Ideas - Be Reasonable: Scholars Define Who Is and Who Is Not

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

From the interpersonal to the societal: what is reasonableness? And in a democracy, how reasonable can we reasonably demand that others be? Five Canadian thinkers try to define what “reasonableness��� means and what it is to behave and think reasonably. *This episode originally aired on Feb. 6, 2024.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, Steve. We're both Steve.

So she's speaking on ideas. And I was told to bring her to booth 11, but I'm not sure exactly. Right, well, I mean, at this point, like, you know, I would just grab the headphones and just put them on. Okay. Hello? Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ahmed. I certainly am very satisfied that we made a reasonable decision. In the ruling, the judge says the move was unreasonable. The decision does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness.

Unjustified. Unreasonable. Alexander, be reasonable. Roughly speaking, this is a reasonable idea. The test of reasonableness is an important one in a democracy. The test of reasonableness is an important one in a democracy. We expect governments to be reasonable when they make laws, reasonable when they use force, and reasonable even when they imprison us. It's vital that we trust judges also to be reasonable. And it's a significant part of a judge's job,

deliberating in public on what counts as reasonableness and deciding what an imaginary reasonable person might think or do. So would it be unreasonable then to ask what the word means? Maybe so, but we did it anyway. This is a good question. How am I going to answer this? Oh, that's a great question to consider. When I came in here, I was pretty certain I knew what reasonableness was. This is like a test, and I'm failing it totally. We composed a short questionnaire and put it to five leading Canadian scholars and writers. To me, reasonableness is about not being stuck in one groove, but being able to do things otherwise.

Reasonable and unreasonable may be the two sides of the same coin. You know, like maybe those big, whatever they were, like those big woolly mammoths, maybe they found humans unreasonable. Each thinker was given an hour to respond to our questionnaire. But instead of writing out their answers, they had to think through them in real time and out loud. Mr. Potato Head, Prime Minister of Poland. I even said more than I could imagine. Bloody hell, don't record any of this. Danielle, turn that off. I'm going to get cancelled.

Today, we showcase highlights from these recording sessions. Five Canadian intellectuals attempting to define what it means to be reasonable. Hi, my name is Miklana Todorova. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, but I'm educated in the United States and I have been living in Canada for the last 15 years. I'm a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education and I teach courses on political ideology and education, socialism, capitalism, race and empire, as well as sexual violence prevention in higher education. Hi, I'm Lynn Viola. I'm a professor emerita from University of Toronto. My last book was entitled Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial, published by Oxford University Press. Hello, my name is Rinaldo Walcott, and I'm a writer and a professor.

I currently teach at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, where I'm the chair of the Department of Africana and American Studies. Hi, I am George Elliott Clark, a writer, poet, former National Poet Laureate 2016-2017, and my day job is a professor of Canadian literature at the University of Toronto. Hi, I'm Anna-Kaina Schofield. I'm a novelist and a plain person. How's that? Question one. When in your life have you encountered what you consider to be unreasonableness? what you consider to be unreasonableness.

Well, these days, reasonableness, whatever we understand it to mean, is all over the place. And so I feel often confused because the world is going mad. And it seems that the pandemic has really unleashed incredible social and cultural forces and much of it is not reasonable to me. But it is what it is. Thinking back, probably the last time someone suggested that I myself was unreasonable was at the Toronto Pearson Airport before the holidays. And so it was a gloomy morning and I was boarding a plane to the United States for a conference. I was on this very long line waiting to go through the US customs on the Canadian side of the border, but they switched the line and invited us to go to the other side of

the space. And so while marching there with my little suitcase, this young man storms behind me and, you know, quickly moves in front of me. And I'm no longer first on the line. He's first on the line. But on top of it, two young women are joining him. So I'm boiling. And I started making public comments like, oh, does this make you feel good? And you're holding an American passport, but in Canada, we behave differently.

So I obviously, you know, showed frustration. And so even a female security person comes and says, ma'am, what is wrong with you? You will all go through customs. So what of the murmuring behind me from people on the line, suggested to me that people did not see my behavior as either proper or reasonable. And so while sipping coffee waiting for my plane, after I went through customs, you know, I reflected on why I did what I did. It occurred to me that this was not a negotiation about who is first on the line. It was actually a negotiation of privilege, self-entitlement, arrogancy, and in my view, the fact that I was a woman. a woman. If I were a man, nobody probably would rush in front of me and make me stumble upon the suitcase, you know, simply to be first online. And so in my mind, I was actually negotiating power and I did it publicly. And so these negotiations or whatever it is, right, of what is reasonable and what is unreasonable,

have become part of my everyday life. I was trying to get a flight to Berlin from Toronto. I won't name the airline involved, but I had bought my ticket and I got to the airport. I was later than I would have liked to have been in getting to the airport, but I was in line. I was in line to get checked in for my flight. The line was moving extremely slowly. And so by the time I was actually standing in front of an agent to be booked onto the flight, the flight had officially closed by about five minutes by the time I actually was able to see an agent. And instead of the agent commiserating with me,

the agent certainly saw I had been in the line for a solid half an hour or more. Instead, the attitude was, you deserve what you got. You deserve to be blocked from this flight. We're not going to help you get another flight. I was sent to another desk where I was asked to basically buy a whole new ticket, which I had to do in order to carry out my travel plans. And even as I expressed my concern and upset over not being given more courteous treatment, the agent who was selling me the ticket then took the time very publicly to give me a very loud dressing down to tell me, sir, it's all your fault. It's

all your fault. And as a result, even though I did carry out the trip, I did decide to not fly anymore with that airline for a solid year. Well, if I think about the early part of my life, I lost my father when I was five and a half or six and a half years old. And I think that is pretty unreasonable. I think death generally is pretty unreasonable. It's an unreasonable concept, but it's not something you can do very much about. So I think that was pretty unreasonable. I think watching my mother struggle with poverty was unreasonable. I don't think she would think it was unreasonable, but I find it unreasonable. And then on the daily, on the hourly, hourly I mean the last five months of my life

have been pretty unreasonable um I mean everybody's lives in the last while have been unreasonable that said my current main unreasonable element today is my left hip my left hip tendon is behaving in a very unreasonable manner well it's got like a hole in it. It's got a tear in it. I mean, and that's another thing that's unreasonable. You know, I'm 52 years old, and I'm a woman. And this is a very unreasonable thing that women have to deal with menopause. Your body is just heating up all day long. Your brain is all woolly. You don't sleep. And this is supposedly natural, but only half of us get lumbered with it. So that's unreasonable. One that I like to use with friends often is losing my bank machine card and going to the bank with my Canadian passport as Ontario ID because they would rather an Ontario ID or a driver's license. And since I don't drive and I don't have a driver's license, to go off and get an Ontario ID card so that I could get a bank machine card replaced.

It would seem to me that the only reason there is that a passport, a national passport, enshrines a certain kind of identity requirement that had to be met for it to be issued in a way that a provincial ID doesn't. Like I went down, I think I showed a utility bill and I told them a date of birth. They snapped a photo of me and then they mailed me an ID. And, you know, you need guarantors to get your passport. A whole series of mechanisms are in place so that a bank wouldn't accept the passport, but would accept an Ontario ID is highly unreasonable to me. but with a 7th Ontario ID is highly unreasonable to me.

It's interesting to me that a lot of unreasonableness exists around proven one's ID. So, you know, you can't use your health card as a form of ID in many places, even though it has a photograph of you, your date of birth, and so on. So it seems to me that lots of institutions are really contradictory when it comes to thinking about what counts as identification. I think unreasonableness in the current Russian context and in the old Soviet context, you know, was really a kind of excuse for lying. I met up with unreasonableness at every step, particularly in Soviet times, but also since around 2012, when things began to get harder in terms of working in the archives. You know, a lot of it concerned access to archives. Probably the most unreasonable thing that happened to me was when I ordered sensitive, supposedly sensitive books at what was then the Lennon Library. And head librarian came back to me and said, you can't have these books because they're old.

Now, that struck me as imminently unreasonable for the simple fact that libraries, by their very nature, hold so-called old books. I think that unreasonableness can be a way to cloak a simple lie, as in the case of the librarian, when she really could have said, if she lived in a different system, that, you know, we don't want you to see these books because there's something sensitive in them. Reasonable citizens want to belong to a society where political power is legitimately used. That last voice is not one of our five guests.

It's a reading from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The online guide includes an entry on reasonable citizens. Specifically, how the concept is explored in the work of thinker John Rawls. The American political philosopher became perhaps the 20th century's most influential writer about law, justice, and democracy. If citizens do not believe that they have reasons to abide by the law from within their own perspectives, social order may disintegrate. For John Rawls, reasonableness is more than a nice quality in a conversation partner. It's the very foundation of liberal democracy. It's indispensable.

Reasonable citizens who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms It's the very foundation of liberal democracy. It's indispensable. Reasonable citizens who want to cooperate with one another on mutually acceptable terms will see that a freestanding political conception generated from ideas in the public political culture is the only basis for cooperation that all citizens can reasonably be expected to endorse. Often, our public political culture seems to prefer inspiring words. Words like truth and freedom. But John Rawls tried to steer us towards more modest terms. Words that evoke a relationship, perhaps a continuing conversation. Words like reasonableness, civility, and justification.

Since justification is addressed to others, it proceeds from what is or can be held in common, and so it is unreasonable for citizens to attempt to impose what they see as the whole truth on others. Political power must be used in ways that all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse. in ways that all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse. Of course, Rawls' advice won't help much if we never agree on what the words mean. So let's turn to the second question in our reasonableness questionnaire. What are the characteristics of unreasonableness?

I think rudeness is a characteristic of being unreasonable. Oh, oh, oh, I've got a better one. because you can't perceive how somebody else might feel about a situation or maybe a disagreement. An inability to imagine that your need, your selfish need sometimes, or your demand to be right about something should prevail over, I don't know, ethics, compassion. So, for example, poverty. Okay, you know, you might have very unreasonable people that say, oh, just pull up your socks and get a job and look at me, I work. And, you know, because they basically have a deficit of imagination that they might not know that that's not how it is for every single person in the world and that people have all kinds of different barriers. There's a lot of things that are decided in

advance for you. You know, I think social class is a big, big factor, even if the way you imagine what's possible for you in life. So yeah, you imagining that somebody should just go get a job. Well, maybe that person has tried to get many, many jobs. Maybe that person has a busted hip tendon. You know, maybe that person has all kinds of barriers that you have a deficit of imagination, imagining because you've not had those barriers. So for you, they don't exist. You know, one way for me to probably unpack it is to lean back on my first original language, Bulgarian, because this is probably the primary way through which I also learned, right, mean senseless or senseful behavior.

But in the Bulgarian language, the very idea presumes public behavior. presumes public behavior. So what is reasonable or unreasonable is not so much in the eye of the beholder or the person who engages in this behavior, but it what makes sense to those who have to experience my behavior and what they think is reasonable or unreasonable in the context of this interaction. Put in other words then, what is reasonable or unreasonable behavior is always determined by a social collective, by the contextual, whether cultural or social context of a particular kind of social interaction. And it's not about what I think is reasonable, but how society or members of society experience this.

This may be slightly different from the connotation of the wording in the English language, where, you know, reasonable gestures to rational behavior and the presumption that all human beings are rational. I don't know if these are characteristics per se or merely accompanying factors or underlying conditions, but I would say a lack of civility, a lack of tolerance, an inability to compromise, and an inability to understand the importance of the role of consensus in a democratic society. In the U.S. in particular, it seems as if the politics of the Roman Colosseum have returned. This is, of course, especially so among Trump supporters who seem to

think that politics are a little more than the Jerry Springer show live or professional wrestling. And so one can hardly expect them to be reasonable given those kinds of discourse. I think if you are leading by emotion and in particular negative emotion, then you don't have the capacity to think reasonably, to think in a measured way. I think negative emotion clouds reason in general, and any kind of over-emotional state can cloud reason, particularly when the leader on the stage is not reasonable to start with and doesn't believe in, say, a rules-bound society or even the truth. Actually, there's no necessary connection between a rules-bound society and being reasonable, but one would expect a little bit more reasonableness in a rule-bound

society, but not necessarily. I see the characteristics of unreasonableness as an inability to recognize that rules are actually just a guideline, that there are not an either or. that there are not an either or. Lots of examples are people who are unreasonable, are people who are not able to work with rules as a guideline. They see the rule as you do it this way or that way or nothing can be done. And so unreasonableness for me is about an inability to be flexible, an inability to be creative on the spot. And it seems to underwrite a certain kind of suspicion that the person who's asking for some flexibility is actually going to transgress something and engage in something nefarious. So unreasonableness really seems to me to be this way of keeping people in line because you have this sense that if they're not kept in line, they're going to do bad things.

And so I'm going to stick to this rule. This rule is going to be the only way that we can do it. There can be no adaptation to it because otherwise something really bad is going to go around. something really bad is going to go around. I think the very first characteristic of unreasonableness is simply the refusal to debate with facts and in a collegial atmosphere. Four years ago, I got cancelled because of the positioning of myself as someone who cared more about freedom of speech, about being a public intellectual, about being able to speak to matters of topical concern as well as intellectual concern and scholarly concern, as opposed to keeping my distance from issues that others felt I had no right to talk about. And so in order to accomplish the cancellation, the original cancellation, because it still goes on, it was basically a pillorying, a pillorying

of myself as opposed to an opportunity to have a fulsome debate about important public policy issues. So again, it was irrational. It was a lynch mob activated. Now, there were people who got upset when I described that reaction as being like that or akin to a lynch mob. But having gone through that process, I can say that the unreasonableness is absolutely vicious. It's absolutely vicious. I did receive threats of violence from people who I know have never read anything I've written, who have no idea of the values I hold dear, that I've always upheld in my writing and my scholarship, but basically accepted other people's perspectives that I was some kind of devil who had to be, you know, totally erased, expunged. erased, expunged.

What is crucial is that all citizens view the values of a political conception of justice as very great values, which normally outweigh their other values, should these conflict on some particular issue. On Ideas, you're listening to an episode we're calling Be Reasonable, where five scholars answer our reasonableness questionnaire. You can hear Ideas wherever you get your podcasts, and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. And being I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides a brief, or relatively brief, guide to reasonableness. Unreasonable doctrines may spread until they overwhelm liberal institutions. It's drawn from a much longer work, some would say an unreasonably long and difficult one, John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that a democracy stands or falls on the strength of what he called its public reason. Citizens have a duty to constrain their decisions by public reason only when they engage in certain political activities, usually when exercising powers of public office. Judges

are bound by public reason when they issue their rulings. Legislators should abide by public reason when speaking and voting in the legislature. And the executive and candidates for high office should respect public reason in their public pronouncements. With so much depending on reasonableness, we should be able to say what it is. That's why we invited five Canadian thinkers to take our five-part reasonableness questionnaire. Those thinkers are George Eliot Clark, Anna Kena Schofield, Magdalena Todorova,

Lynn Viola, and Rinaldo Walcott. We're now turning to question number three. What role should reasonableness play in a democratic society? I think a democratic society can't exist without reason. It's predicated on reasonable discourse and respect and tolerance for different opinions. I still think Canadian politics is mostly reasonable, especially compared to the U.S. or the populist regimes that seem to be taking over large parts of the world. I do, though, think that those regimes are a warning for us. I think reason is like logic. And if you're not speaking the same language of

reason and logic, if you have completely different assumptions about what these things are, then you cannot communicate with people with whom you disagree. It's like talking in different languages. I could use the example of my acquaintances who were racist Christian evangelists in the 1970s. They were speaking a language I couldn't understand who were racist Christian evangelists in the 1970s,

they were speaking a language I couldn't understand and a language I also reacted to emotionally in my own way because I so disagreed with them. So I think, really, it's a matter of having different rules of discourse in your head and in your emotions. For me, I think that when we're being reasonable, each person can walk away feeling satisfied. They might not have gotten 100% of what they were after, but you've reached some kind of interesting compromise

where both parties enjoyed a kind of majority stake in what was at stake. So both parties walk away feeling, okay, I only got 80% of what I needed to get done. But the other party was like, I was able to also fulfill 80% of what my mandate told me I should fulfill. Neither party walks away feeling like defeated or dominated or in some way undermined. Reasonableness leads to a certain kind of satisfaction. I think that this idea of being satisfied is so crucial to a democratic society. So for me, reasonableness allows a wide terrain for improvisation in life because life is about improvisation. Life is about meeting circumstances and figuring out how one is going to maneuver with those circumstances,

known and unknown circumstances. It seems to me that democracy at its best, is founded on trying to continually improvise to the emergent conditions that people are experiencing. Of course, the dreadful opposition of that is fascism. Fascism has these tight guidelines and rules of what it means to be, how it means to be, how things are to be done. Fascism and totalitarianism are the opposite of improvisation, adaptability. So they're actually unreasonable because you can't argue with them. There's no space for expanding their logics of what things mean. And of course, when you challenge them, the ultimate possibility is a possibility of death, of being abandoned,

of being discarded. One of my big, big troubles, one of the most troubling areas of unreasonableness to me is the way that we don't see people's labour and we don't see people. The other day, I was running to get on a bus and, you know, the bus driver just waited that extra two seconds and I got on the bus and I just wanted to give him a kiss. I'm pretty sure I didn't want a kiss, but you know what I mean? Like there are then there are these other little moments where somebody does something or somebody smiles at you. Do you know what I mean? So for me, I think being acknowledged just in the street, people being respectful or just acknowledging the person that's selling them bread, the person that's making them a cup of coffee, the person that's driving the bus.

I don't know. a cup of coffee, the person that's driving the bus. I don't know. I mean, I do feel like I sometimes like I'm beaming in from a different era or another planet because I have those expectations and I'm regularly disappointed. And within that, what I feel is a reasonable expectation is also a level of unreasonableness because other people would say, well, why should it be governed by your cultural expectation? What if this person overhears cultural expectation is that they don't speak to you? Ultimately, in order to live together, we need to trust each other. And we need to be able to trust that each person has everyone else's best interests at heart, even while we can disagree substantially on policy questions and policy issues. But that in order to get to any kind of common ground, we have to get there through

conversation. We might want to ask for explanations. We might want to ask for perspectives before we immediately leap to jumping on someone for voicing an opinion that we may reasonably find objectionable. And that maybe the curative for that objectionable opinion is reasoned debate in as calm an atmosphere as possible, as opposed to assembling the lynch mob and taking somebody down. And to the extent of forcing them out of their jobs, forcing them to consider suicide. And this is not something we take lightly because too many people do take their lives because of the fact that they've been pilloried and humiliated publicly for no good reason, ultimately. So we need to have those debates, as uncomfortable as that is. The way of police states is to shut things down by force, by violence, including violent and vective. I'm thinking of

the Cultural Revolution, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, People's Republic, people being told that they were dunces and being denounced and being paraded for public humiliation and so on. Maybe in some cases, folks, in quotation marks, deserved it. On the other hand, it's no way to actually build trust in civil society. The first thing that comes to mind is that if we do not allow for a degree of tolerance, even for what we may perceive as unreasonable. We are not allowing for that negotiation of difference. We are shutting down all kinds of disagreements and differences that need to come up to the surface in order to be discussed and negotiated so we can move together collectively to a solution.

This solution is based on mutual understanding. Having said that, however, there are also specific behaviors that cannot be tolerated even for the purposes of democracy. purposes of democracy, racism, violence, behavior from a space of material or political or social privilege, those who engage in these behaviors are simply asserting their power and shutting down any resistance to power. So in that sense, then, reasonable and unreasonable may be the two sides of the same coin. That is the coin of politics and negotiation of power and resistance, of freedom of expression, but also of social ability to say, actually, your freedom will end at the point where the rest of our freedoms begin. So everything actually has limits.

And democracy is not about the limitlessness of either language or behavior, but it's about negotiation of what we will agree upon, you know, in terms of behavior and language that makes sense to us at this particular moment. Reasonable citizens understand that these deep issues are ones on which people of goodwill can disagree. Once more, that last reading is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and its entry on the quote, reasonable citizen. Now, John Rawls never suggested we can all be reasonable at all times. What he called public reason matters most of all when someone is exerting power on behalf of the state. Having said that, it's often unclear how to draw a line between an exercise of power in a public sphere and a

person's unreasonableness in private. So now, number four in our reasonableness questionnaire is, when are you unreasonable and why? Well, never, of course. But I'm unreasonable at 3 a.m. when I'm waiting for a red light to turn and decide to go through it and my Canadian passengers complain. I consider it unreasonable, though charming, that in Toronto people will wait at a red light with no other cars at sight at 3 in the morning. I suppose it was very unreasonable of me to go through the light after, of course, looking both ways. I'm also totally unreasonable when I have neighbors who blast their music when I'm trying to write.

I demonstrate a complete lack of tolerance and at times a complete lack of civility. More importantly, I cannot stand dealing with bureaucracy when it is stupid or when it is run by some sort of algorithm. It is the bane of my existence, and I've seen it operate equally in the U.S., Russia, and Canada. And I should also say I'm sure I've been very unreasonable dealing with unreasonable bureaucrats, including in my own department at the university. You know, I'm an emotional person. And I also was raised and socialized in a culture that is very expressive. I have learned to live with a sense of guilt that I am too open for Canadian conversations, that I'm too open for Canadian conversations,

that I'm too open for professional boardrooms, that I'm too much in the way I would spell out things or the way I confront differences. This question makes me realize the degree to which I myself have internalized the policing and the disciplining mechanisms of society that are curbing my own behavior and the way in which I try in my everyday life to constrain and to discipline myself. So as I move from context to context, it becomes part of my own personality, that self-disciplining. Maybe that's why at the airport while sipping my espresso, I also was reflecting again,

right? Oh, did I shame myself then publicly? Look at me, a woman in her 60s well-dressed full of confidence going to a conference and then having this stupid conversation with this young American adolescent who right so am I reasonable should I be silent at that moment and just let go for an hour probably I was feeling guilty that I and just let go. For an hour, probably, I was feeling guilty that I didn't let go. But I also often, you know, come to a different conclusion. And maybe as I'm growing older, I also learn to love myself. Yes, I'm very direct and very open. But you know what? It helps me as an educator. Maybe I'm also successful as an educator because I have these personality traits.

unreasonable in quotation marks. I mean, if one is being treated unjustly, then I do think that a certain level of angry confrontation may be justified within reason. You know, I'm going to use that phrase within reason. At other times, one may simply be in a reactive mode because of previous circumstances. And I can say this, and I will talk about myself being a person of color, being a person who's from the historical black community of Nova Scotia. I call myself Africadian. I call myself Afro-Métis. being someone who has received racist treatment in the past, in my 63 going on 64 years, I sometimes jump to conclusions about why someone is mistreating, why I think somebody's mistreating me or why I think I have not been treated fairly. And my anger is activated and my outrage is activated. So just to give one example, going through airport security, keeping in mind that

there have been many instances where I was pulled to one side, my luggage pulled apart, even though I did not trigger any alarms, simply because I was in essence flying while black. And that has happened in Canada many times. It does happen. There is racial profiling that goes on. It's an infernal practice. But there have been times when I overreacted because I believed that I was being racially profiled, when in fact I was not necessarily being racially profiled. But I took out my frustration on the agent who was essentially conducting the searches of my person and my belongings. One such person responded. The person did not break down in tears or anything like that.

But the person did make me feel bad by saying, no, no, no, it's not about that at all. no, no, this is, it's not about that at all. I mean, I'm just doing my job and, you know, I'm really sorry to make you feel that you feel that I'm treating you in a differential way or prejudicial way. I'm really not. And I'm really feeling bad that you think that of me. You know, this was a few years ago, a couple of decades. And since then, now, we are always told now that it's random. It's random. But I need to say, as someone who is a frequent flyer, it's not always random. I'm very unreasonable when it comes to defending, to standing on the integrity of my work. I'm a novelist.

I write, you know, some might say challenging novels. I'm unreasonable in the extent to which I refuse to write easy books. And that's really very silly. It's not very sensible. The idea of creating literature, especially challenging literature that wants to be rooted in what language can do, is probably an unreasonable ambition at this point in the world, because I think the appetite largely has become for ease. I'm unreasonable in that I will not compromise. And it doesn't matter. Well, I mean, it isn't even compromise. Like I'm constitutionally incapable of doing anything really other than the work that I do. Historically, my novels often met a degree of strong resistance from publishers, some publishers. Obviously, I have wonderful publishers who've taken a risk on my books.

But I used to receive a lot of, it's too difficult, it's too dark, we can't roll it out. They used to say, you know, banal language like that. Art is where, you know, we posit difficult things. Art is the place and literary art making is a place where we do that. And I'm so glad that many of the writers that have come before me have done that because I know that on the page, when I meet that on the page, I'm thrilled. I'm excited. And it unveils to me the possibilities of what can be rather than what I already knew was possible. So that's why.

Because you're always writing towards something and you don't know what it is. And it's very easy to write toward that which has already existed. But, you know, it's so hard to be an artist, a writer. It's such a ridiculous, maybe, and it requires such an unreasonable way that you have to live your life, at least for me, because, you know, you have to spend all your time thinking about this and you're always thinking about it. What would be the point in delivering something that is already, you know, 55 million other people have already done it? Well, I'm often unreasonable in, I'm unreasonable in a couple of ways. I'm unreasonable in my

political beliefs. I have some political beliefs that many people find unreasonable, like that we can have a world without police. Many people find that unreasonable. I have some ideas that I know many other people share as well of what kind of world we could have and what kind of world we should strive for and what are some of the things that we need to change about the world that we live in so that it's a more livable world for the

majority of us. And my refusal to back down from those ideas would be considered by some people to be unreasonable. To say that housing should never be a financial investment would be seen by some people as unreasonable. I'm like one of these people who believe that all housing should be owned by the government, collectively owned by people called citizens, and that that housing should be distributed according to need and size of families, size of families and that it should not be used as a replacement for retirement earnings and all the kinds of things that we presently use housing as a replacement for. And some people find that unreasonable. Some people think that we should be able to invest in every and anything. And I would see something like that as, you know, the first instance of us building a society that is non-capitalist. So some people will say, oh, that's unreasonable.

We must have capitalism. You know, there's no other way to organize human life. And I would unreasonably reply to them, but actually I think there are other ways to organize human life, and I want to keep striving for those. The duty to be able to justify one's political decisions with public reasons is a moral duty, not a legal duty. It is a duty of civility. Overstepping the bounds of public reason is never in itself a crime.

The question of what to do about people when they're being unreasonable is a dangerous one. It's easy to become unreasonable when facing unreasonableness in others, locking them in jail, threatening violence. Suddenly, these tools may begin to seem reasonable under the circumstances. We made this the fifth and final question. What is your strategy for dealing with unreasonable people? If we're in public and something really unreasonable is happening, I would intervene. I would intervene. I've done it on planes.

This woman, this larger woman, was sitting in the plane and another woman was sitting beside her and she was screaming that the woman beside her was too big and she should have bought two seats. It was horrific. It was one of the most awful things I've ever seen in my life. And I was on an aisle seat and I was two rows back. I just stood up and said, what's happening? And I said, look, just I'll move her here. I sat in between the women who'd been totally unreasonable and the poor women who'd been abused. And it was really a nightmare because the woman who'd been abusing this woman continued in my ear. And then the other woman was crying and I just rubbed her arm. And then I thought afterwards, God, this poor woman, she's already had enough, you know, she had this horrific experience,

and now she's got me rubbing her arm. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I mean? The poor woman. I learned this the hard way. The best way to deal with unreasonable people is to write. Is to write the riposte,

the rejection of irrationality, to write, to write as a writer. I mean, I almost forgot about that. You know, the power of the pen, the power of the keyboard, to write with evidence, with fact, with color and emotion, and to make it really clear and to do it sometimes in poesy, in poetry. And so that was my way of dealing with being canceled, was I was very luckily afforded the possibility of writing a rebuttal. And so I did. I wrote Jacques Hughes' Poem Versus Silence.

Because the other way in which unreasonableness exercises itself is through silencing opposition, is through silencing others. That's the only way that injustice can flourish, is through silencing people. That's why the subtitle is Poem Versus Silence. Because I was and I am opposing silencing people. That's why the subtitle is Poem Versus Silence, because I was and I am opposing silencing. Well, I think part of being reasonable is understanding. If you don't understand, you can't communicate, just as I couldn't communicate with those Christian evangelists, because I didn't't understand and they didn't understand me.

It's hard to communicate with racists because they think they're right and we know we're right. But I think understanding at some level might help us explain while never justifying terrible things. And, you know, I've always thought it best to be agnostic, to have some measure of self-doubt. Because if you believe in absolutes, you have no way out of it. You have no way around. You know, the world is black and white. And that's just not true. But it does seem to me, in a polarized world, it's much more difficult to find reason and to find the way to communicate. Well, I already mentioned, I'm an emotional person. I deal by confronting directly. I don't necessarily jump in the confrontation violently. But you know, I may be sarcastic, you will know exactly how I feel. But I'm very mindful

of my own biases. And so I'm not simply reacting to someone's behavior. I also think, or I hope, that I know where it's better to shut up or to keep quiet. More often, however, I negotiate it by talking it through. I may call on you to recognize things in our interaction or in the ways in which we relate to each other or your own location, right, within these bigger structures of power and disempowerment. I may call on you or on us to reflect from where we speak and then engage. My strategy for dealing with unreasonable people is first I laugh. So as I'm doing right now, I just kind of giggle. It kind of buys me time to think about how I'm going to respond. And then usually I often ask the question is there any

other way that we can do this and if the answer is no I usually either argue or walk away there's no I either try to argue my case or I just give up and walk away. Depends upon what mood I'm in that day. When I want to argue my case, it's like I want to try to break down the unreasonableness of the response and try to show up its contradictions so that maybe something different would happen. And when I walk away, it's because I'm just like, I don't have it in me today. I'm going to come back another day, another time, because I always suspect that another day, another time, a different person, what was unreasonable on Tuesday might be very reasonable on Thursday.

You are listening to Be Reasonable. Five scholars answering the ideas reasonableness questionnaire. The episode was produced by Tom Howell. Thank you to all the participants. Miklana Todorova. Lynn Viola. Rinaldo Walcott. George Elliott Clark. Thank you to all the participants. The best way to send us feedback or comments relating to what you hear on Ideas is to write us at ideas at cbc.ca. Perhaps there's someone you would like to hear respond to the reasonableness questionnaire

or a vital question you think is missing, do let us know. Technical production, Danielle Dubow. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed.