How IDEAS saved a listener from sending a regrettable email

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Ideas has been a companion of mine for quite a number of years now. I think I owe it to the Welcome to Ideas. I'm not It is really hard to believe, but we are. Before we marked the occasion in October 2025, we asked our listeners to let us know about any life-altering experiences you have had listening to the show. Dear Team CBC Ideas, it is with sincere appreciation that I write to thank you for another season of programming. Keeps challenging, opening up. We think we know. Dear I dear.

My mother listened to ideas when Mr Sinclair was the host. of elation as she listened. It was so important to her to feel connected to the world. I just treasure the ideas properly. I can't believe it's been going to be a little bit more. I hope it goes for another sixty. Back in 1965, when ideas first hit the airwaves, CBC listeners could only find us on their radio dial. If they missed an episode or just wanted to hear something again, like a massy lecture, for instance, they couldn't.

They had to write in for a transcript to an address that just had three simple lines. Yeah. These lectures are available under the title The Real World of Democracy from CBC Publications if you write to Box five hundred Terminal A Toronto. Then in the 1970s and 80s, listeners could order audio cassettes. And by that time, our address had acquired a postal code.

The CBC has also prepared cassette tapes of the series. If you'd like a copy, just write us at IDEAS Box five hundred Station A Toronto M five W one E six. A former colleague at CBC, the late humorist Arthur Black, helpfully offered a way for listeners to remember our postal code here in Toronto. This is what he came up with M five W one E six. Make five wieners, I'll eat six. Something tells me ideas host Lister Sinclair didn't once mention wieners on our program, but I could be wrong.

To order, send a check or money order to Ideas Transcripts, Box five hundred, station A, Toronto M five W. Ideas has played a role in my life in that I'm somebody who enjoys learning. I just find learning fun. So I've been a consistent listener for thirty years. Back then, as they do now, ideas listeners felt and continue to feel a personal connection with the show. So when I left home for the first time to go to university, I was thrilled to be moving into a a dorm room and

It was a great time in my life, but it was also a little intimidating. And the first thing that I did was I unpacked my little plastic clock radio and I plugged it in and I tuned in C B C. And stay tuned to CBC Radio for the video. Following the ten o'clock. C B C Radio. the sound of home and it gave me that sense of comfort and I felt like okay everything's gonna be okay because at least this thing is still the same.

Of course, the advent of the internet and later smartphones and apps allowed listeners to pick and choose whatever they wanted to click on. And luckily we get a lot of clicks and by whole new audiences from all over the world. I first became attached to ideas via an Australian podcast called The Mindfield. One of the presenters. Suggested that show. So I started listening to it and immediately found it engaging. Ideas has regular listeners not only in Australia.

And even Japan. And they don't hesitate, or maybe I should say you don't hesitate, to write us when you've heard something you've enjoyed or to criticize. When you feel we didn't live up to your expectations. Much of the time though you write to tell us we're doing it. Pitch perfect. Deftly put questions, knowledgeable, no ego cluttering up the discussion, just lucid. I may sometimes Where you land. mine because you got there fairly and I learned something on the way.

C V C when I was uh listening to W NYC. ideas was one of the other fantastic programs I came across. It's programming I feel like I'm not hearing too often. It's just like how do you improve humanity? How do you deal with anxiety? Or whatever it is. It's just really thoughtful. As we continue with our week long series marking our sixtieth anniversary, we'll also hear massy lecturers from the last decade, and of course more from you, our listeners.

I run and so that would be in the mornings usually and I'll have ideas on because now we can stream it. And so I say that um curiosity is a muscle. And for me, the best workout comes from ideas. Terima kasih. I'm Susan Radozhevek. I'm from Mono, Ontario, and I lead Kadima Village. I'm a catalyst for shifting how people think so that they can transform what they do. And one of the areas that I really focus on is our climate crisis. Thank you.

When I'm running and if I'm listening to something that's really interesting to me, I will think about what is being said. And sometimes when I'm have to climb up that extra mountain to get over the hill to uh to continue my run, it's that extra little curiosity that I have about what's being said that keeps me going. the count Tribalism. They're poisoning the blood of our country. It's synonymous with hatred, polarization, conflict, even war.

ご視聴ありがとうございました One of the episodes from Ideas that really resonated with me was about tribalism with David Samson and his whole insight about how identity and our belief systems are much more powerful than facts and figures uh really stuck with me. But tribalism is a fundamentally human trait. It's an instinct. It happens unconsciously. And in fact, it doesn't work if it's not unconscious. So one of its adapters. In june twenty twenty four, I spoke with David Sampson about his book.

Our tribal future, how to channel our foundational human instincts into a force for good. We had a wide-ranging conversation on what David calls the tribal drive. He talked about the positive role that tribalism played in the initial phase of our evolution, and how today it's morphed into a phenomenon he calls a tribal virus.

So I'm using tribe virus as a metaphor. So it's thinking about how ideas that can harm individuals can spread rapidly in a in a social ecosystem. So what identity protective cognition? Is this extremely robust psychological phenomena where if you identify with a group, you will extrapolate from any data set in your environment a way to avoid any attack on your group. and your sense of identity.

Let's take global warming as an example. If the members of your community don't believe in global warming, the use function of saying I don't believe in global warming too is really well functioning parent teacher meetings, right? Um, a church where you everybody gets along, where everybody's family goes to potlucks together. The use function value of just

saying something scientifically incorrect to show that you're part of the team, that is very, very valuable. And in fact, there's a line of thinking where the more radical the statement, the higher you're signaling your allegiance to that particular group. I was stuck with some of the work that we were doing on climate crises and how to get people to think about the climate issue in a different way. And I couldn't name what was making me stuck. And listening to this episode

crystallized it for me. And it was basically that our decisions are based and connected to our identity and our belief system. And it didn't matter how much information we put out regarding climate change and climate crises. People didn't identify with the evidence that was being presented. They identified themselves in a different way.

Identity protective cognition is the capacity for my identity to override any veridical truth if it's attacking my identity. I've got a great example of this. Ken Ham debating Bill Nye the science guy. Ken Ham is a young earth creationist. Bill Nye is a popularizer of science. And the interviewer asked, is there anything that would help you change your mind?

Ah this is a simple question, I suppose, but one that actually is fairly profound for all of us in our lives. What, if anything, would ever change your mind? Well, the answer to that question is I'm a Christian. And a as a Christian I can't prove it to you. I I would ask Bill the question, what would uh what would change your mind? I mean you said even if you came to faith you'd never give up uh believing in billions of years. I I think I I quoted you correctly, you said something like that.

Mr. Knight? We would just need one piece of evidence. We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another. We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding. Bill said, Well, I would have to see some evidence in the fossil record, geological strata, the rate of expansion of the universe. He he listed several things. Evidence was the answer. I would need to see evidence. And what Ken Ham said was I'm a Christian. A as a Christian I can't prove it to you.

The Bible is the Word of God. No one's ever gonna convince me that the Word of God i i is not true. And it full stop. The reason that Ken was not reacting to any of this It's not that he didn't understand what was being said, it's that his identity was totally tied to a particular world view, to his belief. That God created the world. That is the tribe virus at its at its greatest. When you cannot change your ideas in light of evidence, because your identity is in the way.

I think that the world is at a point where we're pushing information out like tablets from the mountain and expect people to fall in place. But it's not about that. It's about how do we connect to where people actually are and w how is it going to happen that they then shift to think about something else. So tribalism for me is like a starting point.

After hearing that episode on tribalism, Listener Susan Radojc brought a whole new level of understanding to her work with tourism bodies, economic development corporations, and community nonprofits in the area of climate change. Her focus became less about what we believe about something and more about why we believe that something, and what it would take to change our minds. I did some work with a municipality.

And their focus was on reaching net zero by twenty fifty. And they had all the great brochures and all the data and language, but they weren't getting any movement. any uh significant shift with what they were trying to do. Uh they ended up falling back into the same old patterns. And the one thing that was stalling that stalled most company is the thinking again, the identity and the belief that uh growth is always good. Growth is not always good when you're trying to shift everything.

And when the stakeholders of the municipality realized what they were doing, they decided that they were going to stop a major infrastructure. So that they can revisit it in a different way that would help them achieve the net zero that they wanted. So according to evolutionary anthropologist David Sampson, while we may be hardwired to be tribal, it's not a fate to which we're doomed. He believes we're much more elastic than that. It's the belief that beliefs can change.

It's the understanding that if evidence is put forward that challenges my understanding of something, I'm willing to change that belief. And if you connect that with identity, oh, I identify. as someone whose beliefs can change. That is perhaps one of the most powerful tools we could have to inoculate, perhaps not the entire human species, but maybe here something as as bold enough as maybe 20 or 30%, which is actually what you need for social norms to spread.

I try to find programs that will help me practice my own way to shift how I think. And especially if I'm going to achieve my big hairy audacious goal, which is to make Canada a leader in innovation. And if you get just enough people identifying as part of this sort of metatribe um at the species level, it would be my hope that it would at least probabilistically increase the odds that we survived the 21st century.

An innovation is not about profits and products and widgets. It's about people and ideas, the program ideas, is all about people. It's about connecting differences as opposed to tearing us apart. It's about bringing us together. So in a way, ideas is a program that's kind of my professional growth and development so that I stay curious.

Our next listener lives in Ireland, and he wrote to tell us how the program has become a regular companion. Whether listening to our podcast while driving on the motorway or propping up his phone in the kitchen while making a meal. He finds ideas, helps keep his mind active and engaged.

My name is Greg Heelan. I come from Waterford in the south of Ireland and I've lived most of my life in Dublin, where I've pursued a career as a civil servant, a policy advisor, or in my own terms as a grey faceless bureaucrat. As an ally, advocate, and champion for the Canadian teaching and learning community, Shannon knows, as Rebecca Solnet writes, hope is not a lottery ticket, you can sit on the sofa and Clutch. Feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Hope should shove you out the door. To hope is to give yourself to the future. And that commitment to the future is what makes the present, no matter how messy it is, inhabitable. It is my pleasure to introduce the inaugural Shannon K. Murray Lecturer and Knapper Award recipient, Shannon Murray. One programme that really stood out for me was called Shakespeare's Guide to Hope and Learning, an unlikely title, but what captivated me was the speaker Shannon Murray.

We need to look actively for others to talk to, to dream with, to struggle with, and to hope with. We need to form hope bubbles. pockets of students and staff and faculty and others. That's Shannon Murray, an award-winning English professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. In the fall of 2023, the Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope in the Academy was established in her honor. And Professor Murray herself delivered the very first one.

Shakespeare has provided the narrative soundtrack of my life, and lines and characters and stories pop into my head when I need them, explaining, coaching, warning. Comforting me in my life as well as in my work. In her lecture, Shannon Murray outlines her philosophy of teaching using examples from Shakespeare to bring her lessons to life.

So I want to talk through the six principles I've settled on for my last teaching philosophy through the lens of some of Shakespeare's plays. And here are my six principles. Return to what you love. Cultivate Freudenfreude. Ducats are not daughters. Beware of efficiency, at least in things that matter. Mind the gap. And don't give up the ship because you can't control the wind. This is a very short, short list. Her first point was Return to What You Love, which for Murray was Shakespeare's.

Yeah. Remember the moment I fell in love almost fifty years ago with Hamlet? I didn't understand everything about the Hamlet that I was watching. But I got it, and somehow he got me. And how could that be? How could a four hundred year old play about a moody Danish aristocrat have anything to say about the experience of a middle class, moody Canadian teenager?

I think that's still my fundamental research question. What exactly is the strange magic that these plays have? It's a question that still brings me joy to wrestle with And that's Greece. It's lovely, very positive. And her second point was even more positive cultivate Freudenfride that is joy at other people's joy and celebrate it with a word or a card. And she explained that in university it wasn't very normal to celebrate other people's joy that the opposite was the case.

So she was given an administrative job and in that job she sent cards to people when she cut them out in a sense, doing good or succeeding or helping the university. We can be constantly pushed into the sense that we are in competition with each other as teachers, as scholars. And shrinking resources can make us feel as if our colleagues, other disciplines, or other departments are the enemies, that the scarcity is their fault.

We need to keep a focus on abundance and not scarcity, and keep up the practice because it is a practice of delighting in the happiness of others. Then she went into two more points which were a lasers. And one of them quoting from the Merchant of Venice is Don't confuse your ducats with your daughters and she had great fun with some speech by um Shylock, where ducats and daughters were repeatedly mixed up and exchanged. My daughter, oh my duckets oh my daughter fled with a Christian.

O my Christian ducats, justice, the law, my ducats and my daughter A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats, of double ducats stolen from me by my daughter. The jewels But her point was there is a difference between what can be counted and what counts. And don't be fixated on measuring. Now that was salutary for me because as a bureaucrat um I was often interested in measuring. I also had a penchant for spreadsheets and putting numbers into boxes.

So this was thought provoking, and I was open to hear it. I am deeply mistrustful of student ratings of teaching as a measure of good teaching. But I'm really happy when mine are high and I'm sad when they're low. Yeah. I am philosophically aligned with ungrading practices. And my God, my brain is wired for percentages and letter grades.

So I have to resist my own metric fixation, both in myself and in the arguments of others, precisely because education matters and knowledge matters and students matter and there are more than numbers.

And I don't want to model excessive and I often said as a civil servant that I was a faceless grey and faceless bureaucrat, and that was your egoist job in a sense to fade into the background and to move the policy process forward. And it could often be quite wearing because there was all sorts of opposition. So there was a lot of struggle in the job. I loved it and I loved doing it, but it cost.

And that's what I liked about Shannon Murray. She loved what she was doing, she was able to express it at the end of her career, and she had seen some of the struggle. I'm a planner. I like plans. And yet I have to admit that my best and most memorable classes or even courses are not the ones where I pull off a meticulous plan. It is to be truly alive in the knowledge that this moment together with this material and these students and me and this classroom and this world will never happen again.

It is the human and the humane and the present and the now in the experience. And like Hamlet, it's messy and digressive and painful and heartbreaking and worth it. There are so many ineffable things in our lives, so many gifts that come to our lives, and also suffering which is inexplicable and can't be managed in an efficient manner.

One cannot grieve for the loss of your spouse in an efficient way. It just goes on in its own rhythm. So that was the real peril of wisdom Not something I didn't know, but it was just expressed beautifully and concisely, and it really touched my heart. I know my own tendency is to over plan, to overstructure, but Shakespeare reminds me of the beauty in the gap. And reminds me to talk to students about watching for those openings and taking advantage of them. Mind the gap.

And she said Mind the gap. And in her case it was don't overschedule your teaching. Leave the gaps where the students can raise questions, disagree with you, bring their perspective, derail the lesson. And that to me was A real truth as well, that I knew what was really working out. him being reminded of, and she said to quote her Life in its messiness is where good things happen, not in a perfect lesson plan perfectly delivered.

Leaving gaps means trusting that my students might fill them with things even more interesting, original, and beautiful than anything I could have planned myself. When Shannon Murray said mind the gaps, it recalled to mind one of my spare time activities, which is spiritual companioning, and it's listening to people talk about their spiritual journeys, and it's the power of listening non judgmentally. And in that war.

Leaving the gaps is where all the magic comes out, all the spirit comes out, that if you just listen non judgmentally and wait and don't rush in with a word of wisdom or advice, that people come up with the most amazing gems. And this idea of mind in the gallery. I daily take time to just stop and reflect. It's a gap in life. It's not productive, it's not efficient, as Shana Murray was talking about. Um it's just waiting.

And I have the blessing of sitting in a room that overlooks a small garden. I see things that I would never have seen if I didn't mind the gap. a bird picking as a ripe fig. And enjoying us. In the gap of sitting uselessly, inefficiently, non productively, these riches are brought to you.

Now it helps to study old stuff like Shakespeare, stuff that tells me three things. Things can get better, things can get worse, things will certainly not stay the same. And there's hope in that. Shannon Murray really knocked my socks off emotionally with one of the things she said almost at the very end of the lecture.

and I was coming up to my local bakery to do my bread shopping and The programme was continuing, and she was quoting not from Shakespeare for her final point, but from Thomas Moore's Utopia. When you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can. And at that point there was a break and it seemed to me like the Wi Fi on my car had been interrupted. That this had been an inordinate delay on the lecture and in the radio.

But when she came back on, she was taking a gulp of breath and For it is impossible that all should be well, unless all people were good. And she was chalking and Which is a situation I do not expect for some time to come. Thank you. Her enthusiasm in the lecture, her energy, her passion and love for what she did. was thrown into total counterpoint by this evidence of her confrontation with real suffering.

And some of that suffering she explained in her final point. She said it don't give up the ship. Don't give up the ship. Because you cannot control the wind. Because you can't control the winds. And explained that there had been a number of headwinds and that the third level sector, the university sector in Canada, was not in a good place. and that PEI University itself was not in a good place. One option is to jump ship.

And she said you don't give up the ship because you cannot control the wind and I understood from my own life there are times when you just have to keep putting one foot. Yeah. My wife was dying over many years from a terminal cancer diagnosis. Just put your foot one in front of you. And you don't give up that ship. You just cannot. So it's been great for me to have a deep dive back into that fantastic talk by Shannon Murray in her inaugural lecture.

So a very big happy birthday at sixty two ideas, as we say in Ireland Gamora to Uncade, may ya live to be a hundred. What a really lovely wish. Thank you. Are we finished? This is like a hard going spiritual companioning session where you bear your soul. Our heartfelt thanks to Greg Heelen for sharing his story and bearing his soul. God, this is worse than confession. I'm Nala Ayad.

Have you completed the census? It's easy to fill out and completely confidential. Your responses can help plan services in your community. Complete it online today at census.gc.ca. A message from the Government of Canada. Viking. Committed to exploring the world in comfort, journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. Learn more at Viking.com.

My name is Kathy Pike. I'm a retired human rights lawyer living in Toronto. When Kathy Pike found out we were celebrating our sixtieth anniversary, she sent in a long list of episodes she found surprising and sustaining. The episode about Nietzsche and the art of passing by really stopped me in my tracks. After listening to it, I decided not to send an email that I really would have regretted. The program gave me pause, and I'm grateful for that.

Despite her long list, we had to ask Kathy to select just one ideas program If I had to choose just one ideas series that I come back to it would be The God Who Maybe featuring the Irish philosopher Richard Carney. The question usually asked about God is whether God exists. Children ask each other, do you believe in God? But what does the question mean? In 2006, writer broadcaster David Cayley produced a three-part series.

based on conversations he had with Irish philosopher and poet Richard Carney, at Carney's home in Boston, about his book The God Who May Be. Is God a fact whose existence we can prove or disprove? Richard Carney thinks it's the wrong question. In two thousand and one, he published a book called The God Who May Be, in which he says that God is revealed to us not as a positive fact, but as a possibility. Imagination, Richard Carney says, is our only way to the divine.

What I'm trying to get at there is that the alternative of sort of dogmatic theism God is, we know what God is. God is this thing. God is this being that can be defined A to Z in this way. Therefore we can possess God, appropriate God, conceptually, compute and classify God. And that's our property. What we have we hold, and it's our duty to kind of convince everybody else. Now, that to me leads to war and in a lesser mode intolerance, and I want to get away from that dogmatic sense of theism.

towards a a non dogmatic sense of theism, basically. And I wanted to get away from the dogmatic atheism of many of the philosophers and thinkers and students that I frequented in in Canada and Ireland and and Paris in in the seventies and eighties, who said, What? I mean you're interested in the question of God, but you know You you gone soft in the brain or something? Did you not hear of the Enlightenment? Have you not heard of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche? You know, where have you been?

The first time I heard the programme I thought it was magical. I found it so interesting that a Christian philosopher could seem to speak to me although I'm an atheist and Jewish. He explained that the Benedictine teachers he had had first made the case against the existence of God. The students read Marx and Freud they were persuaded that God didn't exist. Then the teachers had them read the case in favor of the existence of God, and the students became convinced that God did exist.

And in some ways that seems in keeping with the modus operandi of ideas to present the case for and against. And end up with a synthesis and for me what he said was a synthesis of these two very different approaches, one that I had some familiarity with and one that was new and delightful. So I was looking for a middle way which would be a form of theism that uh learns from atheism and keeps in dialogue with atheism.

So the God that I was suggesting modestly and metaphorically in the book The God Who May Be is a God who is not in a dogmatic sense and yet is in a in another sense that I'm trying to retrieve from certain passages in scripture. Nobody's a hotline to God and thanks be to God we don't because if we did, we'd be in trouble saying, I've got a voice I've heard a voice from God, it says go out and kill the evil ones and so on. We know certain sects or certain religions who sometimes claim

That there's no need for hermeneutics or interpretation. Sorry, there's just one meaning here and this is it. Uh, we know the damage that can be caused by that belief that the interpreter is God, and in fact is not an interpreter at all, because there's nothing to interpret. The message is absolute and is absolutely possessed by that uh claimant. That's terribly dangerous.

At the time that I heard that, two things came to mind. One is that Richard Carney makes it possible for people to enter into a dialogue with him. It makes it possible for atheists and religious people to communicate with each other.

because there's openness on both people's part. I also think what he says is applicable whether you're religious or not, which is uh to not think in absolutes and to consider the possibilities, consider the fact that you may not know everything there is to know about something.

Listener and lawyer Kathy Pike of Toronto was so taken with the ideas of Richard Carney that she wanted to share them at the right time with her daughter. So a few years later, in the fall of 2009, she sent away for the three C D set. Kathy thought the series would make an excellent soundtrack for the long and stressful journey driving her youngest to university for the very first time.

When my younger daughter was going to McGill and leaving home it fell upon me to drive her to Montreal and I was a little intimidated because I didn't really like the idea of being on the four oh one for six hours. And I wished maybe somebody else could do it, but there wasn't anyone else to do it. So I thought to send for the C D Sat

So that she and I would have a treat, something special to listen to on the way that would detract from the anxiety and we would just focus on listening to the programme together. I I knew she would really enjoy it. In his book The God Who May Be, Richard Carney founds his account of God as possibility on a close reading of selected biblical texts.

The first is the story in the book of Exodus of Moses and the burning bush. A voice addresses Moses from the flames and identifies itself as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It tells Moses that he is to lead the captive Israelites out of Egypt. By what authority? Moses asks, Who shall I say sent me? But he does not get the answer he hopes for.

Moses asked the burning bush for a name. Now the burning bush refuses to give a name, and this is a very tawdry thing. It's a just a thorn bush, you know, in the middle of nowhere that's burning. I thought this talk would be just the right one for my daughter and me to listen to. Both my kids have a preference for the least of these over the powerful. They don't like hierarchy. I thought they'd really like the idea that we co create the world with God, even if we're not religious.

And yet it's the divine, right? And and is revealing itself as the divine, but is refusing to give itself a name. One of the reasons being, as it's been argued, because

If Moses was given a name then he'd go back to the Egyptian and he'd say, Look, my God is more powerful than your God because I got the name and I can invoke this name and I'll have more power and more authority than you do. But no. In other words, I am Not a name that you can possess, not an idol that you can revere, not a thing that you can have. I am a promise, basically. I am who may be, I am who will be, shall be, can be, maybe, incarnate in history, if you respond to my command

to be free, to be just, and to be loving. And that's the message that Moses goes back to his people with, and then the people go from bondage into freedom. In fact my daughter did remember this part when I asked her about it a few weeks ago. She remembered the burning bush. And the burning bush says I am what I am, but according to Carney, could be saying, I will be what I will be. So it's all about possibility.

And possibility is so much more interesting than certainty. Certainty leads you into blind alleys. I want the girls to feel prepared to face the difficulties and the uncertainties and still have that sense of agency. Church and what I'll always kind of hopefully retain access to the case. Yeah. of The impossible becoming possible is the sense of expression. The sense of wonder, the sense of Yeah. The feast days of the first time.

As we were driving along, because I also had to pay attention to the traffic, we would stop and we would pause and we would replay something, we would talk about it. And in fact, I listened to it a third time with my other daughter, who took the train to Montreal so I wouldn't have to drive back alone and visit some friends. And we did the same thing. We stopped and paused, but we probably paused over different things, and she had different observations.

But our heads were filled with it and it turned a stressful experience into a really special one because I had something I could share with my girls that we all liked. This is important, but you know, one must always fare la par des choses, as you say up in Montreal. You know, make it Distinction between that which is enabling and liberating and that which is disabling and incarcerating. And the church has both. That's a Jaina's face. Work that one out.

I can't decide whether ideas really offers conclusions at the end or leaves it to people to form their own conclusions. But at least one has a more informed opinion or like more nuanced opinion. But I find there's always How to live? And these days how to cope with things that you may not be able to change, which I find terribly important to be. People often ask me about hope. This is one thing when you're an activist. The end of every interview is like, how do you get that hope going, you know?

I'm like, yeah. Hope is an optimism. It's not the sense that things are gonna go well. Right? For me hope hope is hope is a discipline.

The annual Massey lectures are a pillar of the ideas calendar. The lectures began in 1961, and they're the most prestigious public lectures in Canada. I'm so honored to be here and and humbled to be given the twenty twenty three Massie lecture. And I'm just so grateful to each and every one of you for showing up tonight and being here and being willing to listen um and hopefully have a conversation as well.

They feature some of the best minds of our time discussing the most pressing issues that we face. It's a tremendous honor to be here to give the first of my massy talk. In my bio was mentioned that I have toured around in a rock band. This is the beginning of the nerd tour. Um so it's just really special to be here in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory. Uh and again Astra Taylor, writer, filmmaker, political organizer, and rocker and self-described philosopher nerd.

delivered the CBC Massey lectures in twenty twenty-three. It was a precarious time post-pandemic. The title of her lectures, The Age of Insecurity Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Rather than something to pathologize, I want us to see insecurity as an opportunity, the simple recognition of our mutual vulnerability, of that fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our entire lives. has potentially revolutionary implications.

The twenty twenty three Massey lecture was delivered by Astra Taylor. I'd never heard of her before. We were still in the pandemic. It was gray, it was cold. I was walking my dog and uh I really liked the sound of her voice. The fundamental question here is simple enough. Does the right to security of the person promised by the Canadian Charter oblige the state to provide for citizens materially? Or does it only protect citizens from an abusive state?

In other words, can we expand it to guarantee a positive right to material security? Because right now, Canadian citizens, despite the country's General. I um fifty eight years old. I was born in Halifax and grew up in Nova Scotia, but I moved to Ottawa. And I have worked uh as a communication strategist uh for the last almost thirty years. We haven't made up our minds about whether we are barons or commoners. These tensions, ambiguities, and possibilities of the

When we were asked which ideas episode is our favorite, that's a hard thing to come up with over thirty years. So of course I thought of something that was fairly recent. Despite possessing such entitlements on paper, we continue to live amid pervasive and persistent insecurity.

Governments near and far commit heinous acts of violence against our citizens. An estimated one point eight billion people worldwide are homeless or living in grossly inadequate housing, lacking basic services including electricity, water, and sanitation. Wars rage, people starve, police kill, and the climate burns. My name is Astra Taylor. I am a writer.

Filmmaker and political organizer, and I was the twenty twenty three C B C Massey lecturer. My lectures were entitled The Age of Insecurity Coming Together As Things Fall Apart. I was sitting outside a coffee shop when I got the call in and my expectations were really humble. I thought maybe we would brainstorm future episodes, maybe I would give some reading recommendations.

And when I was invited to actually give that year's Massey lectures, I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility actually because it I think a a huge honor, but also just an incredible opportunity to have a stage like that to talk about ideas, to talk about things that matter, to try to engage the public in this act of collective meaning making.

She did a five part series and the the episode they were all interesting, but the one that interested me the most was the second episode, which she called Barons or Commoners and It centered on the Charter of the Forest, which was a document signed in twelve seventeen. between the King of England, who was apparently a horrible king, and the commoners, the people of England who were the ninety nine percent of their time. who uh got by by uh grazing their sheep and their cattle on common lands.

Rulers before him, King John and his enforcers capriciously infringed on the peasants' customary rights to subsistence. Rights to fish in the streams and let their animals forage and graze, to gather nuts, berries, honey, kindling, and herbs for medicine. Fences and hedges kept them out of land they did not own outright, but had long shared and used and even lived upon.

And for hundreds of years the monarchy had been taking that land away from people, it had been giving them less and less space, and finally, uh the common people decided they'd had enough and they rebelled, and the king was forced to sign a document which gave them access to the land that they needed and the fish in the streams and the wood in the forest that they would gather to heat their homes.

It is no surprise that tales of the folk hero Robin Hood living freely with his band of rebels in Sherwood Forest and thwarting foresters and the local sheriff first appeared during these years. In twelve seventeen, seeking to consolidate political support, the new King Henry III reissued the Magna Carta alongside a new companion document, the so called Charter of the Forest.

The Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest were considered twin documents, often read aloud in public spaces in the same breath. Among other things, the forest charter restored a significant portion of Royal Forest to the commons. It was, in a sense, an early example of reparations. For it returned property that had been stolen, while also providing the peasantry an affirmative right to something, the security that the access to the commons provided.

I found this fascinating because I'd never heard of the Charter of the Forest before. Like most people, I'd heard of uh the Magna Carta, which is the uh the great charter that was signed two years earlier, and I'd always thought of that as being Sort of a an early human rights document. I didn't realize until I heard this episode of ideas that no, the uh Magna Carta was an agreement between the king and his barons, you know, uh the one percent of that time.

Uh and it was uh basically just uh you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back, kind of an agreement. It was uh the barons forcing the king to back off, to tax them less, to let them uh sort of ride roughshod over the peasantry. It really did nothing to protect the common people who were the majority of people. The answer simply stated is that the Charter of the Forest provided material security for all. It limited private property rights, halted privatization, and returned land for common use.

This makes it deeply unsettling to today's capitalist democracies and generally reviled by the business interests that currently reign, for it implies rights not only to be protected from something, a tyrannical state. but the right to something, a good life supported by the state. Both kinds of rights are essential to a free society. That is to say, we need both the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest together.

I I just found it so relevant to the time that we were living in, you know, the uh the pandemic was such an upheaval for all of us in so many different ways. And uh I I found there was a a common thread for me because I was seeing the SERB payments here in Canada and a parallel between that and the Charter of the Forest and commoning rights. when people, average people, common people, have uh a safe place to stand.

they're harder to push around. And that uh modicum of security given to people by the state, it uh it's a threat to uh market forces and some of our political forces. The question before us really is quite simple. Do we see ourselves as barons or as commoners? In today's world, it can be hard to tell, largely because we are encouraged to see ourselves as barons to be.

Given the underfunded and shrinking state of many public services, the most obvious path to security for ordinary people is through the marketplace. Security, crudely put, is a function of wealth. The last thing the powerful want to see is a revival of the idea found in the Charter of the Forest a robust right to the material security of the commons for everyone. Such a guarantee would make it harder to manufacture the insecurity that capitalism relies on.

But if we could rely instead on the As I was walking the dog and listening to Astra Taylor's voice, you know, in my earbuds, she said We are asked these days, in the West at least, to uh consider ourselves uh if we are not already barons, we are asked to consider ourselves as barons in waiting. and uh I see exactly what she means and I am definitely not a baron or a baron in waiting. I am a common person and I uh that makes me feel good. It makes me feel like it's it's uh

All for one, one for all. I like that part about it. And collective well being. The forest charter guaranteed rights to herbage, which was grass for grazing sheep and cattle, pannage, which was sustenance for pigs. Turbery, which was peat fuel from a bog, and Estovers, which is kindling. This lecture is just a convoluted excuse to say the word turbery. To a room full of people. Turbury.

When we come together and support one another, that strength and solidarity. It just it makes society stronger. I'm not explaining that very well, but I'd never heard of the Charter of the Forest. We were living through this uh tumultuous time with the pandemic. And I could see that eight hundred years ago people were living through uh something that was equally tumultuous and threatening.

And instead of being atomized and separated from one another and just letting it happen, they came together in a common cause and they changed things for the better for themselves. So I found it very inspiring. Wow, I love that. That was so well said. And I love the way she phrased it, that when regular people have some security, they're harder to push around. So that was incredibly gratifying and uh moving for me to hear her comment.

The idea that matters of law and policy should be left to experts is a myth today's barons want us to believe. Like the medieval commons, the law is something that belongs to everyone. It is political terrain we can struggle over and change. The right to security, whatever we decide security. Is ours. Proclaim and to make real. Thank you.

I've gone through my own life getting to where I am hasn't been easy, but now with my daughter sort of at that same point where I was when I was moving into a dorm room and plugging in my radio. I know that if we're not here helping her, she's not going to reach her fullest potential. And listening to her program really makes me. And All around me when I do listen to the news. I look at what my daughter said.

I think boy those of us who have been fortunate And that makes things better for everyone in society. Thank you for joining us on this journey. Life altering ideas I Our special series celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of ideas. By Karen Chickalock. Special thanks to Patrick. And Kate Zemond from the And of course too. Susan Radoge. Greg Healan, Greer Johnston, and Kathy Power. Technical production by Emily Chiarvasio. The web producer of ideas. Lisa Ayuso.

Our senior producer is Nikola Lukshich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala. For more C B C podcasts, go to cbc.ca Slash podcast.