 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. The sun is setting earlier and earlier each night. Evenings are cooler. The winds along Dallas Road are picking up. Next Monday is Labor Day. Going back to school ads are flooding the airwaves. These are the sure signs that summer is rapidly coming to an end. Since May 16th, we have produced 15 episodes of First Person Plural. It has been an interesting and rewarding summer as we have examined topics from aging to anger, from makeovers to the moon, and from poetry to pronouncements. Much to our surprise, however, we have discovered that one hour a week is often not enough to discuss everything we like to discuss on a given topic. As things were happening around us and we thought more about certain topics, we had the urge to explore some issues further. During the summer of 2002, scandals have brought to the business world, leaving one to wonder if the cracks in capitalism, especially Wall Street-style American capitalism, aren't showing as company after company is implicated in fraudulent accounting practices and securities dumping. Major League Baseball is once again on the verge of a work stoppage, with players having set August 30th as the strike deadline. Fans are walking out of stadiums of protest, but in many ways it looks like the same old, same old. War rhetoric is heating up between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, and the U.S. and Iraq. No one seems to be sitting down and talking to each other. Can Leontard's concept of parology offer a prescription in a world that seems fragmented and ungrounded? Today we look back on three issues that we have raised during previous episodes. Professional baseball, economic trust and parology. This week's episode is a title and another thing. Specifically you did a review of eBay, taking a look at the culture of eBay. Then quite a bit has happened in the business world. In fact, companies are sort of falling like dominoes over the summer. The Dow Jones has dropped, I don't know how many points. And it seemed like we hit upon a concept that we didn't fully develop that is becoming more important. And that's the concept of trust in economics. The fact that you can't have economic exchange in an atmosphere of suspicion. Boy, were you right. Without some rudimentary element of trust, commerce cannot occur. And as usual, I was the only person in the world who knew this. And as usual, everyone should have listened to me when they had the opportunity. That's right. But there was one gratifying occurrence. I saw Alan Greenspan quoted on the Inron Arthur Anderson fiasco. And it's repercussions all the way up a line. And he said that if anyone involved in the review process had done his job at any point, then the whole thing never would have gotten out of hand. So basically said no one, not a single person who was responsible to ensure the trust of the stockholders and the business community did it. Not to mention the outright criminality that was involved. Yes. But no one executed. Nobody could be bothered to do his job. Nobody could be bothered to put forth any force of will to do what he was expected to do by those who put together the system. Why do you think they didn't do their jobs? Because they just didn't want to. Yeah, but most people have other incentives besides whether they want to or not to be responsible. There may have been other incentives. I'm not so naïve that I think nobody could have been bribed or let's say considered for future considerations in exchange for what they were willing to do today favor trading. But I think the real issue was that they just didn't feel like it. There just was no impetus there to do anything other than accept bribes. There was no impetus to do anything other than trade favors. See, this is the problem that I have with the rhetoric that's been going on this summer about this including Greenspan's statement. Okay, so nobody did their job. What are the consequences to that? How come it took so long and how come somebody had to blow the whistle before they knew that nobody was doing their job? And I don't hear anybody addressing this from a systems level. I mean, Bush gets on TV and says there are a few bad apples. We were trying to make a list before we started talking. I came up with Enron, Arthur Anderson, which is implicated in a half a dozen of these things. AOL, WorldCom, Martha Stewart is being investigated. It seems like you hear a new company every week. I can't keep up with them all. This is not a few bad apples. This is a systematic problem. I am not sure if it's a systematic problem as much as it is a cultural one. What we're learning here is that if a business culture is, well I say a business culture, if a commercial culture, by which I mean commerce, not advertisement culture is fundamentally rotten, then there's no system that's going to save it. A decent system is necessary but not sufficient for, quote, production, close quote to occur. But there ought to be consequences in the system for getting this far off track. Everybody had a job to do the way Greenspan says and they didn't do their job. Shouldn't we have known that sooner? Well that's just the issue in the United States. The system of which you speak was put together by a bunch of people who themselves did not want to get caught. Ah. The monkeys were guarding the bananas and they put together a system that saw to it that it would be darn difficult to prosecute a monkey for anything. And that's a cultural problem, not a systematic one. It's common knowledge that attorneys who put together public policy leave back doors in it in the way that a computer programmer leaves a back door in a computer program so that after they're finished working for the government they can go into private practice and make a great deal of money. Showing somebody where the back door is. It's like a video game company that sells you a video game and then sells you the secret cheap book to it. I mean this is an entirely different level of sleaziness beyond arms dealers who sell to both sides. That actually comes off as being somewhat even-handed. At least they're neutral. Hey, it's just business. Yeah. So what do we do? How do we regain trust? You have to raise the bar to use the common metaphor for it. I like the idea of stakeholder at this point. I think that part of the problem is it's been so bottom line driven that only people who could make a profit or lose money have been important to the system. I think there need to be other players considered when assessing the success or failure of a business. And of course this is something that nobody that I know of is talking about when they talk about these scandals at all. Well, not in the United States. I hear the term stakeholder constantly in Canada. I've complained to some organizations in the States calling for stakeholders to be considered but these are usually environmental organizations or academic organizations. They are not business people. And that's the catch 22. No one who isn't part of the power elite already is going to be permitted to recommend solutions, to participate in solutions, even to comment on the matter at hand. The real issue here that stops an easy and facile diagnostic from occurring is the issue that led to the trouble in the first place. The inner party to use the Orwellianism just can't be bothered to police itself. They do not wish to be policed. They wish to do what they want to do. They do not wish you to stop them. And in fact a system that says that the only control over them is going to be self-policing is a system doomed to failure. I would say it's exactly backwards. So again a cultural problem. We're talking about what can we do to stop this from happening. And the answer is, well there are any number of answers, I would point out that the antecedent to we in that question largely determines what answers are feasible and what are not. Interesting idea. Greenspan may be the exactly wrong person to solve this problem. Just that. It's a lot like George W. Bush telling us that there are only a few bad apples in the bunch. Rather than asking us, do you think there are only a few bad apples in the bunch or do you think the problem is more widespread? He's not into asking anyone anything. Except perhaps his father. Peter Uberoth referred to George W. Bush as quote the boy, close quote in the 1980s. George W. was let's say involved with the Texas Rangers baseball club for a while. And Uberoth said after the fact that nobody among the Major League Baseball Administration had really felt that he was competent to make a go of it. But they felt that they owed some debt of respect to his father and so they let quote the boy, close quote, have a go at it. Yeah that was hilarious. That was Al Franken who said that yesterday. Yeah I'm quoting Al Franken in quoting Uberoth. But I think it's pertinent because what Franken was talking about was we have Bush who is the CEO president trying to solve this crisis in economics and business when in fact he has not been that good of a business person or that respected of a business person in the past. He is in fact the quintessential insider who gets away with a whole bunch of stuff not because of what he knows, but of who he knows. And this is really the problem that went on with Enron and Arthur Anderson. It was a bunch of boys who knew each other, who hung out together, who played golf together and did everything that they could together, had their families together and so forth who all decided that they wanted to make a lot of money and proceeded to do so unethically. No one who has the capacity to solve quote the problem, close quote, is going to be permitted to do so in the United States. Those who have the power do not want quote the problem, close quote, solved. If anything they want it to grow worse. They are perfectly happy with the world in which even the most rudimentary checks on commerce are simply not enforced. Because then they get to make more money. And have more power. The problem with this is that it's going to have consequences that they are pretending aren't going to occur. I mean, I think that this is a crack in the facade, if you will. They can continue along this line, but what happens is eventually somebody whistleblows and a whole bunch of investors lose their trust. And that gets back to what we were talking about on May 23rd, that there is this element of trust that is falling apart. And without trust people don't purchase. And if they don't purchase or they can't purchase, eventually the system breaks down. I think that that's what's going to eventually bring this around to a different way of doing business. It's not going to sustain itself in the long run. I think that this way of doing business emerged during the 1980s when deregulation was the name of the game. And we are beginning now, just now, 20 years later, to see the consequences of this. I think if a countervailing force exists and is brought into play, it's going to be won on an international level. I don't think the Americans are going to do anything about cleaning their own house. They've made it clear for 20 years now that they just can't be bothered. But the rest of the world, including Canada, including Europe, including everyone, depends heavily on the American economy. And they just don't have the luxury of letting the Americans act like eight-year-olds in this respect. And the good news in that is that the Americans are just as dependent upon these foreign economies as these foreign economies are dependent upon them. They have a rhetoric of being all-powerful and so forth, but let's face it, they're the largest consumers in the world, and they like their stuff. They really, really like their stuff. And they're not going to give up their stuff easily. They're not going to sacrifice their stuff. One of the stupidest things I've heard about the Canada-U.S. relationship, the commercial relationship, and again, I mean commercial a la commerce, not commercial a la advertising, is that the U.S. is bigger than Canada, and therefore Canada has to do what the U.S. tells it. It rules out the possibility of overlooking other considerations, one of which is that we discussed in the Pets episode. It is not necessarily pertinent if the other dog is bigger. Not even discussing that consideration. There's a possibility of an alliance among Canada and the other 200-something nations on the globe. If Canada took on the U.S. single-handedly, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Canada coming out on top. But there is no pre-existing reality that stops Canada from forming alliances with other nations. In fact, Canada is involved in several alliances with other nations. Well, look at what Europe is doing. By uniting Europe, they are in fact beginning to create a contravailing force in the world to American dominance. And I think that's part of what motivates the European Union. The question of how much unity Europe is going to have, unified currency, unified constitution, who's in, who's out, which particular alliances are enforceable, which particular alliances are enforced, is one that's fascinated me for years. Ever since it became clear that, well, trivially since it became clear that the euro really was going to be put into circulation, the unit of currency, the unit of exchange, but really for some time before that. There was some speculation when I was in business school, when I was in graduate business school in the United States, that fortress Europe was going to be a reality by the year 2000, and the only real issue was were the Russians going to be in or out. I don't think it's reached that point yet, but I think that they're starting to consider seriously exactly how much compatibility they want to sacrifice to areas outside Europe. It's a curious game because on one hand, they're trying to make up for the colonialism of the past and at the same time, they plan on playing to win in the future and there's a bit of role conflict there, but one thing they're not going to do is give away the house just because the Americans tell them to and I think the Americans have misinformed themselves in this point. They really think that all they have to do is walk in and articulate their wants and they will be given everything and they've been learning for, well, at least since the 2000 presidential selection, that that is not necessarily the case. I'm not sure how long it's going to take for the lesson to stick, but here's hoping it does so before too much damage is done. The police state is using its phallocentric organ, the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me. Back on June 13th, we talked about sports in Canada, specifically baseball and the social context of baseball and you did a great interview with Terry McKag, the coach of the University of British Columbia. Anyway, we wanted to talk a little bit at that time about professionalization of sports and we didn't quite get into it then. I'd like to start by revisiting the status of the two prospects I discussed with Terry McKag during that interview. Adam Lohan is holding out and is threatening to go to junior college in Florida and Jeff Francis injured himself and is out for the season. They both did go in the top 10 picks overall and this is what has happened to them since the draft in June. That's not unusual for first year. Yeah, they're quite young. Lohan especially is quite young. They'll have time to recover from that. So what do you think of the strike? The thing that gets me about what I've read on the internet from the fans is that they're threatening not to come back after the strike, but they being the fans. The thing I remember from the previous work stoppage, this in 1994 and 1995, is that they threatened exactly the same thing and within two years they were all back. Yeah, as soon as Mark McGuire started hitting home runs. Yeah, as soon as McGuire and Sosa had the big slug fest, they all came back. And it baffles me that they think the same technique is going to work this time. Clearly what they think is that if they threaten not to come back, that will be enough to influence the procedure. They haven't had some walkouts at games already, haven't they? I don't know where, I can't remember what park, but they organized a thing that at the end of the fifth inning, everybody in the stadium walked out. I wasn't aware of that. Yeah. Well that's something anyway. That reminds me of what happened in Milwaukee when the Braves were getting ready to move to Atlanta in the mid-60s. The Milwaukee fans tried to organize to stop it from happening. They were doing walkouts, stayaways and that sort of thing. Their actions turned out to be counterproductive, but at least they were becoming wary. They the fans were becoming wary of being used in that manner before when teams had moved, nobody did anything about it. So how does that compare to nowadays? Why do people move nowadays? People move nowadays because it's an oligopoly in a way that it wasn't even back in the 1950s. When Branch Rickey threatened to start a third league in the late 50s, he forced the major leagues close to expand. I think that's the single greatest factor involved with expansion, not the fans being unhappy that their teams were jumping around from city to city. It was that Branch Rickey was just smart, ruthless, and well-funded enough to pull it off. And he scared the daylights out of the baseball league. They were afraid that there was going to be a third league and it would draw more people than the original two? Yeah, they thought Rickey might be able to pull it off. And by the way, I think that they had reason to be afraid. I think he was at least a 50-50 threat to bring it off. That's what forced expansion. The first round of which took place in 1961 and 1962. Nowadays there really is no threat. The oligopoly is much more entrenched. Nobody even looks cross-eyed at it anymore. Occasionally you hear about a U.S. senator or congressman. I should say senator or representative. Senators are congressmen, but they aren't usually called that. Threatening to review the quote anti-trust exemption, close quote the baseball has. But no one ever does it. Yeah, the last time I remembered that it was the 80s, wasn't it? Or the early 90s. What's his name? From Georgia. Nunn. Senator Nunn is the last one that I remember addressing the exemption. I remember Connie Mack did so in the mid-90s. He wanted a team for Tampa. Oh, yeah. And he was making noises about that. I should have remembered that. For those of you in Canada, Connie Mack is not the Connie Mack who managed the Philadelphia A's for 50 years. It's his grandson, I believe it is, who's a U.S. senator from Florida now. I don't know whether he still is, but he was in the mid-90s. And for those of you who don't know, Tampa St. Petersburg built a stadium that stayed empty for 10 years while they waited for Major League Baseball to expand a team to it. This strategy was exactly backwards because existing teams used the empty stadium as a bargaining chip with the cities in which they played at the time. Actually, Seattle was one of the... were the Mariners one of the teams that used it as a bargaining chip? It may have been. I know the Giants did. The San Francisco Giants. I know the Chicago White Sox did. Yes. They would say to their current cities, hey, build us a new stadium for half a billion dollars or we'll move to Tampa. Don't test us. We'll do it. And the pattern has become in the United States anyway for municipalities to give these franchises, not just in baseball, but in all four of the, quote, major sports, close quote, to give them everything they asked for. And the fans never do anything about it, by which I mean the people. They never do a thing about it. Terry talked about that. That was one of the differences between Canada and the United States was that Canada doesn't put the money into local teams, doesn't just give them carte blanche the way they do in the States. That's specifically true in the NHL. The federal government of Canada had been subsidizing the six Canadian NHL teams until about two years ago, and then it cut it off. It said enough is enough. And a lot of people were screaming because they were afraid that all six of the teams would cross the border next to no time. That hasn't happened yet. It might yet happen. The repercussions are not finished repercussing. Is that a word? It is now. But basically the competition is for the Canadian teams, for the Canadian franchises. No, I shouldn't say that. For the Canadian cities, it's American cities that will pay literally any price. Anyway, to make a short story long, if there's one thing I do know about the strike, it's that nobody's paying a bit of attention to the fans. And from a standpoint of unenlightened self-interest, there's no reason they should. There's no reason the owner should pay any attention to the fans. There's no reason the player should pay any attention to the fans. And the reason from the standpoint of real politic is that the fans never do anything. Yeah, there was one week, one week, a couple of weeks ago, where they paid attention to the fans. The player's union got up and said, you know we were going to announce a strike date today, but we're not going to announce it today until we know that the fans will leave us. And then the next week, they announced a strike date for August 30th, and I've heard very little about the fans since then. So it seemed like for one week they tried it, nothing particularly happened, and now they're not doing it anymore. But you said something interesting this week that I want to get to before we run out of time. You said that you think that what's going on with the strike and the kinds of issues that we're talking about have to do with the ways in which professionalization of sports poisons sports. I think that's a really interesting thought, because a lot of people would be upset if we went back to nothing but amateur sports. Well, this is kind of a trivial implication of the principle of dominant culture, but it is a clear one, which is why I seize on it. The principle of dominant culture, for those of you who don't keep up with such things, let's offer an illustration. You hear a lot of criticisms of the IMF because at the same time it's trying to facilitate development south of the equator, it's ignoring the context of business taking place in its own countries. It's ignoring the fact that economic development does not take place in a vacuum, and the cultures that are ahead at the beginning tend to be ahead at the end in economics. The last shall not be first. The principle of diminishing returns does not hold. Okay. This may or may not be true with regard to economic development, close quote. It's unquestionably true with regard to professional sports. And I can offer no better example than the infiltration into lower and lower levels of amateur sport by professional influence. The quintessential example would be junior high school kids getting free sneakers so that they remember who their friends are when they grow up. Junior high school basketball players, for example, being visited on the playgrounds or even at their schools by lower level scouts called bird dogs in the profession who say, hey, you're going to remember who your buddies are, here's a pair of sneakers. And receiving this sort of gift is a sort of pump primer. And it's impossible to construct amateur sports without taking note of the influence of the pros. There's nobody in particular, I asked this of Terry McKay, there's nobody in particular who goes to college and plays any sport who's ruled out the possibility of professionality unless there simply is no professional league in that sport. And McKay confirmed for me that none of the players have ruled out the possibility of a professional career and they'd be crazy to do so. What possible advantage would there be to ruling it out? But the context is there at that point. The context is inescapable at that point. That the professional leagues exist is part of the context. And therefore college leagues exist in part to provide personnel for the professional leagues. Yes. And that in turn influences what they do and what they don't do. Yes. They're playing to develop skills not for the sake of when you're losing. Well, they're not. They're doing both, but the conflict is there. And the line between a contest and an exhibition grows exceedingly thin. And on top of this, because of all of the money that gets invested in professional sports, because of all of the other things, we're not just talking about the salaries and the ticket prices of seeing a game and paying the players and so forth. We're talking about the endorsements. We're talking about the concessions. We're talking about the products that get made for sports. All of this other thing that is sort of surrounding that professional sports is leaking its way into lower and lower amateur sports. Moreover, the existing professional leagues have a tendency to dominate future attempts. Even if there isn't an out-and-out monopoly or oligopoly, their existence is part of the context in which other leagues are developed. Take the Northern League, which is a quote, independent minor league, close quote, possibly the most successful of the new wave thereof. It started in 1993. It operates independently of the National League and the American League. In the sense that no one team is connected to a professional major league. A National League or American League team, correct. They sell their own budgets, they hire their own players, they do the best they can with the money they have. They're in business to make money, but they're also trying to win ball games. They're not trying to lose them in any case. But they do lose players to the major league games. Yes, the players they wind up with are not the pick of the pick, and a lot of players use the Northern League as a bargaining chip. Eddie Drew, if you know the name, played in the Northern League while he was sitting out a year. From the Cardinals. The Phillies. He was drafted by the Phillies originally. He plays for the Cardinals now though, right? He does. That was the whole point. He did not care to work with the Phillies because they would not meet his demands. His agent was Scott Morris, and they announced before the first time he went through the draft, don't draft Drew if you're not prepared to meet our asking price. The Phillies ignore them, they drafted him. He blew them off, played in the Northern League for a year. The Cardinals drafted in the next time throughout, and he signed with them. What team did he play for in the Northern League? I don't recall. I want to say St. Paul, but I'm not sure about that. So it wasn't a Canadian team? It wasn't Winnipeg. Is Winnipeg the only... Winnipeg is not the only Canadian team in the Northern League, is it? No, there's more than one. I thought Calgary had one. The Northern League absorbed, I think, the Northeastern League a couple years ago, so they're now a 16 team circuit instead of 8 team. And they're doing well enough, but at the same time, the existence of the National League and American League compromise the contests they can have. Yes. And they're playing with players who look at this league, this quote, independent closed quote league, as a means to an end. They're playing to be noticed to develop their skills and winning the games is a secondary concern to these players. They may not say so openly. They may not even realize openly. They may not. They may tell themselves the same things that their junior high school coach told them about pitching over the team and team playing all that, but their agents are saying, that's fine, but don't break any interesting bones while you're there. And once this professionalism comes into a particular sport, it's the beginning of the end. That sounds like an insane thing to say, but I think that the implications are there. Have you thought of any remedies other than nothing but amateur? I mean, the argument against nothing but amateur is that people have to make a living. If you have nothing but amateur people playing sports, then you have a whole bunch of athletes who have to do something else besides being an athlete. I think it's an inescapable aspect of culture, and when I say culture, I mean in the broader sense, and yes, I would include sports, as long as there are any spectators of all present, perhaps not even then, the players are themselves spectators. I think it is an inescapable aspect of culture that it is contextual, that you can't set up, in the particular case, a little ball field in the corner of your farm and have that be free of context. Sheer force of will isn't going to do that. So my answer would be that there's not a problem with quote, sports, close quote, as much as there is the context in which they occur. The problem needs to be addressed at the roots, and that's something that what seems fitting that the dominant culture aspect is itself dominated by dominant culture. The dominant culture aspect of the National League and the American League is dominated by the much greater culture in which we live, in which it is invariably inescapably a subset. As far as specific remedies, no, I don't have a one, but that's where the problem needs to be addressed at the roots. You're listening to First Person Plural on CFUV 101.9 FM, Victoria. Our July 4th episode was a commentary on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. We discussed several discursive and other contextual issues associated with that document, and one of the concepts we addressed at that time was parology. Our introduction to the term came from the post-modern condition by Jean-François Miotach, who wrote that report for the Quebec government in the 70s. We'd like to clarify what we mean by the term and address some of the implications of it. So, you want to know what it means, huh? I want to know what Miotach thought it meant. I'm not sure if he coined the term itself, but it figured prominently in post-modern condition. And admitted it as a sort of antidote for, quote, objective, close, quote, read authoritative approaches to public policy to fact-gathering and decision-making. Well, in order to understand what he meant by it, we've got to understand what he was trying to do. He was commissioned to write a report about the state of education, but what he was looking at was mostly university. He basically spends the first part of the report making a case for the death of what he calls the grand narrative. The grand narrative is the things that we think are untouchable, are axioms, if you will, the things that we think are just true. For instance, the scientific method. The scientific method is a way of finding out knowledge that is looked at as supreme in modern thinking. And Liotard says that the only reason that the scientific method holds, the supremacy that it does in Western thought is because Western thinkers hold it in esteem. It doesn't have anything inherent in it that makes it superior to other forms of knowledge, per se. It doesn't grow out of it, but it's the legitimation of that methodology that makes it respected. It is convincing it sells to us the vulgarism. And so he actually was addressing the question of legitimacy. He's saying that in the past, in education, legitimacy was based upon how well it fit with the grand narratives within a specific discipline. So if theories were accepted within a specific discipline and your work fit within those theories and axioms, then your work was legitimate. He's making a case that since World War II, people don't just accept these grand narratives anymore. They have been brought into question. And because they have been brought into question, it is now harder to legitimize knowledge. Knowledge doesn't sell as easily as it used to sell. So he kind of pulls the rug out from under Western civilization. He's sort of taking away the foundation and so you're left with, and one of the complaints that people have about post-moderns is you can't go well. Liberty is good. Freedom is good. Good is irrelevant. It has to do with whether or not it's accepted. It has to do with whether or not it's a legitimate argument. So the question that Leotard addressed in the second half of the report was can you legitimate knowledge without a grand narrative? And the answer that he came up with is parology. Does that make sense so far? So far, it strikes me that it would not lend itself well to prescriptive systems, but that's true of most quote, post-modern, close-quote approaches to epistemology, that one learns a great deal more doing this except one does not learn what to do. One of the appeals of, for instance, applied math is that one is given an ultimate answer. It may be the wrong answer, but that is perceived as scarcely pertinent. At least it is an answer. At least one knows when one is finished with the process. It strikes me that the parology approach, if you're calling it that, would be necessary, but not sufficient for epistemology, for public policy decisions. I disagree. In fact, I think it's a highly pragmatic thing that he's offered. What he has said is stop looking at whether or not it fits in some sort of grand narrative and start looking at it on a local level with two criteria. Did the process include everyone? That is, was anybody cut off from talking arbitrarily? And second, is the process locally defined? In other words, does it fit for the situation? He's saying that if the process is done well, you can argue that the result of the process is legitimate. And he's saying that parology is bringing everybody to the table and giving them a chance to speak to the issue at hand. So it becomes very pragmatic. It's very results oriented and very localized in its approach. Okay, next criticism is that if an individual is ostracized by the community, this is just a more subtle way of putting a veneer of legitimacy on it. Everyone listens to the guy who knows what he's talking about, but just isn't from around here. And they listen very politely. And then when he's finished speaking, they ignore him entirely and do what they're going to do anyway. It legitimizes ostracism. No, if ostracism occurs, parology did not occur. So this isn't something one pursues consciously. It's something that either happened or did not happen. It can be assessed only in retrospect. It can also be attempted in planning. I mean, people can decide that the rules that they're going to apply to the discussion are we're going to let everybody talk. And in the midst of the discussion, if somebody's getting cut off, they can go, wait a minute, I feel like I'm getting cut off here. And we said everybody would have a chance to talk. So I don't think that it's just in retrospect. But what I'm saying is that he's addressing the question of legitimacy. You can question the decision that was made from a process by addressing how the process went. And if you can demonstrate in your arguments that the process cut a significant person off, then you have delegitimized the result of the process. Well, that seems to give a disproportionate amount of power to minorities or the minority of one. If consensus is necessary for parology to work or to happen or to have existed, then the individual can veto anything. He can say, no, no consensus here. And that is that. I don't think that he's trying to get consensus. He's talking about the process. And the process is everybody gets heard, not that everybody agrees. So it's not a prescriptive system. I don't understand why you would think that that's not prescriptive. It's necessary, but not sufficient if you're trying to reach a decision on anything. It's necessary because you want to hear from all quarters. But it's not sufficient because there are too many ways to hang it up. But hanging it up means it's a different process. Then I don't see what the use of it is. If parology happens, it's a good process. He's not offering a methodology. He's offering a legitimacy, a way of legitimating the results. So it's a diagnostic for processes, not a process itself. It's a way of telling if the process you are using is worthwhile. Does it display this characteristic? Yes. It's like fairness. Fairness is not a procedure. It's a characteristic of procedures. What it might encompass or entail is subject to, as it turns out, a great deal of debate, but that it is a characteristic of procedures and not a procedure itself is that issue. Right. Parology is a characteristic. It's a type of discussion that is characterized by everybody being able to come to the table and talk and everybody understanding it in a local way. Those two elements, if those two elements exist, then he argues that you can look at this and say, look at what happened in this process. The result was this. And so this is more legitimate than process B, where everybody did this, this, and this, and nobody got heard. And parology didn't happen. So in analog and law, for example, it would be stereoses. It's not a procedure in and of itself. It's a guideline which those who implement procedures might employ. I think that's a good parallel. It suggests actions in general. Well, no, that's not so. It suggests a certain pattern of the action be held to overall, but it allows, as all case law does, I'm speaking of English common law here, for, well, judgment calls on the parts of those who implement the process in the specific case. Right. It's something one ought to consider if the process is to be cricket. Okay. Well, like law. Okay, like what you're talking about here, it gets renegotiated. That's the other part of this, is that the process never really ends. The fact that a conclusion is drawn at some point can almost be regarded as arbitrary because the process can be ongoing past a conclusion being drawn. And one of the ways that the process can be ongoing is for somebody to come back and say, wait a minute, we didn't consider all points of use, or wait a minute, this doesn't consider our local area, it doesn't consider our local culture. So it is iterative. Yes. It is something that is conscious of, if I may personify it for a minute, something that is conscious of future modifications or future events, future procedures, future cases. It is conscious of its being not a last step, but the next step. An ongoing step. To put it bluntly. Yes. Now, one of the things that gets talked about among post-moderns is whether or not arguments are okay within parology. I think that that's an interesting aspect of it too because Leotard believed that a good argument was worthwhile. But there are a lot of people since then who have been wanting to shut that down a little and say that it should be a agreeable disagreement rather than a blatant disagreement. I think the real issue is the linguistic one. I think the issue is what one means by argument. And I don't think that's something that is or should be confined to the issue of parology. It's not a localized issue. It seems to me telling people they ought to be polite and not offend anyone is, in fact, a way to shut parology down. It is a way of saying to people, your opinion is not welcomed here because you're passionate about it. But what about the lowest common denominator? What about the speaker who just won't shut up, who just won't let anyone else speak, who just won't obey? Parology sounds to me like a sort of procedural anarchy. Pardon the oxymoron. And my issue with it is, as with other forms of anarchy, where are the provisions for enforcement? Answer, missing, else it is an anarchy. Isn't that a fatal flaw? No, because you're looking at parology again as the process rather than as the standard by which to judge the process. If it turns into a lowest common denominator situation in which one guy takes over and spends all of the time doing what he wants to do and terrorizing everybody else, then parology doesn't exist. Then the results of that discussion are not legitimated. And they are not legitimated because the lowest common denominator has done what he has done. So again, it's something that one addresses after the fact and indirectly. It's not... After the fact suggests that it's not ongoing. That's what I'm trying to get you to see or to get away from in your argument. Yes, it may be after that iteration, but the new iteration says, wait a minute, so and so took over the discussion and this didn't work. So we've got to come back to the table and talk about it again. So parology offers... You're saying that it isn't prescriptive and that it doesn't offer enforcement. I'm saying that it can be the tool for enforcement. It can say, you know what? Last time we all got together and talked about this and made this decision, we need to look at the fact that so-and-so took over the discussion and it cut off a whole bunch of other people. But that decision was not legitimate. Let's try it again. Let me ask one more question on the iterative nature of the process. Is this iterative in the way the appeals process in English common law is iterative? Rowan has superior courts, applet courts, circuit courts, a supreme court, without addressing the issue of separate jurisdictions on the federal and local levels. I would think that it would be more parallel to the idea of common law being rewritten every time a case goes through. In other words, you're looking at it in terms of who gets to appeal when, but I think it would be better to look at it by looking at how the law changes with every single case. So instead of how does one case change through each of the appeals process, it would be better to look at it as how does the law change when a new case gets run through the process again. The characteristic you're describing is what gives common law its name. That's what is meant by common law as in the expression English common law. Yeah, it's no accident that legal theory has really hooked on to this. If you read contemporary legal theory, you will find a lot of people looking at parology, looking at literary theory, in order to judge how the law is made, because in essence, the law is discourse. The law is a bunch of people getting together and talking about things over and over again, addressing the same issues and giving nuances and new agreements to the same issue based upon what is going on in the world at that time in history. I find it fascinating that the legal trends and the philosophical trends are exactly backwards, both in Anglophonic and Francophonic culture. The legal culture we've talked about briefly with English common law, French common law doesn't exist. They use code law. They try to cover all cases in statute and proceed from that and don't have the same subtext or context, depending on your point of view, that English common law does. They still have code law in Quebec or for our listeners in the United States, Louisiana. They have code law there. But the philosophical turn has been just the opposite. It's the Leotards and the Doritos of the world who are approaching country-ard, who are approaching postmodern techniques for epistemology, decision-making, various other intellectual pursuits. And it's the English, the literal English in this case, persons from the United Kingdom or specifically the southern part of the United Kingdom who are going crazy trying to retain the ontological a priori precept upon which to pen it all. Yes. Well, I find it curious anyway. You have been listening to First Person Plural on CFUV101.9 FM in Victoria, British Columbia, simulcast it on 104.3 cable and cfuv.uvic.ca First Person Plural is produced weekly by Dr. Patty Thomas and Carl Wilkerson. Music for First Person Plural is composed, performed and produced by Carl Wilkerson. 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