Reflections on Insiders and Outsiders:

Thank you, friends. I feel myself deeply honoured to be asked to give this lecture, not only because I like to be with friends and talk about things of common concern, but I also like very much and feel very honoured to be involved in anything that is done in memory and in the name of Margaret Laurence, whom I too consider my friend.

I met Margaret very much toward the end of her life. We both had, in a way, become public persons and it was there I want to spend a very short minute on how, after we had been involved both in the film of making our peace, we began to start having very, uh, very meaningful and for both of us, I think, very valuable conversations with each other. Margaret had become director of Energy Probe and at that point I said to one of my friends at Energy Probe … "you know, I'd love to talk a bit more with Margaret Laurence. Maybe you should mention it to her but please don't put a burden on her. I know her work has her first demand and she is a public person and a lot of people had come to respect her need to be master of her own time." And thereafter came a phone call from my friend and said … "you know, it's very funny. I mentioned that to Margaret Laurence and she said 'oh, yeah, you know I have always thought I would want to talk greatly with Ursula Franklin but you know she's a public person and I respect her sense of need of her own space. Don't make it a burden." And it was very funny that we both used almost the exact same words. And then came that where I went up to Energy Probe one day before the Board meeting and we were supposed to have lunch and I said "you choose a place" and she said "you choose a place". It turned out that both of us had no use for yuppie restaurants and we ended up sitting in the back room, back of the cafeteria in the medical science building at the University of Toronto, having cups of coffee, two old women, nobody knew who we were. She was still smoking and we were talking undisturbed and there was a great deal of friendship.

But one of the things that I learned in these conversations which I really hadn't appreciated is how vulnerable Margaret was. How vulnerable she was and I tell in a moment how that came to me very much more than I had thought of the criticism from what she considered her own community. I remember her bringing a letter that had come to her when she had taken a very strong anti-nuclear position. It was not a nice letter, not a factual letter, but in fact a letter that said you are just being taken in. A letter that one should just dismiss and throw out. Margaret didn't do that, she brought it and said "you read that and then, Ursula, really tell me, am I a dupe?". And I was so touched that that even mattered, that that even registered. And as we began to talk of what it meant when one is in one's own community, not taken with sufficient trust or respect that one takes a position that is not what others take, that that is not respectfully acknowledged and a sign that it may be worthwhile examining that position. But there comes that derogatory term ... 'well, you are just a dupe' ... and since it involved matters of science, or supposedly, she had brought it to me and we had begun then to talk about that question that I want to talk about tonight. That question of being both an insider and an outsider. We had a very resonating conversation and I had in many ways then began to think about it, which I had done before, and felt that, as we had done, I wanted then to go back next month with some more possible insights to let it reflect in her light and then there was no next meeting because Margaret again, her health began to seriously deteriorate and long periods of concentrated talking were no more in the cards, I felt. It was really getting too much; our meetings became shorter and, in a way, I thought in this lecture tonight I want to continue that conversation.

I want to say to you some of the things that I would have brought there, to see them in Margaret's own light, because it is almost impossible to give a lecture here and not, in some way, speak about her. As I prepared it, I was again and again seeing that I began to divert, that I was talking about Margaret Laurence and I didn't want that. I wanted to talk about the problem that was the last one that we talked together about. And sometimes people say about a prominent person, they cast a long shadow, and for Margaret it is in a sense a different thing. She has left a very far-reaching light. It isn't that we stand in her shadow, we stand in her light.

And it is in that light that I want to talk, speak about that ongoing conversation about the nature of insiders and outsiders in our society and why I think, and in that sense all of Margaret's work says, that we in fact have reached the end of that road in which humanity can divide itself into outsiders and insiders and can also set itself apart from the ecological system, thinking that human beings are essentially in a totally different position than all other things in the environment. And so the plan that I have for that lecture is that I would like to show and explore with you the very long-suffered process that has led to that insider, outsider division. That there are currents and counter-currents; that none of these things are really straight-forward, a long line of black and white, good and evil events but that they are social processes that are currents and counter-currents and that's a practice of science and technology and I emphasize the practice because it isn't science and technology as much as the practice to which we put aside the results of science and technology. How much and in what way it has added to that process of social fragmentation, of separating people from each other, and I want to try and show you that great need to change that process. As well, I think the very hopeful potential that that change can be done and at the end of that change, we must arrive at an ecological view of life with a real and active understanding and practice of the interdependence of life.

And as I planned that, I feel that we first need to share how old that process is and that there are roots, very deep roots, in human social history that differentiate people from each other and separate them. And the reason why I think we need to seek the roots and the historical roots is because the patterns are so deeply laid down. I see life as if it were a fabric and those threads in the warp that give us the patterns of our life are very strong and very permanent. And anyone who weaves or knows weavers knows that it is very difficult to change a pattern, but that there are moments when patterns can be changed, but that there are also severe stresses and that is what Margaret felt so much, that as that change of pattern does occur and must occur, we have to consciously help it so that it can occur without tearing that pattern.

Now, there are various ways of talking and actually defining insiders and outsiders; Margaret used to say writers are a tribe. They have something in common without necessarily saying that everybody who isn't a member of this tribe are what the Greeks called barbarians who speak a language that is hard on the ears and one doesn't really have to understand. There's a difference between the functional differentiation of people who have, do things in common and the judgement of being outside and inside. The great German mathematician, David Hilbert, used to teach first-year mathematics in Gottingen – that was at a time when the greats taught first-year at universities – and he would begin first-year mathematics by saying to the students …. 'now look at yourself, take stock of yourself very consciously, mathematics is a mousetrap, you get in but you never get out again and you will never understand how people react who don't know mathematics'.

And I think it was a good and wise thing to remind students of, but that form of mousetrap is different from what hurt Margaret so in that letter when an insider said you really, on matters of nuclear energy, are an outsider and you have nothing to say about it. And I think the differentiation of outsiders and insiders to those who have something to say and those who are considered to have nothing to contribute to the decision-making and to the value of the operation is a decision, is the differentiation that was hurtful and is a differentiation that we have to transcend.

Now we know that excluding people from something is a very old tradition and I don't have to remind you that there were times when God could be spoken to only by certain men and in the Latin language and normal people who were just ordinary chaps, and women, and spoke the language of the country, had better find themselves a patron saint to whom they could speak and who then spoke to God. We remember that the medical practitioners spoke to each other and wrote to each other in a rather truncated form of Latin so that ordinary people, be they nurses or be they, heaven forbid, patients, would not be part of that inside circle. Nevertheless, of course, the outsiders have always been able to do things, there's always been coping, whether they spoke to God or whether they looked after each other's health, there's a vernacular level of knowledge, taking the word vernacular in Ivan Ilyich's youth, and that has always existed. What has also always existed is the attempt to break that barrier of the inside monopoly, whether it's the access to God or whether it's the access to worldly knowledge. And in most cases, humanity has survived rather well. The earth has not come to an end when large parts of the western civilizations said it's really not right if God could only be spoken to in Latin and by the ordained and she since spoke to others that the grace of God has come to people even when that insider barrier was broken. And so it was with many other events and for that reason we have to think of that exclusion movement, not alone but as part of the dynamic that by and of itself sets up a kind of current. But the power to exclude remained and is extraordinarily potent, whether it is excommunication or the removal of citizenship, the power to exclude some is one of the strongest, and in many ways least visible but most used, social power. And the purpose of this, of course, is control. It's a control of knowledge which goes in parallel with the deliberate mystification, whether it's through mathematics, whether it's knowledge through the Latin language, there's always that social control that excludes.

And that, I think, we have to remember as people before us have remembered it, that we see that in the 18th century, property defined by that exclusion activity, that public property in fact, if you follow CB Macpherson in its definition, means that the citizen has a right not to be excluded from the use and benefit of certain physical, land and things; clean air is for all to be a public good, a public property where the citizen has the right not to be excluded, whereas private property involves the right to exclude people, to build things. So that division of allowing insiders and outsiders is part of our social fabric, part of our tradition, part of our law and is part of the ongoing social process to create a variety of insiders and outsiders as means of social control. And of course we know the role that the university has played in that, giving the idea that certified knowledge is the only knowledge that people who might, by the way of living, have acquired knowledge are irrelevant compared to those who have acquired the knowledge by a process that allowed an external body, such as a university to certify it, never mind the quality of the knowledge. But the central part is that this is a social process and of course the practice of science and technology has greatly added to that separation of both people and knowledge. And in this case, I want to make it quite clear that I do not say that there is not a space in our lives, a part in our society, for detailed specialized knowledge. We will always have and need and respect people who have the ability to do some things extraordinarily well, who are trained and disciplined to do so. What I'm speaking about is the separation of people as a transfer of the validated expertise in one field to an exclusive right of decision-making in fields that are very much broader than that.

And so it is not a downgrading of specialized knowledge but it is an appeal for not separating people because what we need is pooling of knowledge, not separating that. And that is something that, in fact, very much can be done but the bridge to do that is that we need to introduce into that relationship between supposedly outsiders and insiders the notion of reciprocity, that it isn't so that one side only gives and the other has nothing to contribute but that there is reciprocity in the sense that a Margaret Laurence in a discussion on nuclear energy has not only something to learn, which she sure did, but a great deal to give. And that those who think they are the insiders, and she or others might be the misled lay people, are in fact depriving themselves and their enterprise of insights and gifts that come over that bridge of reciprocity and it is that bridge of reciprocity that will give us the possibility to break the separation of insiders and outsiders.

Imagine, for instance, a medical decision made not by excluding patients and nurses and the community but is made with them. It may or may not be the same decision that eventually is arrived at but it is a decision that can be carried out on the basis of shared responsibility. If it works, then all will take the joy and the blessing that comes from it. If it was a wrong decision, the responsibility is shared because it was a decision that was arrived in that reciprocal arrangement in which some brought knowledge, some brought insight, and all brought the understanding that nobody can possibly know it all. The distinction of being an outsider or an insider is then a situational one.

It depends on what one talks about. It isn't personal, it is situational, and for that reason it isn't permanent. One can be an insider on one question but an outsider on most others, but into that picture we have to now bring modern technology because not only do we have to talk about people, we also have to talk about social structures, political structures, devices, and we have to talk about the environment. There are some really significant things that modern technology brings because it profoundly changes the relationship between human beings because it's technology that mediates that, it allows some things to be done and it allows some things not to happen. And I give you really only two very simple examples.

One of them is the telephone. The telephone is a fine device to facilitate the communication between individuals. It's quite a useless device to facilitate the communication between groups. That need not be so but the design of the telephone was such at its very beginning that that was the purpose. The other part of the development on the telephone that I wanted to draw your attention to because it's an extension of what I want to focus on in terms of the technological possibility is something that is quite new. That is that people can dial a phone number and, for a charge, dial a joke or a prayer or an erotic message, or the weather, or the stock market. And you just stop for a moment and say what does that do for human relations. What does it say about people when you go to the telephone when you are desperate or lonely and how profoundly different this is from the distress line, from the line that is open and where volunteers sit at the telephone to talk to people in distress, to talk to those who may need a prayer or an assurance or just plain human help in their distress. And what it says about a society that uses that link that technology gives it, you can phone a distress line for free but you get your joke for three dollars or the erotic message. And what it says about that society, and it is something that we have to pay attention to, that people and their needs, through the mediating influence of technology, can become a source of income. If they can become a resource and in that part of technology people are essentially treated the way irresponsible people treat the earth and all creatures in it, they become that sort of activity, like the phone line is the activity of a mining operation – there is a need and you mine people's need, they mine people's need, as one would mine the soil for gain.

And I think that what we see as an extension of that insider/outsider debate is that in the flat earth of private gain, human beings are pushed into where our environment has been pushed for centuries as something to be exploited with no reciprocity. And of course that happens at a time when the environment, when nature raises its voice and forces upon us recognition that in fact nature does respond to mistreatment. Nature has an answer, a very negative answer to us. The maple trees don't put up with acid rain, they die. And so there is a response out of the ecosystem, even for those who consider themselves so much in charge that all other things are what the accountants call externality. But the frightening extension of that old inside/outside concept, of that excommunication, is that we now have reached the point in which parts of this society consider human beings as a resource and only as a resource, excommunicating them essentially from participating in the normal life of the community. And this is why I think that phone line is so symbolic and the difference between the distress line and that phone line is so important for us to realize.

But then we see that, on the other hand, we have developments that use technology to break that inside/outside barrier. We see not just debates on television, stage, lack of morality or that an immorality play, but we also have phone-ins, we have ways in which that reciprocity that I consider one of the most important and positive countercurrents is being articulated and in which the best of technology is being used to do that.

But let me, as a second example of how technology can invert all human relations, use the technology of war and that of course is one of the things that Margaret and I had so very actively and keenly in common, our opposition to war, to preparation of war, and to the misuse of human intelligence and resources in it. It's of course again that extension of insiders and outsiders and that very easy way of getting the outsiders identified as the enemy. And then out there, there is "the enemy", and the enemy of course is not as much people as it is a social institution. It is a very important social institution and the social institution of the enemy has brought a country like Canada to the point that the enemy becomes a source of income. There is industry depending on the fact that we have an enemy and that, in fact, if you look at the nuclear submarine, there is really an inversion that we spend, as a country, on our "enemy" the money that we do not spend on our own insiders. The call of the outsider, the call of the, the very fact of the people you have excommunicated in a really black irony have more call on the national resources of Canada than their own citizens. If something horrid would happen in the Soviet Union, the Canadian government would find money to buy more tanks or more of something or other. If the native people of this country starve, it's just too bad, we don't have enough money. So in that historical inversion, in that world-turned-upside-down of insiders and outsiders, the outsider has a greater call on the resources of the insider than the insider, herself, their selves, himselves, and that's really quite insane. It's equally insane that that whole war machine has gone to a point that not only no people are safe but that the only people who are safe is the senior military.

I once had a rather irate debate with an admiral when I pointed out that the old, proud navy mix of women and children first had been inverted into women and children last. It had at that point been an exercise in Halifax in a bunker called DeBurke where the most important of senior military and civilian government were exercising in a mock raid how to continue government and where my friends from Voice of Women had a counter demonstration on how to continue life, which seemed to be somewhat more important than to continue government. But in that, in preparation of that, they asked of those who were going into the bunker to, gave them a slip to be signed by their wives giving them the permission to survive while their wives and children would not. And that brought it home rather harshly that, in that world of war, it's again the world turned upside down, the more senior in the military somebody is, the more likely they are to survive. So that is technology, that is the concept of the inside and the outside drawn to its illogical conclusion that is the inversion of what society had intended, if there was any intent, and we have now to say what on earth are we going to do in this world that is upside down, in which a long historical development, very largely through the accelerated tools of technology, have come to a total halt, producing the opposite of what was intended or ought to be done and we have to say, what now.

And before we get too pessimistic, we have to see that the first step to any solution is to recognize that a problem exists. The most horrible things are the unexamined problems. The things where one says 'it has always been like that', whether it was slavery, whether it was women, whether it was any injustice, the beginning of the solution has always been the point where somebody says .. 'hey, what's going on here; that need not to be so'. And we have gone through a good period in which the awareness of the things that are profoundly wrong have really reached the public and economic and the political consciousness. So that the very fact that we see the world being upside down is in fact the beginning of the solution and in that solution, we have to have a few very clear signposts that have to guide both our public and our private life.

And these directions again we can derive in the light of Margaret Laurence; it is first of all the pointlessness of the division between outsiders and insiders, the fact that we have to give it up. But we have to give it up not thinking that the alternative of that is what I call universal courage, it doesn't mean that everybody has to be the same, but what it means to give up that inside/outside division is to really accept as a given in life, diversity, that people are different, that they bring different things, but that we also learn from the ecological considerations that that diversity is absolutely essential for the sustenance and the sustaining of life. The world as it evolved was not just populated by elephants or by mice, it was populated by a wide spectrum of creatures and things that needed each other. The elephants could not survive in a world of nothing but elephants; in addition to that, it would probably be awfully dull if you think you had been an elephant and had to live in a world with nothing but elephants, what could you take offence one. But diversity is really a life, not only life-sustaining, but a life-essential component and that has to get into the rather thick heads of humanity. It is not sort of tolerance as the missionary societies used to see them also, but their presence makes it possible for us to survive and it is that symbionic relationship that one depends in our very roots of existence on each other, that we have to not only learn in words but we have to see, that we practice the survival of diversity. And that of course goes totally counter-current to such things as take-overs, monopolies, political empires, and that is likely the reason why no empire throughout history, past or present, has ever survived because all empires have crumbled, they've crumbled at the periphery because the diversity was an essential part of survival and humanity rather survives than goes down in one glorious flaming empire. And that, I hope, will happen again.

But in addition to a real commitment to the sustenance of diversity and the non-institution of insiders and outsiders, we need the restoration of the commons. The commons in the sense of what is common to us in the environment, the commons in the traditional British sense of sharing the soil, but also the commons in terms of our common humanity. We cannot let fellow human beings and their needs be unmet because they become sources of income for others. We cannot stand the fact that our water supply isn't good, only becomes a source of income for those who sell bottled water and delay the restoration of the commons. But we also, I think, especially in the framework of a university, cannot stand that what we have in common as knowledge becomes private property. Whatever humanity knows, whatever experience, in whatever form, whether it's mathematical tables or poetry, whether it's computer knowledge or literature, whether it's a vernacular knowledge of caring and childbirth, or whether it's eye surgery or the most sophisticated astronomy, all of it is common to humanity. It is owned and ownable, and we have to be very careful and watch for, at this point, that we do not lose the commons of knowledge of which we always have been very proud in this century, as we have lost much of the commons of the ocean and the air. The global public sphere from which all life comes must be retained and restored, and that has to be done both in terms of conviction and action, that as every action we take, whether it's individually, as a community, as a country, has to be tested against those directions. The direction of reciprocity, of breakdown of insider and outsider, the direction of restoring the commons in the broadest possible sense and most of all the direction of respect for all life, human or non-human.

And how do we do that. I think I have probably seen there the greatest impact of Margaret Laurence. If we think whether any action, any plan, anything that is in the books, is in fact designed to maximize private gain or whether it is designed to minimize public disaster and those things that are designed to minimize the chances of public disaster, if we use the extension of our imagination of what a peaceful world can be and what a destroyed world is, that's the course to follow. And so it needs from us a sense of fellowship, a sense of urgency, a sense of discipleship to those who have gone before us and the extension of the imagination that makes it unnecessary to think of insiders and outsiders. Thank you