Remember the big fad a few years back for “evidence-based decision-making”? It always made me wonder what other basis might exist. And mutter, “Many talk of Robin Hood who never pulled his bow” because people fond of intoning it often seemed to use it as a substitute for rigorously checking their opinions against facts not a pointed reminder to do so. For instance in the vexed issue in Canada of all those unmarked graves of aboriginal kids who died, or maybe even were killed, in residential schools.
I find “evidence-based decision-making” very like the trope “I am principled, you are stubborn, and he is an ideologue.” It far too often implies that anyone who disagrees with the speaker has something wrong with their brain. Some defect of intellect, character, or both leads them to see what they want to see, not what is really there, unlike all the splendid people who agreed with me. But such thinking doesn’t just render dialogue difficult. It often creates the exact problem it claims to renounce.
He had it exactly backwards. Nobody had seen any unmarked graves and two years later we still haven’t, except old community cemeteries unrelated to the issue. So it’s not “irrefutable,” it’s “unsubstantiated,” until someone produces at least one actual student body.
Of course, everyone feels pain over some aspects of the collision between Europeans and aboriginals in Canada, including government policy that was at times misguided and at times openly bigoted. But if we’re really going to deal with evidence rather than our feelings about what we’d like to think happened, we must acknowledge that various aboriginal groups also regarded one another with hostile contempt that was “bigoted” or worse, and often behaved horribly in consequence.
It is possible to debate the seriousness of it, question the reliability of historical sources, talk about context, etc. But it won’t do just to dismiss the possibility because we don’t like it very much. Which is exactly what is generally done now, especially again on an elite level, because they want to see a European serpent invading the aboriginal Eden rather than the complexity of fallible humans interacting.
The irony is palpable, because that thing about “evidence-based decision-making” is very often a condescending comment from the commanding heights of politics, academia, and culture about the kind of people who would, for instance, support Donald Trump. I have never concealed my distaste for him and am not about to start. But I have also argued since 2016 that what Trump’s critics claim is disregard for truth is symptom not cause.
The key passage reads, “The book is called The Truth About Trudeau. As students of history know, though, there is usually more than one truth. Ultimately, Plamondon has his Trudeau and I have mine.” It sounds like a nice, friendly, broadminded way to avoid an argument. Like saying we all have our own interpretation of art. But if we all have our own truth, there’s no point looking at “my evidence” or “your evidence,” or the actual Mona Lisa, because we just make it all up to suit our preconceptions.
It’s not obvious how we’d form those preconceptions without something solid to start with. And it is obvious that, once we start down that road, some people’s “truth” appears so ugly to us that we recoil in horror. Does even Cohen really think we all get our own “truth” on residential schools? But if you deny when cornered that you support everyone making up whatever they want to believe, we must make decisions about those “graves” based on… evidence.
I’m prepared to investigate the conditions under which their occupants perished, lament any historical injustices that occurred, and make what mostly feeble amends we can in the present. But first there’s one thing I really, truly need. Actual bodies.
Is it so much to ask?
