Category: History

Love and a city’s possibilities

‘What does love have to do with it?’ asked the late Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in his 2007 book, Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. He was Toronto’s second poet laureate, from 2004 to 2009, and the book is his legacy project from that time. Di Cocco had a passionate, sometimes combustible-seeming connection to Toronto. A practicing Catholic priest, he wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks, smoked cigarettes, and spoke with a fantastic gravelly voice. A cool priest even, cooler than I ever knew from thirteen years of Catholic school. ‘A town that is not in love with itself is irresponsible, and civilly apt for mistakes,’ he wrote. ‘A citizenry is incited to action by the eros of mutual care, by having a common object of love — their city. A town that is not in love with itself will cut corners; lose sight of the common good.’

Love is also something you would be hard-pressed to find in official city statutes, but ask yourself if you love Toronto or whichever city you live in. Often the answer is no: cities are frustrating, but how can we care about something we don’t also love? In a section of Municipal Mind called ‘Restoring the Soul to the City,’ Di Cocco tried to conjure a Toronto that could be — something we could aspire to. ‘Developers are generally not known for their philosophical bent, but for their market enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘But it was a developer who told me the truest thing about cities: Speaking of Florence, a place that revitalized a civilization by a standard of civic care and design excellence, my friend remarked, “You know, Florence was already there, before a building ever went up.”

Toronto is certainly not Florence, and those with little imagination will dismiss the poetry about a city as useless, but Di Cocco was encouraging us to dream up an ideal Toronto that could be something to strive for as this place continues to grow and change. It could be about the architecture, but it also could be the sidewalks, more equitable and affordable housing, lusher parks, or ample public washrooms. Is Toronto living up to the city we dream of? From Di Cocco’s point of view, these collective ideals and visions are what make Toronto beautiful, rather than the stuff already built. It’s possible to dream of a better Toronto even while loving the current one. Perhaps it’s the only way to dream.

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 15

Contrast with: This uncivil city

Forward to Stroll

A new, cool style of engaging and enjoying metropolitan realities has recently emerged in Toronto among certain young writers, artists, architects, and persons without portfolio. These people can be recognized by their careful gaze at things most others ignore: places off the tourist map of Toronto’s notable sights, the clutter of sidewalk signage and graffiti, the grain inscribed on the urban surface by the drift of populations and the cuts of fashion.

Their typical tactic is the stroll. The typical product of strolling is knowledge that cannot be acquired merely by studying maps, guidebooks, and statistics. Rather, it is a matter of the body, knowing the city by pacing off its streets and neighbourhoods, recovering the deep, enduring traces of our inhabitation by encountering directly the fabric of buildings and the legends we have built here during the last two centuries. Some of these strollers, including Shawn Micallef, have joined forces to make Spacing magazine. But Shawn has done more than that. He has recorded his strolls in EYE WEEKLY, and these meditations, in turn, have provided the raw material for the present book. The result you have in your hands is a new introduction to Toronto as it reveals itself to the patient walker, and an invitation to walk abroad on our own errands of discovery, uncovering the memories, codes, and messages hidden in the text that is our city.

Forward from first edition, Toronto, 2010

John Bentley Mays, 1941–2016

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 7

Nuclear risks briefing

Along with the existential risk to humanity posed by unmitigated climate change, I have been seriously learning about and working on the threat from nuclear weapons for over 20 years.

I have written an introduction to nuclear weapon risks for ordinary people, meant to help democratize and de-mystify the key information.

The topic is incredibly timely and pertinent. A global nuclear arms race is ongoing, and the US and Canada are contemplating a massively increased commitment to the destabilizing technology of ballistic missile defence. If citizens and states could just comprehend that nuclear weapons endanger them instead of making them safe, perhaps we could deflect onto a different course. Total and immediate nuclear weapon abolition is implausible, but much could be done to make the situation safer and avoid the needless expenditure of trillions on weapons that will (in the best case) never be used.

Nuclear powers could recognize that history shows it only really takes a handful of bombs (minimal credible deterrence) to avert opportunistic attempts from enemies at decapitating attacks. States could limit themselves to the most survivable weapons, particularly avoiding those which are widely deployed where they could be stolen. They could keep warheads separate from delivery devices, to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use. They could collectively renounce missile defences as useless against nuclear weapons. They could even share technologies and practices to make nuclear weapons safer, including designs less likely to detonate in fires and explosions, and which credibly cannot be used by anyone who steals them. Citizens could develop an understanding that nuclear weapons are shameful to possess, not impressive.

Even in academia and the media, everything associated with nuclear weapons tends to be treated as a priesthood where only the initiated, employed by the security state, are empowered to comment. One simple thing the briefing gets across is that all this information is sitting in library books. In a world so acutely threatened by nuclear weapons, people need the basic knowledge that allows them to think critically.

P.S. Since getting people to read the risk briefing has been so hard, my Rivals simulation is meant to repackage the key information about proliferation into a more accessible and interactive form.

Progress in uranium enrichment for weapons

In 1946, few if any could have imagined the dramatic effects technological change would bring. At the time, the prevailing image of uranium enrichment was the gaseous-diffusion plant built at Oak Ridge: a facility of such enormous scale that it employed at its wartime peak some 12,000 people, enclosed forty-four acres under a single roof, and by 1945 consumed nearly three times the electricity of the heavily industrialized city of Detroit. By the 1960s, the enrichment challenge had changed completely. Using centrifuges, a handful of engineers and a few dozen technicians could build a plant capable of enriching uranium for one bomb per year. It would fit in a high-school cafeteria, and could be powered by a single diesel generator. In 2014, such a centrifuge plant might be had for as little as $20 million.

Kemp, R. Scott. “The Nonproliferation Emperor Has No Clothes: The Gas Centrifuge, Supply-Side Controls, and the Future of Nuclear Proliferation.” International Security (2014) 38 (4): 39–78.

Canada and the ‘Golden Dome’

Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.

Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.

Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”

The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.

Related:

See also my 2005 report: “Common Threats, Joint Responses: The Report of the 2005 North American Security Cooperation Assessment Student Tour“

The uncertainty principle and limits of knowledge

[Heisenberg and Bohr] left the park and plunged into the city streets while they discussed the consequences of Heisenberg’s discovery, which Bohr saw as the cornerstone upon which a truly new physics could be founded. In philosophical terms, he told him as he took his arm, this was the end of determinism. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised. According to the determinists, if one could reveal the laws that governed matter, one could reach back to the most archaic past and predict the most distant future. If everything that occurred was the direct consequence of a prior state, then merely by looking at the present and running the equations it would be possible to achieve a godlike knowledge of the universe. These hopes were shattered in light of Heisenberg’s discovery: what was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.

Labatut, Benjamín. When We Cease to Understand the World. New York Review of Books, 2020. p. 161–2

Experiential education on nuclear weapon proliferation

I have been searching for ways to get people to engage with the risks to humanity created by nuclear weapons.

The whole issue seems to collide with the affect problem: the commonplace intuitive belief that talking about good or bad things causes them to happen, or simply the instinct to move away from and avoid unpleasant issues.

Pleasant or not, nuclear weapon issues need to be considered. With the US-led international security order smashed by Donald Trump’s re-election and extreme actions, the prospect of regional arms races in the Middle East and Southeast Asia has never been greater and the resulting risks have never been so consequential.

To try to get over the ‘unwilling to talk about it’ barrier, I have been writing an interactive roleplaying simulation on nuclear weapon proliferation called Rivals. I am working toward a full prototype and play-testing, and to that end I will be attending a series of RPG design workshops at next month’s Breakout Con conference in Toronto.

I am very much hoping to connect with people who are interested in both the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation and the potential of this simulation as a teaching tool.

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While global conditions and humanity’s prospects for the future are disastrous, my own life has become a lot more stable and emotionally tolerable over the course of this past year of employment. The PhD did immense psychological damage to me. After a lifetime in a competitive education system in which I had done exceptionally well, the PhD tended to reinforce the conclusion that everything I did was bad and wrong, and that I had no control over what would happen to my life. I had serious fears about ever finding stable employment after that long and demoralizing time away from the job market (though still always working, to limit the financial damage from those extra years in school). Being out and employed — and even seeing shadows of other possibilities in the future — gives me a sense materially, psychologically, and physiologically of being able to rebuild and endure.

As noted in my pre-US-election post, having a stable home and income makes the disasters around the world seem less like personal catastrophes, though the general population are behaving foolishly when they assume that the 2020–60 period will bear any resemblance to the ‘normality’ of, say, the 1980–2020 period. Of course, there has been no such thing as intergenerational stability or normality since the Industrial Revolution; after centuries where many lives remained broadly similar, the world is now transforming every generation or faster. In the 20th century, much of that change was about technological deployment. In the years ahead, ecological disruption will be a bigger part of the story — along with the technological, sociological, and political convulsions which will accompany the collapse of systems that have supported our civilization for eons.

My own answer to living through a time of catastrophe — in many ways, literally an apocalypse and the end of humanity, as we are all thrown into a post-human future where technology and biology fuse together — is to apply myself in doing my best in everything I undertake, whether that’s photographing a conference, making sandwiches for dinner, or advocating for climate stability and reduced nuclear weapon risks.

None of us can control the world. A huge dark comet could wipe us out tomorrow. A supervolcano or a coronal mass ejection from the sun could abruptly knock us into a nuclear-winter-like world or a world where all our technology gets broken simultaneously, stopping the farm-to-citizens conveyer belt that keeps us alive. There are frighteningly grounded descriptions of how a nuclear war could throw us all into the dark simultaneously, perhaps unable to resume long-distance contact with others for months or years.

It really could happen all of a sudden, with no opportunities for takesies-backsies or improving our resilience after the fact. We live in a world on a precipice, so all we can do is share our gratitude, appreciation, and esteem with those who have enriched our lives while it is possible to do so, while retaining our determination to keep fighting for a better world, despite our species’ manifest inabilities and pathologies.

Struggles in the post-secondary sector

Even before the appalling Trump re-election, there have been deep problems in the post-secondary and university space. COVID was obviously a disruption to everyone, but there are also deeper and longer-term forces changing how universities operate and how students interact with them.

Sadly, the near-to-medium future seems certain to be characterized by further resource conflicts, tough decisions by schools, and continued political contention about higher education. It is particularly worrisome to see cost-saving measures eroding things which likely can never be replaced: when you get rid of the specialist ancient language training that makes history possible, you effectively close down those historical fields by ending the pipeline of new experts. More broadly, universities are full of important fields of work which nonetheless have trouble defending their value to legislators and an angry public.

Ironies abound in a world where knowledge is more important than ever yet education is suffering – where technical knowledge is more indispensable than ever for being politically informed, yet dominant political movements sideline and disparage expertise. Collectively, we have a lot to survive and overcome in the decades ahead and in order to have a fighting chance we need trained and informed minds.