APPLIED RELATIVISM

From: The great university cheating scandal (MacLeans, February 12th, 2007)

Experts say the reasons for cheating among today's students extend from on-campus competition, to more fluid notions around what is unethical, to a cultural generation gap between students and professors. "In this knowledge-worker age, it's now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs -- so the pressure to do well is really high," says Stephen Covey, author of The Speed of Trust. "There's strong data that within companies the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations." The same, he says, holds true for school. Over the last two decades, too, North American universities have seen their mandates shift from institutions of learning, remote from the more quotidian aims of finding work and putting food on the table, to the necessary condition for entree into the corporate world. "I think there's a lot of students these days who have bought into the message that you come to university for a credential -- to get a better job, to make more money," says Christensen Hughes. As Covey says, students "get the degree, not the education."

Some students who admit to misconduct often believe their professors are complicit in their cheating. Among engineering students, says Christensen Hughes, "there was a sense that they were expected to take more courses than other students, typically, so they felt justified -- they needed to find shortcuts." She adds: "They also said that they assumed that faculty knew that. So in a sense they felt there was collusion or, 'Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, we all know what's going on, we all know what it takes to survive this program.' "

McCabe sees something else at work in the trend. "Younger people joining the workforce feel much more at ease making their own rules -- deciding what rules they can ignore, what rules they should apply and what way they can apply them," he says. In a small but not insignificant number of the students surveyed, McCabe finds some who see cheating as a valuable skill in itself. "I'll have students who will say, 'I'm just acquiring a skill that will serve me well in the real world,' " says McCabe. "They see it as training in a sense -- they're learning how to beat the system."

Cheating at university is hardly a new development, but surely a culture of widespread, openly-admitted cheating is. Faced with a generation that has been taught to equate “wrong” with “wrong for me”, how could this problem be tackled other than through increased surveillance, invasion of privacy and police work? Is honesty not just another one of those platonist ideals that have caused us so much unnecessary grief? Would they respond to reasoned arguments on how we evolved an aversion to cheating because it conferred survival benefits?

HEY MOM, I JUST RE-INVENTED THE WHEEL

From: Chimpanzees 'hunt using spears' (BBC, February 22nd, 2007)

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks.

The report's authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution.

Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.

From: Jane Goodall Institute

At first, the Gombe chimps fled whenever they saw Jane. But she persisted, watching from a distance with binoculars, and gradually the chimps allowed her closer. One day in October 1960 she saw chimps David Graybeard and Goliath strip leaves off twigs to fashion tools for fishing termites from a nest. Scientists thought humans were the only species to make tools, but here was evidence to the contrary. On hearing of Jane's observation, her mentor Louis Leakey said: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

Also in her first year at Gombe, Jane observed chimps hunting and eating bushpigs and other animals, disproving theories that chimpanzees were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters who only occasionally supplemented their diet with insects and small rodents.

FATHER AL BLESSES THE FLOCK

From: Eco-pilgrims gather to 'heed the Goracle' (Anthony Reinhart, Globe and Mail, February 22nd, 2007)

They came in their hundreds to hear him speak, and even those left standing outside the crowded hall would not be deterred from lingering in the proximity of the Baptist prophet from Tennessee.

It wasn't any old-time religion that drew these believers to Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, but a concept they feel is every bit as crucial to humanity -- global warming -- that made them want to get close to Al Gore, the impassioned former U.S. vice-president, as he delivered his now famous Inconvenient Truth about climate change.

Like many a bygone leader who happened along at a key moment in history, Mr. Gore -- who has been sounding the environmental warning bell for years -- has suddenly inspired the kind of faith and fervour in others that he insists will be needed to overcome such a monumental problem.

"From my perspective, it is a form of religion," said Bruce Crofts, 69, as he held a banner aloft for the East Toronto Climate Action Group amid a lively prelecture crowd outside the old hall. [...]

Across the driveway in front of the hall, a large banner exhorted the crowd to "Heed the Goracle." Belonging to a fledgling group called ecoSanity, it was still there hours later, as Mr. Gore enjoyed a reception at the adjacent Simcoe Hall and the dispersing crowd voiced its praise.

"He's the prime minister we need in Canada," said Reid MacWilliam, who has been re-examining his entire life to make it more environmentally responsible.

Many attendees said that the speech closely mimicked the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but they seemed pleased to listen to it again.

"You can't hear that message enough," said Shawn Omstead, attending with his daughter Meredith. "When we watched the movie, the next day we went and replaced all the light bulbs in the house . . . you see the movie and it sticks with you for a bit and then it fades."

"It was not our intention to have a religious approach," ecoSanity group founder Glenn MacIntosh said, "but it was our understanding that it was that kind of movement that people were craving; that kind of spiritual connection in their gut."

Perhaps the most quaint thing about us climate change sceptics is that we still believe we’re engaged in a scientific debate.

THAT THIRD ORDER EVIDENCE CAN BE SO PERSUASIVE

From: Finding God at 30,000 feet (Larry McCloskey, National Post, February 21st, 2007)

I didn't expect spiritual uplift from the magazine -- just the usual fluff. Yet there in front of me was an extraordinary article written by the Canadian intellectual Northrop Frye just before his death in 1991. Frye astounded the world with his dispassionate and erudite academic writing for half a century. But this was Frye raw, naked, utterly unlike his former public self.

The article described how Frye came to grips with the death of his beloved wife of many years. He began by mentioning the fact that, in 1936, before his academic life began, the author was ordained a United Church minister.

Yet he admitted that during his entire life he had never had faith. Even as the author of the monumental The Great Code: the Bible and Literature, Frye hadn't believed in God. It seems that, for most of his life, he was content to consider all matters of faith as academic.

Yet after his wife died, Frye could no longer sustain an academic distance from his own life. Though he had a masterpiece on the Bible to his credit, on the question of God he now felt the need to go deeper. So he put his giant intellectual motor to work.

What he could not accept was that his wife of a lifetime -- what she had meant to him, the essence of her -- could be reduced to simply a collection of cells that had once lived and were now dead. And since this belief was his strongest impulse, it followed that he must believe that she continued to live in some way. And if this latter belief was really stronger than his former academic belief, he reasoned that this was faith, perhaps not in the accepted pure sense of the word, but what he saw as a negative faith--a default faith.

It was an epiphany. If Northrop Frye believed that the concept of negative faith had merit, that was good enough for me.

After a lifetime of guilt for what I had not been able to believe, Frye's revelation was a welcome relief. Negative faith may not be a fulfilling form of faith -- because it means never really knowing the things we long to know, such as the nature of God and the afterlife. But I'll take negative faith with an open mind over the fraudulence of an atheist's claim to knowing what can never be known.

Mock on, Dawkins.

IN THE TRADITION OF JEREMIAH

From: Climate protection best choice for business growth, top economist says (Mike De Souza, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

Fighting global warming and working to meet Canada’s Kyoto commitments will not cause an economic collapse, despite the Harper government’s recent assertions, a major economist told a lunchtime business crowd on Monday.

Former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern was making his first visit to Canada since last fall, when he published a 700-page report that made international headlines with its warnings that the world could face an economic catastrophe similar to the Great Depression by ignoring the threat of climate change.

"So you have your choice now," Stern said in a speech to the Economic Club of Toronto: "You can be absurd and reject the science; you can be reckless and say we can adapt to whatever happens; or you can be unethical and disregard the future, simply because it’s in the future. That’s entirely up to you."

Decisions, decisions.

More: Stern Warning

WHY CAN’T YOU BE IRRATIONAL, LIKE THE ANGLOSPHERE?

From: Airbus faces break-up as Franco-German talks fail (David Robertson et. al., The Times, February 20th, 2007)

The crisis at Airbus was triggered on Sunday by shareholders refusing to back a restructuring plan submitted by Louis Gallois, the co-chief executive of EADS and head of Airbus. The plan, which was scheduled to be announced today at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, called for cost-cutting and improved efficiencies in aircraft production.

The Power 8 plan will entail the outsourcing of factories, the rationalisation of the supply chain and possibly thousands of redundancies. Mr Gallois is also trying to tie work on a new aircraft, the A350, into this new, more efficient production regime. This would mean concentrating A350 work at fewer sites rather than spreading construction across Europe, as happens at present.

However, the German Government has balked at receiving less work on the A350 than the French. The present proposals could leave the Germans with only 10 per cent of A350 work, compared with France’s 35 per cent.

Pressure will be on Mr Gallois to water down Power 8 and assign more A350 work to Germany. This could endanger the UK’s role in the A350, which covers about 20 per cent of the €10 billion (£6.7 billion) project. The Airbus factory at Broughton, North Wales, is scheduled to build the wings of the aircraft. However, sources close to Airbus said last night that the Germans were playing a political game with France. These sources believe that the Germans will agree to Power 8 — and giving France the bulk of A350 work — only if they get all A320 production in return. This would effectively split Airbus, with the smaller aircraft made in Germany and the larger ones in France. A formal divorce between the two countries would then be achieved easily.

French Airbus executives were pinning the blame yesterday on German shareholders for the deadlock over Power 8 restructuring. They said that Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, had used the main German shareholder, DaimlerChrysler, to express her opposition to a reorganisation of Airbus’s production model.

Sources in Paris accused Mrs Merkel of playing politics at the expense of Airbus to win praise among the German electorate.

Which, of course, the French would never do. But what a debacle. Is it any wonder half of Europe wants to deep-six the EU and the other half wants to get rid of the nation-states that compose it?

More.

SHOOTOUT AT THE OK CORRAL

From: The fantasy that is Kyoto(Don Martin, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

Deep in the bowels of government, they're working on Operation Dusty Shelf. OK, so that's not the actual name of this huge bureaucratic undertaking. More like the code word for its future destination.

When a Liberal-ordered bill forces a Conservative government to plan ways to implement the Kyoto protocol, let's just say this is not a motivational exercise for federal bureaucrats. They know their strategy will be stillborn.

Sources say Environment Minister John Baird regrets his initial dismissive bluster against the Kyoto-enforcing private member's bill, which passed through the Commons last week and now awaits a rubber stamp after being debated in the Liberal- dominated Senate.

But it hasn't dimmed his government's disdain for a bill that gives them 60 days to produce an action plan to deliver on the Kyoto target of cranking down Canadian greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels.

"It's not enforceable, not economical and not even constitutional," fumes a senior official in the Environment Ministry. "But we're working on something to deal with it."

This much is certain. The cost and consequences of Kyoto's implementation will not be sugarcoated by this government. The intention is not to deliver warm and fuzzys on ways to meet our international obligations, but to pour cold water and hard realities on the folly of aggressively trying to meet the 2012 target.[...]

If there's a message Prime Minister Stephen Harper should be preparing amid his sudden greening, it's that Kyoto is a fantasy. That Canada will default on the first round of targets for the Kyoto accord is no longer in doubt.

In the months to come, his government will have to roll out a plan to sell the cost of Kyoto as incredible -- and his alternative as credible.

If the Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois cannot stomach a Conservative green scheme that doesn't include Kyoto's 2012 targets, they will be dared to force an election.

Canada is not generally in the forefront of intellectual debate on global issues, but this could be very interesting. Last week the opposition parties foolishly combined to pass a bill compelling Ottawa to meet its Kyoto commitments and to produce a plan within sixty days. Everyone knows the task is impossible, but on this issue we live in a world where rhetoric trumps reality. Last fall, Harper was sagging in the polls over the environment, but a series of high-profile announcements earned him some credibility and he now seems to be standing in good stead for a looming spring election. Harper is obviously looking for a way to force the opposition to tell Canadians exactly what Kyoto would mean to them personally. He is articulate and intelligent himself, and not a man to back away from a principled fight or hide behind mushy platitudes. If you will excuse the cliche, sparks are going to fly.

BUT SURELY WE ARE HARDWIRED TO USE THEM?

From: Are cliches the Achilles' heel of our language? (Or do they take one for the team, give 110% and keep us in the loop?)(Robert Fulford, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

Anyone who talks about writing, or writes about talking, makes a point of condemning dead phrases. These denunciations, while effective and sometimes eloquent, change nothing. The enemies of cliches come and go, but cliches persist.

Everyone seems to agree that cliches stifle writing and thinking. In politics they're downright dangerous. Vaclav Havel, hero of the Czech struggle against the Soviets, claims that cliches, by supporting accepted ways of thinking, encourage dictatorships: "The cliche organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defence lawyer, judge and the law."

Thirty-five years ago Walter Ong, a great student of language, described the anti-cliche campaign in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: "Cliches have for many years now been hunted down mercilessly with a view to total extermination." More recently, Martin Amis expanded that metaphor in his book of essays, The War Against Cliche. Ideally, he claimed all writing opposes cliche, including cliches of the mind and heart. "When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice."

But if you open a newspaper, or watch the TV news, you're likely to be told that wolves are appearing in sheep's clothing, someone is killing someone else with kindness, fools aren't suffered gladly, X is a poster child for Y, and today's fast-paced society is causing widespread stress.

Meanwhile, some helpful soul will explain (as if it had been discovered recently) that most of an iceberg lies below the water, out of sight, like certain problems. Expressions like these fill the air around us. Just the other night on TV I heard it said that some commentator was a boy crying wolf.[...]

Observant readers can take innocent pleasure in the appearance of attachment-cliches, in which one word serves as the inevitable accessory of another. In newspapers we write about only one kind of hoax, the elaborate hoax. In book reviews (as Tom Payne noted in the London Telegraph) epics are all sprawling, quibbles minor, insights penetrating and roller coasters emotional. Scholarship, if worn, is worn lightly.

Contest time. You are invited to share your examples of modern cliches that thwart intelligent or even intelligible debate on the war on terror and/or climate change. There are no limits, so enter often. There are no prizes either.

ECRASEZ L’INFAME!

From: Von Trapp Children to perform in Ottawa (Allison Hanes, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

They break into song spontaneously, wear lederhosen, play practical jokes and had to convince their parents to let them perform on stage.

There are many parallels between the modern lives of Sofie, Melanie, Amanda and Justin von Trapp and the mostly true story of their ancestors made famous by the 1965 film classic Sound of Music.

But the four chipper home schooled teens from Montana got in to show business by accident when they recorded themselves singing to cheer up their ailing grandfather, Werner von Trapp --called Kurt in the movie.

Now the real-life great-grandchildren of Georg von Trapp, an Austrian naval captain, and Maria, a prospective nun who became stepmother to seven and mother to three, have picked up where their performing relatives left off after fleeing the Nazis for the United States.[...]

Six years on, the von Trapp Children have toured the world, playing sell-out shows in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Japan the Philippines and Korea.[...]

They include such Sound of Music favourites as So Long, Farewell and Do-Re-Mi in their repertoire

Some days, even the crustiest traditionalist gets in touch with his inner Jacobin.

A FARAWAY COUNTRY OF WHICH WE KNOW LITTLE

From: The audacity of Obama (Niall Ferguson, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

Take a look at Obama's arguments for a speedy U.S. withdrawal. Speaking on the Senate floor on Jan. 30, he asserted that "redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve ? political settlement between its warring factions." The key is "to give Iraqis their country back," since "no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war." He repeated these words when he announced that he was running for the presidency last weekend.

But Obama's claim that an American withdrawal would somehow "pressure the Sunni and Shia to come to the table and find peace" is a fraud. On the contrary, an American withdrawal is much more likely to lead to an escalation of the internecine conflict that is tearing Iraq apart. In a devastating paper for the Brookings Institution, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack have pointed out that, given the vast potential for violence that exists in the Middle East, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

If the U.S. pulls out, as Obama recommends, Byman and Pollack predict "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die". There could also be huge economic fallout, with oil prices surging above $100 a barrel as the war spilled over into neighbouring countries.

What is particularly objectionable is that Obama appears to have forgotten Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule, as famously enunciated on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: "You break it, you own it." Far more than in Sudan, the United States has a burning moral responsibility to prevent Iraq from plunging into a bloodbath. When Obama refers to "someone else's civil w a r," you have to ask how he thinks this civil war got started.

It might be different if there were any informed voices arguing that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would result in peace, but of course there are none. It might be different if the left was arguing the old isolationist view that liberating or protecting foreigners is not worth the death of one American soldier, but they aren’t. The only coherent explanation for the rising anti-war ethos is that it is based on a self-contempt so profound that it now views the death of one Iraqi at the hands of the U.S. as more morally offensive than a massive internecine slaughter of which we can all thoroughly wash our hands. We imagine that, in the morally confused universe of the left, this is all made blindingly compelling by the doctrine of self-determination.