The Lost Massey Lectures (2 page)

The Masseys have been graced by some of the greatest minds in the world. In this book, House of Anansi Press and the
CBC
have gathered together some early sets of lectures we are calling “the lost Massey Lectures.” All of them have been out of print for years. The
CBC
had published the Massey Lectures as part of its own publishing program until the end of the 1980s, when Anansi took over that role. By then, some of the lectures had gone out of print, and we thought it was time to give the public an opportunity to rediscover them.

The lost Massey Lectures are about the complex of ideas that link our political, social, and moral worlds — how we live together in modern societies and define our responsibilities towards each other as global citizens. There are five sets of Massey Lectures in this collection. The first three — by John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Goodman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — were written during the heat and turmoil of the 1960s, the decade of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” the escalating Vietnam War, political protest, civil rights struggles, cultural upheaval, and the assault on the staid certainties of the '50s.

In the 1965 Massey Lectures, the distinguished liberal economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith returned to the theme Barbara Ward had introduced five years before. He called his lectures
The Underdeveloped Country
. The expression “underdeveloped countries” was coined in the late 1950s and is no longer in general use. Thought to be patronizing, it was replaced by other, more congenial descriptions — developing countries, less developed countries, the Third World, the South — but while the vocabulary may have changed, the issues Galbraith talked about more than four decades ago are depressingly familiar.

Galbraith analyzed the causes of poverty in different parts of the world. The barriers to advancement, he wrote, were not the
same everywhere. In some areas, the main barrier was lack of education; in others, it was social structure or the way resources were distributed. To help poor nations move forward, aid was necessary, but one size would not fit all. Different problems required different solutions. In particular, Galbraith was concerned that what worked in rich countries would not work in poor countries, which faced different pressures. He decried conservative thinkers who opposed foreign aid, saying, “I do not worry about these people. They have always been with us; they add variety to life.”

Paul Goodman followed Galbraith as Massey lecturer in 1966. Trained in philosophy and literature, Goodman taught at several major universities in the United States. He described himself as an anarchist. In keeping with the spirit of his times, he also taught at the so-called “free university” organized by students at San Francisco State College. Goodman was a trenchant social critic. He wrote essays, novels, plays, and poetry. His Massey Lectures,
The Moral Ambiguity of America
, were strongly felt and often angry. He was both gloomy and optimistic as he pondered the ambiguities in American values. On one side, he saw the drive for efficiency and control by the institutions of politics, industry, and commerce, which he argued destroyed vitality and excluded human beings as useless; these values produced what he termed the “Empty Society.” In contrast were the lives of real, flesh-and-blood people, organized in local communities, dynamic and socially inventive. Goodman described this upside of American values as “our beautiful libertarian, pluralist and populist experiment.”

The world lost a great spirit when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in the early evening of April 4, 1968, on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had come to the city to lead a march to support black garbage workers who were striking for better pay and working conditions. As a campaigner for civil
rights and an orator of extraordinary power, King was unequalled. Who can forget the eloquence of his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963?

The broadcasts of King's Massey Lectures,
Conscience for Change
, began in November 1967. They followed a summer of severe racial unrest. There had been major riots in Detroit and Newark. Scores of people had been killed. Hundreds had been injured. Many more were permanently traumatized by what had happened. In his lectures, King spoke of the causes of the violence. He said that everyone had underestimated the rage that black people had been suppressing. Most of the violence in the riots had not been directed against people, he noted, but against property, the symbols of white power and wealth. Despite this, he argued that the best strategy for improving the tragic living conditions of black people, and of poor people everywhere, was through massive campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience. People had to transcend the boundaries of race, tribe, class, and nation. “We must either learn to live together as brothers,” he said, “or we're all going to perish together as fools.” In his final lecture, King described non-violence as an “imperative for action.” The lecture was broadcast on Christmas Eve. A little more than three months later, he was dead.

The final two sets of Massey Lectures in this collection are about familiar and enduring themes in Canada: national unity and Canadian sovereignty. In 1976, René Lévesque, leader of the Parti Québécois, was elected premier of Quebec. He pledged to pursue a new relationship between the province and the rest of Canada, an arrangement he called “sovereignty-association.” When the influential thinker and urban activist Jane Jacobs delivered her Massey Lectures,
Canadian Cities and Sovereignty Association
, late in the fall of 1979, the first Quebec Referendum was only six months away and the possibility that the province
might secede from Canada was high on the country's list of national anxieties.

In her lectures, Jacobs described a key dynamic in the sovereignty debate as “a tale of two cities” — Toronto and Montreal. For most of its history, Montreal had been the financial, industrial, and cultural capital of Canada. In the 1970s, it was surpassed by Toronto and relegated to the status of a regional city. This, noted Jacobs, was unprecedented in Canada: never before had a national city lost its position. The traditional role of Canadian regional cities, she wrote, was to exploit resources from their hinterlands; they were not economically creative. If Montreal became a typical regional city, it would stagnate economically and culturally, which would spell trouble, not only for the city but for the province of Quebec as a whole. Jacobs wondered whether Montreal and Quebec would be able solve their problems within the Canadian political framework.

Jane Jacobs analyzed Lévesque's proposals for sovereignty-association. She was largely sympathetic to them, not just because she thought that the prevalent approach to economic life in Canada might not work for Quebec, but for another, more compelling reason, which went to the heart of her political thought: she hated centralization. She thought centralized governments and bureaucracies were “stifling” and “wasteful” and would become a heavy burden on future generations. Sovereignty-association might combat centralization and lighten the burden. It would be a “presentable gift to the future.”

If Jane Jacobs was concerned about centralization in Canada, Eric Kierans was concerned about a larger process, globalization. A businessman and economist, Kierans had taught at McGill University and later had a short-lived career in federal politics under Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Critical of the government's economic policies — Kierans thought they undermined Canada's sovereignty — he resigned and returned to teaching in 1972.

In his Massey Lectures,
Globalism and the Nation State
, delivered in the fall of 1983, Kierans took as his starting point the Summit of Industrialized Nations held in Williamsburg, Virginia, earlier that year. Hosted by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the conference took place in the wake of the second oil price shock, a period of rising inflation, growing unemployment, and declining world trade. Tensions between the West and the Soviet bloc were high. The purpose of the Williamsburg Summit was to counter the Soviet threat and formulate common economic, foreign, and defence policies among the seven advanced industrial nations. As part of a closing statement, President Reagan read what he called the “Williamsburg Declaration on Economic Recovery.” It called upon member nations to pursue policies that would lead to reduced inflation, lower interest rates, and increased investment and employment opportunities. Reagan spoke of achieving a “convergence of economic performance.” Kierans saw in this the emergence of a Western bloc that would override the interests of individual countries and harm their capacity to look after the welfare of their own citizens. In his lectures, Kierans pleaded for Canada to affirm its independence. “We are not an accident of geography,” he wrote, “nor are our traditions, culture, and languages to be written off in the alleged efficiency of a global economy.” He called the promise that globalization would improve the living standards of people everywhere “an illusion and thoroughly dishonest.”

We live in an age that is said to be a historical. It is difficult to remember the past — or even acknowledge it — living as we do, focused on an “eternal present,” driven by busy schedules and information overload, and wrapped up in anxieties about careers, family, health, the environment, terrorism, the future of the world.
It can be both comforting and discouraging to know that many of the issues we confront today have been with us in different forms for a long time; people have thought about them and grappled with them for generations. I hope you find that these lost Massey Lectures are both a useful mirror of the times in which they were written and an insightful context for some our most pressing current dilemmas.

B
ERNIE
L
UCHT
Toronto
June 2007

In a lecture series, in contrast with a novel, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot. These five lectures have all to do with the same general theme—the economics and politics of what we have come to call, with some optimism, the developing countries. In the manner of a musical composition—and this I imagine is the only resemblance—the treatment has several distinct movements. The first two lectures deal with the common features of the poor countries and the problems that are common to them. They show how poverty tends to induce common patterns and modes of economic, political and also social and biological behavior and to justify our looking at the poor countries as a class.

The next two lectures are concerned with the causes of poverty. In contrast with the first two, they show the great differences between the poor countries. They show that although poverty enforces common patterns of behavior it proceeds from radically different causes. This I consider to be the most serious error now
characterizing not all but a great deal of the discussion of economic development. In these lectures, I divide the developing countries into three distinct classes in accordance with the obstacles which principally oppose economic advance.

Inherent in this type of classification is a diagnosis—an identification of the causes of backwardness and poverty. In the last lecture, I go on from diagnosis to remedy—to consider what can be done to promote or insure advance in light of the causes previously identified.

The first and most obvious consequence of poverty is political and social and civil instability. As I write these lectures, the world is anxiously watching the ominous course of conflict in Vietnam. We are occasionally reminded that there is also chronic warfare a little to the west in Laos. There have recently been riots over food in India and the Indians and Pakistanis continue to snarl—and at this writing are fighting—across their long and intricate frontier. Various of the Arab states are at odds with each other on all matters except their hostility to Israel. Algeria has recently undergone a convulsive change in government. In the Congo vast areas, in the words of today's
New York Times
, “are not being governed in any significant sense.” In this hemisphere we have had until recently an armed truce in Santo Domingo and a good deal of tension in Colombia, Bolivia and other of the Latin American
republics. Even in the countries I have not mentioned in Africa, Asia and Latin America one can count, from time to time, on window-breaking at the American Embassy, or the burning of a United States Information Service Library, these being the now accepted manifestations of discontent. It is said in Washington that the American diplomat, once characterized by his striped pants, cocktail glass and dignified bearing, can now be told by his putty knife.

By contrast, in recent years things have been peaceful in Western Europe and, by all outward evidence, in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And similarly in Canada and the United States. We are having disorders associated with racial discontent, and will have more, and this is by no means unconnected with the poverty with which I am here concerned. This apart, the major manifestation of unsettlement in the United States in recent times has been the Free Speech movement at the University of California. And now all is quiet there. Either free speech is safe or interest in it was a passing fad.

A visitor from another planet, in these past years, would have been inclined to divide this one into two halves—into the troubled and the untroubled sector. The untroubled sector would be the comparatively well-to-do countries of Eastern and Western Europe and of North America. The troubled part would be the poor and contentious lands comprising most of the rest of the globe. Only after snatching a surreptitious look at the staff papers of the National Security Council, hearing a speech by a high State Department official on the intentions of the Sino-Soviet Bloc,
¹
studying a thoughtful article in
Foreign Affairs
or seeing the newspapers of our two countries would he be aware that the proper distinction is not between the well-to-do and tranquil countries and the poor and troubled but between the Communist countries and the Free World.