Ideas book encourages readers

Ideas book encourages readers

By commoner • Feb 5th, 2009 • Category: 2009, Arts & Culture, Feb. 6-19, 2009, Weekly

Nick Logan
nc616634@dal.ca

The producer of one of CBC Radio’s longest running shows, Ideas, is bringing the words of some great thinkers from the airwaves to the page.
Bernie Lucht took some of the program’s best interviews — mostly conducted by host Paul Kennedy — to compile IDEAS for a New Century. He hopes the book, published by Goose Lane Editions, will appeal to more than just loyal CBC listeners.
He has no one reader in mind, only people who are “curious and interested in ideas.”
He knows the long list of names running down the book’s cover will attract people to pick it up, names such as political scientist Donald Savoie, East Coast artist Mary Pratt, inventor Ray Kurzweil, former United Nations high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour and former Ideas host Lister Sinclair.
In the introduction, Lucht writes Ideas stems from “the tradition of adult education” and a time — 44 years ago — when the network was moving towards “radio for the mind.”
Despite all the changes in society and technology since then, the program has adapted to maintain its goal of “popularizing ideas” that can change the way we look at our world.
Lucht says we can’t form opinions based solely on what we read, hear and see in the media. People need to have doubt in order to change their perceptions and the book provides many arguments that will do that.
In the chapter “From Charity to Entitlement,” Louise Arbour expresses her view that Canada is not entirely the “darling of the international community” we’ve long thought it to be, especially when it comes to social and economical rights.
“What I found most astonishing was that, at a time when we were very actively engaged in constructing the social safety net, which I believe Canadians really embrace,” she told Paul Kennedy in 2005, “we were expressing great reluctance to transforming these ideals, these values, into rights.”
Canada, she points out, has been taken to task by the United Nations on various issues. Just this month, the international body in Geneva announced it would examine the country’s shortcomings in dealing with problems such as poverty and aboriginal equality.
“It is terrible,” Lucht says, “that they haven’t resolved the aboriginal questions.”
Salish First Nation artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun spoke
passionately to Ideas in 2007 of the mistreatment of his people. Lucht titled the interview “A Beautiful Nasty World.”
Yuxweluptun tries to share the horrors aboriginal communities face through vibrant, contemporary paintings that incorporate traditional Native imagery. It’s not an easy task, nor painless.
“How do you paint Canadian policy, poking their noses around places they shouldn’t?” he asked. “How do you record a pedophile priest in a traditional form, as a sculpture, as a totem pole, in terms of history?”
Lucht respects the fury Yuxweluptun feels, but says the power of his art was lost in the interview.
“If I have any regrets about that one is that it didn’t do any justice to the nature of this guy’s work, which is simply breathtaking,” he says. “The anger was there.”
“What we call the western world,” he says, “is now discovering that it has to live in the same world with the people it colonized. I think we are now in a long process of understanding our part of a bigger world that the West – the colonial part – used to dominate, but no longer do.”
Colonial ambitions still exist says author John Gray. He spoke of the continuing battles between “good and evil” in search of a utopian world, in his 2008 interview with Ideas.
He describes the “interventions” by Western countries, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a “faded, neo-colonial conception” of
responsibility, in the name of progress.
“Conventional ideas of progress don’t just say what we all think, which is that some societies are better than others,” he said. People in Iraq, he used as an example, are far worse off since the West brought its vision of a better life to their country than they were under Saddam Hussein’s rule.
IDEAS for a New Century encourages readers to question their interpretation of what makes a better world.
The 18 conversations Lucht assembled offer perspectives on topics such as the balance of science and spirituality (psychologist Jerome Kagan), how technology creates democracies (Ray Kurzweil), and the greater impact of a little pill called Viagra on our society (sexologist Lenore Tiefer).
The ideas and opinions the program’s guests present motivate people to care about what’s happening around the world. But, Lucht says, it takes more than just
“concern” for change to happen.
“When you talk about being concerned about something, what is it that you actually mean? I think it only means anything when you get to work on it.”