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from the Crow's Nest
Reflections on Toronto-Part III
by Fritz Wagner
A little Anamnesis and Marshall McLuhan;
Risotto and the Innkeepers Act;
Manifest Destiny
Voegelin in Toronto. The DVD, that is. Panel 12, held late on Saturday just before the business meeting, was devoted to a discussion of the 1978 conference that has been preserved as a video showing the brilliance of Voegelin, Gadamer, Lonergan, Bloom, Poole and Lawrence in disussion with one another. The conference might have been forgotten had not panel chairman Zdravko Planinc, then a student at York University, transcribed Voegelin’s lecture and comments which were subsequently published on the Web by Maben Poirier in the erstwhile Voegelin—Research News, which in turn led to the obtaining of the conference tapes and eventual issuing of the DVD. The pamphlet prepared to go with the DVD gives the conference history and Voegelin’s own comments afterwards. It can be seen here.
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An Example of Anamnesis. Barry Cooper was one of the students who attended the 1978 conference. But he did something quite unexpected when he received his copy of the Voegelin in Toronto DVD. He did not do what I and most others would have done: pop it in the player and watch it. Instead he sat down and did not watch it. He sat and summoned from the past his personal recollections. Afterwards, he watched the DVD. He offered these comments, among others:
• About the '78 conference itself, Barry felt it was, and is, unique. He marveled at the depth of learning shown by Gadamer and Lonergan and Voegelin—a learning which he doesn’t think exists today. He also thinks it is unlikely today that intellectual prima donnas would appear together in the same forum; they would prefer to be the main figure in the room. The interchange that took place among the panelists was one in which they actually listened to what the others said. They didn’t merely await their turns and deliver written remarks but instead thought and responded as the discussion unfolded.
• On the panel Reading the Republic: Bloom was not at that time considered a man of stature equal to Gadamer and Voegelin, having until then only a translation of The Republic to his credit. His fame came years later. It was a case of Bloom vs. Gadamer and Voegelin, and the fundamental disagreement was over whether the ideas were absolutes or attributes of God. Actually, Bloom embraces the term atheist toward the end of the discussion.
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Nicholas Graham is an incommensurable sprite shouldering well-planed lumber. In 1978 he was the York University student body president. He organized the whole conference and is seen and heard introducing the panelists at the beginning of the discussion, Reading the Republic.
Professor Graham, now President of the Northrop Frye Society, told wonderful stories about the conference.Two of them were especially memorable:
The Money. The conference might never have taken place at all had normal procedures been followed. Apparently, through lack of university foresight, the student government officers could incur obligations of up to $10,000 without prior faculty approval. So they did!
The Media is the Message. Another story involved panelist Roger Poole, the literary critic and Kierkegaard scholar.The students met the arriving panelists at the airport and took them to their hotels, except for Roger Poole, who was to be a house guest of Marshall McLuhan. They took him to McLuhan’s old mansion and were invited inside. As they passed from one room to another, they noticed in each room there hung a painting of Marshall McLuhan. When they finally reached the patio and sat down, a McLuhan assistant slipped about unobtrusively and took photos. One of the other guests was the poet, Martha Zaborska. It was her volume, Seeing Stone, that Roger Poole mentions in the panel on Reading. (McLuhan was the inventor of pop culture criticism. He became very successful through his best selling books and consulting work. In 1977, the year before the conference, he had famously appeared in Woody Allen’s movie, Annie Hall. The year following the conference he suffered a stroke and died the next year.)
When this year's conference was almost over, Professor Graham brought me a backpack stuffed with the original '78 conference video tapes, the recording of which is to his credit. These huge cassettes were 1½ times the width of the standard VHS tape. Before forwarding them on to Paul Caringella for delivery to the Voegelin Archive at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, I had a comparison done between these tapes and the final DVD, which had been based on second generation copies of the originals. I was surprised to see there was no quality loss. In fact, our video engineers had produced a product more viewable than the original through the use of sophisticated restoration technology.
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Best Quip. Panel Chairman Zdravko Planinc: “On the basis of this conference, I decided to become a philosopher. What they were doing is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I later learned it was not going to be like that.”
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Young Scholars. What a delight to listen to and talk a bit with the young scholars who participated in the panels. I have perhaps forgotten some aspects of being young, but I was reminded by one participant of how one must swallow one’s fears when speaking in front of potential critics, sympathetic though they may seem. It will be these young scholars who transmit Voegelinian thought to the next generation. They should be encouraged.
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Osso Bucco. We came home from Toronto with some congenial memories. The weather was glorious with marvelous blue skies and a warm sun. The dining was memorable, especially at Pier 4, where we sat at the edge of the Lake Ontario Harbor and watched ships of all types sail past us, as though they had been paraded for our entertainment: a three-masted schooner with full sails, a stern-wheeler tourist boat, ferries, a police boat, and an enormous sea going yacht flying the Union Jack that anchored near us, presumably so its passengers could catch a bite to eat. There was also Little Anthony’s, a northern Italian bistro with good service, good linen, and respectably prepared osso bucco and risotto. I was surprised to see that the lively restaurants in the city center that were jammed with young people on Thursday and Friday were deserted on Saturday and closed on Sunday. But it is understandable once one thinks about it.
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And under the Maple Leaf. You will recall that we did have a panel on “political correctness” with an emphasis on the Canadian denunciatory “Human Rights” commissions. But wholly apart from political considerations, I had a sense of disquiet as I walked the streets and interacted, though superficially, with the people I met. Many people seemed to be from other countries. This is typical in large cities. But in Chicago the Russian cabdriver complains about the Mayor with Chicago gruffness. In Washington D.C. the Haitian cab driver seems sarcastic in an American way. My Canadian contacts displayed an impenetrable reserve so that I could get no “reading” or sense of what they were like. Perhaps that is the Canadian version of British reserve. Max Arnott warned us we might find it so in his primer on Toronto. But there was one noteworthy exception. I was speaking on the phone to a hotel manager, a lady, and I remarked that her last name was the same as that of a famous person doing the kind of work she did. She replied, “Oh, that is my ex-husband’s name. I’m divorced but I haven’t gotten around to changing the name yet.” I almost dropped the phone!
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Déja vu all over again. I must give thanks to the Sheraton Centre Toronto manager, who kindly saw to it that I was credited for the value of the TomTom GPS unit stolen from my car while it was being kept by the hotel. The venerable Canadian Innkeepers Act, presumably politically immune to modernization, absolves hotels from liability beyond $40, except for stolen horses and carriages. So the compensation was a matter of good will, which I especially appreciated, since 12 years before, while staying at another hotel in Toronto, burglars found my car in the underground garage adjacent to the hotel and punched out my driver’s side door lock to gain entry to the trunk release so they could steal the trunk’s contents. When I reported this to that hotel's front desk I was informed that my car had been parked in a public garage for which the hotel bore no responsibility, despite it being their elevator which carried us from the garage to their lobby!
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Manifest Destiny. Timothy Hoye chaired a panel on the Languages of Political Order beyond western thought. In his commentary, Thomas McPartland added a Voegelinian notion to Yu Nam Kim’s exposition on the future of the two Koreas: China, Japan, Russia, and the United States—the four outside powers in the six power talks over the Korea nuclear weapons— have a history of indulging in "ecumenical concupiscence," a Voegelin term. Of course, as he pointed out, in the U.S. we never called it that. Instead, we called it “manifest destiny!” Also commenting were Timothy Lomperis and Robert John “Haj” Ross. I would very much have enjoyed passing some time with them and asking them some questions.
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Dare we Innovate Next Year? Which brings up a question that has occupied my thoughts since we returned home from the conference. What were we doing there at EVS? Young scholars must participate in these conferences as a part of their career development. And for the older scholars it is an opportunity to come together again with friends from distant places. But for the observer hoping for stimulating thought, one is given fragments, sometimes hastily chosen, usually from unpolished papers, and the subjects of which are sometimes a bit arcane. It was obvious that the best time was had when people were dining and relaxing with friends. Is it our manifest destiny to hold as many panels as the law allows and to be profession-al at every moment of the day? Is anyone enlarging his capacity to understand and care in this meeting format? Perhaps housed beneath the positivist-tinted umbrella organization APSA (The American Political Science Association), we must be content with what we have?
What would be the result if we sat around in a lounge in comfortable chairs, with the chosen speakers sitting in our midst? And what if they read nothing but talked about what they knew and thought, with the chairman guiding the conversation? The papers could be filed and published later, as they always are. Now that is a manifest destiny we could get excited about. 
Part I can be read HERE. Part II can be read HERE.
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