Ideas - How IDEAS saved a listener from sending a regrettable email

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

"IDEAS is often a surprise" says Cathy Pike. It's why she's been a longtime listener. To our delight, IDEAS was there for her just at the right time. After listening to an episode about Friedrich Nietzsche and his philosophy about "the art of passing by," Cathy says she decided not to send an email that she realized she would have regretted. "The program gave me pause and I’m grateful for that.”And we're grateful to hear from Cathy and other listeners who share their personal encounters on how IDEAS shows up for them, as we continue our 60th anniversary series. *This is the fourth episode in our special programming. Listen to other episodes in this series:The time when a guest said, "I love you!"The best — and worst — ideas of the last six decades How an IDEAS episode on traffic changed a doctor's practice  CBC Massey Lecturers reveal how the talks changed them 

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Ideas has been a companion of mine for quite a number of years now. And I said, you know, I think I owe us to ideas to do something for the program. Welcome to Ideas. I'm not. It is really hard to believe, but we are now 60 years old. Before we mark the occasion in October 2025, we asked our listeners to let us know about any life-altering experiences you have had listening to the show. Your response was both heartening and humbling.

Dear Team CBC Ideas, it is with sincere appreciation that I write to thank you for another season of programming. that keeps challenging, opening up, and nudging us to rethink what we think we know. Dear Ideas, my mother listened to Ideas when Mr. Sinclair was the host. She had a look on her face, I would say, of elation as she listened. It was so important to her to feel connected to the world of ideas. I just treasure the Ideas program. I can't believe it's been going for 60 years.

I hope it goes for another 60. Back in 1965, when ideas first hit the airwaves, CBC listeners could only find us on their radio dial. If they missed an episode or just wanted to hear something again, like a Massey lecture, for instance, they couldn't. They had to write in for a transcript to an address that just had three simple lines. These lectures are available under the title, The Real World of Democracy, from CBC Publications.

to Box 500, Terminal A, Toronto. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, listeners could order audio cassettes. And by that time, our address had acquired a postal code. The CBC has also prepared cassette tapes of the series. If you'd like a copy, just write us at Ideas, Box 500 Station A, Toronto, M5W1E6. A former colleague at CBC, the late humorist Arthur Black, helpfully offered a way for listeners to remember our postal code here in Toronto. This is what he came up with.

M5W1E6, make five Wieners, I'll eat six. Something tells me Ideas host Lister Sinclair didn't once mention Wieners on our program, but I could be wrong. To order, send a check or money order, to Ideas transcripts, Box 500, Station A, Toronto M5W. Ideas has played a role. in my life in that I'm somebody who enjoys learning. I just find learning fun. So I've been a consistent listener for 30 years. Back then, as they do now, ideas listeners felt and continue to feel a personal connection with the show. So when I left home for the first time to go to university,

I was thrilled to be moving into a dorm room and it was a great time in my life, but it was also a little intimidating. And the first thing that I did was I unpacked my little plastic clock radio and I plugged it in and I tuned in CBC. And stay tuned to CBC Radio for Between the Covers following the 10 o'clock news. CBC radio was the sound of home and it gave me that sense of comfort and I felt like, okay, everything's going to be okay because at least this thing is still the same. Of course, the advent of the internet and later smartphones and apps allowed listeners to pick and choose whatever they wanted to click on. And luckily, we get a lot of clicks and by whole new audiences from all over the world. I first became attached to ideas via an Australian

podcast called The Mindfield. One of the presenters suggested that this show Ideas in Canada was a really good show. So I started listening to it and immediately found it engaging Ideas has regular listeners not only in Australia, but in the U.S., Ireland, Iceland, and even Japan. And they don't hesitate, or maybe I should say you don't hesitate, to write us when you've heard something you've enjoyed, or to criticize us when you feel we didn't live up to your expectations. Much of the time, though, you write to tell us, we're doing a decent job. pitch perfect definitely put questions knowledgeable no ego cluttering up the discussion just lucid thought I may sometimes disagree with where you land but I don't mind because you got there fairly and I learned something on the way I live in New Jersey here in the States I first came

across CBC when I was listening to WNYC and ideas. It was one of the other fantastic programs I came across. It's a program I feel like I'm not hearing too often. It's just like, how do you improve humanity? How do you deal with anxiety or whatever it is? It's just really thoughtful. As we continue with our week-long series marking our 60th anniversary, we'll also hear Massey lecturers from the last decade. And of course, more from you, our listening. I run and so that would be in the mornings usually and I'll have ideas on because now we can stream it and so I say that curiosity is a muscle and for me the best workout comes from ideas I'm Susan Radojevic I'm from mono Ontario and I lead Kadima village I'm a catalyst for shifting

how people think so that they can transform what they do. And one of the areas that I really focus on is our climate crises. When I'm running and if I'm listening to something that's really interesting to me, I will think about what is being said. And sometimes when I have to climb up that extra mountain to get over the hill to continue my run, it's that extra little curiosity that I have about what's being said. sad that keeps me going.

Tribalism. They're poisoning the blood of our country. It's synonymous with hatred, polarization, conflict, even war. One of the episodes from ideas that really resonated with me was about tribalism with David Sampson. And his whole insight of... about how identity and our belief systems are much more powerful than facts and figures really stuck with me. But tribalism is a fundamentally human trait.

It's an instinct. It happens unconsciously. And in fact, it doesn't work if it's not unconscious. In June 2024, I spoke with David Sampson about his book, Our Tribal Future, How to Channel Our Foundation, human instincts into a force for good. We had a wide-ranging conversation on what David calls the tribal drive. He talked about the positive role that tribalism played in the initial phase of our evolution and how today it's morphed into a phenomenon he calls a tribal virus. So I'm using tribe virus as a metaphor. So it's thinking about how ideas that can harm individuals can spread rapidly in a

social ecosystem. So what identity protective cognition is this extremely robust psychological phenomena where if you identify with a group, you will extrapolate from any data set in your environment a way to avoid any attack on your group and your sense of identity. So let's take global warming as an example. If the members of your community don't believe in global warming, The use function of saying, I don't believe in global warming too, is really well-functioning parent-teacher meetings, right? A church where everybody gets along, where everybody's family goes to potwarks together. The use function value of just saying something scientifically incorrect to show that you're part of the team, that is very, very valuable. And in fact, there's a line of thinking where the more radical, the statement, the higher you're signaling your allegiance to,

that particular group. I was stuck with some of the work that we were doing on climate crises and how to get people to think about the climate issue in a different way. And I couldn't name what was making me stuck. And listening to this episode crystallized it for me. And it was basically that our decisions are based and connected to our identity and our belief system. And it didn't matter how much information we put out regarding climate change and climate crises. People didn't identify with the evidence that was being presented.

They identified themselves in a different way. Identity protective cognition is the capacity for my identity to, override any veridical truth if it's attacking my identity. I've got a great example of this. Ken Ham debating Bill Nye the science guy. Ken Ham is a young earth creationist. Bill Nye is a popularizer of science. And the interviewer asked,

is there anything that would help you change your mind? This is a simple question, I suppose, but one that actually is fairly profound for all of us in our lives. What, if anything, would ever change your mind? Well, the answer to that question is, I'm a Christian. And as a Christian, I can't prove it to you. I would ask Bill the question, what would change your mind? I mean, you said, even if you came to faith, you'd never give up believing in billions of years.

I think, I quote you correctly, you said something like that. Mr. Knight? We would just need one piece of evidence. We would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another. We would need evidence that the universe is not expanding. Bill said, well, I would have to see some evidence in the fossil record, geological strata, the rate of expansion of the universe. He listed several things. Yeah, he did see evidence.

Evidence was the answer. I would need to see evidence. And what Ken Ham said was, I'm a Christian. As a Christian, I can't prove it to you. The Bible is the word of God. No one's ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true. And full stop. The reason that Ken was not reacting to any of this, it's not that he didn't understand what was being said. It's that his identity was totally tied to a particular worldview, to his belief that God created the world.

That is the tribe virus at its greatest, when you cannot change your ideas in light of evidence because your identity's in the way. I think that the world. is at a point where we're pushing information out, like tablets from the mountain and expect people to fall in place. But it's not about that. It's about how do we connect to where people actually are and how is it going to happen that they then shift to think about something else. So tribalism for me is like a starting point. After hearing that episode on tribalism, Listener Susan Radojevic brought a whole new level of understanding to her work with tourism bodies,

economic development corporations, and community non-profits in the area of climate change. Her focus became less about what we believe about something and more about why we believe that something and what it would take to change our minds. I did some work with a municipality, and their focus was on reaching net zero by 2050. And they had all the great brochures and all the data and language,

but they weren't getting any movement, any significant shift with what they were trying to do. They ended up falling back into the same old patterns. And the one thing that was stalling, that Stahl's Mok's company, is the thinking, again, the identity and the belief that growth is always good. Growth is not always good when you're trying to shift everything. And when the stakeholders of the municipality realized what they were doing, they decided that they were going to stop a major infrastructure so that they can revisit it in a different way

that would help them achieve the net zero that they wanted. So, according to evolutionary anthropologist David Sampson, while we may be hardwired to be tribal, it's not a fate to which we're doomed. He believes we're much more elastic than that. It's the belief that beliefs can change. It's the understanding that if evidence is put forward that challenges my understanding of something, I'm willing to change that belief. And if you connect that with identity, oh, I identify as someone.

whose beliefs can change. That is perhaps one of the most powerful tools we could have to inoculate, perhaps not the entire human species. But maybe here's something as bold enough as maybe 20 or 30%, which is actually what you need for social norms to spread. I try to find programs that will help me practice my own way to shift how I think. And especially if I'm going to achieve my big hairy audacious goal, which is to make Canada a leader in innovation.

And if you get just enough people identifying as part of this sort of metatribe at the species level, it would be my hope that it would at least probabilistically increase the odds that we survived the 21st century. An innovation is not about profits and products and widgets. It's about people. And ideas, the program ideas, is all about. people. It's about connecting differences as opposed to tearing us apart. It's about bringing us together. So in a way, ideas is a program that's kind of my professional growth and development so that I stay curious. Our next listener lives in Ireland, and he wrote to tell us

how the program has become a regular companion. Whether listening to our podcast while driving on the motorway or propping up his phone in the kitchen while making a meal. He finds ideas helps keep his mind active and engaged. My name is Greg Heelan. I come from Waterford in the south of Ireland and I've lived most of my life in Dublin where I've pursued a career as a civil servant, policy advisor or in my own terms as a grey faceless bureaucrat. As an ally advocate and champion for the Canadian teaching and learning community, Shannon knows, as Rebecca Solnett writes, hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

Hope should shove you out the door. To hope is to give yourself to the future. And that commitment to the future is what makes the present, no matter how messy it is inhabitable. It is my pleasure to introduce the inaugural Shannon K. Murray Lecturer and Napper Award recipient, Shannon Murray. One program that really stood out for me was called Shakespeare's Guide to Hope and Learning, an unlikely title, but what captivated me was the speaker, Shannon Murray. We need to look actively for others to talk to, to dream with, to struggle with, and to hope with. We need to form hope bubbles, pockets of students and staff and faculty and others. That's Shannon Murray, an award-winning English professor at the University of Prince Edward Island. In the fall of 2023, the Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope in the Academy was established in her honor.

And Professor Murray herself delivered the very first one. Shakespeare has provided the narrative soundtrack of my life. And lines and characters and stories pop into my head when I need them, explaining, coaching, warning, comforting me in my life as well as in my work. In her lecture, Shannon Murray outlines her philosophy of teaching using examples from Shakespeare to bring her lessons to life. So I want to talk through the six principles I've settled on for my last teaching philosophy through the lens of some of Shakespeare's plays. And here are my six principles. return to what you love, cultivate Freudenfreude, ducats are not daughters,

beware of efficiency, at least in things that matter, mind the gaps, and don't give up the ship because you can't control the winds. This is a very short, short list. Her first point was Return to Watch You Love, which for Murray was Shakespeare. I remember the moment I fell in love almost 50 years ago with Hamlet. I knew that I didn't understand everything about the Hamlet that I was watching.

But I got it. And somehow he got me. And how could that happen? How could a 400-year-old play about a moody Danish aristocrat have anything to say about the experience of a middle-class moody Canadian teenager? I think that's still my fundamental research question. What exactly is the strange magic that these plays have? It's a question that still brings me joy to wrestle with. And that's great. It's lovely, very positive. And her second point, was even more positive. Cultivate Friday and Friday. That is joy at other people's joy and celebrated with a word or a card. And she explained that in university

it wasn't very normal to celebrate other people's joy that the opposite was the case. So she was given an administrative job and in that job she sent cards to people when she caught them out in a sense doing good or succeeding

or helping the university We can be constantly pushed into the sense that we are in competition with each other as teachers, as scholars, and shrinking resources can make us feel as if our colleagues, other disciplines or other departments, are the enemies, that the scarcity is their fault. We need to keep a focus on abundance and not scarcity and keep up the practice because it is a practice of delighting in the happiness of others. then she went into two more points which were related and one of them quoting from the Merchant of Venice is don't confuse your dockets with your daughters and she had great fun with some speech by Shylock where dockets and daughters were repeatedly

mixed up and exchanged my daughter oh my duckets oh my daughter fled with a Christian oh my Christian duckets justice the law my duckets and my daughter a sealed bag two sealed bags of dockets of double dockets stolen from me by my daughter but her point was

there's a difference between what can be counted and what counts and don't be fixated on measuring now that was salutary for me because as a bureaucrat I was often interested in measuring I also had a punch on for spreadsheets and putting numbers

into boxes so this was thought provoking and I was open to hear it I am deeply mistrustful of student ratings of teaching as a measure of good teaching. But I'm really happy when minor high and I'm sad when they're low. I am philosophically aligned with ungrading practices. And my God, my brain is wired for percentages and letter grades. So I have to resist my own metric fixation, both in myself and in the arguments of others,

precisely because education matters and knowledge matters and students matter, more than numbers. And I don't want to model excessive and inappropriate. I often said as a civil servant that I was a faceless, grey and faceless bureaucrat. And that was your egoless job in a sense to fade into the background and to move the policy process forward. And it could often be quite wearing because there was all sorts of opposition. So there was a lot of struggle in the job.

I loved it and I loved doing it, but it cost. and that's what I liked about Shannon Murray. She loved what she was doing. She was able to express it at the end of her career and she had seen some of the struggle. I'm a planner. I like plans. And yet I have to admit that my best and most memorable classes or even courses are not the ones where I pull off a meticulous plan.

It is to be truly alive in the knowledge that this moment together with this material and these students and me and this class, in this world will never happen again. It is the human and the humane and the present and the now in the experience. And like Hamlet, it's messy and digressive and painful and heartbreaking and worth it. There are so many ineffable things in our lives, so many gifts that come to our lives, and also suffering, which is inexplicable and can't be managed in an efficient manner. One cannot grieve for the loss of your spouse in an efficient way. It just goes on in its own rhythm. So that was a real pearl of wisdom, not something I didn't know, but it was just expressed

beautifully and concisely. And I'd really touched my heart. I know my own tendency is to overplan, to overstructure. But Shakespeare reminds me of the beauty in the gaps and reminds me to talk to students about watching for those openings and taking advantage of them. the gaps. And she said, mind the gaps. And in her case, it was don't over schedule your teaching. Leave the gaps where the students can raise questions, disagree with you, bring their perspective, derail the lesson. And that to me was a real truth as well that I knew what was really worth being reminded of. And she said to quote her, life in its messiness is where good things happen, not in a perfect lesson plan, perfectly delivered. Leaving gaps means trusting that my

students might fill them with things even more interesting, original and beautiful than anything I could have planned myself. When Shannon Murray said, mind the gaps, it recalled to mind one of my spare time activities, which is spiritual companioning, and it's listening to people talk about their spiritual journeys, and it's the power of listening non-judgmentally. And in that work, Leaving the gaps is where all the magic comes out, all the spirit comes out, that if you just listen non-judgmentally and wait and don't rush in with the word of wisdom or advice that people come up with the most amazing gems.

And this idea of minding the gap in my own life, I daily take time to just stop and reflect. I could call it prayer, but in that pausing and stopping it's a gap in life it's not productive it's not efficient as Jana Murray was talking about and it's just waiting and sitting and I have the blessing of sitting in a room that overlooks a small garden and I see things that I would never have seen if I didn't mind the gap like a bird pecking at a ripe fig and enjoying it.

In the gap of sitting uselessly, inefficiently, non-productively, these riches are brought to you. Now, it helps to study old stuff like Shakespeare, stuff that tells me three things. Things can get better. Things can get worse. things will certainly not say the same and there's hope in that

Shannon Murray really knocked my socks off emotionally with one of the things she said almost at the very end of the lecture and I was coming up to my local bakery to do my bread shopping and the program was

continuing and she was quoting not from Shakespeare for her final point but from Thomas Moore's Utopia Well, you cannot turn to good You must make as little bad as you can And at that point There was a break And it seemed to me like

The Wi-Fi on my car had been interrupted That this had been an inordinate delay On the lecture and in the radio But when she came back on She was taking a gulp of breath For it is impossible that all should be well, unless all people

were good. And she was choking. Which is a situation I do not expect for some time to come. Thank you. Her enthusiasm in the lecture, her energy, her passion and love for what she did

was thrown into total counterpoint by this evidence of her confrontation with real suffering. And some of that suffering, she explained in her final point. She said, don't give up the ship. Don't give up the ship. Because you cannot control the wind.

Because you can't control the winds. And explained that there had been a number of headwinds and that third level sector, the university sector in Canada, was not in a good place and that PEI University itself was not in a good place. one option is to jump ship and she said you don't give up the ship because you cannot control the wind and I understood from my own life

there are times when you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other like when my wife was dying over many years from a terminal cancer diagnosis you just put your foot one in front of the other and you don't give up that ship You just cannot. So it's been great for me to have a deep dive back into that fantastic talk by Shannon Murray in her inaugural lecture. So a very big happy birthday at 60.

Two ideas. As we say in Ireland, Gomorrah two on Cade. you live to be a hundred. What a really lovely wish. Thank you. Are we finished? This is like a hardgoing spiritual companioning session where you bear your soul. Our heartfelt thanks to Greg Heelan for sharing his story and bearing his soul. God, this is worse than confession. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specksavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam

includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.ca.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.C.A. learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at Love's

Scarborough.ca. My name is Kathy Pike. I'm a retired human rights lawyer living in Toronto. When Kathy Pike found out we were celebrating our 60th anniversary, she sent in a long list of episodes she found surprising and sustaining. The episode about Nietzsche and the art of passing by really stopped me in my tracks. After listening to it, I decided not to send an email that I really would have regretted. The program gave me pause, and I'm grateful for that. Despite our long list, we had to ask Kathy to select just one ideas program. If I had to choose just one ideas series that I come back to, it would be the God Who May be featuring the Irish philosopher Richard Carney.

The question usually asked about God is whether God exists. Children ask each other, do you believe in God? But what does the question mean? In 2006, writer-broadcaster David Cayley produced a three-part series based on conversations he had with Irish philosopher and poet Richard Carney at Carney's home in Boston about his book, The God Who May Be. Is God a fact whose existence we can prove or disprove? Richard Carney thinks it's the wrong question.

In 2001, he published a book called The God. who may be, in which he says that God is revealed to us not as a positive fact, but as a possibility. Imagination, Richard Carney says, is our only way to the divine. What I'm trying to get at there is that the alternative of sort of dogmatic theism, God is, we know what God is, God is this thing, God is this being that can be defined A to Z in this way. therefore we can possess God, appropriate God, conceptually,

compute and classify God, and that's our property. What we have we hold, and it's our duty to kind of convince everybody else. Now, that to me leads to war and in a lesser mode in tolerance, and I want to get away from that dogmatic sense of theism, towards a non-dogmatic sense of theism, basically.

And I wanted to get away from the dogmatic atheism of many of the, philosophers and thinkers and students that I've frequented in Canada and Ireland and Paris in the 70s and 80s who said what I mean you're interested in the question of God but you know you've gone soft in the brain or something did you not hear of the Enlightenment I mean I've heard of Freud Marx and Nietzsche you know where have you been the first time I heard the program I thought it was magical I found it so interesting that a Christian philosopher could seem to speak to me although I'm an atheist and Jewish.

He explained that the Benedictine teachers he had had first made the case against the existence of God. The students read Marx and Freud. They were persuaded that God didn't exist. Then the teachers had them read the case in favor of the existence of God, and the students became convinced that God did exist. And in some ways, that seems in keeping

with the modus operandi of ideas to present the case for it against. and end up with a synthesis. And for me, what he said was a synthesis of these two very different approaches, one that I had some familiarity with, and one that was new and was delightful. So I was looking for a middle way, which would be a form of theism that learns from atheism

and keeps in dialogue with atheism. So the God that I was suggesting, modestly and metaphorically in the book the God who may be is a God who is not in a dogmatic sense and yet is in another sense that I'm trying to retrieve from certain passages in scripture. Nobody's a hotline to God and thanks me to God we don't because if we did we'd be in trouble saying I've got a voice

I've heard a voice from God it says go out and kill the evil ones and so on we know certain sects or certain religions who sometimes claim that there's no need for harmonetics or interpretation, sorry, there's just one meaning here and this is it, we know the damage that can be caused by that belief that the interpreter is God, and in fact is not an interpreter at all, because there's nothing to interpret.

The message is absolute and is absolutely possessed by that claimant. That's terribly dangerous. At the time that I heard that, two things came to mind. One is that Richard Carney, makes it possible for people to enter into a dialogue with him. It makes it possible for atheists and religious people to communicate with each other

because there's openness on both people's part. I also think what he says is applicable whether you're religious or not, which is to not think in absolutes and to consider the possibilities, consider the fact that you may not know everything there is to know about something. Listener and lawyer, Kathy Pike of Toronto, was so taken with the ideas of Richard Carney that she wanted to share them at the right time with her daughters. So a few years later, in the fall of 2009,

she sent away for the three-CD set. Kathy thought the series would make an excellent soundtrack for the long and stressful journey driving her youngest to university for the very first time. When my younger daughter was going to McGill and leaving home, it fell upon me to drive her to Montreal and I was a little intimidated because I didn't really like the idea

of being on the 401 for six hours and I wished maybe somebody else could do it but there wasn't anyone else to do it so I thought to send for the CD set so that she and I would have a treat something special to listen to on the way that would detract from the anxiety and we would just focus on listening to the program together

I knew she would really enjoy it. In his book The God Who May Be, Richard Carney found his account of God as possibility on a close reading of selected biblical texts. The first is the story in the book of Exodus of Moses and the Burning Bush. A voice addresses Moses from the flames and identifies itself as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

It tells Moses, that he is to lead the captive Israelites out of Egypt. By what authority, Moses asks. Who shall I say sent me? But he does not get the answer he hopes for. Moses asked the burning bush for a name. Now, the burning bush refuses to give a name. And this is a very tawdry thing.

It's just a thorn bush, you know, in the middle of nowhere that's burning. I thought this talk would be just the right one for my daughter and me to listen to. both my kids have a preference for the least of these or they're powerful. They don't like hierarchy. I thought they'd really like the idea

that we co-create the world with God, even if we're not religious. And yet it's the divine, right? And it's revealing itself as the divine, but is refusing to give itself a name. One of the reasons being, as it's been argued, because if Moses was given a name, then he'd go back to the Egyptian,

then he'd say, look, my God is more powerful than your God, because I got the name and I can invoke this name and I'll have more power and more authority than you do but no in other words I am not a name that you can possess

not an idol that you can revere not a thing that you can have I am a promise basically I am who may be I am who will be shall be can be maybe incarnate in history if you respond to my command

to be free, to be just, and to be loving. And that's the message that Moses goes back to his people with, and then the people go from bondage into freedom. In fact, my daughter did remember this part when I asked her about it a few weeks ago. She remembered the burning bush. And the burning bush says, I am what I am, but according to Carney, could be saying, I will be what I will be. So it's all about possibility.

And possibility is so much more interesting than certainty. Certainty leads you into blind alleys. I want the girls to feel prepared to face the difficulties and the uncertainties and still have that sense of agency. What I love about the church and what I'll always kind of hopefully retain access to is the sense of the impossible becoming possible. Is the sense of epiphany, the sense of wonder, the sense of sacredness about certain places and times of the year.

You know, the liturgical calendar is wonderful. Advent and Easter and Christmas and Little Christmas and the feast days of six. As we were driving along, because I also had to pay attention to the traffic, we would stop and we would pause and we would replay something, we would talk about it. And in fact, I listened to it a third time with my other daughter who took the train to Montreal so I wouldn't have to drive back alone

and visit some friends. And we did the same thing. We stopped and paused. We probably paused over different things, and she had different observations. But our heads were filled with it, and it turned a stressful experience into a really special one, because I had something I could share with my girls that we all liked. This is important, but, you know, one must always fare la part of the shows, as you say up in Montreal, you know, make a distinction between that which is enabling and liberating

and that which is disabling and incarcerating. and the church has both visages. It's a Janus face. It looks in both directions. And we got to try and work that one out. I can't decide whether ideas really offers conclusions at the end or leaves it to people to form their own conclusions. But at least one has a more informed opinion or more nuanced opinion.

But I find there's always some lesson, how to live, some of the big philosophical questions. and these days how to cope with things that you may not be able to change, which I find terribly important. People often ask me about hope. This is one thing when you're an activist, at the end of every interview is like, how do you get that hope going, you know?

I'm like, hope is an optimism. It's not the sense that things are going to go well. Right, for me, hope is, hope is a discipline. The annual Massey lectures are a pillar of the ideas calendar. The lectures began in 1961, and they're the most prestigious public lectures in Canada. Wow. I'm so honored to be here and humbled to be given the 2023 Massey Lecture, and I'm just so grateful to each and every one of you for showing up tonight

and being here and being willing to listen and hopefully have a conversation as well. They feature some of the best minds of our time discussing the most pressing issues that we face. It's a tremendous honor to be here to give the first of my Massey talks. In my bio, was mentioned that I've toured around in a rock band. This is the beginning of the nerd tour. It's much more my element. So it's just really special to be here in Winnipeg on Treaty One Territory. And again, thank you. Astra Taylor, writer, filmmaker, political organizer and rocker and self-described philosopher nerd delivered the CBC Massey lectures in 2023. It was a precarious time post-pandemic. The title of her lectures,

The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Rather than something to pathologize, I want us to see insecurity as an opportunity. The simple recognition of our mutual vulnerability, of that fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our entire life has potentially revolutionary implications. The 2023 Massey Lecture was delivered by Astra Taylor. I'd never heard of her before. We were still in the pandemic.

It was gray. It was cold. I was walking my dog. And I really like the sound of her voice. The fundamental question here is simple enough. Does the right to security of the person promised by the Canadian Charter obliged the state to provide for citizens materially, or does it only

protect citizens from an abusive state? In other words, can we expand it to guarantee a positive right to material security? Because right now, Canadian citizens, despite the country's general... My name is Greer Johnston. I am 58 years old. I was

born in Halifax and grew up in Nova Scotia, but I moved to Ottawa and I have worked as a communication strategy. are just for the last almost 30 years. We haven't made up our minds about whether we are barons or commoners. These tensions, ambiguities, and possibilities

when we were asked which ideas episode is our favorite, that's a hard thing to come up with over 30 years. So, of course, I thought of something that was fairly recent. Despite possessing such entitlements on paper, we continue to live amid pervasive and persistent insecurity. Governments near and far commit heinous acts of violence

against their citizens. An estimated 1.8 billion people worldwide are homeless or living in grossly inadequate housing, lacking basic services, including electricity, water, and sanitation. Wars rage, people starve, police kill, and the climate burns. My name is Astra Taylor. I am a writer, filmmaker, and political organizer, and I was the 23 CBC Massey Lecture. My lectures were entitled The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together, as things fall apart. I was sitting outside a coffee shop when I got the call, and my expectations were really humble. I thought maybe we would brainstorm future episodes. Maybe I would give some reading recommendations. And when I was invited to actually give that year's Massey lectures, I felt

this tremendous sense of responsibility, actually, because it's, I think, a huge honor, but also just an incredible opportunity to have a stage like that, to talk about ideas, to talk about things that to try to engage the public in this act of collective meaning-making. She did a five-part series, and the episode, they were all interesting, but the one that interested me the most was the second episode, which she called Barons or Commoners. And it centered on the Charter of the Forest, which was a document signed in 1217,

between the King of England, who was apparently a horrible king, and the commoners, the people of England, who were the 99% of their time, who got by by grazing their sheep and their cattle on common lands. Like rulers before him, King John and his enforcers capriciously infringed on the peasant's customary rights to subsistence, rights to fish in the streams and let their animals forage and graze, to gather nuts, berries, honey, kindling, and herbs for medicine.

Fences and hedges kept them out of land. They did not own outright, but had longed, shared and used and even lived upon. And for hundreds of years, the monarchy had been taking that land away from people. It had been giving them less and less space. And finally, the common people decided they'd had enough and they rebelled. And the king was forced to sign a document which gave them access to the land that they needed and the fish in the streams and the wood in the forest that they would gather to eat their homes.

It is no surprise that tales of the folk hero Robin Hood, living freely with his band of rebels in Sherwood Forest and thwarting foresters and the local sheriff first appeared during these years. In 1217, seeking to consolidate political support the new King Henry III reissued the Magna Carta alongside a new companion document

the so-called Charter of the Forest. The Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest were considered twin documents, often read aloud in public spaces, in the same breath. Among other things, the Forest Charter restored a significant portion of Royal Forest to the Commons. It was, in a sense, an early example of reparations for a return property that had been stolen while also providing the peasantry an affirmative right to something,

the security that the access to the Commons provided. I found this fascinating because I've never heard of the Charter of the Forest before. Like most people, I'd heard of the Magna Carta, which is the Great Charter that was signed two years earlier. And I'd always thought of that as being sort of an early human rights document. I didn't realize until I heard this episode of ideas that, no, the Magna Carta was an agreement between the king and his barons, you know, the 1% of that time. and it was basically just you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back kind of an agreement. It was the barons forcing the king to back off, to tax them less, to let them sort of ride roughshod over the peasantry. It really did nothing to protect the common people who were the majority of people.

The answer simply stated is that the charter of the forest provided material security for all. It limited private property rights, halted private tax. and returned land for common use. This makes it deeply unsettling to today's capitalist democracies and generally reviled by the business interests that currently reign, for it implies rights not only to be protected from something, a tyrannical state, but the right to something, a good life supported by the state.

Both kinds of rights are essential to a free society, that is to say, we need both the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest together. I just found it so relevant to the time that we were living in. You know, the pandemic was such an upheaval for all of us in so many different ways. And I found there was a common thread for me because I was seeing the Serb payments here in Canada and a parallel between that and the Charter of the Forest and commoning rights. When people, average people, common people, have a safe place to stay. they're harder to push around.

And that modicum of security given to people by the state, it's a threat to market forces and some of our political forces. The question before us really is quite simple. Do we see ourselves as barons or as commoners? In today's world, it can be hard to tell, largely because we are encouraged to see ourselves as barons to be. Given the underfunded and shrinking state of many public services, the most obvious path to security for ordinary people is through the marketplace.

Security, crudely put, is a function of wealth. The last thing the powerful want to see is a revival of the idea found in the Charter of the Forest, a robust right to the material security of the commons for everyone. Such a guarantee would make it harder to manufacture the insecurity that capitalism relies on. But if we could rely instead on the security as I was walking the dog and listening to Astra Taylor's voice in my earbuds, she said we are asked these days, in the West at least, to consider ourselves, if we are not already barons, we are asked to consider ourselves as barons in waiting. And I see exactly what she means.

and I am definitely not a baron or a baron in waiting. I am a common person, and that makes me feel good. It makes me feel like it's all for one, one for all. I like that part about it. Individual and collective well-being. The Forest Charter guaranteed rights to herbage, which is grass, for grazing sheep and cattle, panage, which is sustenance for pigs, terbury, which is peat fuel from a bog, and S. Dovers, which is kindling.

This lecture is just a convoluted excuse to say the word terbury to a room full of people. Terbury. When we come together and support one another, that strength and solidarity, it just makes society stronger. I'm not explaining that very well,

but I'd never heard of the charter of the forest. We were living through this tumultuous time with the pandemic, and I could see that 800 years ago, were living through something that was equally tumultuous and threatening. And instead of being atomized and separated from one another and just letting it happen, they came together in a common cause and they changed things for the better for themselves. I found it very inspiring. Wow, I love that. That was so well said. And I love the way she phrased it, that when regular

people have some security, they're harder to push around. So that was incredibly great. gratifying and moving for me to hear her comments. The idea that matters of law and policy should be left to experts is a myth today's barons want us to believe. Like the medieval commons, the law is something that belongs to everyone. It is political terrain we can struggle over and change. The right to security, whatever we decide security is, is ours. It is ours to debate, to reimagine, to proclaim,

and to make real. Thank you. I've gone through my own life, getting to where I am, hasn't been easy, but now with my daughter sort of at that same point where I was when I was moving into a dorm room and plugging in my radio, I know that if we're not here helping her, she's not going to reach her fullest potential. And listening to her program really made me reflect on how lucky I've been. been in my lifetime. And I just, I see all around me when I do listen to the news, when I look at

what my daughter sees on her phone, I think, boy, those of us who have been fortunate, we have an obligation to help other people, right? It's a rising tide that lifts all boats. And that makes things better for everyone in society. on this journey through life-altering ideas episodes as told by you are dear listeners. Our special series celebrating the 60th anniversary of Ideas is produced by Karen Chikiluck. Special thanks to Patrick Mooney, John Scaife, and Kate Zeman from CBC Library Services, as well as the technical team at CBC Ottawa. And of course, to our listener contributors, Susan Radojevic,

Greg Heelan, Greer Johnston, and Kathy Pike. Technical production by Emily Kiervezio and Sam McNulty. The web producer of ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luchic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.com. slash podcasts.