 In early 1978 I became the father of a very small baby. She was three months premature and weighed 980 grams at birth. There followed a three month adventure, during which she lived in an “isolette” in the neo-natal intensive care ward of the Ottawa Civic Hospital. During this time her mother and I sometimes came into conflict with the doctor who ran the nursery and his staff. Usually, the issue, at bottom, was: whose baby is this? Ten years later, memories of this trying time woke up, when we heard the story of the Gordon family whose infant son Andrew had just been “apprehended” by Catholic Chiildren’s Aid as a “child in need of protection.” In this case the parents had been unwillig to consent to the treament the Hospital for Sick Chidren in Toronto wanted to administer.. I decided that it was time to investigate some of the issues involved with doctors, nurses, parents, journalists and lawyers who had found themselves caught up in such “dilemmas.“ The following two programs were the result. The participants were:Part One: John Watts Gaylene Leveque, Robin Whyte, Vivian Wahlberg, Maggie Waligora, Andrew Whitelaw, Laura SkyPart Two: Agnes Gordon, Frank Carnevale, Joseph Magnet, Bob Haslam, Diane Lister, Stephen Smart, Laura Sky, Maggie Waligora, Jeff Lyon 

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Heroic Measures: Dilemmas in the Care of Sick Children

 In 1970, when Ivan Illich was enjoying, and suffering a moment of world-wide celebrity, he explained to me what he thought had caused this vogue. His views were so utterly orthodox, he said, and so deeply rooted in the first Christian millennium that he appeared enticingly radical to contemporaries who had completely lost touch with these roots. Perhaps it was this remark that persuaded me to pay attention when I first heard, nearly thirty years later, of a theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy. It began when my friend Lee Hoinacki urged me to read Catherine Pickstock’s book After Writing: On the LIturgical Consummation of Philosophy. From there I was led to John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, the manifesto-like magnum opus that first announced this new tendency, and to an anthology called Radical Orthodoxy in which these two writera and co-conspirator Graham Ward were joined by other thinkers who shared their view that the gateway to the future lies in a reappropriation of a misappropriated past. In 2006, on a visit to England, I was able to interview Pickstock and Milbank and to present the following thumbnail sketch of their thinking. Pickstock had been up with a sick child the night before she met me at her Cambridge college and insisted that she was barely compos mentis, but, in my view, she rose admirably to the occasion. Later, I met John Milbank at his home in Southwell, a old cathedral own in Nottinghamshire that I had known of old because my mother’s family came from nearby Mansfield. Five years later, I interviewed Milbank again, for a more extensive treatment of his thinking. That program can be found on this site in the series called The Myth of the Secular. 

Radical Orthodoxy

 This past summer there was a brief flaring of concern about rainforest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon. Panicked headlines portrayed the whole region as on fire, the President of France took the President of Brazil to task, and ‘the lungs of the planet” were said to be risk. Brazil’s Foreign Minister responded by saying that the number of fires were not above average. This was presumably meant as reassurance, as well as defiance, It was, in fact, a tricky claim - there had been past years when there were even more fires, though the number in 2019 was double the number of the year before - but, even if it had been true, it would not have been that reassuring. The Brazilian rainforest has been on fire for a long time, as I think the following series will make clear.For two years in the mid-1960’s I lived near the little town of Sibu in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, a vast region of tropical rainforest. By the later 1980’s I was hearing, again and again, of a logging boom there. Not only were valuable tropical hardwoods being sold so cheap that they ended up in shipping pallets and other similarly wasteful uses, but forest peoples were losing their homes and livelihoods. Similar stories were coming from Brazil and elsewhere. I began to investigate, and the result was this five-hour effort, broadcast in 1989. It gathered stories from Sarawak and Brazil - but also from Canada where acid rain was believed responsible for the declining health of maple forests. - and it reflected on forest ecology and forest conservation through the world.Thirty years later, it remains germane, although many details may be out-of-date. It also contains a number of inspiring accounts of resistance from around the world. One caution concerns the conclusion of the fifth and final program in the series that maple decline in Canada was a direct result of acid rain. New scientific evidence, presented in the year after these broadcast, suggested that damage to roots sustained during an unusually harsh winter in the later 1970’s was also playing a key role in maple decline. This theory received some confirmation, when the maple bush began to recover out of proportion with any declines in acid rain. This demonstration that scientific theories are always, more or less, provisional became a lasting lesson to me and seems relevant at a time when the expression “settled science” has become something of an ideological cudgel.A transcript of the series is available on the transcripts page of this site. The lineo-up of speakers was as follows:#1 - José Lutzenberger, Barbara Zimmerman, Tom Lovejoy, Kenton Miller, Adrian Forsyth, Richard Evans Schultes, Susanna Hecht, Dan Janzen#2 - Job Dudley Tausinga, Theodore Panayotou, Bruno Manser, Mat Sylvan, Martin Khor, Randy Hayes, Peggy Hallward, John Seed, Neville Wren, Martin Teni#3 - Simon Dick, Catherine Howard, Susanna Hecht, Peggy Hallward, Darrell Posey, Guujaw#4 - Steve Schwartzman, Susanna Hecht, Robert Kasten, Ted Macdonald, Gary Hartshorn, Theodore Panayotou, Bill Burch, Kenton Miller#5 - Michael Herman, Arch Jones, Dick Klein, Dale Willows, Tom Hutchinson, Robert Bruck, Bernard Ulrich, Don Goltz, Ian MacLachlan

From Commons to Catastrophe: The Destruction of the Forests

From Commons to Catastrophe Part Two

From Commons to Catastrophe Part Three

From Commmons to Catastrophe Part Four

From Commons to Catastrophe Part Five

 This series was first broadcast in the spring of 2012, my last year at Ideas. Since then these shows have been available through the Ideas website. I learned this week that they no longer are, so I am now making them available here. In my original plan these programs were to form one big series with the seven episodes of The Myth of The Secular which I have already posted. They were broken apart only for convenience in scheduling, and because these five seemed sufficiently similar in theme to be able to stand together on their own.What was on my mind, broadly speaking, at the time they went to air, was the so-called “return of religion” - a figure which I thought described a resurgence of religion in philosophy, as much as in politics. In politics this movement is sometimes traced back to the years around 1980. Fundamentalist Christians played a crucial role in the rise of Ronald Reagan in the United States, producing what political theorist William Connolly called “the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.” In Iran a theocratic revolution replaced the secular government of the Shah with a regime in which the Ayatollah Khomeini became the Supreme Leader. The prediction of an earlier generation of sociologists that religion would soon drown in a rising tide of secularization had failed - and quite spectacularly. In philosophy, the “linguistic turn” had led to widespread acceptance of the idea that our knowledge has no absolutely secure and unassailable foundation. Faith was suddenly something that philosophy and theology have in common, rather than what sets them apart. Parisian philosophers began writing in praise of the apostle Paul as a paragon of committed knowledge.Religion’s restored prominence produced a backlash from the defenders of science and enlightenment. The so-called “new atheists” appeared. “God is not great,” sputtered Christopher Hitchens. Religion is childish, incoherent nonsense, said biologist Richard Dawkins. I found this response obtuse, but not because I wanted to speak for some unreconstructed revenant called religion. I thought rather that there was new ground to be mapped - a new and perhaps unprecedented religious situation to be investigated. Philosopher Richard Kearney, who leads off this series, had then just published a book called Anatheism: Returning to God after God. His new word, anatheism, gave a name to the condition I was interested in exploring - one that was neither theistic nor atheistic in the older sense of these terms. (The God Who May Be, an earlier series in which I first introduced Kearney on Ideas is also available on this site.) The other thinkers in the series echo Kearney - John Caputo speaks of “religion after religion” in much the same sense as Kearney speaks of “God after God.” James Carse makes the case that “belief” is not definitive of religion. Roger Lundin, adapting a phrase of W.H. Auden’s, speaks of “believing again” as something fundamentally different than naive first belief. William Cavanaugh, who had then just published a collection called Migrations of the Holy, argues that the main site of “religion” in our world is not the church but the state. These five comprise the line-up of the series in the following order:Program One - Richard KearneyProgram Two - John CaputoProgram Three - William CavanaughProgram Four - James CarseProgram Five - Roger Lundin

After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion

After Atheism Part Two

After Atheism Part Three

After Atheism Part Four

After Atheism Part Five

 I first heard of Richard Sennett through a broadcast on Ideas in the later 1970’s. He was discussing his book The Fall of Public Man which had been published in 1974. The book, in very curt summary, argues that public life has been diminished by the idea that the intimate and the personal is always more intensely “real” than the more formal and artificial gestures which inevitably structure the interactions of relative strangers in public. Sennett was reacting, most immediately, to that current of 1960’s thought which had argued that “the personal is political” and that the path to liberation lay in bringing the private out of the shadows and making it public. But he takes his story back to the 18th century when the public world, in his view, still provided a stage on which people could act at a certain remove from the nagging questions of identity - who am I? - which so dominate contemporary discourse. This public realm, he argues, was undermined by the cult of authenticity which began to take hold in the 19th century and now exerts almost total sway. For me Sennett’s book was an aid to reflection on a topic which continues to preoccupy me today: what do we mean by the word public when we speak, for example, of public broadcasting. At the time The Fall of Public Man appeared, and even more today, most people involved in public broadcasting were in full retreat from any appearance of formality in their broadcasting style. The preferred stance is casual, the preferred tone familiar, as if one were addressing an intimate friend and not, as is actually the case, a distant stranger. Sennett helped me to develop a thought that had already begun to occur to me - that this collapse of the distance between broadcaster and listener might be a dangerous and de-politicizing illusion - the substitution of a self-serving mirage for real community.The character of public life has been one of two great subjects that Richard Sennett has pursued during a long career as a sociologist. In books like Flesh and Stone, from which I took the title for this series, he has studied the ways in which city life is embodied and experienced, and the ways in which urban form has fostered or inhibited the encounters that, for him, are the glory of urbanity. His second great subject has been work, and the social classes it defines. His 1973 book, with Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class explored the painful ways in which class is experienced in a society like the United States in which the very existence of social hierarchy is often denied. Later, he studied the new world of precarious and fragmented work in a series of books that began with 1998’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, and continued with Respect in a World of Inequality, and The Culture of the New Capitalism, which had just appeared went I went to New York to interview him at his home in Manhattan in 2006. Both subjects are treated in a graceful literary style, in which story-telling takes precedence over the quantitative methods of many of his sociological colleagues. In what follows, Sennett talks about his urbanism in the first episode, and his sociology of work in the second…

Flesh and Stone

Flesh and Stone Part Two

 In 1988 I broadcast a series of programs called “Literacy: The Medium and the Message”which I have already posted on this site. The series explored the latest scholarship on a theme first broached at the University of Toronto by Harold Innis: how the techniques by which we communicate shape the way we think about the world. It was recorded at a conference organized by two University of Toronto professors, David Olson and Derrick de Kerckhove, and held at the University of Toronto in 1987. Five years later David Olson organized a two-day workshop which posed the topic of modes of thought, or mentalities, in more general terms - looking not just at the cognitive implications of orality and literacy but at all the ways in which our styles and habits of thought are formed. He assembled psychologists, anthropologists, historians and philosopher interested in this question, and, knowing of my continuing interest in the subject, he again invited me to observe and report on the proceeedings. The result was a book called Modes of Thought, edited by David and Nancy Torrance, which was published by Cambridge in 1996, and a series of four radio programs, also called “Modes of Thought” which I broadcast in 1995. Their theme, to say the least, remains current. The participants are as follows: Part One: David Olson, Brian Stock, and Myron TumanPart Two: Jerome Bruner, Carole Feldman, and Keith OatleyPart Three: Geoffrey Lloyd, Paul Thagard, and Deanna KuhnPart Four: Scott Attran and Ian Hacking

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