Episode 22: Dr. Philip Lancaster – Philosopher Soldier

In this episode, Dr. Philip Lancaster discusses:

• Economic feudalism
• Public discourse about the corruption in our political system not getting the traction that it needs
• Dramatic environmental changes that have happened over his lifetime
• Themes in genocides across the globe
• How to counteract corporate interests in politics
• The power of a well-made film, plus free Coca-Cola, in shifting people’s beliefs
• The obligations of being a citizen
• How hope is found in resistance

More about Our Guest

Dr. Philip Lancaster had a distinguished career as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. His career spanned a wide variety of posts, from lecturing at the Royal Military College of Canada to serving as General Romeo Dallaire’s military assistant during the Rwandan Genocide. Philip has conducted extensive research into the use of child soldiers and helped launch the Child Soldier Initiative. He has engaged as a consultant to several leading international non-governmental organizations involved in counter child soldier initiatives. In Mali, he was the lead International Humanitarian Law instructor for the European Union Training Mission. He has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Ottawa and holds an appointment as adjunct professor at the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria.

GUEST Resources

• Academic website
• The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, which Phil helped launch
• An article he wrote, published in the Globe and Mail
• A video of Philip giving a speech at the Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

• Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined
• Quote by Aristotle: “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all…”
• The Belgian Congo
• David Suzuki
• Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song lyric “And virgin places don’t mean a thing to people who never bring their hearts along”
• “Bread and circuses”
• Eleanor Gordon-Smith
• Simon and Garfunkel lyric “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”
• Book: Gilles Lipovetsky’s L’Ere de l’éphémère

 

Quotes From The Episode

(Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets, and some quotes are shortened using ellipses.)

• [9:12] “Once the legal system that preserves the order that we have today, that preserves Steven Pinker’s world and keeps his statistics pure, once that breaks, we’re liable to see a period of considerable chaos. And that’s what I fear.” Gord says, “And you think it could be breaking?” Phil says, “I think the tension is certainly building up. You’ve got this collision between growing concern, almost paranoia, about the environment and environmental collapse – all of us can see what’s happening – and a rigidity, an impossibility of getting our political processes to adapt to cope with it.”
• [10:17] “Our own survival imperatives drive us to collude with this corrupt system, and I see it building to a crescendo. I think the first sign of it will be a collapse in the U.S.”
• [12:00] “There were many people, if you go way back to early Suzuki, being a voice in the wilderness to where we are today, it took a long time to get the public narrative, the public discourse, shifted. And I think that has never actually happened in this case, in this particular context, the idea that we need to be concerned about the corruption about our political system just did not get the traction that it needed to get.”
• [13:16]: “The notion of property rights and fundamental libertarianism still garners a lot of support, the core idea being that if the state steps in, then it undermines people’s capacity to achieve a virtuous life on their own. […] But in a time when we know we need collective action and we can see that the lack of intervention from the state has just completely undone any notion of distributive justice – which is another term that’s gone out of use, and needs to come back; we need to recapture it…”
• [15:39] In response to a story shared by Phil, Gord says “I’m wondering if there’s a generalist lesson here or principle that if you’re in a situation – it could be family, it could be organizational, and it could be the larger political system – that when the power balance begins to shift, if you don’t act, if you don’t stand up to it in some sense or speak about it, that it will tend to continue and even maybe gain momentum.” Phil says “Yup. I’m glad you brought that up. That is something that I would love to talk about, is the passivity of today’s electorate. That is another worrying sign. The notion of conflict, in some cases…in order for political space to be preserved at the bottom, people – the voters the electors, the common man, the common woman has to be ready to take a stand and to insist on their rights. And that may take them into a position of conflict, but arguably, unless you can achieve some sort of sub-violent political evolution through conflict, through a conflicting political process, then it’s liable to just result in a buildup of tension that eventually explodes.”
• In response to Julia asking about his approach to the big-picture issue he mentioned earlier, Phil says:
  • [18:15] “In my case, I refuse the notion of despair. I just won’t go there. Perhaps this goes back to my experience in Rwanda where at certain points we were overwhelmed. Just could not begin to answer all the requirements, all the needs. But we kept going. And the only thing we could do was to do what we could do. And we made sure that we did that everyday. Everyday.”
  • [18:51] “I’ve turned my attention to local affairs. I’m deeply involved in my local community association, in municipal affairs. I’m trying to find some way to get a more meaningful conversation about the environment, about what we can do, taking action on my own, doing everything I can to eliminate my own footprint, and using that as a kind of springboard into talking to neighbours and other people about what they can do. Needless to say, this carries over into political engagement, political involvement. I think it is absolutely essential that every citizen understands that the duty of citizenship is not to sit passively by and wait for things to happen, but to make clear what we want to happen. To think about politics seriously and to take our engagement seriously, in whatever way we hope to do this, and through whatever political party we hope to support. We just have to take it more seriously.”
• [20:39] In replying to a question from Julia about how to motivate people to mobilize and organize, Phil acknowledges that his following statement is a rather jaded view of human nature: “We are a suspiciously trivial species, easily distracted by things that shine and make us feel good, and in a middle-class society where we have a high level of personal comfort, it takes a lot to get people to engage seriously. It’s much easier when people are facing threat and see the threat. It’s much easier when people are cold and dark and hungry to get them engaged. When survival issues are apparent. The problem we have today is that the emergency we’re facing is a slow one. It’s unfolding at a speed that allows us to deny it, to put off action, to just look the other way. And we can’t, we really cannot do that.” Julia clarifies, “And you’re referring to the environment when you say that?” Phil confirms that he is.
• [22:45] “I’d like to take people out to look at any city from the air, as you come in, particularly at dawn or dusk, and you see this pall of smoke. I’d like to take people back in my own life to when you could look up at the sky at night and you could see stars. And now, in the same places where that once was possible, you can’t. You see this blur through a haze. I’d like to take people out to camp in a snow-filled wood in Quebec where the snow is dry and clean and cold, and now it isn’t. It might be for a week, but then the weather changes because we’ve got these dramatic shifts in weather patterns.”
• [24:18] “I think that the debate will eventually be won by nature. As things dry, as water levels rise, as we start to see more and more forest fires and droughts and heavy rains where normally there weren’t, and, you know, it’s going to be so obvious to anyone who lives in an area where nature is apparent. This gets more difficult because of the urbanization of our society. But I have hope that the young people see it; they don’t need to be shown, they seem to be able to watch it on TV and get it.”
• [25:23] Julia says to Phil, “You’ve seen so much of the world, and I just wonder, what keeps you hopeful?” Phil says, “You know, you give up hope, you collapse in despair, you become unable to do anything. Even when the water rises, it’s always possible to look around for a log to hang onto. You’ve just got to keep going. Giving up is, I’m sorry, it’s suicidal. It’s just not worth doing.” Phil then discusses the historical role of rationality in political and collective decision-making. [27:12]“As soon as reason gives way to fear, you’re hooped.” He also speaks about the Rwandan genocide and the Jewish Holocaust.
• [27:59] “I don’t know what it is in humanity, but as soon as we have this righteous feeling of self-defense, it seems to open the doors to all sorts of depravity.” Julia comments on how easily manipulated the reptilian brain is.
• [30:18] “I just think hope is to be found in resistance.”
• [32:11] “There are many people who think that our political system is itself the problem, but I don’t see that. The problem with proportional representation in a mass democracy like Canada is that it will inevitably lead to the rise of a more fractured political landscape because we have so many local interests. We’ll end up with parties forming around those specific local interests that are unable to find a common good, a common thread. The first-past-the-post system that we have now, at least allows us to build consensus around a core set of ideas that form the platforms of major political parties leading up to an election. A lot of us vote holding our noses because we don’t like the whole platform but we like part of it. But if you go to the other system, any form of proportional representation, you’re not going to get that. What you’re going to get is a whole bunch of discrete interest parties, and I see that as a much bigger threat to a political consensus around important issues like the environment than first-past-the-post.” Phil discusses the Australian political system’s structure and the resulting lack of transparency.
• [35:15] “Perhaps I’m perverse. I like a good fight. And I don’t like it if I’m winning. It’s much more fun if you’re in a losing position. It allows you to be much more devious and creative and inventive in the way you go at your resistance. Now we are in a much more powerful position than we think. It is just a matter of deciding that we have power to do something. That’s all we need to decide in order to do it, and I just don’t think despair is much help. If anything else, it facilitates corporate interests.”
• [35:59] “On an individual basis, what could we do? Well, we could stop shopping at Costco. We could stop buying packaged meat knowing how meat is produced. We could stop buying food that is produced through ways and means that are unsustainable. We could reject the use of gasoline-driven vehicles. We could switch over to hanging our clothes out on clotheslines and growing as much of our own food as possible. There are so many small ways you can resist. You put these together and voila, you’ve got a drop in the marketing system that feeds corporate takeover and corporate control. We could patronize local industries. […] Get away from hockey games and professional sports, all these things that focus our attention, they’re like bread and circuses back in the Roman times. They take our attention away from what matters. I’m not saying we all have to be serious and dower and sit around like a bunch of middle-aged puritans, but for God’s sakes, let’s stop being distracted by such fluff. Find something important to get worried about.”
• [39:51] Gord mentions research being done by Princeton philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith and asks Phil, “I’m wondering if you’ve encountered that challenge of providing objective evidence to belief and not having it move, and what you’ve found can help people shift their beliefs, because that’s certainly one of the things that keeps people entrenched in conflict.” Phil says, “I almost want to suggest that if you’re interested in that, you don’t really need to look at any PhD research – just go and look at how marketing works, because that’s exactly what they do. Move people from wherever they are to believing that they need or want this product.” Phil says he’s had direct experience with this and shares a story about his time with the United Nations. Julia notes, “It sounds to me you’re saying one of the keys to influence is emotion.” Phil agrees, and Gord points out that emotion can be used manipulatively or sincerely. Phil says “I’m saying that emotion trumps reason under certain contexts. So under conditions of threat where fear is prevalent, fear will almost always trump reason. But, at the end of the day, without reason, we end up afraid of our own shadows, imprisoned by our own fear, locked inside our castle walls and unable to live.”
• [47:13] “The violence, the potential is always there when people lose faith in the political process to find the common good.”
• [50:06] “Democracy cannot work if its citizens don’t play their part.”
• [56:40] “Just one other notion which I think is key and something to watch for going forward. If the projections of environmental collapse are correct, we’re going to see uneven distribution of the effect. We’re going to see some areas that are hit harder than others. So the key thing to watch for will be whether those areas are considered zones of sacrifice, much as New Orleans was during the flood. And one of the key indicators of that is whether the elites dominating the political processes in question start to blame the victims and use that as a reason for not acting, and for writing off the areas. Now we’ve already seen that happen to some extent in Puerto Rico with the U.S. president. It’s an indication of the level of corruption and the level of elite indifference to the problem, which should worry us. Now as this starts to happen, as the environment starts to bite back, we need to watch very carefully how our own political processes react. What happens in this next year’s fire season? How do we control it, how do we respond to it, how do we deal with the inevitable climate refugees that we’re going to have? This is going to be one of the key areas that I really think we need to pay attention to. […] For me, the buzzword that I’d be looking at is ‘the zone of sacrifice.’ If we sacrifice each other, sacrifice bits of our land, we’re on the wrong road. It’s a test of cohesion and social and political solidarity.”