Author / Neil Cameron

by Neil Cameron

Truth, Trust, Trend and Trump

Time magazine has lost most of the influence it once had, but not its flair for striking covers. A spring one asked, in bold red lettering on a black background, “Is Truth Dead?”. They used the same cover format as they had once in 1966, then asking “Is God Dead?”. But that had been a late popular reflection on Nietzsche’s philosophical assertion that this was the case. The cover and content this time were current and narrow, and better replaced by “Has Trump Killed Truth?”.

Either choice recalls G. K. Chesterton’s wise priest, Father Brown, explaining we should worry less about wrong answers, more whether we are asking the right question. Perhaps Nietzsche was doing so, as was the cooler but epistemologically similar David Hume, but maybe should not have published their obituaries. Both of them were revolutionary philosopher-theologians and historians of ideas, ever afterwards misunderstood and misapplied as destructive gravediggers. All “searches for Truth with a capital T” can be defined as “searches for God with a capital G,” including those made by atheists, despite some insisting otherwise. It has been, and likely will continue to be, an eternal and worldwide search. For Western European civilization, it can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophers, Jewish prophets, Roman statesmen, and Christian synthesizers; then only partially recast by Enlightenment philosophers. Later philosophers, in the English-speaking world, after Bertrand Russell, have largely scaled down Truth-seeking to analyses of the language we use when turning to “ultimate questions.”

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by Neil Cameron

From elite Prometheanism to free research

“Our time and energy are being sapped by bureaucrats and politicians. The SSC is becoming a victim of the revenge of the C students.”
– Dr. Roy Schwitters, Head of the Superconducting Supercollider Project, in 1993.

“The open science movement is gaining momentum…But the Neuro is bringing open science to a new level by making a commitment to share everything from brain imaging to tissue samples to the data associated with its experiments.”
– McGill Principal Suzanne Fortier, McGill News, Winter 2016/17.

The early 1990s may now be recalled mainly for large political developments. In Canada, they were the climactic years of a decade of constitutional conflict, ending in negative outcomes of two referendums; in the U.S., the victory of Bill Clinton. But two other events would cast long shadows over the quarter century that followed. One was the large popular vote won in the 1992 presidential election by the unconventional third-party candidate, Ross Perot, a major factor in denying George H. W. Bush a second term. It was an early portent of the growing current of cultural and economic nationalism that has now culminated in the victory of Donald Trump, with signs of a similar direction arriving in Europe. The other, less-recalled but highly significant in its own way, was the 1993 cancellation by the U.S. Congress of the funding necessary to complete the building of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) project in Waxahachie, Texas.

The SSC was spearheaded by the Harvard physicist Roy Schwitters, co-winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, experienced both in past large projects and lobbying in Washington. His 1,900 scientists and construction workers were building the SSC to learn more about the fundamental properties of matter, with what would have been the largest and most expensive scientific apparatus ever built. Everything about it was gargantuan. It required an elliptical tunnel 150 feet underground, 54 miles in circumference, and fitting together more than 10,000 large superconducting magnets, cooled to less than -200 degrees C by a river of liquified helium. Completion would have taken until at least 1999, at a cost of above $8 billion. The scientists had been working around the clock, almost as driven by deep conviction as the atomic physicists of the Manhattan Project. They hoped for world-changing discoveries, which might have made Schwitters as famous as Robert Oppenheimer. Instead, like Canada’s Avro Arrow, the SSC ended in heroic failure. More, it became the symbol of a worldwide retreat from decades of unbounded “Prometheanism” in natural science, changing the understanding of science in general.

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by Neil Cameron

Max Aiken and the Limits of Unidirectional Power

The Canadian who did most to change the world in the first half of the 20th century did so as a a British tycoon. Max Aitken, First Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), a small pixie in appearance, was a phenomenon of energy. Son of a Scottish clergyman, growing up in New Brunswick, he made his first fortune in Canada as a bold and adventurous company promoter and stockbroker, becoming a millionaire before he was thirty. He left permanently for Britain in 1910 and became a Commons MP less than a year later. He then set about becoming the richest and most politically influential of the British press barons. He built the Daily Express, from a circulation of 40,000 when he acquired it, into a giant, with hundreds of thousands of readers by the end of the 1920s; after 1945 it reached daily sales of almost 4 million, highest of any newspaper in the world. By then, he owned as well a large string of other newspapers and businesses, and maintained a dozen luxurious homes in England, France, Canada, and the U.S., famous as well for his many affairs and for the lively conversation at his dinner table.

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by Neil Cameron

Advice from a 17th Century French Aristocrat for Public Figures of Our Times

For many years Senior Discourse Contributor, Neil Cameron, has been fond of sharing a piece of Christmas doggerel with friends and colleagues.

This holiday season his inspiration is François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, (1613-1680) who was one of the finest writers of maxims in the 17th century. The carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’ is about a 10th century Bohemian monarch, now patron saint of Czechs; its melody is from 16th c. Finland, the English lyrics from 1853. For Christmas 1916, the notion came to Neil that, with a few judicious adjustments, a dozen of the Duc’s maxims could be sung to the melody of the carol, as good advice to some celebrated folk of our time. Here it is for your fireside pleasure.

Re-reading La Rochefoucauld, found us still his brothers;
Had we no faults., be less pleased, finding fault in others.
And take one on success eased, done in manner steady:
Always pretend, when you can, you’re success alrea-dy.                              (Donald Trump)

Judging speeches aimed at you, use this firm foundation:
Sincerity is found in few, much dissimulation.
Self-reflection seldom nails, how two things we sever:
All admit their memory fails, but their judgement ne-ver.                                (Hillary Clinton)

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by Neil Cameron

The Soldier President and the Conservative Philosopher

“We know more than we can tell.”   – Michael Polanyi.

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” – Dwight Eisenhower.

Historical amnesia began reaching new proportions in the 1960s, especially in the United States. Baby boomers in their salad days felt the impact of network colour television and its depiction of the Vietnam War. Among many of them. even the major two most destructive wars of all time in 1914-18 and 1939-45, , and the first decade of the Cold War were almost consigned to oblivion.

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by Neil Cameron

History’s Slow Dance of the Seven Veils

The past is not dead; it’s not even over.
– William Faulkner

Voltaire once joked that historians are more powerful than God, ‘as even God can not change the past’. But sometimes no revisions by historians are necessary to make the world view the past differently; profoundly important public events can accomplish that directly. The great year for that was 1956, when three such events arrived. The first was the leaked ‘secret’ February speech of Nikita Krushchev to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party; the second, in October,-was the aborted British-French military intervention in Egypt, intended to protect the Suez Canal from Nasser’s new ‘pan-Arab’ nationalism; and the third, at roughly the same time, was the outbreak of revolution in Communist-controlled Hungary. All of these, surprising enough in themselves, led to the instantaneous collapse of three concepts about domestic and international politics that had held sway in all quarters since the end of the Second World War.

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by Neil Cameron

The Long and Twisting Path to Brexit

Romance and Courtship
Winston Churchill, in the years immediately following World War II, out of office but still hugely influential, sometimes then sounded like the herald of a ‘United States of Europe’, at least of its non-Communist components. But when he returned to power in the early 1950s, he never entered into any practical negotiations with the original six-member European Economic Community, and his successor, Anthony Eden, showed no enthusiasm for doing so.

However, when I was living in London in 1960-61, it looked as if Harold Macmillan’s Conservative Government was going to take the U. K. into the EEC. I was in favour, i nfluenced by persuasive arguments I was reading in the literate political monthly, Encounter. I was unimpressed by the opposing populist views (‘Empire Free Trade!’)regularly thundered by Max Beaverbrook and his minions in the Daily Express, which had over four million readers in those days. I was also little moved by hostile fulminations I heard from radical orators in Hyde Park.

As a mathematics student at Queen’s, I had not been very interested in politics of any kind, but Britain rapidly drew me in. I began, like many of my generation, with an illusory enthusiasm for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which I imagined as having far greater importance than the European economic question. I was unconvinced of the necessity of nuclear weapons for Britain or Canada, and I attended numerous CND rallies, listening attentively to Bertrand Russell. But I soon acquired doubts. ‘Unilateralism’ looked to me too much like a dangerous unreciprocated favour to the Soviets, and the more I read about atomic weapons, the more I understood the grim logic of maintaining them. In any case, the CND Trafalgar Square crowds were having little impact on the House of Commons. Like the Conservatives, the Hugh Gaitskell-led Labour opposition supported strategic deterrence, more divided about joining the EEC.

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by Neil Cameron

Last Days of a Sorcerer’s Apprentice

As a sceptical 1950s student hangover, I was still around university campuses and undergraduate life during the upheavals of 1965-75, but saw them very differently from most students around me. I was most interested in surprising ideas and developments that did not fit the instant mythology being created. A major cause of these surprises was that, when university departments, flush with cash in those days, sought to raise their prestige by inviting a ‘Distinguished Visiting Professor’ from afar to join them for a year or two, they sometimes got different distinctions from the ones they expected.

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by Neil Cameron

Temperament or Ideology: Clinton Rossiter & William F. Buckley

Sixty years ago, a Professor of American Government at Cornell University published a book called Conservatism in America; The Thankless Persuasion. Later editions of the book dropped the subtitle but Clinton Rossiter, a distinguished scholar who wrote many good books on political ideas and constitutional government; was himself to suffer a sad and thankless life.

In 1969, when armed black student radicals seized the Student Union building, Cornell faced one of the most notorious crises of the 1960s. Rossiter tried to act as a moderating intermediary between his faculty colleagues and the young black radicals. He gained lasting enmity from some of his colleagues. Allan Bloom declared he would never speak to him again. His three young sons, all ardent activist radicals opposing the Vietnam War, had already become alienated from him. 

He committed suicide a year later, only 52, although one of his sons much later learned and revealed that his father, still recalled by him with love, had suffered for years from severe depression, uncontrollable rages, and alcoholism, long before hit by the 1960’s combination of campus politics and private family storms.

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by Neil Cameron

Remembering Quebec’s Jacque Parizeau

When the Quebec Legislature began its first post-election session in November of 1989, the first speaker was Jacques Parizeau.

It was my first day there as an Equality Party Member, and he surprised me, by giving a very non-partisan address, almost the kind one would expect from someone like a Lieutenant-Governor.

Parizeau was amiable and wide-ranging, and drew our attention to the painting above the Speaker. It was entitled “The Language Question in Quebec,” an early sitting of the Lower Canada Parliament in 1793, when it was first decided that French would be allowed in debate. He almost seemed to be hinting at an underlying reality: that the Legislature was on most days an oil painting masquerading as an action film, or a theatrical performance, in which he was looking forward to playing the role of a lifetime.

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