What does it mean for an industry to die?
What responsibility does a government have to prevent these
things from happening?
As someone who hails from Atlantic Canada, I wonder about
these questions constantly. I’d go further and say that these questions are the
most pressing concerns of nearly every jurisdiction in Canada that isn’t a metropolitan
region. Yet these fundamental questions seem to rarely make it into the
political conversations taking place in my home region or elsewhere. Instead, all
of the political conversations I hear tend to focus exclusively on value for
money.
We know, of course, that this isn’t how things play out in
the real world. The truth is that per capita funding is anathema to people
living in sparsely populated areas, because a turn to pure per capita funding
would result in the immediate closure of countless schools, hospitals, and
other vital pieces of social infrastructure that would see many of our rural
communities disappear. Yet many of these communities continue to receive the
support they need to continue existing, even if it constitutes a bare amount of
“life support” that keeps them limping along.
To those concerned with efficiency and a utilitarian best-outcome-for-the-most-people
set of values, this reality can be very frustrating. These people believe that
it is only political expediency, and the disproportionate voting power
apportioned to specific regions, that keeps politicians making “political”
promises of social infrastructure funding to areas that, for some, should
simply be permitted to die of natural causes—read: the decline of their
traditional industries.
On the other side, people living in rural communities will
argue for the importance of their dignity, which is directly attached to their
sense of home and community. They might also point to the logistical impossibility
of their moving to a more densely populated area, or the foolhardiness of concentrating
all of a province’s population in one or two urban centres as a long-term strategy. Most of the time, though, these conversations tend to come
back to the eternal notion of value for money, as though the meaning of "value" were self-evident.
It’s the failure of these conversations to get to the real
issues, the “Why?” that should entice governments
to fund more problem-based humanities research that speaks directly to the challenges
faced by local communities. What are people truly asking for when they ask to
be supported in their rural communities? What is at stake in a government’s
decision to subsidize a dying industry that has little chance of ever becoming
sustainable again? Are better jobs really the sole way of helping citizens live
more fulfilling lives? These are questions for rigorous humanities-based research. The reason we often don’t invest in this type
of research is because we’ve come to accept the notion that philosophy is a private
concern, with each person’s values being just as important as anyone else’s.
While this is true in a democracy, this does not mean that the ways in which
people apply those values to specific
decisions (and their rationale for doing so) are equal.
It’s in this realm,
the realm where people’s core values intersect with decision-making, that all
of society can benefit from the help of experts in the humanities. I am a PhD
in English literature, and I still would never argue that I have all the philosophical knowledge I need to assess how governments should approach the big
questions I’ve outlined earlier in this piece. To achieve that kind of understanding,
I’d need to read a report from a humanities scholar (or better yet, a team of diverse scholars) who has invested the right
amount of expertise, time, and experience into framing and addressing these questions. That doesn’t mean that the final report will produce answers that will
make everyone happy or will compel everyone to agree about what to do. It doesn’t
even mean the report will produce more answers than questions. What it will do, though, is finally get us
talking about the real issues, like human dignity, that underlie our policy debates.
Without this kind of humanities-based intervention, we are
left with a cacophonous town hall in which the plurality of self-interested voices becomes
noise, and policymakers are much less likely to meaningfully integrate community
feedback into their decisions. When you have these voices collected by experts,
however, then distilled into a government report on the human value of work and
community, you have something that policymakers can use (if they wish) to reflect meaningfully
on the “Why?” of what they’re doing.
Let’s take the example of jobs. To be sure, there are few people in Canada who die of
starvation or exposure each year. This is not to downplay the crisis of
adequate food and housing that many Canadians suffer from Rather,
my point is that for many people across Canada (especially for those whose entire
politics are built around the notion of more, better jobs), it is wrong to
believe that more, better jobs are necessary to "make people not die." It's also wrong to assume that more, better jobs will immediately cure our society of problems like violence or addiction, as a quick look at Fort McMurray will attest to.
So if jobs aren’t the true solution, what is?
To start, we have to realize that a lack of good jobs is
never the real problem. The real problem is the corrosion of security, freedom,
and dignity that precarious or alienated employment has on an individual. Once we collectively accept that this assault on dignity is the real
problem, we can open our minds to a wide variety of ways to help our citizens
feel more empowered in their daily lives.
The point of all of this is to say that politicians across
our country, especially those who govern over areas with sparse populations or
dying industries, would do well to ask themselves the question, “What do our
citizens actually need and want?” We should then invest not only in the
stakeholder research that allows people’s voices to be heard, but the kind of problem-based humanities research that will help all of us get to the true crux of
these issues. Then, we might begin having a genuine public conversation about the truly valuable things that secondary concerns like jobs are supposed to make possible.
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