Childhood and adolescence

My goal in presenting this text to other people is not to dwell on my private life. Instead, I want to refer to my own political and professional experience, as well as my research and my earlier writings, to show why I arrived at the general historical conclusions that I was mentioning earlier. Which means that in this opening chapter, about my first nineteen years, I only intend to write about events that had a real influence on some aspect of my public or intellectual life since that time.

For example, in one of the little Canadian towns in which we were living, I had a hard time accepting the ultraconservative views of two of our young friends there, who tried to conscript us into an evangelical Protestant religion by teaching us a bunch of religious songs. My opinion of the place was not helped either when I watched the annual Orange Lodge parades going down main street, commemorating the Protestant (“Macs”) victory in Great Britain, over the Catholics (“Mics”), back in 1690. They were always singing their true-blue Orange songs, which included lines like the following ones: “Oh, Mic hit Mac and Mac hit Mic, and Mac hit Mic thereafter; ten thousand Mics lay down their sticks, in the Battle of the Boyne in water.”

At about the same time, during the second Berlin crisis, all the children in my school had to go through various drills, like the one where we had to get under our desks and bend over with our hands over our heads, in case of a nuclear strike. To say the least, it was not a very realistic response. In the event of a nuclear war, as various radicals pointed out at the time, the only thing for ordinary people to do was to bend over real far and “kiss your ass goodbye”. Because of my critical reaction to incidents like those, I began my intellectual life already very much opposed to both religion and militarism.

To find out why the world was set up the way that it was, I started reading a lot, taking out subscriptions to geography and news magazines, as well as making the most of the educational toys that I received from my parents, such as a microscope, a telescope and a chemistry set. I also started actually reading the daily newspaper that I was delivering to the people on my paper route. During those same years, I met quite a few teachers who helped me get interested in history and English literature, as well.

As a result, I paid attention to those songs on the hit parade that had a certain amount of historical content in them, such as the one about “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1815, sung by Johnny Horton. I remember one of the local disk jockeys getting upset about that song since it referred to how the Americans beat “the bloody British”. In those days, most English-speaking people in Canada were still recalling their origins as United Empire Loyalists, counter revolutionaries who were driven out of the Thirteen Colonies immediately after the war of independence. However, such songs are not nearly as well remembered by most people as some of the much less political tunes that are still being played over and over again today.

In high school, I came in second in a public speaking contest, in which I tried to defend the United Nations. Unfortunately, back then that school still practiced compulsory military training for boys. This meant that we all had to get dressed up in army uniforms and parade up and down in the football field, carrying fake rifles while being watched by the girls, the teachers and our parents. During one particularly hot day in June, I remember holding my breath in such a way that I genuinely lost consciousness, upon which I was promptly pulled off the parade square and got to sit under the shade trees instead, with all the other weak boys. Another time, I managed to emphasize to my classmates just how much of a weirdo I was by insisting on standing outside in the hallway every morning while everyone else was reciting the Lord’s prayer inside the classroom.

My interest in literature was developing quite well during those years. It was then that I attempted to read all the great books of western civilization, such as the Bible, which after an exciting start soon became a boring account of Israeli tribal heroics, under the watchful eye of a rather parochial god who was always picking on Israel’s unfortunate neighbors. Some of the other parts of the Bible, however, such as “Ecclesiastes” and the “Song of Solomon”, were far more interesting. In any case, I got more enjoyment out of reading English romantic poetry, as well as various novels from the nineteenth century, particularly some of the Russian ones. Other times, I went with friends to a local bookstore, where we would read and discuss science fiction stories. My particular favorite was the Daniel Keyes story, Flowers for Algernon, with its emphasis on how different life can be for people with very different capacities for learning.

One interesting event that took place was my participation in a local radio show. As high school students, we were all supposed to think up some amusing skit to deliver on the air. On November 22, 1963, I was therefore scheduled to go on the local radio broadcast with my imitation of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, featuring such typical lines as “We shall pursue this policy with vigor and force and direction.” I was cut off, however, by the high school principal who came running up to inform me that I could not do that skit since the president had been shot. Several years later, I remember underlining an account of Malcolm X’s own reaction to the Kennedy assassination, when he muttered that “the chickens have come home to roost”, presumably meaning that Kennedy had been killed as a result of his own actions.

All in all, my years of high school were quite useful, particularly in giving me a certain cultural heritage. For one thing, I managed to accumulate a whole slew of remembered verses, which I still recite to myself nowadays. Unfortunately, young people are no longer obliged to commit anything to memory, a fact that limits their cultural horizons for the rest of their lives. The ability to remember several reasonably long passages from the soliloquies found in Hamlet or Macbeth, a dozen quatrains from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Edward Fitzgerald), or even a few lines from poems written by people like Shelley, Poe or Swinburne, makes life a lot more interesting down the road.

By this time, I was getting more and more interested in unorthodox ways of thinking, so I started subscribing to the bulletin of the Canadian Humanist Association for awhile. At one point, I also campaigned for the mildly socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) during  the 1965 federal election. Canvassing the entire town for the party, I soon discovered that it was clearly divided between a rich section, with very large houses and lawns, and a much poorer section, especially around the trailer park. Another time, I went to Toronto by bus to meet some humanist friends and on the way back I started talking to a young NDP supporter who had just been to a meeting of the Buckley caucus in another nearby town. The so called Buckley caucus was a small group of rightwing social democrats opposed to the leftwing “Waffle” faction inside the NDP. They used the name Buckley for fun, since William F. Buckley, Junior, the American journalist and ultraconservative, in fact hated all socialists pretty much equally.

During one of my visits to the big city, I met several people who were not only involved in atheist organizations but also in various anarchist and left-wing groups. One local anarchist put me in touch with the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) in Toronto, which interested me a lot even though I did not become a university student until much later.