031 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 031
Air Date: November 15, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this program are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Clip (Relic Hunter S01E03 – The Headless Nun)

Speaker 1: You don’t look good.

Speaker 2: Do you ever consider what it’s all about?

Speaker 1: What what’s all about?

Speaker 2: Why we’re here, why we exist, what really is the nature of our being. I know, I’m asking questions that don’t have answers.

Speaker 1: I never do that.

Bob Metz: Good morning London. It is Thursday, November 15, 2007. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right. On CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now until noon. Not right wing. Just right.

And welcome to the show today where you can call in on 519-661-3600 to join us. Where later in the show we’ll be asking, so what’s new on TV? What have you been watching lately? How’s the new TV season going for you? Are you worried about the upcoming writer strike? And take a look at a couple of the earlier TV reviews and see how they pan out against what’s actually been going on out there. Another topic we’re going to touch upon today, too much freedom?

Or is it anarchy? Talk about those two different issues. But first in the show, I want to talk about something most people don’t like to talk about. And very rarely do in most common discussions, in public at least. But it’s about philosophy basically.

And I’m going to basically look at some questions about philosophy. Who needs it? Who hates it?

And who cares? Are a lot of you like Claudia from the series Relic Hunter who never does that? Never examines the deeper issues of life and the meaning of life.

Or just basically how the real world works. I had intended to do my third reorientation review on the nature of left and right, which I’ve already done twice on the show. And it basically explains why I feel that I’m legitimately saying at the beginning of each of the shows when I say, not right wing, just right. And if those of you who are regular listeners, you know I’ve gone through that list before, sort of starting with Plato on the left and Aristotle on the right. I don’t want to go through that list again yet today, but I will be leading up to it and I will be covering it again. I thought that first we should examine the larger picture. Because I have time to do this now.

We can do this over a bit of time. Certainly not going to cover it all today. But I had no interest personally in philosophy until I was well into my late 20s, early 30s. There were a lot of reasons I wasn’t interested in it. And since becoming interested in it, I now ask myself why wasn’t I always interested in it?

But there’s a bit of a story behind that and I thought I’d sort of get in on that just from the beginning. First of all, the word philosophy, for those who aren’t certain, it’s derived from the Greek word philo, which means love, and sophia, which means wisdom. So of course it means the love of wisdom. Philosophy is basically the subject which discusses the foundation of all the special sciences and interprets their mutual implications and sets limits to their theoretical extension. Now, I bet most of you don’t think about philosophy that way, that it’s actually related to the real world and to science and how we look at the nature of nature itself.

Greek philosophy had its beginnings not in Athens, as a lot of people believe, but with the Ionians on the coast of Asia Minor and it was further developed in Magna Graecia before it attained its full fruition in Athens. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. But one of the things that’s always amazed me is why do people avoid philosophy? What is it about philosophy that maybe they don’t want to discuss, maybe it causes too many differences?

I actually had one poor soul sitting in my office one day actually arguing seriously that reality was all in his mind and that there really is no objective reality as such. And I’ve met a lot of people who think that way, but this is one of the few who actually sat there right in front of me and was bragging about the fact. And I’ve got to tell you, he looked it.

When I said one poor soul, I dearly meant it. This guy looked confused and directionless and I think he was kind of hoping that I might have some answers for him, but anything I would have had to say would have been meaningless given the way he was thinking. He looked more in need of counseling really than philosophical advice, though if I think back in retrospect, maybe some philosophical direction would have been the appropriate remedy. Had he been emotionally prepared to accept it, you can’t just go up to a total stranger and say, hey, the premise of all you’re thinking and your reasoning is totally false. Okay, let’s start with that.

That’s a tough one, especially when they’re not in an emotional state to accept it. But I think what he was clearly missing was a foundation in philosophy. But people resist philosophy. I think there’s also a belief that philosophy is for losers.

Ever think about that? Wouldn’t you ever hear the word philosophy most expressed in the media? Think about it for a second. I think about it and go, well, whenever a sports figure or a political figure loses a game or an election, suddenly they get really philosophical about it, don’t they? They explain their loss in terms of philosophy.

Often the only time I hear people use the word philosophical is in the face of a great loss or of pain or of death. And rarely, I have to admit there’s the odd feature once in a while, and someone who’s successful and offers his or her philosophy of success. But usually when I look at such references, it’s not really a philosophy that they’re often talking about, but some kind of strategy or of finance or of personal interactions with others that may be based on some philosophy, but rarely explicitly expressed as that philosophy. And of course, there’s the greater issue when we see a lot of people who do espouse philosophies that there are evil philosophies in the world, and they probably outnumber the good ones. And I think that makes a lot of people unaware of the good ones and probably is something that encourages them to avoid philosophy altogether. Interesting, when we go back into the history of philosophy, basically it’s a triad of opinion that all began back around 400, 300 BC with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who amazingly are the defining points.

All the basics of philosophy were essentially laid out at that time, although we’ve gotten more sophisticated today and understand a lot more of the sciences that they didn’t know at the time. And what’s really interesting is that they all lived around the same time. Socrates and Plato lived into their 70s, Aristotle into his 60s. Socrates, of course, was the oldest.

He lived from 469 to 399 BC. And he was a guy who first formulated the rules of disputation or dialectic, his chief interest lay in moral questions and in the attempt to elicit definitions of the virtues and of the virtuous man that, of course, led to his famous theory of ideas, which was more promulgated by Plato. You’ve heard of the Socratic method.

It’s basically asking questions. Actually, my understanding is that Socrates never really ever wrote anything or recorded it himself. All the accounts of him came through Plato and Aristotle who actually did the recording.

And Plato, of course, lived from 428 to 328 BC, and he was the foremost pupil of Socrates. But he regarded the fundamental nature of reality as an ideal. He saw the real world as a realm of timeless immutable essences or what he called ideas. And they always spell that with a capital I when they refer to Plato.

The experienced world consists of rude copies of these ideas formed by shaping matter in their likeness. And to every class of things there is a corresponding idea. And Plato believed that the ideas and matter had always existed. And, of course, at this point he is what they call a metaphysical dualist. And he believed that a deity stamped matter with their form. So basically he believed that reality was sort of in the mind and it sort of conformed to what the mind could see. He thought the world would have a beginning and an end, but this fact does not affect the ideas with a capital I again. And in his thinking, the crowning idea is the idea of the good. And in attempting to characterize it, Plato was led into an inquiry for the attributes of the just man and of the just society, which we often heard Pierre Trudeau referring to, and trust me, Pierre Trudeau was a Platonist. The theme of this treatise work was the Republic, which I think was actually misnamed. I have to check that, but most people still refer to it as the Republic, but I saw a reference that the actual title was supposed to be translated as the ideal state. But I have to check into that.

I don’t have that with me right now. Now of course then there was Aristotle and he was from Macedonia, 384-322 BC. And he came in early life to Athens and became a pupil of Plato.

So you got Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all in succession. And he was the great organizer and systemizer of the sciences and made contributions to all of them. He created, believe it or not, the science of logic, of biology, of meteorology, of oceanography, and even of politics. As a philosopher he changed the whole idea of the sharp Platonic dualism of matter and ideas into immanent dualism of matter and form. In other words, he figured matter always existed.

It just changed its form and that was the real dualism that we were looking at. And he believed that ideas are the forms of things, but they exist not outside of things as in Platonic theory, but as inner urges or forces, literally the ends or purposes of things. To Aristotle God was the supreme form, ultimate purpose, and the only form that is not itself matter for a higher form. And he believed God is actually interchangeable with good, for the good is that at which all things aim. And the good life consists, according to Aristotle, of doing nothing over much, but rather to the appropriate degree, which was referred to as a theory of the golden mean. So basically you could see a difference between Aristotle and Plato.

Aristotle believed that reality existed independent of the mind, Plato did not. Now we move ahead a couple thousand years. There’s all sorts of philosophers that have existed since those first three.

They’ve all been variants of those first three, or just different mixes. And of course that’s basically how new ideas are created. But I would have to say that the most impacting philosopher of the modern era has to be Ayn Rand, who really didn’t set out to be a philosopher. What’s really amazing, and it was brought to my attention yesterday, is that she didn’t even become active or start writing essays about philosophy and politics until she was in her 60s. And she did all of this, this whole reputation she got was really from age 60 to 80 something, because before that she was working on newspaper. She had written books, she had her movie The Fountainhead was produced by Hollywood. And so she did have a sort of reputation, she immigrated from Russia actually. But she created a philosophy that she called Objectivism. And she would be considered an Aristotelian philosopher, because the whole point is that she believed that reality and reason were the things by which we could determine what are the proper choices to make. And she really got into a branch of philosophy, which is where her real expertise came out. And that branch of philosophy I think we’d call epistemology.

And it’s really the knowledge of knowledge. How do you know that what you know is the right thing to know? How do you know you’re not making mistakes in your logic?

How do you know you’re not making mistakes? And there’s actually a science to this. And Rand wrote this very interestingly, why you had to go into this area. And she talked about how philosophy is sort of like the programmer of your mind. It’s almost the software to the hardware of the computer.

And she once wrote, and I quote, you’ve probably heard the computer operator’s eloquent term, GIGO, which means garbage in, garbage out. The same formula applies to the relationship between a man’s thinking and his emotions. And she says, your subconscious is like a computer, and it’s more complex a computer than any people could build, and its main function is to integrate all of your ideas and your knowledge. And so who programs it? It’s your conscious mind.

And she says, if you default, you won’t reach any firm convictions. Your subconscious will be programmed by chance. And you will deliver yourself into the power of ideas that you will not know that you’ve accepted.

They will be other people’s ideas. But one way or the other, your computer gives you these printouts daily and hourly in the form of what we call emotions, which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you calculated according to your values. And that’s why people react so differently. You could have two different people with different values acting entirely different to the same physical thing they might be seeing or the same idea.

One might hate it, the other one might love it. You can just see it. But if you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you do know the nature of your values and emotions.

And of course, if you didn’t, you don’t, she says. Now, I think computers make a great analogy to the workings of the mind and for good reason. Because although they are artificially constructed, they still have to obey the laws of nature. And their construction has to conform to that nature.

The whole digital world is very much a natural world in the sense that it doesn’t exist in nature, but it’s natural in the sense that it follows the rules of nature. It has to. And the rules of logic apply to inanimate objects and forces like energy as well as to people. Logic is not an invention. It’s a discovery.

And since people too are part of nature, the similarities may be more literal than we might expect. I’ve often thought of when I first saw how computers worked, I think of a hard drive as being a person’s memory. And then the random access memory, RAM, I call that your consciousness.

That’s the part that you actually see on the screen that’s live. Not all the data is there all the time. So that would be the conscious part of the computer, whereas the memory would have to be recalled. Many of the ideas we encounter and absorb into our subconscious might be considered, say, viruses or spam if you were talking about a computer. And most of them are harmless, all sorts of trivia and odds and ends of ideas that we think, but some are deadly.

And we often accept them thinking they’re perfectly sweet sugar and the nicest idea. And they can be deadly, especially when they affect what we might call our operating system, our system of epistemology, how the mind actually works and how it arrives at its conclusions. So you could almost ask, does your mind run on Windows XP and crash regularly? Because if it does, you’ve probably got a virus that’s affecting your way of thinking and prevents you from running the program necessary to solve the problem. It could be just logic.

Maybe some necessary data files are missing, which we would call evidence, or maybe the wrong data files are being accessed. You’re back to garbage in, garbage out. But definitely, philosophy is at the root of all the harmony in the world, it’s at the root of all the conflict in the world. And it’s very important to understand that it is largely the motivating force.

That’s certainly something I’ve discovered in 20 years of getting involved in public life and in politics. Rand also wrote that at the root of every significant philosophical theory, there’s a legitimate issue in a sense that there’s a real need for a person’s consciousness, which some theories struggle to clarify while others struggle to obfuscate or corrupt or prevent people from discovering. So she says the battle of philosophers is really a battle for man’s mind.

And if you do not understand their theories, the theories of other people, you will be vulnerable to the worst among them. Now of course, Rand believed that modern day philosophy has been basically abolished by two fashionable schools of linguistic analysis and existentialism, which I’ll mention briefly a little later on. But basically she said that most people, the biggest mistake when it comes to philosophy is their tendency to accept consequences while ignoring the cause, to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as a given and to regard it as self-evident while negating all the preconditions that led up to that. And she said examples can be seen all around us, of course, especially in politics. And she warned that if you want to know when something doesn’t look right philosophically, watch for rationalization, because she says that’s not a process of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions. And people who rationalize don’t judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality, they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.

And so she realized that after a while she could see that evil philosophies are basically systems of rationalization. Now what’s interesting is that today’s trend philosophically, and this has been the case for a while, I checked out my encyclopedia, it even said the same thing back in the 1950s, especially in North America, is towards pragmatism. And pragmatism really isn’t a philosophy, and what I found amazing, even in my encyclopedia, here’s what it said about pragmatism. It said, pragmatism is a theory of knowledge that is anti-intellectual. That is to say it is a general mental attitude that was part of a reaction against extreme intellectual speculation as to the theory of the possibility of knowledge in its nature. So it basically says pragmatism claims that all thought is purpose and that there’s no such thing as pure thought, that there’s always interest and purpose in thought, and that all knowing must be related to some aim.

Now that’s sort of the philosophic part of it. But of course most people see pragmatism as just practicality, oh it’s going to be practical, although that doesn’t determine what you would practically do on a philosophic level. What a socialist might regard as a practical way of solving the housing problem would be totally different from what a capitalist would regard as a practical way of solving a housing problem. But basically pragmatism rejects all sorts of fixed standards and just basically absorbs the prevailing standards that are in society. So basically there’s no real objective standard to practicality or to pragmatism because it can be anything. Linguistic analysis, which is one of the things Rand hated, basically argues that words are really arbitrary. It’s a social product immune from any really principles or standards and don’t really have an objective purpose. And it basically declares that the ultimate reality is just words, almost sounds like Plato doesn’t it, and that words don’t have any specific reference, but mean whatever people want them to mean.

And so it’s kind of opposed to a hierarchical structure of concepts. And then there’s of course existentialism, which is the last one on my philosophy lesson this morning. I have a wonderful set of philosophy encyclopedias at the office and it was very interesting what it had to say about existentialism. It said, existentialism is not easily definable.

Its protagonists have traced it back to Pascal, to Saint Augustine, and even to Socrates. That two writers both claim to be existentialists does not seem to entail their agreement on any one cardinal point. Consequently, to define existentialism by means of a set of philosophical formulas could be very misleading. Any formula sufficiently broad to embrace all the various forms of existentialism would necessarily be so general and so vague as to be vacuous.

In other words, it’s almost meaningless. Basically existentialists believe that reality always evades our ability to conceptualize it. Oh, we can never possibly conceive reality when in fact we can.

We can’t perceive it all at once, but we can understand it and conceptualize it. My Funk and Wagnalls just looked at existentialism and just said it’s a philosophy that stresses the active role of the will rather than of reason confronting problems posed by a hostile universe. And my Webster’s unabridged, which is really the one that says it all about existentialism, it says, it’s a literary, philosophic cult of nihilism and pessimism.

Popularized in France after World War II, chiefly by Jean-Paul Sartre. It holds that each man exists as an individual in a purposeless universe and that he must oppose his hostile environment through the exercise of his free will. I don’t know how they’re going to do that without using reason or any other senses to perceive reality, but boy, is that depressing or what?

That’s not a philosophy I’d want to have. So here’s a comic talking about what it’s like to be an existentialist and when we come back we’ll be talking about freedom.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy)

Comedian: I don’t really care where I live, frankly, because I’m an existentialist. To me, it’s hard for me to even reconcile the fact that I have a wife and a kid, because as an existentialist of 15, I want to do what all existentialists of 15 want to do with their life. End it. But I didn’t. I persevered. But I had a friend that did it. He had a wife and a kid and he actually committed suicide, but he had to make it look like a robbery homicide in order to collect the insurance money.

So what he did is he rigged up a shotgun and put it against the door jam and made sure the trajectory matched that of a home invasion, messed up the apartment, left a note, ostensibly from the robber, which read, I killed him because life is meaningless.

Clip (Revolutionary Speech)

Speaker 1: The day proves that that is yet another lie. Our fight for freedom continues, but it will take place here in the streets. I call on everyone to rise up, rise up and join me. I need you to be my army. If we stand together, nothing can oppose us. Freedom is ours for the taking. Freedom!

Freedom!

Bob Metz: Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and this is CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can call in at 519-661-3600. Ira Timothy will pick up the phone to put you through to us if you’d like to have a comment in there. We’ll be talking about the TV shows and the current season a little later. But first, I want to ask the question, is it possible to have too much freedom in a society? I heard an announcer on another radio station always keep saying, total freedom is total anarchy, and as though that were some sort of self-evident truth that we were all supposed to accept. And again, it comes down to definitions, doesn’t it? If freedom is the same as anarchy, then why do we have both words? What are the two words for?

Why are there two words? Do you not get a different impression if somebody were to come up to you and say, hey, there’s anarchy in the streets versus there’s freedom in the streets. It certainly has a different ring to me. Anarchy sounds chaotic and freedom in the streets sounds like a release of oppression or the end of a war or something like that.

And that to me doesn’t denote anything negative to me. And of course, this again is a branch of philosophy, specifically epistemology, which is largely about definitions. And philosophy in general, you can look at all aspects of it in political terms, definition, the context, about language versus semantics, about the varying systems of socialism, capitalism, communism, fascism, which I’ve discussed before and will do again but not today, and about, of course, the distinctions between democracy and majority rule, which is something I’m planning to do a little in detail on some of the upcoming Just Right shows in the future. And of course, it’s about the nature of government and of individual rights. Now, most people might think of anarchy or freedom. I’m not sure if they think of them as a system, but they’re both socioeconomic political conditions, really. They’re not systems, per se. It’s interesting.

I’ll try to compare the two. But I’m going to start with anarchy first because so many people, and you might think a lot of this. I’ve been called an anarchist in the past, and maybe there’s some good reason for that because there’s some confusion on that level that there is some definite confusion about this term, what it means historically, what it means in practice, what it actually, how it’s actually employed. But I have this old out-of-print, it’s called the Dictionary of Misinformation that came out by a guy named Tom Burnham back in the mid-seventies.

I don’t think you can get it anymore. But it’s called the Dictionary of Misinformation and in it, under the word anarchism, it read the following. Entirely in contrast to the popular conception, anarchy is probably the most idealistic and peaceful of political theories. As a philosophy, it assumes a system in which the individual is free and living in peace. It looks forward to a time when human beings can coexist within a framework of voluntary associations.

Anarchy rejects any theory involving control of one class of individuals by another. Now, in a lot of ways, I guess that might describe me a little bit. I guess emotionally it might, but there’s a very key phrase in there and it says, as a philosophy, it assumes a system. Well, you can’t assume a system. Anarchy isn’t any system and if it assumes a system, what’s the system?

And who decides what the system is? So I had to go to a better definition source and again I go to my encyclopedia of philosophy for things like this, which is just an amazing encyclopedia in fact because I’m only reading you bits and pieces of it. When they give you a definition, they’ve got about between four and twelve pages of Bible thin paper just giving you the whole history of these things and it’s amazing what you can learn just from studying definitions.

Often you can learn more about a concept or any word and what’s involved with it just by learning the definition than anything you could do afterwards. But nevertheless it looks at anarchism as a social philosophy that rejects authoritarian government and maintains that voluntary institutions are best suited to express man’s natural social tendencies. Historically, the word anarchist derives from the Greek an archos, meaning no government. And it appears first to have been used pejoratively to indicate one who denies all law and who wishes to promote chaos. It was used in this sense against the levelers during the English Civil War and during the French Revolution by most parties and criticizing those who stood to the left of them on the political spectrum.

The first use of the word as a positive description was apparently Pierre Joseph Proudhon when in his book What is Property published in Paris 1840 he described himself as an anarchist because he believed that political organization based on authority should be replaced by social and economic organization based on voluntary contractual agreement. Now, I could say that I believe in that too. I believe in voluntary contractual agreement.

But again, it misses the system. What if somebody doesn’t want to go along with the contract? What type of agency do you have to enforce it? And this is where anarchism just falls apart.

And why there are different uses of it? And in one sense, if anarchy can almost mean anything. And the two uses of the word have survived together and have caused confusion in discussing anarchism, which to some has appeared as a doctrine of destruction and to others as a benevolent doctrine based on faith in the innate goodness of man, so to speak.

And there’s been further confusion. Some people associate anarchism with nihilism and with terrorism, when in fact anarchism, which is based on faith, interestingly enough, in natural law and justice, stands at the opposite pole to nihilism, which denies all moral laws. And of course, what they’re arguing is that it’s just because you’re anarchical and you’re violent doesn’t mean that it’s special to that because there’s all sorts of terrorists who are not anarchists and are violent for other sorts of movements. So you can’t say that this one movement is particularly prone to violence per se. Although in a condition of anarchism, you have to expect more violence in the sense of no government anarchism. Anarchism aims at the utmost possible freedom compatible with social life and the belief that voluntary cooperation by responsible individuals is not merely more just and equitable, but is also in the long run more harmonious and ordered than authoritarian government. That’s true as long as people are getting along and as long as everyone’s agreeing.

It’s when you have disagreements or people who are just not well, who we have to deal with at some point in society. Anarchist philosophy has taken many forms, none of which can be defined as orthodoxy. And basically, its exponents have deliberately cultivated the idea that it’s an open and mutable doctrine, like, come on in, anybody can be an anarchist. And that’s part of the problem with the movement. And so certainly part of the problem with the libertarian movement, which has a large degree of anarchism within its membership and philosophy. And which is why I’m not really and never have been a strict libertarian in the sense, although I’ve used the word sometimes. But all of its variants of anarchism sort of combine a criticism of existing government societies, a future of some libertarian society that might replace them, and a projected way of attaining that society by some unusual way, some means outside normal practice. Anarchism in general rejects the state. It denies the value of democratic procedures because they’re based on majority rule and on the delegation of responsibility that the individual should retain. Now, you see, on my way of thinking, I think that’s almost backwards. Majority rule, yeah, I don’t believe in strict majority rule, but I do believe in democratic principles.

I’m just not that insistent. It has to be 51%. And that everyone has to be in on it because you’re going to get the same results anyway in a general, in a proper type of an election. But basically, it criticizes utopian philosophies because they aim at static ideal type of societies. And anarchism inclines toward internationalism and federalism. And while the views of anarchists on questions of economic organization vary greatly, it may be said that all of them reject what William Godwin called accumulated property, which is very much opposed to capitalism in a sense. And that’s why anarchists aren’t really capitalists. Attempts have been made by anarchist apologists to trace the origins of their point of view in primitive non-governmental societies. And I’ve seen that happen right here at the University of Western Ontario, where certain anarchists were trying to prove tribal anarchy, a wonderful way for people to live.

Well, anarchy works at a very primitive level, but it cannot work at a sophisticated level where you require contracts to be signed through sometimes years and years of time that have to be enforced by governments. However, the first forms of anarchism as a developed philosophy appeared at the beginning of the modern era. And when the medieval order had disintegrated, basically, the Reformation had reached its sectarian phase, and the rudimentary forms of modern political and economic organization had basically begun to appear. So in other words, the emergence of the modern state and of capitalism was also paralleled by the emergence of anarchy in a sense, which in its various forms has opposed both of those things very fundamentally. Some of the more famous anarchists I saw in the Encyclopedia were Proudhon, Winstanley, Godwin, and various forms of anarchism. Believe it or not, there’s individualist anarchism, mutualism, collectivism, anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and pacifist anarchism.

So you can imagine putting all these people in the one group together, and they certainly aren’t of one mind. Rand always said that anarchy is a political concept, and that’s very important to note as a political concept, as a social concept, like who cares, is a naive floating abstraction. A society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. Which she says, and even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy. It’s the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government. Not all disagreements are about one person being dishonest, and the other guy being dishonest.

They might be two honest people who have a legitimate disagreement. Now that’s it for basically anarchy. Freedom is a lot easier to handle in terms of defining it, because it’s a very narrowly defined thing, although some people might disagree. And freedom, of course, is not a system, it’s a condition. As I said, that arises when the proper philosophical principles are in play, both in the hearts and minds of individuals and in the institutions that govern them.

I think freedom is very much a social concept, and it’s very much ingrained in the very essence of a people. But I think one of the key points to focus on, and it’s this one I found again in the philosophy encyclopedia, and it basically said, and this was under the heading, Absence of Constraint or Coercion. And it basically says, it is best to start from a conception of freedom that has been central in the tradition of European individualism and liberalism. According to this conception, freedom refers primarily to a condition characterized by the absence of coercion or constraint imposed by another person. A man is said to be free to the extent that he can choose his own goals, or a course of conduct can choose between alternatives available to him, is not compelled to act as he would himself not choose to act, or prevented from acting as he would otherwise choose to act by will of another man, or the state, or of any authority. Freedom in the sense of not being coerced or constrained by another is sometimes called negative freedom, what they call freedom from.

It refers to an area of conduct within which each man chooses his own course and is protected from compulsion or restraint. And basically, I have to say that some writers take the view that the absence of coercion is the sufficient and necessary condition for defining freedom. And I certainly believe that in the political sense, certainly not in the broader total sense of what you could say about freedom, but politically that’s basically it. Those are the basic definitions of freedom. So here I am, I believe in freedom, and I’m described in this encyclopedia of philosophy, basically as an individualist and a liberal.

And that is actually, if you go back in history, it’s a small L liberal, not a capital L liberal, I think that’s pretty accurate. Now, of course, other people want to widen the concept of freedom in one or both of two ways. They kind of argue that natural conditions, and not only the will or the power of other people can impose obstructions and restraints on people to choose between alternatives, and therefore, they’re not free just because of that situation. And so that, of course, is the left arguing, and they support positive freedom. Basically while the right would support the negative freedom, and the positive freedom, of course, negates the negative freedom because in order to implement that, you have to violate that right against other people and use coercion against them, especially if you want money from them, that’s what taxes are, especially when it’s just to transfer from one person to another. So anyway, that’s it for our philosophy lesson today, and basically as an illustration of this conflict in action, and I just talked about it, we’ve got a clip coming up here now that might not be the best of shape because it’s kind of old, maybe I’ve got enough of an old data tape, but it was recorded in 1999 on CBC television, and it features Avi Lewis in conversation with then Freedom Party leader Lloyd Walker and a panel of representatives from some other Ontario political parties. And just an interesting way of ending up the whole conversation, and we come back after that, we’ll be talking about what’s on TV.

Clip (CBC Television 1999 – Avi Lewis Interview with Lloyd Walker)

Panelist: The old thing of capitalism is man exploiting his fellow man in communism is just the other way around. Not only man, actually, but they also exploit a lot of women.

Lloyd Walker: No, but it’s just the other way around. You mean when you have a government system that insists that the government runs things, you can be sure that somebody’s going to be exploited. I’ll guarantee that.

Avi Lewis: No, no, no, no, no, no. I actually don’t want to turn this back to the libertarian side of the equation because that is the critique of communism, that there’s sort of a state control. That’s the stereotype. The problem that people have with libertarianism is in this absolute freedom, in this radical freedom, what responsibility do you have to other people?

Lloyd Walker: Okay, there is, first off, there’s no such thing as radical freedom. I think radical freedom would be being allowed to go around throwing bombs and blowing up babies and I don’t come up with that. There are the limits. Absolutely. Freedom is a self-limiting concept. It’s like I’m free to swing my arm, but I have to stop at Sam’s nose.

There’s no question there. I can’t do that. I can’t violate the rights of another person. So freedom becomes self-limiting. It’s like… Freedom is a belief in human nature. Freedom Party is stated from the outset, the purpose of government is to protect our freedom of choice, not to restrict it. And it’s there to allow us to be free, to make our own choices, to accept responsibility for them. But it is there to protect us from other people violating our rights. So that’s it. It’s a negative definition.

Clip (Star Trek: Enterprise S01E13 – Dear Doctor)

Movie Character 1: But always I go with you wherever you go. Understand? You go now, Maria. No.

Movie Character 2: No, I stay with you, Rebecca. No, Maria. I…

Movie Character 1: What I do now, I do alone. I couldn’t do it if you were here. If you go, then I got to… Don’t you see how it is? Whichever one there is is… No! No!

Crew Member 1: We can go if you’re bored. No, no. I’d like to stay and see what happens. Shh.

Crew Member 2: You won’t be disappointed. The ending’s classic.

Crew Member 3: No, not the film. I’m sensing a rise in emotional undercurrent in the room. I’m curious to see if it culminates in some kind of group response. They don’t have movies where you come from, do they? We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discovered their real lives were more interesting.

Movie Character 3: If you go, I go too.

Crew Member 4: Oh, still? It’s a long way I can. It’s nice to take a break from real life every now and then, don’t you think?

Crew Member 5: I suppose it is.

Movie Character 4: Remember, Liza, now you understand. Now you’re going. I mean, you’re going well in the past, and far and into the old America. Oh, so am I. Stand up now and go, and we both go. Stand up, Maria. Remember, you’re me too.

Dr. Phlox (voice-over): It’s remarkable, Doctor. Even fictional characters seem to elicit human compassion. My shipmates have calmly faced any number of dangers, and yet a simple movie can bring tears to their eyes.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. You’re Just Right. I’m Bob Metz, and this is CHRW 94.9 FM, where it looks like this year’s TV season, according to a headline in the London Free Press, is lacking breakout hit TV shows. Michael Rechtshoffen on October 17th seems to think that this just isn’t the season to make it. I was looking at some other reviews of some of the TV shows that are out this season, and I think you get a little bit different views depending on who you read and who you look in terms of trying to find out what you want to watch on TV.

I don’t watch TV in a normal way. I generally watch all of my TV on DVDs that I burn from just taping them off of various stations, burn them on DVDs. I’ve got complete seasons of shows, folks, that I haven’t even watched yet. But what I do is I try to go to the newspapers and news sources that when I see new shows coming out, because generally I do most of my TV watching in the summertime, not so much during the so-called seasons, the television seasons, just because of my lifestyle.

And of course I collect a lot of these shows, so a lot of them I won’t see for a while. So I just went through some of the papers and looked at some of the reviews to see what I might try this year. And I have tried some of them. I’ve sampled some. I’ve been taping some that I haven’t even looked at yet. In fact, right now I think my computer is at home rendering an episode of Bionic Woman.

And I haven’t watched an episode yet, but I keep hearing it’s a good show, so I’m going to give it a chance. How about you, Ira? You’ve been noticing anything interesting on the airwaves this year, or you’ve just been too busy for television?

Ira: No, I’ve been pretty darn busy for television. I know that in radio you’ve got to stick with the news and everything, but I get a few chance to sit down and really watch some new cartoons and some new shows and so forth.

Bob Metz: What have you seen new that has interested you?

It can be about anything. I’m not, you know…

Ira: Well, I know it’s not new, but 24 is an actually unique, totally new experience for me. I mean, the fact that someone thought of the idea of taking an hour and putting it on and it goes around the clock, that’s actually pretty interesting to me. I thought it would be showing the camera someone sleeping.

Bob Metz: Yeah, it’s a great formula. Believe it or not, I’ve never seen an episode of 24 yet. I’ve got the first season of Sopranos on DVD and I haven’t watched that yet either, and a lot of people tell me that’s a good show to watch.

Ira: The problem I have though is that I just cannot seem to start a show and not see the very first episode or the…

Bob Metz: I’m exactly the same way and that’s one of the reasons I started saving them on DVDs. So many of today’s shows depend entirely upon the serial approach. If you’re watching Heroes or you’re watching even Bionic Woman and to be continued, to be continued, they’re almost following the old comic book formula that used to have when we were kids and stuff. Every story was always continued.

Ira: But I’m a very strong supporter of the writers. I think I would… If I had the chance, I’d go out there and picket with them, stand right there on the lines and say, they need more rights, they need more money, they need all this stuff.

Bob Metz: Well, that’s an interesting… I was actually planning to make that the subject of today’s show and I collected so much stuff on it and a lot of the information of that hasn’t really come out yet. There’s just starting to leak out. The other side is starting to make its point of view heard because it’s a tough issue to look at just on the surface, but it’s certainly going to affect a lot of the TV seasons.

I was looking at… In fact, one of the articles I just referred to, they were saying that some of the shows I think that are already in trouble are Carpoolers, Cavemen, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of them. I actually watched the first episode of each of them and they were, eh, so-so. I thought they might make a go of it, but it kind of… Just half hour sitcoms. In Cavemen, there’s literally these guys looking like cavemen, right? But playing it kind of straight. Which kind of… I’m going, okay, is that going to work? I don’t know if a thing like that can work.

Ira: Well, I think that we have a problem with today’s entertainment and the fact that they don’t go with an old system. We’ve lost a lot of our attention span, we’ve lost a lot of our patience. A classic shows like The Waltons, for example. I remember I was a little kid, me and my mom would sit down and we would watch it together. And I remember hearing in an interview from the man that plays John Boy, that says that they were actually in trouble in their very first few episodes, and not a lot of people were watching them. But he also mentioned that those were during the days when a network would let them have the entire season to see how it gauges out, to see how people get used to it. And these days, if a show doesn’t hit, make the ratings in like the first two episodes, it’s canned.

Bob Metz: That’s exactly a major issue with the whole rating system. I’ve complained about that on this show. Remember, I once predicted Drive would be the next Lost on this show. Four days later, cancelled. And again, I still think that show would have been as good as Lost, but it’s all about ratings and it depends on where they actually schedule those shows. If you see a show scheduled on a Friday night, you can almost begin by writing that show off. It’s just on the precipice.

It’s ready to go. And it’s even worse when they do some shows. I’ve seen some shows debut on Friday and have their second episode on Sunday. Now, who’s going to follow that? And then again, you miss the first one and you really can’t follow the rest of the series or you don’t want to get into it. Because if you miss the way a lot of, especially key characters are properly introduced to each other on a show, you miss the chemistry of what’s supposed to be going on there.

Ira: A lot of network heads are just impatient these days and they want something that will just rock it out of the gates and finish the race first with about four links ahead of all the other shows. But they don’t have the patience or time to really sit down and say, OK, let’s look at this and let’s really baby it.

Bob Metz: That’s absolutely right. I think one of my favorite shows that died that way was called Firefly. I don’t know if you ever saw that. Basically, an outer space western. If somebody had told me an outer space western would be fun to watch, I’d say no way. Watch this show was hooked on it. And of course, they had to cancel it.

Ira: Well, of course, I think we should be relieved to know also is that the viewers do have power. I mean, I have noticed twice where the viewer said that we want this show back and the networks actually caved in and gave it back and gave the shows new life. Jericho for one and Family Guy for a second thing. A lot of people have been watched old episodes, bought the DVDs and the network saw they made a mistake in canceling the show and they brought it back. Great.

Bob Metz: And that’s how actually Firefly the movie got made too, to finalize it. Listen, let’s go to that next clip. And when we come back, we’ll just talk about a couple of the shows that were reviewed in the National Post. Maybe we can squeeze them in in the last few minutes and we’ll be back right after this.

Ira: Yes, we have a caller online.

Bob Metz: Oh, we have a caller. That’s what you’re trying to get my attention for. OK, let’s have the caller.

Caller 1: How you doing, Bob?

Bob Metz: Not too bad.

Caller 1: That’s good. Yeah, actually, you’re right about the serial ones. Have you heard of, there’s a show my favorite now is called Dexter.

Bob Metz: I haven’t seen that. No, not yet.

Caller 1: Oh, you might find that kind of interesting. He’s a serial killer that hunts serial killers.

Was that what it’s about? Yeah. Now, is this a new show or is it in second season?

Caller 1: It’s in its second season.

Yeah, I think there’s 13 episodes or 14 in the first season. You get it on DVD. Yeah, and it’s one of my favorites because it’s dark and yet it follows a moral code.

Bob Metz: Oh, fascinating. There’s a lot of shows that follow that basic formula. And, too bad I can’t, we’re not going to have definitely enough time to cover all the shows I wanted to do today. I think I might continue this next week. But any other new shows you’ve seen there?

Caller 1: That and I enjoy Heroes.

Bob Metz: Oh, Heroes is a masterpiece.

Caller 1: Yeah, yeah. I like the way it’s laid out and everybody’s sort of secretive and, you know, all underground. Yeah, and the conspiracy. I find it enjoyable.

Bob Metz: Yeah, you know, it’s got a formula that works so well. If somebody had told me just out of the blue, if you were just to describe Heroes to someone who’d never seen it, that these people can do anything like jump around like Superman or go invisible, you’d probably write the show off, wouldn’t you? Just like, yeah, is that going to be, how can you make that interesting?

Caller 1: Yeah, that’s it. I’d like to know how they pitched that.

Bob Metz: Yeah, and not only to make it interesting, but end up making it more interesting than most of the competition that’s out there. That’s a true accomplishment, I think, and it really uses a lot of fantasy to get some real deep issues across. And I think it’s a fun show to watch. It’s like a roller coaster ride, and they always leave you wanting more at the end, don’t they?

Caller 1: Oh, that’s it. That’s it. That’s why you just can’t wait for the next week. Yeah, and I watched it on DVD, which gets expensive because I think there’s only four episodes on a DVD. But yeah, you watch them all in a row, and it’s really hard to shut it off. Excellent. You can’t keep watching.

Bob Metz: Okay, well, thanks for calling. And we’ll see. How about you, Ira?

We’re going to have another caller coming in if you give me a few minutes.

Bob Metz: Can’t give you a few minutes.

Ira: All right, caller, go ahead.

Bob Metz: Hello, caller.

Ira: Well, I think we lost him on the air, but I totally agree with our last caller right there. We have some absolutely excellent new shows, but as to reiterate what I said before, we need to give them a chance.

Bob Metz: I think so, too. And what’s interesting is that one of the things that the writer strike may cause is that some of these shows that are a little bit on the edge, according to the same article, says one of the reasons there hasn’t been any cancellation notices posted thus far, might have to do at that time with the possibility of a writer strike. So they didn’t want to start cancelling shows and not be able to replace them with new shows if they weren’t going to have any writers to do that. Interestingly, that’s the same thing that happened back in the 1980s when Star Trek, the Next Generation, got on the air.

They were in the middle of a writer strike, and that’s why that first season was a little crappy.

You say we have another caller there?

Ira: Yes, I do.

Bob Metz: Okay, let’s get him in.

Caller 2: Hey, Bob.

Bob Metz: Hi there.

Caller 2: Yeah, I was going to stick with that comment. We don’t really need too many of the new shows, as long as we just have Star Trek, so we’ll be good.

Bob Metz: A lot of people might think that way. Star Trek is still one of the highest demographic rating shows on television, especially among men between ages 18 and 55. Can you believe that?

Caller 2: That’s a huge demographic.

Bob Metz: It is. It accounts for why you see reruns. When I say Star Trek, I mean all, what was it, five series?

Caller 2: Five. Actually no there was six.

Bob Metz: Six?

Caller 2: Because there was a cartoon version of the original series.

Bob Metz: Of course. Of course. I’d forgotten completely about that.

Ira: Ira has given me the signal out there. I think our time is just about running out. Is it, Ira?

Ira: Yes, it is. Coming up to the top of the hour.

Bob Metz: Okay, well, I guess that’s it for today. We’re going to continue with this next week though, because I didn’t even get into half of the things I wanted to say about a lot of these TV shows. But thanks for calling, folks. And tune in again next week when we will continue. And we’ll focus a little more on this season’s shows. And so next week, take care.

And make sure that you join us again next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. Until then, be right. Stay right. Do right. Act right. And think right. We’ll see you then. Take care.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy)

Comedian: We’ve all been a cartoon character, every one of us here tonight. I’m going to remind you when it happened, you went out, you partied, went to bed. Next morning, your friend called you early, too early, woke you up, you answered the phone, and you sounded just like Elmer Fudd, hello. And we never admit to the other person that we just woke up, we all lied. Oh no, you didn’t wake me up. I’ve been up for a long time. I feel great. How was your night out? My God, I got hammered.