From -ist to -ite, well-rounded people should be centered

February 2, 2007

This is my manifesto. I'm against rigidity. Fences, walls, that sort of thing.

Okay, it wouldn't start a riot if you nailed it to a door.

But this manifesto is mine. Here goes.

At some point in your intellectual journey, you are likely to become an "ist." This could mean leftist, rightist, feminist, atheist, monetarist, capitalist, pacifist, and endlessly exhaustingly onward. "Ist" simply means that you have pitched your tent in that camp, but it's now widely taken to mean that you have parked your mobile home.

Becoming an "ite," though, means you have built a monster home in a gated estate. Your world is narrower and therefore more dangerous. Think of being a "Bushite," a "Harperite" or anthracite. Either way, you are as clever as a particularly intractable lump of coal. Perhaps it is a right-wing habit. One cannot be a "Dionite." It sounds like something you'd find on a David Yurman bracelet. No, sorry, that's chalcedony. I'm getting off-track.

My intention today is to point out the dangers of being an "ist" and especially an "ite." These mad suffixes lead you to think that all of life is an either/or proposition, that the truth is either this or it is that, that politics is a matter of good vs. bad. This is nonsense.

I am a feminist. This means I believe in justice for women, not that I think all femaleness is entirely wonderful. I have met feminists from whom I recoil (in fairness, they recoil from me too). I don't like the language purists who won't let me use the word "fisherman" or "blacklist" and am appalled by the rigid feminists who snubbed me for this even as Canadian women lost a national daycare system because Stephen Harper thought it was government-financed feminism. (For "ism," see "ist.")

I'm also a socialist. Part of the reason is what Stephen Fry once howled in an essay: "Why, why are all the clever people left-wing?"

I don't know, but I look at feminist Michele Landsberg's family (her husband Stephen Lewis, her son Avi Lewis, her daughter-in-law Naomi Klein, etc.,) with awe. What's their secret? Maybe they weren't allowed to read comics when they were growing up.

But I'm not a hard-line humourless doctrinaire socialist. Here my borders get even fuzzier. Socialism simply means social justice. It causes me pain when a small group of fortunate people roll about in rose petals, and hard-working Canadian families go without warmth, dentistry and even protein. It makes me deeply angry. It makes me DO things, like vote and write angry columns and fork over cash and call for higher taxes.

But it does not make me want to ban the rich their petals. Good for them. I like pleasure. Have an E, eat a peony, whatever. This enrages the rigid right. But why are neocons allowed to write that feminist socialists shouldn't wear makeup when I am not allowed to point out that their wives look like longshoremen?

The answer is that it is always a mistake to be doctrinaire. There are perfectly pleasant Conservatives. I admire the British commentator Ferdinand Mount who is so right-wing that he is more wax figure than human. Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun is a genuinely charming man — but then I like older men — and his stepdaughter Danielle Crittenden has always been a favourite of mine. My neighbour with the Vote Conservative sign on his lawn shovels my sidewalk despite my undoubtedly offensive NDP bulwark. David Frum, who is so right-wing that he isn't (he's actually a wing all his own) is sweet and polite at parties.

What I'm saying is that people's political beliefs, viewed from the altitude of GoogleEarth, should not look like the narrow boxy strips of farmland along the St. Lawrence. They should look amorphous, like a pond that has overflowed its edges. We have central beliefs, but don't fence us in.

That said, here comes the unpopular bit. I am so deeply conservative on education that I might well be a snob. I prefer to call myself a meritocrat, but probably won't get away with it. Don't dumb culture down, smarten it up, I say. America has been coarsened and made stupid by terrible public schooling. A diet of Rupert Murdoch pop culture that has made Americans as dumb as a coagulated Kraft Dinner lump welded to a wooden spoon.

Let's not go that way. All children should get free, nutritious food at school. Raise teachers' pay, increase classroom hours, teach at least one Shakespeare play a year. And force students to memorize poetry. It'll give them something to do in prison. In difficult times, it has helped me to repeatedly recite Gerard Manley Hopkins' Spring and Fall. When I watch the slaughter in Iraq, I recite Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts. . And if that makes me sound 102 years old, well, okay then.

So I'm strict about education, lax as all hell about sexual mores, violently antiwar and keen to make corporations pay to fix the damage they are doing to the environment. I don't want more choice, I want nicer things. Don't let the market decide; I think the market, like U.S. President George W. Bush, will make the wrong choice for the wrong reasons.

It's not exactly the bog-standard left-wing package. And yet it is.

Here's the thing: I say we should all be Whitmanesque. We should contain a multitude of views, not all of them matching. We should be well-read and intelligent. We should be judged on the content of our character.

Hard-line left, rigid right, it means nothing. It rates below zero.