Hike One: Remembering Dad
#TakeAHikeDay
In November I travelled to Hamilton to visit Dad’s house one last time, and as it happened, my first full day at the house was Sunday November 17th #takeahikeday
It seemed fitting to plan an itinerary of hiking and remembering our time together, tramping about on the Dundas Valley trails we tramped on together. I looked forward to quiet solitude between bursts of house cleaning, to ponder the meaning of life and consider the state of the world and my role in changing things for better or for worse – Dad always encouraged my philosophical studies. Indeed many naturalists are influenced by the philosophy of the utopian socialists who took positions on social change very similar to what I heard Dad say during our debates. Not my positions but positions I can understand, but more on that later.
That first day I spent a blissful sunny hiking afternoon, remembering Dad and some of his qualities and values I appreciated and that I shared at his memorial at McMaster University in July: investigating, teaching, encouraging, discovering, loving, creating, and appreciating the intellectual potential of silence.
Hike Two: Love and Contradiction
As I hiked on Monday I reflected on love and contradiction, or love amidst contradiction.
Going through a box of photos, I came across a folder of letters I wrote to Dad with photocopies of his replies. I am struck by two things: that I wrote him so many letters in my youth, and that he kept them all and in order! One paragraph beautifully expresses his love for me, and the constant tension of him wanting me to be different that undercut our relationship:
“It is because I love you beyond all means of expression, that I write to you about how you are approaching your future. The most important thing about worthy personal values is that they be a state of mind; implementation of those values is a strategic question which requires sensitivity to constraints in the world around, whatever that world might be. Adaptation in the natural world is more than being pushed by constraints, but to ignore them makes living one’s values much more difficult. Your face, like a flower or a tree in the Tofino rainforest, is a beautiful and natural thing. Why should it not be left to prosper as all natural things do? What purpose is served that transcends the difficulties imposed, where values are a state of mind and not appearances? No life direction is well served by neglect of reality, and recognition of that reality does not mean ones values are lost.”
Dad and I struggled over the question of what is necessary to make a real difference in confronting injustice, and whether or not fundamental structural change is realistic; we struggled over what it means to prosper in a world where prosperity for the few comes at the expense of impoverishment for the many. Throughout our relationship, our interpersonal struggle was at heart a political struggle. Dad could never accept my positions on radical political-economy. In my own turn I pushed Dad hard to change his positions. Our relationship revolved around a debate that history demonstrates has no peaceful resolution, akin to a mother giving birth, there is pain in the change to a new society.
The debates between me and Dad centered on the question: Can we build a better world while leaving unaltered the fundamental contradictions of capitalist private property?
This was also a debate engaged by utopian socialists whose ideas were influential among American naturalists at the forefront of hiker culture. I can see so much of Dad in their positions.
In the period between the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the Civil War (1861-1865), the economic base of American society, scaffolded by Antebellum slavery, transformed from colonial mercantilism to industrial capitalism through the consolidation of private property into the hands of leading capitalist families. As former slaves became indentured sharecroppers and dispossessed workers moved to urban centres, the resultant burgeoning of a cheap labour workforce led to rapid expansion of trade union organizing and an explosion of class conflicts in some of the earliest and most militant strike actions in labour history.
Contemporary to Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto which called for workers to abolish private property, white genteel intellectuals from petty-bourgeois families who had supported the abolition of slavery now walked a thin line of eschewing the brutal exploitation and suffering of the working classes, while holding fast to their property. Influenced by the ideas of utopians such as Charles Fourier, this society of men sought alternatives to capitalism which left private property untouched. Intellectuals such as Charles Anderson Dana appealed to the utopian society of men not to join with, but rather to politically outmaneuver the New England working class uprisings of the 1880s: “It is an essential characteristic of the new Social Science, that it is pacific and not destructive. . . . It calls on individuals, on parties, and on nations, to lay aside their differences, and to find, in a just union of material forces, the only sure means of private success, and of public well-being” (Newman, 2003, p 526). Utopian communities sprung up across New England; communities which attracted the interest of Henry David Thoreau and others who remain influential in modern hiker culture.
But utopian communities were inaccessible to the working classes and did little to nothing to alter economic inequities. Marx called utopian positions “grotesque mediocrity”, for laying aside “differences” means accommodating to the interests of capital. Marx countered the utopian position with a materialist understanding of social organization. According to Marx, “the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch” (Engels, 1880).
My hike on Monday emphasized to me how much we’re destroying our society and the planet. Capitalist economic organization is fundamentally corrupted by exploitative social relations; profits result from unequal exchange between owners and labourers. If everyone had the same inherent worth and right to equal standards of living, capitalism wouldn’t work; there would be no return on investment and the system would collapse in financial ruin. I personally believe that no one individual, no family, no community, no country is inherently more deserving than another; I definitely don’t believe that rich people are smarter or more deserving than poor people. Actually, history shows us that rich people screw things up for everyone else; some of the most innovative and ecologically responsible solutions to major human problems have come from the world’s poor communities.
As I hiked I reflected on how much of my relationship with Dad revolved around such economic debate, and how I struggled with a balance of engaging Dad versus setting the debate aside so we could appreciate our relationship through music or being outdoors.
Hike Three: Clashing World Views
As I hiked on Tuesday I reflected on how Dad and I situated our opinions and world views in our class / gender /generational experiences.
When Dad came to visit our family in the Philippines, he was so engaged and interested in everything we were doing. We had a good time, and I know that he was deeply moved by his experiences. But even after his trip we still fought, sometimes very heatedly, about peasant struggles for land reclamation. We couldn’t get past our differing opinions on the private ownership of property. It’s not like socialists think people shouldn’t own things – but land and factories and productive capital aren’t just things – they’re the way we meet our needs as a whole society. When some people own the land and the sites of production and derive all the profits, it creates an owning class and an exploited class, along with ever widening inequities.
So Dad tries to convince me that there must be a way that land-owning families can keep their land and peasant communities can have access to the land, too. I get frustrated because addressing economic injustice is what peasants are asking for, and I can’t see why we should let land-owning families keep vast tracts of land. Peasant communities, who have suffered unspeakable depravations and losses, they should be the ones to decide, and what I hear them saying is give us our land and support our communal farming operations.
It’s about whose leadership we accept and whose position we’re willing to follow. And political positions are a result of our class position and the rich/white/male/hetero privileges we have access to. We need to turn this society on it’s head and follow the lead of the exploited and oppressed for a good long while, or else we will see the end of our days.
Hike Four: Friends and Enemies
Wednesday morning was my last hike of the week due to time constraints. Friends and enemies is a good synthesis of my reflections as I hiked my last hike in Dundas Valley.
I understand where Dad is coming from – but I wish we could have done a better job agreeing to disagree. I was too hard on Dad in my own turn – I do think at times I treated him like the enemy because he held bourgeois liberal positions. Ultimately he wasn’t the enemy, but like the utopian socialists, his philosophical and political perspectives on the world were tangled in his class position in the world, a position I struggled to move away from. But I still loved my Dad, and he loved me.
At the end of the day, the hike, our journey in life, what really matters is holding our loved ones close while living our principles to the fullest.
Some of my readings:
Under the Frosty Sky 