Sometimes, as a journalist, you put up your pen, close your notebook, and start listening in a different way. You find yourself asking, “Who is this guy?” instead of trying to take down what he’s saying, because things aren’t adding up.
That moment came for me when 13 Ways CEO Doug Griffith said towns shouldn’t place the word ‘sustainability’ too prominently on their literature, because it doesn’t have the gusto and glitter of other words. Communities need to portray themselves as innovative, aggressive, focused, not lumped in with the NOPE (Never On Planet Earth) crowd of naysayers.
The audience laughed, and I heard a few people sitting near me making appreciative comments. Being of a martian green hue, I cringed. I mean, really, in the 21st Century, not to think of sustainability as something progressive, exciting, fraught with wonderful possibilities? How could people not see the flies in this man’s ointment?
He’d prefaced his NOPE declaration with an avowal of himself as a ‘staunch’ environmentalist, but then went on to humorously depict sustainability–types as people who want to wrench the spigots closed tomorrow, depriving the world of its hydrocarbon fix overnight… None of the staunch environmentalists I know think remotely like that, so which martians has Griffith been talking to, in which coffee shop, and on what Planet B?
Trying to make sense of his comments, I remembered it had been mentioned in his introduction that he’d graduated university as an honours student of philosophy, and taught high school, amongst other things. Any freshman PHIL 101 student would have seen right away that Griffith had pulled the ‘straw man fallacy’ on his appreciative audience – one of the favourite strategies of the most accomplished and insincere politicians.
As a demolition tool the straw man is pretty effective. All you have to do is recast the intentions and policies of your opponent – and the straw man is only used against an opponent – as ridiculous and outrageous for a receptive audience, then tear that effigy apart to the cheers of the crowd. Never mind that the straw man is a gross misrepresentation; the object isn’t a slavish adherence to accuracy or truth, it’s winning. As a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister from the other side of the Rockies, as well as a philosophy grad, Griffith would no-doubt be well versed in the straw man tactic, and he deployed it skilfully.
The premise of his schtick was what you might call a thought inversion, one he’d first practised on his high school students. Instead of encouraging them to make the best of their lives, Griffith challenged them to think how they could ruin their chances, and what their degraded futures might look like if they made all the bad choices open to them.
Brilliant idea! But in the classroom he listened to his students and wrote their ruinous ruminations on the blackboard for them to reflect on; at Shawnigan Lake School he told everybody what the ruinous 13 mindsets in town are, then berated some unnamed characters who had dared think that way, dragging their communities into the abyss with them. Griffith cited numerous instances when he rode into town – he’s a rancher by heritage, and rightfully proud of it – and offered up his ideas as to what the locals needed to do to fix things, then left them to it, only to return and find they hadn’t acted on his advice and were wallowing deeper into the mire of mediocrity and decline.
As a philosophy grad, former Alberta cabinet minister, and pretty good comedian, I’m sure Griffith is aware that ‘causality’ hasn’t been established just because two variables on a graph happen to change at the same time. For instance, if I gather together a crowd near sunset and predict vehemently that, if they don’t do something, the sun will drop out of the sky; and if the crowd neglects to do what I’ve suggested and, indeed, the sun does set; that doesn’t mean my saying so and them not heeding my advice was the reason; it might have had something to do with the rotation of the earth!
Griffith wound up his presentation by urging people to take responsibility. Personal responsibility. The cumulative effect of not doing so was the most important point on his list of 13 don’ts that will doom a community. And he’s bang on there. But I found myself asking on my way to the parking lot: How could I take responsibility for the future of my town based on the other things he’d said before that?
Answer: Put on a blue blazer and go volunteer for the Conservative party nearest you. Tout the inviolable efficacy of competition, while lauding the wonderful benefits of cooperation; make sure ‘sustainability’ doesn’t become an inconvenience; snap my fingers in a way the appeals to youth and seniors in the same time and place; et voila, I’ll have done well. And if I don’t achieve the complex goals he’s set for me, and my town goes down for the big swirl as a result, I can always invite Doug Griffith back to say: “I told you so,” just for a laugh.
