DIVERSITY, SOLIDARITY, JD VANCE, & THE WORLD SERIES (31 October 2025)

The Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, has claimed that “diversity weakens unions,” which is a common conservative claim most often expressed by invoking the “natural tribalism” of human beings. I have expertise to demonstrate that this is false. These notions rest on the idea that, in the past, human communities were unmixed–I hesitate to use the word ‘pure,’ which I avoid; or, in JD Vance’s telling, hyper-assimilationist. That is untrue. Anthropology shows us that traditional societies have culturally determined technologies of interacting with outsiders. There is little in the world that I have studied more than the technologies of interconnection and coexistence between communities. In remotest antiquity, human communities bordered one another, and there have been almost no societies in history who regard themselves as isolated, not having neighbors who were different than them. In this situation of human communities being aware of humans who are different than them, communities invent rituals and processes intended to manage interaction and coexistence with outsiders. Sometimes these processes result in the assimilation of the newcomer, but more often, the newcomer retains a foreignness even when interacting with the new community.

Most people have a pessimistic view of humanity and think that our natural impulse towards the outsider is murder. Au contraire! The human story is that, 90% of the time, human groups come to some accommodation with outsiders or neighbors, including through migration, trade, and intermarriage, and thus incorporation of the outsider into a new community, but not necessarily the ‘assimilate-or-else’ idea now promoted by Vance. There is not a shred of evidence to claim that “diversity weakens unions” unless you have an a priori prejudice about ‘others.’

Back to JD Vance: he claims that distrust arising from diversity causes people not to find common cause with one another, not to unionize, and that this supposedly low level of social trust is deleterious and undesirable. The mind boggles. I think of The March on Washington in the 1960s, which my white, rural parents attended in support of Martin Luther King, Jr., and civil rights. I think of the labour movement itself, which bridges all demographics in its promotion of workers’ rights. I think of a baseball team like the Toronto Blue Jays or the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose rosters represent dozens of countries. You can see high levels of social trust and a strong union of people working in solidarity across cultural and linguistic difference in every game of the World Series!

ALBERTA’S BILL 2, FOX NEWS, AND THE NOTWITHSTANDING CLAUSE (28 October 2025)

What just happened in Alberta? We have publicly funded K-12 education, and publicly funded post-secondary with the addition of tuition, as a matter of law and norms throughout Canada. K-12 teachers are allowed to unionize as a matter of their rights, and so our teachers’ unions are strong throughout the country, although in Alberta there are unreasonable legislative restrictions on the strike funds a union can raise. What happened yesterday is that the government didn’t like how collective bargaining was going with the Alberta Teachers Association, which had resulted in a strike and a lock-out, and so they forced teachers back to work with a law, Bill 2, that explicitly OVERRIDES THEIR CHARTER RIGHTS TO FREE ASSOCIATION AND TO COLLECTIVE BARGAINING, claiming extraordinary harm to students because of the teachers’ strike and invoking the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms to pass otherwise unconstitutional legislation.

Au contraire, these Mar-a-lago visitors and Fox News fanatics, who do nothing but import American garbage into Canada, caused the teachers’ strike by systematically insulting teachers and making their lives worse through book audits, book bans, anti-LGBTQ legislation, overstuffing and understaffing classrooms, and the like. We cannot let ignorance and unknowing reign as sovereign in this province. We should depose this Fox News-inflected government at the ballot box. No family tradition of voting Conservative is worth this parody of good governance.

JORDAN PETERSON AND THE CANADIAN POSTSECONDARY CLASSROOM (17 September 2025)

Since 2017, faculty in Canada have had to cope with students who are ginned up to believe something corrupt is happening in university classrooms because they are intellectually saturated by Jordan Peterson YouTube videos. 

There are many “tells” that reveal his misleading influence. One is that male students will ask a question in a class about ancient Greek history or academic writing–the subject matter doesn’t matter–that begins with a proposition such as “Well, since God is dead…” or “we know that the vast majority of faculty are leftists” or some other such certainty that they learned not through experience but because Prof. Dr. Jordan Peterson has told them, over and over, that universities are this way and that these facile generalizations are evidence of high intellect.

This is a new phenomenon that began in my eleventh year of teaching in universities, but it is really no more troubling than any other trend students bring to class that is more characteristic of High School than it is of university. What I mean is students start university-level classes with many ideas that turn out not to be true upon closer examination. That is the very nature of university-level study. All of a sudden, in their first year of adulthood, if they don’t take time off, which I advise students do do, they are in an environment where knowledge is not a matter of government policy. It is a matter of research and argument. So, now, saying things that sound like the truth without any grounding in the subject is insufficient; the propositions will have to be examined, and much more closely than the student, whose knowledge of universities is limited to what the good disgruntled psychologist from the 416 says, expects. 

The most important part of all this is that I, and my colleagues, have a duty to hear this young person’s first intellectual foray and help him to refine it so that it is demonstrable in evidence, and lead him away from ideas that are demonstrably wrong. That has always been the job, and while we may not like it when the students come to class primed to denigrate what faculty bring to the table, the students remain persuadable by good argument and evidence, and so we show them both what that is and give them tools to interpret it for themselves. I have come to see the student who arrives with enormous suspicion of academia as quite a fertile mind, who can be led to nuanced understanding through reading and discussion.

THE KIDNEY IN THE 20TH CENTURY (10 September 2025)

Back in 1999-2003, I was doing some work with the National Kidney Foundation CyberNephrology and the International Society of Nephrology Video Legacy Project, opportunities I had through my father, Dr. Kim Solez, M.D. Physicians around the world working on kidney medicine were newly galvanized by international cooperation through new technologies, and in this atmosphere some wanted a graphic expression of this collaboration.

I was put to work finding the words for ‘kidney’ in world languages. I did this work in the reference section of Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, with Monier Monier-Williams’s dictionary for Sanskrit (no typos in that name!😂), Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of English, and all the others to boot. Through this primary research we gathered sufficient content to generate a graphic for one of Kim Solez’s initiatives, and this became a logo and letterhead, with dozens of words for ‘kidney’ in a kind of proto-wordcloud.

This activity and its products seem particularly emblematic of what was going on in kidney medicine and international cooperation in the 1990s and early aughts, with NephrOL, new protocols on crush syndrome and international relief efforts, and other initiatives.The most memorable feature of this time growing up in a household permanently connected to renal pathology were the calls we got, and I often fielded, from the US Geological Survey. Kim Solez was on a call-list for first notifications of any significant earthquake around the globe. Crush syndrome and new protocols for treating it were the reasons for his membership in this list.

*Ring, Ring* “Hello?” “Hello, this is the US Geological Survey, is this Kim Solez?” “No, but I can take a message for him.” “OK, there has been a X magnitude earthquake near Istanbul, Turkey.” “OK, I’ll let him know.”

I fielded half a dozen such calls from employees of the geological survey, and many more when the service became automated with a digital voice reading out the information.

The connection between earthquakes and kidney medicine is a fascinating subject. When a person is crushed under significant weight, but not killed, their organs suffer in ways that are not apparent at first when they are rescued. Earthquakes produce many such injuries. It was discovered in WWII that people crushed beneath destroyed buildings would later die of kidney failure, if they were initially rescued.

Physicians working over the 50 years from then until the 1990s discovered that saline introduced into the blood would protect the kidney from this catastrophic failure. So, the new protocol that occasioned the calls from the US Geological Survey was that international medical relief efforts needed to include a nephrologist who could direct triage physicians and medics to give a saline IV to those who had been crushed under weight, saving thousands of lives.

A NOTE ON ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE HOMERIC POEMS (20 July 2025)

The anthropological reading of Homer is radical because it eschews scholarly tradition. It is unimpacted by Plato’s condemnation of Homer. It is unconcerned with the greatness of the poems. The question is: what must be true about the Greek-speaking human beings in the ancient eastern Mediterranean for these poems and the epic tradition to exist?

It’s a radical question, the answers to which will cause a scholar to say things that fly in the face of the received wisdom of the Classics classroom. Plato is inherent in that received wisdom, but so is the Jesuit “being like a corpse,” and Calvinism; at least twelve generations of Euro-American scholars have been interpreting Homer as a good according to their religious sensibilities (using a twenty-five year generation and going back to 1725).

The Jesuits deserve much credit for the strength of the Humanities over several hundred years, but the core philosophy and approaches of the Jesuits doom efforts to be accurate about the Homeric poems. Their intense study of non-Christian literature seeks to find the extent of human wisdom and intuition prior to revelation; that is, which parts of Christianity already existed in the pre-Christian world, and which parts necessitated the intervention of Christ? It is an explicit effort to find Christian values in pagan literature; how can such an approach do justice to Achilles! I come back again to thank the Jesuits, nevertheless, for caring so much about pre-Christian literature that they and their universities sustained the Humanities in Europe and the Americas for centuries.

Plato poses an even bigger challenge, because he enjoys the status of being ancient Greek, and so his criticisms of the Homeric poems can be posited as indigenous interpretation of the epic tradition. As I always like to tell fans of Plato, he does not represent widespread views on anything. He was a sui generis genius. We cannot take a single view held by Plato to be representative of Greek culture as a whole. Epic poetry is entirely different from that. You can take everything expressed in Archaic epic as reflective of the cultures of Greek-speakers.

In my long engagement with the Homeric poems, I am frequently confronted with the influence of Christian tradition and Plato in scholarly assessments. This influence comes primarily from classroom experiences with Classics professors, who enjoy speaking of Achilles as a whiny brat and emphasizing the “ennobling” aspects of the poems, which means no more than features of the poems which play into one’s confirmation bias.

I get it; we have to appeal to the students and these are good strategies to do so and fun things to talk about. It is much more fun, however, to say what is true about Homer.

All this to say that the anthropological reading of Homer continues to bear fruit and continues to be novel one hundred years after Milman Parry wrote his dissertation on oral formulaic theory.

FINALLY, HOME (5 July 2025)

It took exactly two years, but I rolled into Plamondon the other day and it felt like home. That relief I assume everyone knows crested on the horizon of consciousness; finally, home.

This was not the moment it first dawned on me. It was at the pizza shop, the second time I sat for a meal at their tables, when the young lady asked me if I was going to the event at the school, because she had studied with my wife and knew me, though I didn’t know her. That was the first moment I felt the change but I couldn’t name that feeling yet.

We’re all making virtues of our choices as a survival instinct, subscribing to an adaptive view of reality in which we are not all fools. This makes me wary of celebrating my love for my little house and land too much. I would presumably feel the desire to celebrate it even if it were much worse.

Mustering my best approximation of an objective view, however, this is a very nice place to live. Yes, it could have a fence and might yet some day. Yes, I live in what is usually called a trailer on an algaefied lake, with no water or sewer service, so I have to arrange for my own. Had I not lived here, I probably would have never known for sure that a family of four with our high standard of living uses 400 L of fresh water per day. I know that now as certainly as I know anything. On a weekend day full of dishes and laundry chores, it’s more like 600 L.

When Ava and I met, which is a great story, I rented a single-wide almost exactly like the house we have today on the mountainside in West Creston, BC. Our romance grew, and Ava moved in there with me. It is a small but precious part of our happiness here that it reminds us of back then, when I was 29 and she was 24. We’ve been together almost 17 years and it all started when we both took jobs at the same place in Creston.

Plamondon is kind of like West Creston, if Lac La Biche is Creston; but all that is besides the point. The air, the animals, the sounds, the smells, the forest, a little garden, a morning chore that gives me an excuse to be active in the early hours, the big, south facing windows, the giant Jurassic rhubarb, my retired pastor neighbour, the school-bus down the country road, the nearby beach with ice cream–all these together are very fine.

The itinerary of our journey goes from Creston to Edmonton, to Vancouver, to Erlangen, to Edmonton, to St. John’s, to Edmonton, to Plamondon, and one gets the feeling that there will be only one more move, back to Edmonton, hopefully when we are very old. It all depends on where the kids end up, of course.

I love the city but there’s always been this draw of the countryside, and I surrender. The Boreal Forest and the lakes can have me.

REFLECTING ON TWO YEARS IN THE LAKELAND (15 April 2025)

Looking out over Lac la Biche produces a meditative calm that unites those who live around its shores. I first noticed it in January 2018, when I started coming to Lac La Biche once a week for work. This ‘lake of the doe’ from the French name, or ‘elk lake’ from the Cree name wâwâskesiwisâkahikan, is a tonic in all seasons.

Experiencing life in Lac La Biche one day a week for a few years made me think that it would be a nice place to move my family. The pieces fell into place in the summer of 2023 and we moved to Plamondon.

As someone who made his career up to this point teaching ancient history and languages at universities, a few things caught my attention right away. The region has a rich cultural history, with its Cree, Métis, French, English, Lebanese, and Old Believer roots.

The patron saint of the Catholic church in Plamondon, the 7th-century bishop Isidore of Seville, is famous in scholarly circles for his encyclopedic work Etymologiae (‘Origins’), which is particularly significant for its documentation of early medieval thinking about grammar and the history of Latin words. Working with this text twenty years ago in my first year of grad school, I found that several of Isidore’s word origins, which we would normally categorize as folk etymologies with no scientific basis, were in fact correct in light of 21st-century linguistics. That is no small feat for the old Padre. The name Isidore always reminds me of this work on ancient Roman wordplay I did a lifetime ago in Baltimore.

Church Slavonic, the religious language of the Old Believers in Lac La Biche County, is an important language in Indo-European studies, the branch of linguistics that describes and theorizes about the fact that dozens of languages stretching across the globe from western China to Britain are descended from a common linguistic ancestor. Old Church Slavonic is the earliest Slavic language to be written down, originating in the translation of the Greek Bible into that language in the ninth century, and so it is important in understanding the development of eastern European languages and of the Indo-European language family as a whole. The language of the Old Believer Bible is a slightly younger version of this earliest Slavic language, and our region plays a role in perpetuating knowledge of this important Medieval language.

The Lakeland has a decidedly independent streak today, and that appears to have been part of the character of the region for some time. Major raids and attacks associated with the 1885 Northwest Rebellion took place in these parts, and I look forward to learning more about these and our distinct local history in the coming years.In the meantime you’ll find me staring blissfully out over the water.