A recent segment of the Current on CBC radio included an interview with Jon Ronson who has produced a podcast that explores the history of the development of the culture wars in areas such as abortion and sex education.
Some scenarios he relates reveal how the fury of these debates may have evolved because of decisions and desires not related to the values currently driving heated conflicts.
In his new podcast Things Fell Apart: Strange Tales From The Culture Wars, Jon Ronson traces the history of culture wars over issues like religion, gender, and sexuality — and finds some very weird stories along the way.1
Steven Mintz, aka Ethics Sage, asks the related question “Do the Ends Justify the Means?” He cites Niccolo Machiavelli for an early explanation of the ends justifying the means, expressed in Chapter XVIII of The Prince. The statement that “the ends justify the means” can be traced back to Niccolo Machiavelli. The closest he came to it was when he expressed his view in Chapter XVIII of The Prince:
“There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality (appearing to be religious), inasmuch as men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch withyou.”Machiavel_Offices_Florence2
Mintz explains that in this quote from Chapter 18 of The Prince about keeping faith, or being true to your word, Machiavelli is instructing a Prince on how to behave and how to keep up appearances. He says it’s very important to appear merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious. He also says that one must be prepared to act in a manner contrary to the appearance to keep up the appearance. This is because everyone can see what you appear to be, and only a few will get close enough to touch you and actually find out what happened.
These people (each with slightly different reasons and motivations) are all about appearing as they wish people to see them. Even if it is nothing like what they really are, even if they are saying the exact opposite of what they will eventually do, they know that few will see through their appearances. So, for Machiavelli, to appear to be doing something is good enough even if the actor has no intention of doing so, or achieving an end result far outweighs how we got there; what road we took; and whether our behavior was ethical or not.2
Max Fawcett shares his opinion, in the National Observer, that the anti-vaxxer truck convoy signals an insidious spread of Trumpism in Canada where Conservatives are misrepresenting reality and promoting false information and fake controversies to their base.
Take former leader Andrew Scheer’s recent tweet, in which he declared his affinity for the convoy of truckers making their way to Ottawa to protest the government’s policy. “Trudeau is attacking personal liberty and threatening everyone's ability to get groceries because of his overreach on vaccine mandates,” Scheer wrote. “He is the biggest threat to freedom in Canada.”3
The fusion of hyperbole, hatred and fear-mongering is, to Fawcett, exactly the sort of thing the Republican Party has traded in ever since Donald Trump stepped onto that Trump Tower escalator in 2015. Since then, both he and the Republican Party he controls have routinely treated the truth and those who tried to defend it with open contempt.
There’s no question supply chains are stretched right now due to a combination of factors (recent floods in B.C. and droughts on the Prairies, for example, not to mention the growing percentage of truck drivers and other key employees who are sick with the Omicron variant), and that this is showing up in the form of shortages of certain products in our grocery stores. But to pretend, as the Conservative Party of Canada has for days now, this is entirely because of the federal government’s vaccine mandate for cross-border truck drivers (a similar mandate already exists in the United States) is dishonest in the extreme.3
Fawcett finds that they have gone further than just garden variety dishonesty, too.
Reverse the mandate 🚛🚛
— Melissa Lantsman (@MelissaLantsman) January 21, 2022
Sign the petition and SHARE 👇https://t.co/noPa1ZRX8e pic.twitter.com/iMF1Dhc5sX
In a recent tweet, Thornhill MP Melissa Lantsman (who was once heralded as a bright, new moderate voice in the party) used a stock image of empty shelves in a British grocery store in a post that suggested “empty Canadian grocery store shevles [sic] could become a larger problem.” When people pointed out the obvious error — and deceit — she simply doubled down and directed people to her petition against the federal government’s vaccine mandate. These sorts of blatant lies and deliberate attempts to mislead Canadians are a threat to our democracy. But what makes the CPC’s recent conduct even more dangerous is the obvious desire on the part of its key members, including former leader Scheer and potential leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre, to provoke a portion of the Canadian public that’s already inclined towards anti-social behaviour — and direct their fury towards the prime minister.3
The truckers, who are over 80% vaccinated, have gathered support for their freedom convoy. Unfortunately, it is likely that this demonstration has become the means for others to use misinformation, and populist demagoguery to promote ends that threaten the truth needed in a well functioning democracy.
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