September 30, 2000

The Talking Head We Want

Jonathan Kay

National Post

You can tell a lot about a writer from his columnist sketch. Case in point: ubiquitous multimedia pundit Mark Kingwell, whose bald, grinning, goateed head frequently adorns the National Post op-ed page. The shaved scalp shows he's young and hip. The goatee suggests progressive attitudes. And the broad, devilish smile -- that lets you know he's playful and ironic. It's not the smug, conservative grin you see gracing the musings of many right-wing pundits. Mr. Kingwell is having fun. He looks like he's about to break out laughing.

But Mr. Kingwell has a serious side as well. When he's not wearing a clip-on microphone or writing for the Post, he's teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto (with tenure, thank you very much). And though he may appear on television to discuss subjects like the Spice Girls, cosmetic surgery for men and South Park cartoons, his academic work has appeared in publications with serious-sounding names like International Philosophical Quarterly. And then there are his books, the latest of which, The World We Want: Virtue, Vice and the Good Citizen, examines the lofty issue of "the state of citizenship in a world where borders have lost their significance."

Mr. Kingwell does not see his two roles as completely distinct. Just the opposite, in fact: One of the reasons he is so successful as a "public intellectual" is that he's able to serve up a digestible, coherent pastiche of high and low culture to readers and viewers. In a cultural milieu that has become -- to use a recently coined term -- "nobrow," Mr. Kingwell is one of the rare birds who can glide confidently back and forth between the two poles. Peruse the index of The World We Want, for instance. Nike follows Nietzsche. Hegel follows Hasselhof. Baywatch follows Balzac.

It is this ability to fuse high and low that has made Mr. Kingwell popular with television producers. "He has a way of bringing philosophical or big picture topics down to earth and connecting them in ways the viewer would find interesting," says Tasha Kheiriddin, a producer with CBC's Counterspin. "He can philosophize about pop culture, which is not something everyone can do."

Mr. Kingwell's ubiquity on television has provoked a backlash in some quarters.

Last year, for example, when the CBC show Undercurrents named Mr. Kingwell pundit of the year and ran clips of him saying "I think ... I think" over and over again with a list of topics he had discussed on the air, he refused to accept the award, claiming, among other things, that the show was "mean-spirited."

Mr. Kingwell has since publicly complained (in the Post and elsewhere) about the feeling of being "stalked" by TV producers and resolved to decline more of their invitations.

"We haven't had him on the show that often," Ms. Kheiriddin laments. "He's actually said that he doesn't want to do as much TV because he felt he was being labelled unfairly -- as just a talking head. He's an academic and he wants to be taken more seriously."

With the arrival of The World We Want, it is Mr. Kingwell's capacity as serious thinker that is being put on display. He hopes the book, which argues for the importance of civility and "the willingness to engage in public discourse," will be assessed on its own merits, independent of his own efforts to find slightly less public prominence on the airwaves and in people's living rooms.

In his first book, A Civil Tongue, Mr. Kingwell identified civility as a means for society to decide what is just. In his new work, he focuses on civility as a touchstone of citizenship, the definition of which, he says, is in flux.

"The oldest models of civic belonging are forms of virtual racism, tribal fear given a political formulation," he writes. "Later they were based on adherence to a body of civic and, usually, religious nostrums: They were fluently ideological, but no less exclusive. More lately still, democratic states have adopted a model of citizenship based on neither blood nor conviction but on procedural exercise and access to a body of rights."

Now, Mr. Kingwell argues, in citizenship's fourth stage, none of these models can serve us: "What we need is a new model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself."

That is where the idea of "civility" comes in. "Civility, conceived as openness to the arguments of others combined with a measure of restraint on my own arguments," Mr. Kingwell writes, "captures the necessarily deliberative elements of inclusive political life."

The thesis is a timely one, says Daniel Weinstock, a Université de Montréal philosophy professor who has written about the interplay between citizenship and globalization.

"As the world broadens out due to globalization, one starts questioning local allegiances," says Weinstock. "Why is it so important that I am a Canadian rather than an American? ... [Contemporary] views on citizenship arouse skepticism when one considers one's place in the global community."

But other readers say Mr. Kingwell has merely replaced a definition of citizenship that is obsolete with one that is vague. "The willingness to engage in public discourse," they note, is a fuzzy concept. And Mr. Kingwell rarely concerns himself with specifics. His writing sometimes dips into soft-edged, virtually indisputable aphorisms.

Certainly on contentious issues such as multi-culturalism -- a subject about which one supposes a scholar concerned with the nature of citizenship might have plenty to say -- Mr. Kingwell sits on the fence. "A language of individualism can be politically useful, but only if its limits are constantly acknowledged and any tendency to eliminate otherness or difference is ruthlessly resisted," he writes in The World We Want. "What must equally be resisted, however," he equivocates, "is the tendency to celebrate particularity at the expense of larger political goals."

To scholars in Mr. Kingwell's field, such passages often appear to be hedging or saying very little.

"Some critics of [Kingwell's] first book said that you ultimately have to say something about how the state or political actors could make changes in order to encourage people to foster that sort of citizenship attitude," says Professor Wayne Norman, who works with the University of British Columbia Centre for Applied Ethics. "It's not enough to say, 'wouldn't it be nice if people behaved this way.' You want to say something about what would you do in the state to try to encourage people. What would you do in the education system? The legal system? Would you impose obligatory duties on citizens?"

Barry Allen, a McMaster University philosophy professor who reviewed Mr. Kingwell's first book, goes farther and describes Mr. Kingwell's views on civility as "platitudinal."

"One of the problems with [Mr. Kingwell's] first book was that the overwhelmingly large part of the book -- easily seven-eights of it -- was just a laborious discussion of what other people have said," says Mr. Allen. "That's what shows the book was really a worked-over dissertation."

Mr. Allen complains that Mr. Kingwell 's vision of civility is too narrow, especially compared with the broader vision of civility outlined by Yale scholar Stephen Carter in his 1998 book Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy.

"Carter doesn't have a narrow notion of civility," Mr. Allen explains. "It's how you answer the phone, how you teach your children. It's a whole range of things."

Mr. Weinstock is similarly skeptical about Mr.Kingwell's theory of participatory citizenship. "Citizenship is quite plausible as an active exercise when you live in a Greek polis," he says. "But it is a little less plausible when you live in a modern nation-state of 25 million people or more. My view is that what we need to do is [focus on] the institutions that are currently spanning nation states -- that regulate international commerce and human rights."

On the other hand, there may be something refreshing about Mr. Kingwell's reticence on the broad issue of modern manners. We hear daily from plenty of back-in-my-day-kids-didn't-flip-me-off-at-the-mall pundits. Mr. Kingwell wants nothing to do with that stodgy beat. He is a hip, left-leaning intellectual who knows how to get through to 19-year-old college students. Kant, he writes in his new book, "bequeaths to us a twinned vocabulary of individualism and universalism that runs through the modern world like the buzz of conversation at a good party."

In keeping with his hip intellectual status, Mr. Kingwell's writing -- The World We Want included -- is infused with a pungent anti-corporatism. In a recent Post essay on the blobby design of products like the Nike Air Max and the Macintosh G5, he wrote that "Smooth objects, so seductive in their physical smoothness ... act to obscure the conditions of their own production, the way they are assembled in sweatshops that are anything but clean or polished. Here, in the small antique factories of what we choose to call the developing world, machines of an outmoded industrial age produce, paradoxically, the ... objects of our post-industrial desire."

If there is grounds for complaint about Mr. Kingwell's writing, it may be most on display here: His critique of corporate globalism rarely gets much deeper than this sort of elegant bon mot. Should Canada withdraw from the World Trade Organization? Should we boycott Nike? Mr. Kingwell doesn't tell us. He lobs grenades at globo-capitalism from his ivory tower -- but pleads a philosopher's innocence when it comes time to provide alternatives.

"I see myself as part of the anti-corporatist movement, and I see the book very much as part of that argument," Mr. Kingwell says. "[But] philosophers do best to offer ways of thinking things through, rather than try to pre-empt the citizenry and its legitimate government. There are lots of people who will tell you what policy should or should not look like. I'm interested in exploring the deeper roots of our thinking about politics ... as far as policy statements, I'm prepared to commit myself on various questions. Why do I write a newspaper column? In one sense, it's to take the issues of the day and throw in my two cents. But I don't see the book as part of that. I see the book as being more serious and thoughtful."

Still, Mr. Kingwell does not imagine there to be a complete firewall between his role as philosopher and his role as pop culture commentator. "I don't like the image of the firewall, because that suggests it is impermeable, and I don't think it is. It's simply a case of what you can take for granted. When I give a graduate seminar or deliver a lecture at Cambridge, I can take a great deal for granted ... Clearly, I'm going to talk in a voice that would be incomprehensible to many people. If I go on television, or give a public lecture, or write for a mainstream publication, I'm trying to do something else. I think there's a relationship [between the two roles]. Clearly, it's still me. It's not as though I'm suffering from intellectual multiple personality disorder."