Tag: Politics

The Descriptivist Fallacy

A recent hobby-horse of mine—borrowed from Norbert Hornstein—is the idea that the vast majority of what is called “theoretical generative syntax” is not theoretical, but descriptive. The usual response when I assert this seems to be bafflement, but I recently got a different response—one that I wasn’t able to respond to in the moment, so I’m using this post to sort out my thoughts.

The context of this response was that I had hyperbolically expressed anger at the title of one of the special sessions at the upcoming NELS conference—”Experimental Methods In Theoretical Linguistics.” My anger—more accurately described as irritation—was that, since experiment and theory are complementary terms in science, the title of the session was contradictory unless the NELS organizers were misusing the terms. My point, of course, was that the organizers of NELS—one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of generative linguistics—were misusing the terms because the field as a whole has taken to misusing the terms. A colleague, however, objected, saying that generative linguists were a speech community and that it was impossible for a speech community to systematically misuse words of its own language. My colleague was, in effect, accusing me of the worst offense in linguistics—prescriptivism.

This was a jarring rebuttal because, on the one hand, they aren’t wrong, I was being prescriptive. But, on the other hand and contrary to the first thing students are taught about linguistics, a prescriptive approach to language is not always bad. To see this, let’s consider the to basic rationales for descriptivism as an ethos.

The first rationale is purely practical—if we linguists want to understand the facts of language, we must approach them as they are, not as we think they should be. This is nothing more than standard scientific practice.

The second rationale is a moral one, stemming from the observation that language prescription tends to be directed at groups that lack power in society—Black English has historically been treated as “broken”, features of young women’s speech (“up-talk” in the 90s and “vocal fry” in the 2010s) is always policed, rural dialects are mocked. Thus, prescriptivism is seen as a type of oppressive action. Many linguists make it no further in thinking about prescriptivism, unfortunately, but there are many cases in which prescriptivism is not oppressive. Some good instances of prescriptivism—assuming they are done in good faith—are as follows:

  1. criticizing the use of obfuscatory phrases like “officer-involved shooting” by mainstream media
  2. calling out racist and antisemitic dog-whistling by political actors.
  3. discouraging the use of slurs
  4. encouraging inclusive language
  5. recommending that a writer avoid ambiguity
  6. Asking an actor to speak up

Examples 1 and 2 are obviously non-oppressive uses of prescriptivism, as they are directed at powerful actors; 3 and 4 can be acceptable even if not directed at a powerful person, because they attempt to address another oppressive act; and 5 and 6 are useful prescriptions, as they help the addressee to perform their task at hand more effectively.

Now, I’m not going to try to convince you that the field of generative syntax is some powerful institution, nor that the definition of “theory” is an issue of social justice. Here my colleague was correct—members of the field are free to use their terminology as they see fit. My prescription is of the third variety—a helpful suggestion from a member of the field that wants it to advance. So, while my prescription may be wrong, I’m not wrong to offer it.

Using anti-prescriptivism as a defense against critique is not surprising—I’m sure I’ve had that reaction to editorial suggestions on my work. In fact, I’d say it’s a species of a phenomenon common among folks who care about social justice, where folks mistake a formal transgression for a violation of an underlying principle. In this case the formal act of prescription occurred but without any violation of the principle of anti-oppression.

The problem with reporting on Bill C-18

About a year ago, Bill C-18—The Online News Act—was introduced into the Canadian House of Commons. On its face C-18 will require online platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter, to negotiate with Canadian news organizations. The coverage of C-18, at least what I’ve been seeing, has been … weird. Since most Canadian news orgs have a vested interest in the outcome, they haven’t been reliable. Instead, the coverage comes from media critics like Jesse Brown, and Law professor Michael Geist, who are, perhaps, less conflicted about the bill and who have been fairly consistently and sharply critical of it.[1]I’m critical of Brown and Geist here, but not always. Brown has insightful takes on Canadian media more often than most other journalists, while Geist was somewhat heroic when it came to … Continue reading between the two of them they paint a picture of a Postmedia, Torstar, and other media conglomerates using the Liberal government to shake down tech platforms for subsidies, and that, while this shakedown might help the big guys, it will almost certainly harm independent news outlets and ordinary Canadians. Indeed, recent developments seem to have confirmed this story as Google has made moves to block news links from Canadians, with Facebook/Instagram following suit.

But there’s always been something that’s bothered me about these narratives—for all their correct Herman-Chomsky-esque analysis of news media as consisting of huge profit-seeking corporations, they seem to assiduously avoid turning that lens on the tech platforms. Take, for instance, Prof. Geist’s framing of the news that Facebook planned to block news sharing for Canadians:

Rather than calling it what it is—a giant multinational corporation run by a billionaire attempting to extort the duly elected government of Canada with the threat of a capital strike—Geist calls it “the Consequence” of the government doing its job and attempting to regulate a market, which implies that what is happening is simply the laws of nature at work—just as if you throw a ball X m/s at angle Y, it will trace parabola Z in the air, and if you strike a healthy person’s knee just so, they will kick, if you try to regulate a market, it will cease to function. The only agents in the story are the government and the media companies, and they’re playing with forces they are either too stupid to understand or too corrupt to acknowledge. Facebook and Google, or more accurately, their managers, are not agents here, or to the extent that they are agents, they’re good-faith agents trying to provide a service—the shop-owner to the government and big media’s racketeer.

This framing couldn’t be farther from the truth. Not only are Google, Facebook, etc. actors in this dispute, they are often bad actors. Take, for instance, the infamous pivot to video, when Facebook told news and entertainment publishers that, according to The Data, the best way for publishers to drive users to their sites—i.e., to their advertisers—was to make videos instead of written content. Of course it turned out that The Data was bullshit. As Cory Doctorow put it: “Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content It’s Stealing Their Money.” Google and Facebook are no innocent grocers being shook down.

Including the Big Tech firms as actors also puts in a new light another concern over C-18 that’s been brought up, usually by Jesse Brown—that Bill C-18 would create a government registry of news media, with only those in the registry benefiting from the ability to bargain with Big Tech. Any sort of state press registry, of course, is at least in tension with the notion of a free press, as the original notion of a free press was in opposition to restrictive press licensing regimes in monarchical societies.

Adding Big Tech into the mix, though, complicates the matter. Google and Facebook are able to credibly extort the governments because they have made themselves seem virtually indispensable to news media—the Big Tech “platforms” are how news gets disseminated. The threat to drop news was credible, for a more sinister reason too: Google and Facebook could actually do it—Google and Facebook know which sites publish news and they are able to shut them out of their platforms. Viewed this way, it’s hard to see the Big Tech “platforms” as anything but a potentially restrictive press registry, but a privately held registry, shielded from even the modicum of transparency and responsibility that an elected government has. Even if C-18 doesn’t require transparency or responsibility, it could serve as a precedent for further regulation of Big Tech.

But to be clear, I’m not here to defend Postmedia, Torstar, or the Liberal Party government of Canada. Big Media, as Herman and Chomsky have argued, consists of a handful of giant profit-seeking corporations, that have no interest in competition, preferring to have an oligopoly, while Justin Trudeau’s government mostly lurches from corruption scandal to corruption scandal, and in between it’s a bog-standard centrist administration, meaning it does virtually nothing for Canadians while saying the right things. I’m fairly sure the only reason they’ve remained in power for this long, is that the main opposition is obviously much worse.[2]There’s a narrative that probably stretches back to a time when the Whigs squared off against the Tories in which the left/liberal party pushes a country’s legislation forward and the … Continue reading

There don’t seem to be any good actors in this story, and that’s what makes it tough to talk about—that and the universality among Serious Commentators. of a particular assumption called capitalist realism, expressed by one of it’s greatest proponents as “There is no alternative”, and by its critics as fact that for most elites “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We’re at a crisis-point in media industries. Big Tech and Big Media depend on each other—Big Tech needs media to serve to its users, while Big Media needs platforms to serve its products to the consumers—but they also compete with each other—both industries are funded by a finite pool of advertising money. This is an untenable situation, as capitalist competition means one firm trying to put the other firm out of business, an outcome that, in this case, would mean self-destruction. Serious Commentators will always struggle to properly explain the nature of this crisis, because it’s not the fault of any of the individual actors, but something inherent in capitalism, and under capitalist realism capitalism is like air or water—maybe it’s polluted or corrupted a bit, but the idea that there’s anything per se wrong with it is unimaginable.

There’s another problem with the Big Tech–Big Media relationship that conflicts with capitalist realism—Big Tech is clearly the dominant side, despite the fact that it depends on Big Media.[3]Big Tech arguably needs Big Media more than the other way around. Big Tech, as a player in the news industry, is a creature of the 21st century—Google News came out in 2002, Facebook in 2004, … Continue reading Such a situation is almost unthinkable under capitalist realism, as it’s almost axiomatic that relations of dominance are, in fact, derived from dependence—Capitalists “create jobs”, Landlords “provide housing”, Slave owners “feed, clothe, and shelter” enslaved people. This is why truisms like “you don’t need your job, your job needs you” are so subversive. So the idea that Facebook needs media firms and also can effectively dictate their business practices is nonsense, no matter how much the facts suggest it.

And again, I’m not saying that the coverage should flip, and take the side of Big Media and the Government—there are no good actors here. Rather, coverage should take the side of the people who are likely to be harmed bay any outcome—the actual journalists and the consumers of journalism. Indeed, it’s difficult to have a clear-eyed view of this and similar dust-ups and not adopt the slogan ¡Que se vayan todos! (“They can all go to hell!”). What would such an approach mean? It would mean coverage of that includes the context that Big Tech and Big Media are both a collection of monopolistic profit-seekers, that reminds us that Big Tech keeps committing fraud, that the Liberals promised us good things, including electoral reform, and reneged. This is all too much to hope for, but for a start, it would be nice for Serious Commentators to treat Big Tech as what it is—a cabal of monopolists threatening to punish Canadians for the crime of trying to regulate them.

Notes

Notes
↑1 I’m critical of Brown and Geist here, but not always. Brown has insightful takes on Canadian media more often than most other journalists, while Geist was somewhat heroic when it came to copyright and digital privacy in the earlier 21st century. Both seem incapable of seeing Big Tech clearly though, I suspect, having to do with their relations to the cycles of enshittification at Google and Facebook. Maybe I’ll write a separate post about that.
↑2 There’s a narrative that probably stretches back to a time when the Whigs squared off against the Tories in which the left/liberal party pushes a country’s legislation forward and the right/conservative party resists such moves. The reverse is now true: the right/conservative parties actively enact barbaric and anti-social policies, and the left/liberal parties, despite promises of rolling back said policies, mostly just do nothing when in power.
↑3 Big Tech arguably needs Big Media more than the other way around. Big Tech, as a player in the news industry, is a creature of the 21st century—Google News came out in 2002, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006—while Big Media goes back much farther, and Big Tech has repeatedly gone out of their way to entice media firms to become more integrated in the tech platforms they control.

De re/De dicto ambiguities and the class struggle

If you follow the news in Ontario, you likely heard that our education workers are demanding an 11.7% wage raise in the current round of bargaining with the provincial government. If, however, you are more actively engaged with this particular story—i.e., you read past the headline, or you read the union’s summary of bargaining proposals—you may have discovered that, actually, the education workers are demanding a flat annual $3.25/hr increase across the board. On the surface, these seem to be two wildly different assertions that can’t both be true. One side must be lying! Strictly speaking, though, neither side is lying, but one side is definitely misinforming.

Consider a version of the headline (1) that supports the government’s line.

(1) Union wants 11.7% raise for Ontario education workers in bargaining proposal.

This sentence is ambiguous. More specifically is shows a de re/de dicto ambiguity. The classic example of such an ambiguity is in (2).

(2) Alex wants to marry a millionaire.

There is one way of interpreting this in which Alex wants to get married and one of his criteria for a spouse is that they be a millionaire. This is the de dicto (lit. “of what is said”) interpretation of (2). The other way of interpreting it is that Alex is deeply in love with a particular person and wants to marry them. It just so happens that Alex’s prospective spouse is a millionaire—a fact which Alex may or may not know. This is the de re (lit. “of the thing”) interpretation of (2). Notice how (2) can describe wildly different realities—for instance, Alex can despise millionaires as a class, but unknowingly want to marry a millionaire.

Turning back to our headline in (1), what are the different readings? The de dicto interpretation is one in which the union representatives sit down at the bargaining table and say something like “We demand an 11.7% raise”. The de re interpretation is one in which the union representatives demanded, say, a flat raise that happens to come out to an 11.7% raise for those workers with the lowest wages when you do the math. The de re interpretation is compatible with the assertions made by the union, so it’s probably the accurate interpretation.

So, (1) is, strictly speaking, not false under one interpretation. It is misinformation, though, because it deliberately introduces a substantive ambiguity in a way that, the alternative headline in (3) does not.

(3) Union wants $3.25/hr raise for Ontario education workers in bargaining proposal

Of course (3) has the de re/de dicto ambiguity—all expressions of desire do—but both interpretations would accurately describe the actual situation. Someone reading the headline (3) would be properly informed regardless of how they interpreted it, while (1) leads some readers to believe a falsehood.

What’s more, I think it’s reasonable to call the headline in (1) deliberate misinformation.

The simplest way to report the union’s bargaining positions would be to simply report it—copy and paste from their official summary. To report the percentage increase as they did, someone had to do the arithmetic to convert absolute terms to relative terms—a simple step, but an extra step nonetheless. Furthermore, to report a single percentage increase, they had to look only at one segment of education workers—the lowest-paid segment. Had they done the calculation on all education workers, they would have come up with a range of percentages, because $3.25 is 11.7% of $27.78, but 8.78% of 37.78, and so on. So, misinforming the public by publishing (1) instead of (3) involved at least two deliberate choices.

It’s worth asking why misinform in this way. A $3.25/hr raise is still substantial and the government could still argue that it’s too high, so why misinform? One reason is that puts workers in the position of explaining that it’s not a bald-faced lie, but it’s misleading, making us seem like pedants. but I think there’s another reason for the government to push the 11.7% figure, it plays into and furthers an anti-union trope that we’re all familiar with.

Bosses always paint organized labour as lazy, greedy, and corrupt—”Union leaders only care about themselves only we bosses care about workers and children.” They especially like to claim that unionized workers, since they enjoy higher wages and better working conditions, don’t care about poor working folks.[1]Indeed there are case in which some union bosses have pursued gains for themselves at the expense of other workers—e.g., construction Unions endorsing the intensely anti-worker Ontario PC Party … Continue reading The $3.25/hr raise demand, however, reveals these tropes as lies.

For various reasons, different jobs, even within a single union, have unequal wages. These inequalities can be used as a wedge to keep workers fighting amongst themselves rather than together against their bosses. Proportional wage increases maintain and entrench those inequalities—if everyone gets a 5% bump, the gap between the top and bottom stays effectively the same. Absolute wage increases, however, shrink those inequalities. Taking the example from above a $37.78/hr worker makes 1.33x the $27.78/hr worker, but after a $3.25/hr raise for both the gap narrow slightly to 1.29x, and continues to do so. So, contrary to the common trope, union actions show solidarity rather than greed.[2]Similar remarks can be made about job actions, which are often taken as proof that workers are inherently lazy. On the contrary, strikes are physically and emotionally grueling and rarely taken on … Continue reading

So what’s the takeaway here? It’s frankly unreasonable to expect ordinary readers to do a formal semantic analysis of their news, though journalists could stand to be a bit less credulous of claims like (1). My takeaway is that this is just more evidence of my personal maxim that people in positions of power lie and mislead whenever it suits them as long as no one questions them. Also, maybe J-schools should have required Linguistics training.

Notes

Notes
↑1 Indeed there are case in which some union bosses have pursued gains for themselves at the expense of other workers—e.g., construction Unions endorsing the intensely anti-worker Ontario PC Party because they love building pointless highways and sprawling suburbs
↑2 Similar remarks can be made about job actions, which are often taken as proof that workers are inherently lazy. On the contrary, strikes are physically and emotionally grueling and rarely taken on lightly

On pop-culture and our appetite for complexity

(A slightly edited version of a series of posts on Twitter)

There’s something to this take by Dan O’Sullivan, but I actually think part of the appeal of Marvel movies etc. is that they’re complex. In fact, I think one of the defining characteristics of popular 21st century film/TV is complexity.

A tweet from Dan O’Sullivan (@osullyville)

Lost, Game of Thrones, the MCU, Star Wars, they’re all complicated world-building exercises, and that’s what people love about them. They revel in the web of plot and characters.

It reminds me of an observation that Chomsky made once about sports talk radio:

When I’m driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I’m listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it’s plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it’s at a level of superficiality that’s beyond belief.

Noam Chomsky: Why Americans Know So Much About Sports But So Little About World Affairs

The people who call in to these shows are not necessarily highly educated, but they’re able to give very sophisticated and well-thought-out analysis of baseball or hockey, or whatever, but ask the average person, even a well-educated person about world affairs, and you’ll get some very shallow platitudes. People are smart. They like understanding complex things. And, more importantly, they like debating and engaging with complexity.

The governing principle of most “democracies,” though is that the political and business bosses do the thinking, and the rest of us should butt out.

Any attempt on our part to engage with, debate, or affect anything that matters is met with ridicule at best and tear-gas, truncheons, or bullets at worst.

So, the MCU didn’t make us dumb. It merely absorbed our natural impulse to engage with complexity, and, in doing so, distracted us from the complexity that really matters.

Coming back to O’Sullivan’s point: With complex works of fiction created by massive corporations, the choice of which aspects are simple and which are complex is up to their creators. So naturally, they’ll make those choices according to their own interests.

Conflict is between individual heroes and villains, and we can identify with or revile them, but certainly not the mass of people threatened by the villains or defended by the heroes.

Video essayist Evan Puschak, AKA The Nerdwriter, gives a similar analysis:

Of course, there’s another question lurking: Don’t the more artsy films serve the same function? Doesn’t SILENCE or THE LIGHTHOUSE just distract us from the real problems too? Maybe, but, if it’s done well, I think not.

I think the key ingredient of fiction that subverts that function is ambiguity. World-building fiction presents a complete closed system. nothing in or out. Ambiguity forces us to actively interpret, and to do so under uncertainty.

To resolve such ambiguity, we have to bring our experience (of the real world) into the fiction, and that necessarily means examining our own experience, to some extent.

It doesn’t give us the tools to understand geopolitics, it gives us the tools to be okay with the ambiguity.

Originally tweeted by Dan Milway (@thrilway) on March 1, 2022.

Some idle thoughts on the arguments for semantic externalism/internalism

This semester I’m teaching an intro semantics course for the first time and I decided to use Saeed’s Semantics as a textbook. Its seems like a good textbook; it gives a good survey of all the modern approaches to semantics—internalist, externalist, even so-called cognitive semantics—though the externalist bias is clear if you know what to look for. For instance, the text is quick to bring up the famous externalist thought experiments—Putnam’s robotic cats, Quine’s gavagai, etc—to undercut the internalist approaches, but doesn’t really seem to present the internalist critiques and counterarguments. So, I’ve been striving to correct that in my lectures.

While I was preparing my most recent lecture, something struck me. More precisely, I was suddenly able to put words to something that’s bothered me for a while about the whole debate: The externalist case is strongest for natural kinds, but the internalist case is strongest for human concepts. Putnam talks about cats and water, Kripke talks about tigers and gold, while Katz talks about bachelors and sometimes artifacts. This is not to say that the arguments on either side are unanswerable—Chomsky, I think has provided pretty good arguments that even, for natural kinds, our internal concepts are quite complicated, and there are many thorny issues for internalist approaches too—but they do have slightly different empirical bases, which no doubt inform their approach—if your theory can handle artifact concepts really well, you might be tempted to treat everything that way.

I don’t quite know what to make of this observation yet, but I wanted to write it down before I forgot about it.

There’s also a potential, but maybe half-baked, political implication to this observation. Natural kinds, are more or less constant in that, while they can be tamed and used by humans, we can’t really change them that much, and thinking that you can, say, turn lead into gold would mark you as a bit of a crackpot. Artifacts and social relations, on the other hand, are literally created by free human action. If you view the world with natural kinds at the center, you may be led to the view that the world has its own immutable laws that we can maybe harness, maybe adapt to, but never change.

If, on the other hand, your theory centers artifacts and social relations, then you might be led to the conclusion, as expressed by the late David Graeber, that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”

But, of course, I’m just speculating here.

Break up Big University; Create Jobs

This argument in this article (tweeted out by Shit Academics Say) is just designed to pit one group of workers (sessional lecturers) against another (tenured faculty). This is because it ignores the fact that the number of faculty positions at least in Canada is kept artificially low.

Notice that there is no mention whatsoever of class-sizes. Coming from UofT, I can tell you, class sizes have been out of control for years. My intro bio class so big that no lecture halls could house it. Lectures were in the 1730-seat Convocation Hall.

Convocation hall is a beautiful building but it is designed for ceremony, not pedagogy. There is no chalkboard or whiteboard, and if there were, the students in the upper balcony wouldn't be able to read them. What's more the seats have no writing surface for note-taking.

More recently, I taught a "general interest" linguistics course (a "bird course") so big that it also couldn't be housed in a proper lecture hall. Instead we had what was basically a movie theatre. The lights were perpetually dimmed, and again, no chalkboard.

These sorts of non-classrooms really only allow for one type of teaching style, possibly the worst type: A lecturer droning on about a slide deck.

Beyond just the lectures, it's quite impossible for all 1000+ students of such a class to have direct access to their professors in office hours. There aren't enough hours in the day.

(Of course, most students don't go to office hours. It might make a good action, though, for student unions to organize students to go to office hours en masse. Not to shout slogans at professors, but just to ask for help)

Clearly, UofT, the largest university in Canada, has reached its capacity of students.

Imagine, though, if we kept tenure and the researcher/teacher model of academia and put hard limits on class sizes. Say, 200 for 1st yr classes, 100 for 2nd yr and so on. How would that affect things?

The neoliberal response would probably be "well, you'd have to have fewer students, probably only well-off white students."
But there's another possibility: Expand the faculty size by creating new universities.

This could mean founding a brand new university, or it could mean splitting up oversized universities. UofT, for instance, has three campuses: Downtown, Scarborough, and Mississauga. Why not spin them off from each other?

There are definitely ways to do this that I haven't thought about, and none of them are perfect, and all of them require public funding. But that's true of any societal problem.

But we can't really expect to solve the problem without an adequate diagnosis of the problem's source.
There's no shortage of qualified educators, nor is there a shortage of people who want/need an education.The problem is infrastructure.

So, whenever someone makes an argument pitting workers against workers, it can only really serve to obscure the fact that the problem is elsewhere—with management, with bureaucracy, with politicians.

Originally tweeted by Dan Milway (@thrilway) on June 26, 2021.

Why is temporary injustice bearable?

In my last post, I argued that being required to pay rent to a private entity for housing is an injustice. However, as I was thinking about it, I couldn’t help but think of examples were rent is justified, or perhaps just a bearable injustice. Consider, for instance, travel accommodations—hotels, hostels, B&Bs. A person travelling to another city to attend a conference, or a wedding, or to perform, will, in many cases have to rent a room for the duration of their stay. This, according to my reasoning, could be considered an injustice, but few people would agree that the hotelier-guest relationship is the same as the landlord-tenant relationship. Or consider a longer-term rental—a person who moves to a city and, rather than buying a new home sight-unseen, opts to rent an apartment while they house-hunt. Again, my reasoning says that this is an injustice, but definitely a bearable one. Or perhaps a young academic is hired for, say, a two-year position in a city far from their home. In all likelihood signing a two-year lease will be less of a burden than buying a home only to have to sell it in two years.

Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Amboy (California, USA) — 2012 — 4” / CC BY-SA 4.0

If rent is unjust, why is it bearable if it’s temporary? Or perhaps it’s only unjust when it’s a permanent situation.

Or consider a slightly more recognized injustice: wage labour. In his book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, historian Eric Foner writes about the early development of the Republican Party in the mid-19th century. Most people familiar with US history are aware that the early Republican Party was anti-slavery, few people know that it was also anti-wage-labour. In fact, many Americans, including Frederick Douglass, considered wage labour to be not that different from slavery. Wage labour existed prior to the mid-1800s, as did the opinion that it was not that different from slavery—the wikipedia article on “wage slavery” notes that Cicero expressed this opinion—but something had happened so that a political party could be successful by being against wage labour. What happened was the industrial revolution. Previously, wage labour was mostly confined to farm-hands or apprentices. This situation was acceptable because it was understood that a farm-hand or an apprentice would save their wages to buy their own plot of land or workshop, thus becoming their own boss. The industrial revolution changed this. It was completely unreasonable to expect a factory girl to save up her wages to buy her own mill. The industrial revolution made wage labour permanent. So, wage labour wasn’t unjust enough to mobilize people, but permanent wage labour was so odious that resistance to it propelled a new political party to the White House.

Again, we have an injustice that is bearable when temporary, and unbearable when permanent. Why?

I don’t have a good answer, so the rest of this post is mostly me just thinking out loud.

What do you think?

It’s not that it’s temporary, it’s a means to an end

When we consider the temporary situations above, we can see that they are also all, a means to an end. You stay in a hotel so that you can attend a friend’s wedding. Someone new to a city rents an apartment so that they can properly look for a house to buy. An apprentice submits to an artisan so that she can become an artisan herself. Perhaps these situations are bearable because we can view them as a means to an end and temporariness is just a by-product.

Consider the following as corroboration:

  • Suppose the government instituted a new program: Every citizen’s first home will have to be a rental. They pay market rent to a private landlord for 8 years. After the 8 years are up, they are granted ownership of a home.
    • The most obvious objection to this would be to question why you would have to pay rent for 8 years. If you’re going to be granted property anyway, why not just skip the 8 years and start with the property.
    • This policy would become slightly more palatable if a portion of your rent went towards the property. That is if it changed from an arbitrary requirement to a means to an end.
    • Conclusion: An arbitrary, but temporary injustice is less bearable than a means to an end.

The bearable temporary situations are sometimes more brutal than the unbearable permanent situations.

There are still some vestiges of the old apprenticeship system today. The two that spring to mind are the restaurant business and academia. At the top of these sectors are highly respected professionals—chefs and professors—who have a degree of independence not widely found in the rest of society. But at the bottom you find people working highly demanding jobs for low pay and little esteem. As a grad student, my work and studies had the tendency to occupy my entire life. If a regular waged job did the same, I wouldn’t have tolerated it.

Hotel guests surrender a amount of privacy that no tenant would willingly surrender. If I knew my landlord was entering my apartment when I was out, or monitoring my internet usage and TV watching habits, I’d be tempted to take legal action.

The contrast between temporary and permanent is not well understood.

As philosophers and poets like to stress everything in this world is temporary. Buildings collapse, empires fade, everyone dies. Despite this, we still seem to innately divide entities, situations, states, and eventualities into permanent and temporary. A camp is a temporary settlement, while a town is permanent. Visiting is temporary, residing is permanent. A US War in Afghanistan is temporary, US rule in Afghanistan is permanent. What does it even mean to be temporary or permanent?

Maybe even these temporary injustices shouldn’t be bearable

In his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, anthropologist David Graeber writes about the apprenticeship system in the pre-industrial anglosphere. Under this system, a male child of a certain age would be sent by his parents to apprentice with a master. The child would become part of the master’s houshold, meaning he would be expelled from his childhood household. Eventually, the apprentice would become a journeyman, get married, start a household of his own, and be considered an adult. Graeber points out that such a system was peculiar to the northwestern Europe and that southern European observers were shocked with the barbarity with which, say, English parents treated their children. In Italy, by contrast, adulthood wasn’t achieved through such arduous means. Young men spent their youth socializing until they decided to start working for themselves. So, maybe even the temporary wage labour of pre-industrial times was bad.

Similar things can be said about temporary rent. In many of the cases I cited above, we could think of a way of meeting these needs without charging rent. In most cases this could be achieved by some system of reciprocal hospitality. We often hear that one of the great virtues of some of the poorest agrarian societies was hospitality. I always heard that in Ireland, it used to be the case that if a traveller showed up on your doorstep, you would take them in and share your meager food with them. Such hospitality is still the norm in some sectors of society. Hospitality is generally expected of friends and family. Grad students often offer “crash-space” to visiting grad students. Same goes for many musicians.

Note, these are all quite informal, but it’s not hard to imagine how they might be formalized. I, for instance, am a member of a labour union (CUPE 3902). Suppose my union created reciprocal agreements with similar unions in other areas, such that if I was travelling through those areas, my union’s partner union would provide me with lodging and if a member of a partner union travelled here, we would provide them with lodging. Or suppose hospitality was made a municipal service, paid for by residents of a town or city, so visitors or new residents would not need to rent a hotel or hostel room in a city that wasn’t their own. I don’t think these are utopian ideas. In fact, I’d wager that if you looked, you’d find many historical precedents for them.

Another bit of sovereignty surrendered at the US Border

As I mentioned previously, I’m not very comfortable with the presence of US Customs and Border Protection agents in Canadian airports. I recently found out that the situation just got much worse. In a piece for the CBC, H.M. Jocelyn, a Rutgers PhD candidate, reports on recent amendments to the Canada-United States Preclearance Agreement, the set of laws that govern the presence of USCBP at Canada-US border crossings. According to Jocelyn, the amendments effectively allow US border guards operating on Canadian soil to countermand Canadian authorities. For example:

This new authority also allows U.S. border guards to deny Canadians their right of withdrawal. Before the amendment to the law was enacted, if a person felt at all uncomfortable in the course of preclearance questioning she could simply leave, retracting her intention to cross the border with no penalty.

Now, as a result of amendments, the guard is entitled to detain her if he finds “reasonable grounds” to do so. And the request to leave in itself could be construed as reasonable grounds.

Given that USCBP is not really goverened by the US Constitution at the border, Canadians had to hope that our own constitutional protections would be there for us at border crossings. Now, it seems, we can’t count on that anymore.