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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Canada

Why I’m staying in the USA

06 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Family, Flourishing, Friends, Place, Politics, Social Science

≈ 9 Comments

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Alasdair MacIntyre, autobiography, Canada, identity, J.D. Vance, Jason Stanley, LARP, Mark Granovetter, United States

Canadians have always had a love-hate relationship with the USA; for obvious reasons, the hate side is stronger right at the moment. The US government is doing everything it can to make the country hateable – and harder to live in. When lawful permanent residents are detained without trial for exercising their free speech, this becomes a scary place indeed. So it’s quite understandable that many of those who can leave the US for Canada are planning on doing so – like the philosopher Jason Stanley making a high-profile announcement that he’s leaving Yale for Toronto.

It’s tempting to try to do something similar myself. But I’m not going to. And I want to talk about why.

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Globalization was never inevitable

26 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Globalization was never inevitable

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20th century, 21st century, Brian Mulroney, Canada, COVID-19, democracy, Donald Trump, Economist, European Union, George W. Bush, Jane Jacobs, Kofi Annan, Margaret Thatcher, Russia, Tony Blair, Ukraine, United States, war

Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

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Anishinaabe, autobiography, Ben Koan, Benedict Anderson, Canada, Fred Kelly, J.D. Vance, Jeff Jacoby, John Ganz, Joseph Miller, natural environment, Northeastern University, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, United States, Viola Cordova

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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George Grant, Daoist

21 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity

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Canada, Chris Fraser, George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther, modernity, natural environment, Robert Meynell, Robert Sibley, Zhuangzi

I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.

For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.

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Embrace culture, not race

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Biology, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

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Canada, Glenn Loury, identity, Jona Olsson, Kmele Foster, race, slavery, United States

Glenn Loury – who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a “sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness”, on these reasonable grounds:

I don’t just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one’s children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].

So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It’s something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?

My response, not far from Foster’s, is: you don’t have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people’s race, but rather their culture.

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The varieties of right-wing authoritarianism

11 Sunday Feb 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics, Roman Catholicism

≈ 4 Comments

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20th century, António de Oliveira Salazar, Benito Mussolini, Canada, conservatism, Curtis Yarvin, fascism, Filippo Marinetti, Marc Andreessen, Maurice Duplessis, N.S. Lyons, Portugal, Viktor Orbán

“Fascist” has long been a go-to pejorative to describe political enemies, especially for leftists like myself – I recall using it as a youth against hard libertarians like Mike Harris, even though they bore basically no similarity to fascism beyond the bare fact of being right-wing. But in those days there were very few politicians who had the authoritarianism or nativism characteristic of historical fascism. Today there are more – but it’s still rare for them to call themselves fascists. The word isn’t going to go away, and, it appears, neither are the new more-fascist-like breed of politicians and voters. So it’s probably helpful to think on what historical fascism actually was – the people who once actually called themselves fascists.

I got an education on historical fascism in Lisbon a few years ago, when I visited the Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom. The museum was devoted to the dark years 1932-1968 when Antonio de Oliveira Salazar ruled the country, and to the heroic struggles of citizens to fight against his rule – a difficult task when his authoritarianism went as far as the confiscation of typewriters. Salazar had everything I would have considered the hallmarks of fascism: he took dictatorial power over the government with no checks and balances; his não discutimos speech proclaimed there would be no debate over any ideas guiding the country; he had secret police spying on the people to stamp out dissent. None of this surprised me as I read it, until I read one additional thing:

The Fascists opposed Salazar.

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How to learn from indigenous North American philosophy

24 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by Amod Lele in French Tradition, Hermeneutics, Indigenous American Thought, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

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Baron de Lahontan, Bryan Van Norden, Canada, David A. Bell, David Graeber, David Wengrow, Huron-Wendat, Jay Garfield, Kandiaronk, Lame Deer, law

A little while ago I made it through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s ambitious The Dawn of Everything. It’s an exciting book for a variety of reasons, one of which is its approach to indigenous North American thought.

Graeber and Wengrow want us to rethink our assumptions about political philosophy, in which we assume that a centralized state is necessary to govern human affairs above a certain scale. They cite the archaeological evidence of various indigenous cultures in support for this claim. Philosophically, they turn to the ideas they attribute (circa 1700) to a Huron-Wendat leader named Kandiaronk, defending a system that avoids many features taken for granted by Europeans:

You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them. (Graeber and Wengrow 54)

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Introducing Canadian Hegelianism

04 Sunday Dec 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in German Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

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20th century, autobiography, Canada, Charles Taylor, Douglas Adams, G.W.F. Hegel, George Grant, James Doull, John Watson, José Enrique Rodó, Queen's University, Robert Sibley, United States

Hegel wrote about Canada just once, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and what he said comes down to: mostly harmless. His main concern in that passage is the future power of the United States; having noted that the poor organization of the American colonies prevented them from conquering Canada, he then adds that Canada and Mexico “present no serious threat” to the US, and then moves on. It is scarcely more consideration than Voltaire’s dismissal of Canada as “a few acres of snow”; like the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discussing Earth, Hegel pauses on Canada only long enough to say “you don’t need to worry about it.”

And yet, as Robert Sibley notes in beginning his fascinating Northern Spirits, English Canadian philosophers have had a deep, abiding and continuing interest in Hegel, unrequited as it may be – an interest not generally shared by other countries in the anglophone West. Canadian Hegelianism turns out to be its own philosophical tradition – one that’s played a significant role in my own philosophical formation. It is only in the 21st century that people like Sibley have started writing about this Canadian Hegelianism, but it’s been around for longer.

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My post-racial life

17 Sunday Jul 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

autobiography, Canada, Ibram X. Kendi, identity, Ireland, Leo Varadkar, Martin Luther King Jr., race

While I think it is important not to pretend our society is post-racial or colour-blind now, I insist on the importance of colour-blindness (in a racial sense) as a future ideal to strive for. And I maintain that the ideal of a colour-blind society, a post-racial world, is not a pipe dream. How do I know that? Because I’ve lived it.

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Against “Euro-American”

30 Sunday Jan 2022

Posted by Amod Lele in Islam, Metaphilosophy, Place, Western Thought

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Australia, Bartolomé de las Casas, Canada, ibn Rushd, New Zealand, race

I noted before how there are two objections to the concept of “the West” or “Western”. I dealt previously with the objection that “the West” is meaningless, and the subpoint that it’s tied to whiteness. Now I turn to people who accept that something like “the West” exists, but don’t want to use the term.

This latter approach seems fairly specific to philosophy. Garfield and Van Norden and others understandably do not want to use “Western” – but, for reasons I can’t fathom, they replace it with the far worse term “Euro-American”, a term with absolutely nothing to recommend it. As a way of replacing “Western”, the dreadful neologism “Euro-American”, appears to be in use pretty much exclusively among 21st-century philosophers. If you Google “Euro-American”, you’ll mostly find references on Americans of European descent, including the Wikipedia page on European-Americans – also known as “white Americans”. When normal people hear “Euro-American”, they do not hear it to include Europeans who remained in Europe – or philosophy made by non-white Americans. That’s one strike against “Euro-American” right there, though I think it’s far from the worst.

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