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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 22, 2009
Lemming people
One needn't apologize for being a backward person when the mob is dashing for the edge of a cliff.Fasten on this conventional "lemming" metaphor. As I imagine, one is performing a public service even by distracting one's fellow lemmings from their onward march. Some of them may be so outraged to find you marching the wrong way that they stop to argue with you. You might even save a lemming's life that way. Now, this old cliché comparison between humans who follow the crowd and the subnivean rodents of Canada's tundra biomes is not entirely fair to the lemmings. A lemming is in fact a rather solitary animal, in its workaday life, especially when foraging in our sub-Arctic winters under those crusting snows. Everyone has heard about their mass suicides. Everyone has probably also heard that this is really "a myth." It isn't, entirely. Unlike humans, but very much like some other rodents, lemmings can be extraordinarily fecund. When there's food to be had, they will suddenly breed up to unbelievable numbers. They then become food themselves, and there are oscillating population swells and crashes. "Myths" often seem to echo facts of nature. The ancient underlying belief that lemmings did not so much reproduce sexually as fall from the sky may be an instance of this. (They are light, roll nicely, and can thus land well from considerable heights.) Under population pressures, lemmings do sometimes congregate in huge hordes and go off in great migrations, or radiations, toward some promised lemming-land, in search of "hope and change." Lemmings can swim, but not forever. They have often been observed pausing at cliffs, over the edge of water. But also on shores just beside the water: it's not as if they choose the cliffs. The impulse to go onward is hard to check. Surely, progress may be resumed on the other side of the water. A few lemmings, anyway, get pushed over, or pushed in, by the pressure of the crowd. Then, in a blink, they are all off and swimming: very cute, if you have ever seen a video (tiny limbs paddling like crazy). Sometimes topography obliges, and the lemmings all make it to the other side of a fine, slow river. Sometimes it does not, for it turns out they have chosen Hudson's Bay. It is the same when people vote for demagogues, or "pied pipers." Sometimes they survive, to go on reproducing, after the usual losses to predators along the way. Certainly there is no conscious intention to commit mass suicide. Indeed, one of my favourite posters, from Despair.com, shows a grizzly interrupting the migration of a salmon, and reads: "The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly." While I've taken two uncharacteristically subtle digs at the current U.S. president already, and would not hesitate to take more at the man Charles Krauthammer referred to this week as "baby Jesus," after reviewing the president's latest narcissist performances in Asia -- surrendering U.S. interests in Taiwan, Japan and India that his Chinese hosts hadn't even asked him to surrender -- Barack Obama is only a foreground illustration. And we can hardly sneer at the Americans, after we accepted 16 years of Pierre Trudeau. There will always be demagogues, as there will always be people eager to follow them, into new "promised lands." The advantage humans have over lemmings is in our knowledge, or potential knowledge, of history. I was delighted this past week to receive several kind compliments from present or former history teachers, who told me they thought a line from last week's column belongs up in classrooms: "One of the things that built our civilization, and has contributed to every other great civilization, is reverence for the past. With its extinction comes the extinction of the civilization itself: it loses all of its moorings." It delighted me that, even today, such people easily grasp both propositions: the more obvious one about history as a manual of instruction for things not to do, but also the less obvious -- for history is also a manual for things that always need doing, and can only begin to be understood through this "reverence" for the past and surviving custom. Reverence, or love, as Christians and Confucians have long taught, is the great teacher, the mysterious agency that opens our eyes. Nothing will ever be learned without it. This is the last of three Sunday columns in which I've touched generally on the idea of "the people." I have done so because I think we are living in a society that has -- through lovelessness, in fact -- lost sight of what they are. We have come to look at them in bureaucratic terms, in statistical masses, in "constituencies" to be manipulated by political processes. Reciprocally, we have come to endow "the people" with gnostic collective powers, and "leaders" with perverse magical attributes to inspire these masses. True charity and true understanding begin when we look into the eyes of a single, actual person. All the saints knew this; all the great philosophers knew that philosophy itself is "personal." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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