Going to Massey

Every year, Massey College in the University of Toronto and CBC Radio co-sponsor the Massey lectures, inaugurated in 1961 “to enable distinguished authorities to communicate the results of original study or research on important subjects of contemporary interest.” Among the luminaries who have presented are: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jane Jacobs, Robert Jay Lifton, Doris Lessing, Noam Chomsky, John Ralston Saul, and even Martin Luther King. These books are a non-fiction lover’s delight.

After reading Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress last year, I made a mental note to get through the lot of them, and today decided to get a move on with it, starting with Margaret Visser’s Beyond Fate. This is such an intelligent book, exploring the fatalism of people today; what it means to us and why we accept it. She discusses our perceptions of freedom and time; our use of metaphor; chance vs. fate; guilt and forgiveness vs. honour and shame, and much, much more. At every turn she supplies the Greek and Latin roots for words and concepts that have been modernized, and for that alone, I know she is my kind of person. I love her writing style, which is consistently excellent and engaging. Read her other books too, and I guarantee you enlightenment.

Conor Cruise O’Brien’s On the Eve of the Millennium suffers from acute anachronism, although one could say it was inevitable, given the subject of his lecture. This book is so much from a pre-September 11th world that it seems almost quaint, although it still has merit. For instance, he talks about how the democratic process has turned into a series of popularity contests (true), how all forms of social organization involve significant amounts of hypocrisy (truer), and how religion and nationalism have great staying power (alas, truest). I think this book was probably more meaningful when it came out in 1994, but I’d have read it anyway for this one line alone: “…the American Enlightenment resists decay because it is pickled in holy brine.”