Sunday April 3, 2022

I won’t offer excuses for General Jonathan Vance, Canada’s former chief of defence staff. I do suggest that we all have something to learn from his downfall.

            Earlier this week, Vance pled guilty to a single charge of obstruction of justice. He was under investigation for sexual misconduct with a subordinate officer. 

            The judge granted him a conditional discharge, subject to probation and 80 days of community service. If Vance complies, he will have no criminal record. 

            There’s no question about the sexual liaison with Major Kellie Brennan. Brennan testified to the parliamentary committee looking into sexual harassment in the military that Vance had fathered two of her children. A DNA paternity test confirmed that  one child was certainly Vance’s. His lawyer told the court Vance has been making support payments. 

            After their affair became public, Vance tried to get Brennan to deny their relationship. Their child. Even that they had ever had sex together. 

            There’s no question about that, either. Because Brennan recorded his phone calls. 

            Vance’s attempts to protect his reputation indicate that he knew he had done wrong. If so, why did he do it?

Male-dominated institutions

            I suggest it comes from a lifetime of working within a male-dominant institution. 

            Institutions resist change. The bigger the institution, the longer its collective memory, the longer it takes to bring about change. It’s like trying to reverse a supertanker.

            The Canadian Armed Forces were exclusively male until 1989. It has had female officers only since 1991.

            In such a context, male morality reigns supreme. Although I don’t like to say this, male morality has been simple -- if you can get sex, go get it. 

            I concede that I have never been a member of any country’s armed forces. But I have been on all-male sports teams. I have belonged to all-male management teams. I have worked in all-male forestry and warehouse crews. 

            We were young. We had hormones.

            In those contexts, the topic of sex –or the possibility of sex – came up often. And I never once heard those young guys advocate abstinence. No one raised moral, religious, or ethical scruples. 

            You may not agree with that diagnosis. All I can do is cite my experience.

            From what I’ve read in books and magazine articles, I’m confident that the macho perspective still dominates the military. 

            Elaine Craig, a law professor at Dalhousie University, would concur. In a Globe and Mail report, she criticized the Canadian military as “threaded through with sexism and misogyny.” Witnesses at the parliamentary committee hearings consistently described the military as “hostile, sexualized and hyper-masculine.”

            Simply issuing new orders for conduct will not change that pattern. As the Vance case reveals, orders from the top don’t even change the top. 

Part of a longer process

            Back in the 1970s, society as a whole was only just beginning to recognize how the male perspective shaped our thinking. 

            Legal documents commonly carried a caveat that was supposed to cover gender prejudice: “Any masculine pronouns herein shall be construed to include the feminine.”

            For legal purposes, that meant all persons -- male or female, singular or plural -- could be called “he.” Or “He” when referring to God.

            And we had manholes, man-hours, mankind, and manpower. We had salesmen, spokesmen, firemen, mailmen, and policemen. We manned the barricades and hired “the best man for the job.” Female runners got urged, “may the best man win.”

            We created self-contradictory titles,  like “Madame Chairman.”

            The initial movement for gender-neutral language generated great hostility. I resisted it myself. I saw non-sexist language as an attempt to tinker with my thinking.

            It was.

            My business partner persuaded me. Once I yielded, I took up the cause with evangelical fervor. I imposed non-sexist language on my authors, like it or not; they had to accept my editing to get published. 

            Indeed, I became so skilled at writing language free of awkward “he/she” and “his/her” circumlocutions that I was complimented for not having succumbed to “those silly language police.” 

            In reality, I was out ahead of them.

            Forty years later, I was shocked recently to find that some friends still had never noticed that firemen were now fight fighters. That committees had a “chair,” not a chairman. And that stewardesses had become flight attendants.

            If it takes that long for change in a society where women are clearly visible as half the population, we should not be surprised at how slowly attitudes change in institutions that are still overwhelmingly male.

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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

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Your turn

“Another challenge to rethink!” wrote David Gilchrist, in his response to last week’s column about the intelligence (and perhaps altruism) of Australian magpies. 

            David continued, “I have been referring to anti-vaxxers as birdbrains. I’d better quit insulting the birds! Being co-operative, they are the opposite to the disruptive protesters. 

            “My favourite smart-bird story: A chap took his pet crow to visit a pal. That lad’s mum hated the crow and threw things at it. That mum hung out a whole line of whites over a muddy patch. She heard the crow cawing from a nearby tree; and when she looked out, she saw every garment lying in the mud -- the crow had removed every clothes pin!”

Tom Watson asked, “What is it in the human being that refuses to learn that in aggression and war, the strongest prevail at the expense of the weakest, and it leads to misery for so many?  Right up to the present moment in time, we're still operating in accordance with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's ‘will to power.’ You're right: the birdbrains here certainly  aren't the magpies.”

Mirza Yawar Baig called last week’s column “a totally beautiful post. I didn’t know about this magpie experiment. I must now look at those in my garden with much greater respect. And of course you are right. The problem is that our claim, to be the most intelligent of all creatures, needs serious reconsideration based on comparing our claim with our actions. A species that spends more money on the means of destroying itself, than on health, education and scientific research put together, has no claim on intelligence.”

Steve Roney didn’t buy my summary of evolutionary history: “The idea that life is a battle was more a product of Darwinism than something pre-existing that he simply confirmed. Greed and selfishness have always been human failings, but until Darwin no one thought such behaviour was proper. Darwin justified selfishness and competitiveness as ‘natural,’ and ‘scientific.’

            “Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859. First use of the term ‘robber baron’ was 1870. European colonialists and the Nazis also embraced this new ‘scientific’ morality of survival of the fittest.

            [Herds are not] “really altruism—since each individual derives a survival benefit through cooperation. True altruism therefore would be conduct that actually reduces the ability of an individual organism to survive, while increasing the ability of another individual organism to survive. Only this is a challenge to Darwin’s original amoral concept. Such cases have been found in nature, but the Australian magpies do not seem to qualify. A magpie incurs no significant cost by pecking something off a fellow. He might do as much out of idle curiosity.

            “As collectivism is self-interested, it is no more moral than individualism. In fact, it is less moral. Another example of herd cooperation is the lynch mob; another is a cartel in restraint of trade. 

            “Altruism, and morality, is more likely to be found on the individual than on the group level, since peer pressure is a force often acting against conscience.”

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)

            Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.

            I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/

            Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE

            The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns