, we are assured that the effort invested will be repaid; at some level, we are often told, the novel we are reading is not just about the characters, or about the things novels used to be about—love and money—but “about language itself,” or “about memory itself,” and it’s worth taking the time to work all that out.

At some level, certainly, all this is work; “literary fiction” might well be defined as “fiction the reader is expected to work at appreciating.” That’s not to say that such work can’t also be a pleasure, of course; indeed, there can be few greater pleasures than reading a great literary novel. But when a literary novel is less than great—and such is the case most of the time—the reader can surely be forgiven for wondering if the work is worth it. When the sentences start to creak with the strain of all that vividness imparting, and the tangles in the narrative start to seem as pointless as they are dense, we can be forgiven for wishing we had opted instead for a book that aimed to please without making us work.

Stylistically, Middenrammers does precisely that. It tells its story straightforwardly, from beginning to middle to end—and a gripping story it is, too; a doctor and a midwife take sides against the medical establishment in a 1970 Yorkshire community where women still struggle for reproductive rights. At a sentence-by-sentence level the narrative never calls attention to its style. Descriptions—including several memorable descriptions of crises being dealt with as women give birth—are entirely matter-of-fact; metaphors are rarely employed, and even adjectives and adverbs are used sparingly. About as close as the book comes to a “poetic” passage is this nicely understated end-of-chapter description of the book’s protagonist leaving the hospital after a difficult delivery:

I was surprised to find it was evening outside. The rough grass at the edge of the path to the prefabs was wet. Perhaps it had rained. Perhaps it was just sea spray. The standard lamps along the way had a stippled halo around their bulbs. Everything looked washed and worn, and I felt the same.

If Middenrammers is straightforward so far as its style is concerned—an easy read, from that angle—its subject matter certainly does not always make for easy reading. The story is emotionally wrenching at more than one point, and it certainly carries with it an important message about medical practice. Though the style doesn’t make readers work, in other words, we may have to work a bit to come to grips with the novel’s content.

I want to make one more point about Middenrammers and work—which is simply to say that the novel concerns what happens at work far more than do most novels. (Television programs deal with the workplace a good deal—literary novels, not so much.) Most novels in any era—and certainly most novels of the past few decades—foreground personal relationships outside the workplace. Love and money are the traditional topics of the novel, not love and work. To be sure, personal relationships are part of the story of Middenrammers too—but the heart of the novel is what happens at work—in this case, at a small Yorkshire hospital.

The closest literary analogy to Middenrammers I can think of is the fiction of Nevil Shute—novels such as Landfall (about the struggle to develop better planes during WW II) and The Ruined City (about the struggle to revive a shipbuilding town that has fallen on hard times). Like Bart, Shute wrote in an utterly matter-of-fact style; like Middenrammers, these novels of his deal with personal and romantic relationships as well as business and professional ones. But in all these cases, the work developments are at least as important to the progress of the story as are the personal ones.

Like Shute’s novels too, Bart’s Middenrammers is entirely engaging—and no less well-written for being written with clarity and simplicity.

Let me end with a thought about writing and work more generally: writing and work can go together far better than many aspiring writers assume. By “work” in this context, I mean of course work other than writing—but, more than that, work that you find truly engaging (not “day jobs” that you don't care about and work at only in order to give you time and money to write). Working at something you care about can of course provide raw material for your writing—and for most of us, it beats sitting at a desk staring at blank paper when you’re finding creative writing difficult. But arguably it can also help develop habits of caring about life in a broader variety of ways than can a more purely writer’s life. It’s surely not coincidence that both Bart and Shute, who write so well about work, did not make writing their life’s work. (Though he became a best-selling novelist later on in life, Shute worked in aviation and as an engineer for several decades; Bart has worked as a doctor for over forty years.) Young writers sometimes assume that the key to success as a writer is to find time to write—the ideal being a position in a Creative Writing Department that does not impose too heavy a teaching load. It’s certainly true that some fine writers have followed that route—and remained fine writers even after having done so. And of course many great writers—Jane Austen perhaps chief among them —never took paid employment of any sort at any time. But the body of work done by writers who worked at work other than writing is pretty impressive; among them are Geoffrey Chaucer the comptroller and diplomat, Anton Chekhov the doctor, Joseph Conrad the sea captain, George Eliot the periodical editor, T.S. Eliot the banker, Henry Green the industrialist, Thomas Hardy the architect, Philip Larkin the librarian, Wallace Stevens the insurance executive, Virginia Woolf the publisher, and Anthony Trollope the Post Office inspector. Whatever works for you, I say.

PS One related idea is simply that having some experience in the world helps when writing fiction. On that theme there was an interesting piece in the Globe recently--Want to write a novel? First Novel Awards finalists say it's better with age (April 16).