By Paul Murphy
Amid the kid's stuff under our tree this year I found a copy of Conrad Black's Rise to Greatness: the History of Canada (Maclelland and Stewart, 2014) with my name on it. That was a surprise, because my wife is a lifelong Trudeau liberal and thus wholly bought into the Hollinger farce - but I got even: two weeks later I got her a copy of The Big Fat Surprise (Simon & Schuster, 2014), by Nina Teicholz.
Reading these back to back was a bit disconcerting, because both are massive compilations of fact but Black's work struck me as arguably wrong with respect to his intentionality theme but a remarkable achievement nonetheless, where Fat Surprise seemed repetitive, medicore, and right.
The reason I think this worth reporting - and the point of using the first person throughout is to emphasize the personal nature of the views expressed - is that nearly every parallel between the two books expresses in terms of opposites - much the same way that Newton's laws of motion require us to see decelleration as indistinguisable from accelleration except in terms of direction.
At the global level The Big Fat Surprise presents the misuse and misdirection of nutrition research in the United States since the early 1900s to make the argument that naturally fatty foods can be good for you; that cutting them out of the American diet has been a terrible mistake with long term, negative, consequences for Americans; and, that this mistake was driven by a combination of personal and corporate greed, good intentions, weak opposition, strong personalities, and both political and academic opportunism.
Her bottom line, although she never actually makes the case and certainly never states the obvious quite so baldly, is that humans evolved as carnivores who can digest plant materials when they have to, but aren't well adapted to their consumption. That's hardly a surprise, but what is astounding is that this book made it through the left's correctness filters - meaning that it may be time to invest heavily in meat producers and/or fast food chains switching to lard, because it wouldn't have if the politically narcissist didn't see massive, and socially approved, dietary change coming.
Rise, in contrast, argues that men like Louis de Buade (Comte de Frontenac), John A. Macdonald, and Wilfred Laurier had a vision for Canada that is now being fulfilled - that Canadian history consists of a rise to national greatness driven by the genius, hard work, and commitment of visionary leaders. I think that's sheer revisionism, but the book can make a significant contribution to the reader's understanding of Canadian history whether that reader agrees with the author or not.
What drives the argument for both is the great man theory of history - but directionality is opposed with Ms. Teicholz damning just about everybody to document a bad outcome and Mr. Black attributing intentionality and a positive outcome to actions taken by the major players in Canadian history.
At the microstructure level both books contain introductory and closing elements I found objectionable and interpreted as conscious or unconscious attempts to win audience trust by demonstrating authorial allegiance to delusions characterizing membership in the intended reader's community of opinion.
Thus Ms Teicholz, whose leftist credentials include work for PBS, The Economist, and Salon, proves her allegiance to the community of the self-deluded early on by embracing the myth of the noble savage living in joyful harmony with nature; while Mr. Black quickly establishes his credentials as a holier-than-thou Canadian by castigating Americans over slavery.
The reality is that those noble Masai goat herds Ms. Teicholz salutes liked to drink the blood of their enemies while those enemies were dying, still practice female genital mutilation even in the United States and Canada, and cheerfully used fire to stampede herds of elephants, along with whatever else got in the way, to their deaths - while her willingness to cite second and third hand reports of right thinking Navaho centenarians left me imagining her as comfortable with portraits of Mao Tse Dung (easily the bloodiest fascist to date) adorned with symbols and slogans preaching Love and Peace.
Similarly, Mr. Black may think the fact that there was no United States, and therefore could have been no Americans, prior to constitutional ratification on June 21, 1788 mere pedantry, but the fact is that if the slavery reparations movement ever succeeds the monies will have to be collected from the responsible parties - i.e. the noble families of England, not Americans.
England sold nearly 400,000 Irish, Scots, and English paupers into slavery during the 17th and 18th centuries (with those sold into the American colonies, becoming the source of most American mixed race children born in the 18th and 19th centuries) excluded its empire, (then including all the American colonies) from its 1772 emancipation proclamation; excluded its richest slavers from the 1807 anti-slave trade bill (which itself came 13 years after the new American Congress unequivically outlawed the support, off-loading, or resupply of slave traders anywhere in the United States) and even in its 1833 abolition act not only specifically continued slavery in parts of the empire where it was most valuable to the English nobility, but included legislated asset protection for affected slave owners allowing them to turn the newly freed into apprentices whose contracts were regularly bought and sold until well after Appomattox.
Canadians, furthermore, should be aware that slavery and torture were common among the indigenous people, that the leaders of New France accepted slaves as treaty gifts, (q.v. references cited here); and, that the 1793 upper Canada Act Against Slavery allowed Canadians to keep slaves until England's 1833 Abolition Act came into force in 1834.
Both books have commensurate codas - Black's an editorial reflection on what he sees as Canada's grand prospects (and I see as the working out of something Smaual Adams wrote about those who prefer "the tranquillity of servitude" over "the animating contest of freedom"); the other a "note on Meat and Ethics" suggesting that the ethical dilemma of eating methane gas producers "which contributes to greenhouse gases" might be balanced by a reduction in national health care costs.
This ritual bowing to political correctness occurs at both ends in both books and not just in opposite directions, but in full field reversal: switching, in Black's case, from a positive view of the role of the great to a unreasonable, but politically correct, condemnation of Americans while Ms. Teicholz switches from a reasonable negativity about the role of the politicized great to an absurd, but politically correct, enthusiasm for the cultural greatness of savages on the one hand and society's collective responsibility for health care costs on the other.
This parallel but opposite comparability carries through from the vocabulary and writing style to underlying value. Black regularly rises to eloquence and casually assumes the reader understands words like "prevenient"; rarely prorupts his chronological organizing principle; and covers or touches on so much material that a second edition intended for classroom use in Canada's colleges and highschools, should he decide to offer one, could easily become an authoritative three volume set in the 1,300 page range. The result is that Rise, despite its 1000 page length and density, is generally memorable: I had no difficulty, for example, rediscovering the half dozen or so howlers I'd noticed while reading.
(Mr. Black, incidently, responded promptly and personally when I contacted him about these.)
Black, in this book, does what the reader expects him to do: there is no great elephant stomping about the room in Rise: it sets out to recount the history of Canada and interests its reader in precisely that, the history of Canada. You can disagree with him about the intentionality of it all, but he never lets either his agenda or his opinions get in the way of the facts and has produced, I think, a significant work deserving of far more attention among students of Canadian history than it seems likely to get.
Fat parallels this, but with opposite directionality: simple sentences, limited vocabulary, weak chronological adherence and a tendency to glaze the reader - I know, for example, that rashers became rations (of bacon) somewhere early in the book, but I'd have to re-read from the beginning to find the reference. One reason for this is her endemic commitment to piling it higher and deeper (using many citations, references, or interview note quotations where one would do) - so more because of, than despite, the fact that over 100 of the book's 456 pages are given over to acknowledgements, notes, and citations, I am fairly sure that it could be rewritten in 30 pages without significant loss of substance.
Oddly, it's this process of painstaking, non judgmental (except with respect to hydrogenation), repetition - something I thought of while reading as stringing together years of notes into something the publisher could sell - that produces the oddest of the opposite-but-the-same parallelisms with Rise, because the real value of the Teiholhz woork isn't so much in its content as it is in the politically unmentionable elephant stomping around in it.
As far as I know, the left's climate change extravaganza is never explicitly mentioned in The Big Fat Surprise but it utterly dominates the book because it's not possible to read any section or subsection without seeing that the processes she describes almost exactly describe the how, the why, and the institutional who underlying the left's support for all major aspects of the global warming hypothesis.
From pages 45 and 46:
When I started my research I expected to find a community of scientists in decorous debate. Instead, I found researchers like Ravnskov, who, by his own admission, was a cautionary tale for independently minded scientists seeking to challenge the conventional wisdom. His predecessors from the 1960s onward hadn't been convinced by the orthodoxy on cholesterol; they'd just been silenced, worn out, or had come to the end of their careers. As Keys's ideas spread and became adopted by powerful institutions, those who challenged him faced a difficult --some might say impossible-- battle. Being on the losing side of such a high stakes debate had caused their professional lives to suffer. Many had lost jobs, research funding, speaking engagements, and all the many other perks of prestige. Although these diet-heart opponents included a number of researchers who were at the top of their fields, including, notably, an editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, they were not invited to conferences, and were unable to get prestigious journals to publish their work.* Experiments that had dissenting results, they found, were not debated and discussed but instead dismissed or ignored altogether. Even being subject to slander and personal ridicule were surprisingly not unusual experiences for these opponents of the diet-heart hypothesis. In short they found themselves unable to continue contributing to their fields, which of course is the very essence of every scientist's hopes and ambitions.* The former editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association was Edward R. Pinckney, whose 1973 book, The Cholesterol Controversy was followed in 1988 by a groundbreaking scientific critique of the evidence used to support the diet-heart hypothesis. This second effort is still the most thorough critical review of that science ever written, but he could not find a publisher. (Pinckney and Pinckney 1973; Smith and Pinchkey, 1988)
It almost doesn't matter where you open Fat Surprise: within a few paragraphs you need only change a few words to imagine yourself reading about climate change deniers fighting to put science ahead of politics, to get overwhelming contrary evidence accepted by people whose minds are blinkered by money, prestige, politics, doctored data, and their own prior commitments to rather obviously absurd positions.
Some semi-random phrases from pages 122 to 130:
The view in ascendency among nutrition experts was that Americans should "hedge their bets" against heart disease by reducing dietary fats until more evidence emerged..The media had a heyday .. Generally, the media coverage was fiercely in favor of the government's low fat recommendations... The New York Times essentially took a poll...
Here, then, was the new reality; a political decision had yielded a new scientific truth.
For the academy's report [arguing a lack of convincing evidence for the diet-heart hypothesis], the death knell was surely sounded on June 1, 1980, when the New York Times ran a front page story about two board members and their ties to industry...
Thus the penultimate reversal between the two books is that Rise to Greatness left me wanting to know more about some aspects of Canadian history where Fat Surprise left me wanting to read an entirely different book - one comparing what happened with respect to the heart-diet hypothesis to what is happening with the CO2-Warmist hypothesis, particularly in terms of the role the evolving interactive media have had in breaking the linkage between expert pronouncement and public opinion on the one hand while simultaneously strengthening commitment among those trapped inside the warmist, or heart-health, echo chamber on the other.
And the final parallel opposite is, sadly, that mediocrity has its rewards: Black's Rise to Greatness is an important work that hardly anyone will buy, let alone read - but Teicholtz's Fat made the New York Times best seller list almost immediately on release and will be paged through by hundreds of thousands, if not millions.