Gabor Maté: Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté knows how to attract a crowd. Today the "world-renowned physician and writer" gave a Keynote Presentation at the University of Alberta that the police had to shut down. Not for anything he said or did, but because too many people swarmed into the Telus Centre to hear him. Someone complained and forty-five minutes into his presentation the organizers had to arrange another room for the overflow. Maté looked stunned at first but quickly adapted. He's used to adjusting to sudden shifts in his environment. Much of his research depends on identifying the influence of surroundings on our physical and mental health.

The crux of his argument was a refutation of conventional scientific wisdom. For too long the medical community in the west has treated mental health issues as separate from physical ones, which are then further isolated from wider environmental or social concerns. All the evidence points to the combined influence of these factors on the well-being of an individual's total health. To isolate one area from another is essentially an ideological position that ends up exacerbating illnesses of all kinds, leading to what Maté calls our "toxic culture."

According to Maté, humans need attachment and authenticity. We're wired to be attached to others and to express ourselves authentically without fear. That gut feeling you ignored? That's what Maté calls "a denial of authenticity." He goes on to identify sociologist Erich Fromm's "myth of normalcy" as a source of society's problems. Rather than attachment and authenticity, society values appearance, behaviour, and life circumstance as measures of success.    

One of the ways to remedy this malpractice is to accept the science and not the ideology, which wrongly attributes only biological or genetic sources for illnesses. The main cause, according to Maté, is our environment. When we cease dividing mind from body, or the individual from society, the toxins in our collective system will wither and die. Only then will Karl Marx's so-called "four alienations" - from nature, others, work, and from ourselves - be finally resolved.

University Of Alberta: Corporate Pandering

Despite local and international outrage, the University of Alberta, led by president Indira Samarasekera, conferred an honorary degree yesterday on current Nestlé executive Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. Why honor someone who has so explicitly pursued an agenda that is diametrically opposed to the public good? Brabeck-Letmathe has been consistent in his priorities; he has said it's an “extreme” view to call water a human right while advocating it be privatized as a marketable commodity.

According to the recent documentary, Bottled Life: Nestlé's Business with Water, Nestlé generates US $10 billion dollars a year with bottled water. As Kirsten Goa of the Breastfeeding Action Committee of Edmonton says, “Nestlé is trying to normalize turning water into a commodity the same way it normalized the use of artificial baby formula.”

U of A Chancellor Linda Hughes confers an honorary degree on Nestlé chairman Brabeck-Letmathe (via Edmonton Journal).

In his speech at the U of A, Brabeck-Letmathe lamented "our somewhat innate tendency to follow emotions more easily than facts" and said "no dogmatic or ideological approach will suffice to find solutions." Except, of course, the ideological dogma of so-called free markets and globalization.

We live in precarious times. Since returning to Canada from Hong Kong six months ago I've noticed an increasing collusion of government and corporate interests. Hannah Arendt, perhaps the greatest chronicler of totalitarianism's creeping influence, wrote eloquently about the dangers of the corporate state as a prerequisite to fascism. The University of Alberta has now committed to a dangerous liaison. Citizens of conscience must be vigilant and speak out relentlessly against these "dignifying" abominations. If they fall away the failure belongs not to the proactive usurpers, but to the silent enablers.

Broken Virtues: University of Alberta

***UPDATE FEBRUARY 24***
My letter on this topic has been published in the Edmonton Journal. It prompted and email to me from Dr. Frank Robinson, Vice-Provost and Dean of Students at the U of A explaining, in short, that the students and police were to blame for the events of February 1. The students for not asking for permission beforehand and the police for the overkill of force. I've since responded advising the administration to quit with the finger-pointing, take responsibility and issue an apology. He wrote nothing about my concern regarding Brabeck-Letmathe’s honorary degree.

Strange things have been happening at the University of Alberta. It began February 1st when a police helicopter suddenly appeared at the window of my graduate seminar. My first thought was of terrorism. I soon discovered that the only threat was coming from my fellow students and other concerned citizens who (god forbid!) were engaging in a peaceful protest against education cut backs on a designated National Student Day of Action.

It turned out that the administration, led by U of A president Indira Samarasekera, thought it appropriate to disrupt classes and inflame resentment by ordering over 20 officers in seven squad cars and an Air-1 police helicopter to subdue the demonstration. I was certain this overreaction would be regretted and that a full explanation and public apology would be forthcoming. No such luck.

Now Samarasekera is defending the university’s decision to confer an honorary doctorate on Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, because, as she said, "This guy is an intellectual. We give honorary degrees to intellectuals of distinction, controversial or not." Controversy? Gandhi was “controversial.” The decision is a disgrace and a betrayal of the U of A’s motto, Quaecumque vera, ("Whatsoever things are true") from the Epistle of St. Paul:

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and there be any praise, think on these things.“

Brabeck-Letmathe has long been a vocal advocate for privatizing fresh water, while dismissing free public access as “an extreme” human right. During Brabeck-Letmathe’s tenure as Nestlé's CEO from 1997-2008 the company was accused of engaging in child slavery in the Ivory Coast. More recently Nestlé has again become the target of a boycott over its reckless marketing of baby formula in Armenia and Laos, where, according to Mike Brady of the non-profit organization Baby Milk Action, it has put “company profits before the health of infants and rights of mothers.”

Indira Samarasekera needs to reflect on whether there be any virtue in such positions. A world-class university does not turn police on peaceful protesters nor honor someone who advocates privatizing fresh water supplies while subjecting people to destructive economic practices. We can and should do better. Much better.

"¡No pasarán!": Student Action Stifled

I'm beginning to adjust to this frigid, northern outpost of Edmonton. I plug in my car; I shower in my long johns. My senses too are adapting. They're thawing and slowing down the whirlwind of incoming data to a more comfortable, legible pace. I'm now able to identify certain rhythms and patterns with more ease and almost daily I receive a message drifting through the ether: "Welcome to Harperland!"

Just this week at my own University of Alberta a peaceful protest was shut down by over 25 police officers equipped with a helicopter. This battalion had been mobilized to protect the private property of the university from nefarious cretins called...students! Yes, students protesting tuition hikes and cutbacks on a "National Student Day of Action," obviously just a cover for something far more sinister and dangerous.

(Police battalion saves University of Alberta from itself, @ Occupy Edmonton)

It has since backfired into a monumental embarrassment for the administration, but how could they have ever thought otherwise? Did they think they could get away with stifling student activism at a university? Apparently so - in Harperland such idiocy has become a daily occurrence.