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Not long after I began regularly freelancing at Ideas in the early 1980's, a new executive producer was appointed.  The person he was replacing had been popular with her colleagues, and, consequently, the new man had, at first, a somewhat refractory and dissatisfied staff on his hands.  One day I was told, as an instance of the lameness of the new boss's programming ideas, that he had suggested a series on the Loyalists.  This was in 1983, the two hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the seven year American War of Independence, and resulted in the resettlement in Britain's remaining northern colonies of those who had opposed independence and taken the British side.  Two Canadian provinces, New Brunswick and Ontario, celebrate the settlement of these refugees as their founding, and Loyalist refugees were resettled in the existing colonies in Quebec and Nova Scotia as well.  Yet strangely, this anniversary seemed to generate more embarrassment than true patriot love in many Canadians.  Some even suggested that these counter-revolutionary Tories would be better left in oblivion.  Such was the view of my Ideas' colleague.   I was of a different mind, and I immediately knocked on the new executive producer's door and volunteered to make the programmes on the Loyalists that he wanted and which I now present here.  They were first broadcast on Ideas in late 1983.

Making the series was a revelation to me.  I have Loyalist ancestors, but I also spent my adolescent years in the United States, where I was inevitably imbued with a good deal of American mythology.   Among the surprises was the discovery that many communities in the American colonies had split more or less down the middle on the question of independence from Britain, and that often these splits were not ideological but instead followed existing lines of cleavage within these communities.  The American Revolution, in other words, was not quite so swift and surgical as that name makes it sound, but was actually a protracted civil war in which many people were thrown onto one side or the other for quite accidental reasons.  It was also a shock to come to see in many of the Loyalists, not a privileged remnant, but desperate boat people huddled on the docks of New York awaiting resettlement.  The United States, over time, has completed co-opted the name American.  In its own national imagination, it now is the one and only America, but here too were Americans, defeated and sent into exile in search of another America, the one that in time would become Canada.

These two programmes began an adventure for me, and over the next few years I continued my fascinated study of early Canadian history.   Eventually I would make two other series, "Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism" and "The Rebellions of 1837" which I will post here subsequently.

The historians heard in this series, in order of appearance, are as follows:

Part One: Ann Condon, Dennis Duffy, Janice Potter, Wallace Brown, George Rawlyk,   Christopher Moore, Jim Walker, David Bell, and Kevin Quinn

Part Two: David Bell, Neil McKinnon, Ann Condon, Sidney Wise, Mary Beacock Fryer, Janice Potter, George Rawlyk, and Dennis Duffy

Readings from historical sources were by Lynn Deragon and Colin Fox.

During the 1930's and 1940's two scholars working at the University of Toronto began to outline a new theory of the role played by media of communication in shaping consciousness.  English-born and trained classicist Eric Havelock studied ancient Greece's transition from an oral to a literate culture and the changes in mentality this brought about.  Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications, linked the rise and fall of empires to the media they had employed - from stone and clay to papyrus, parchment and paper.  In a second book published after his death, The Bias of Communication, Innis broadened his theory and proposed fundamental questions such as:  What assumptions do communications media take from society and what assumptions do they contribute?  What forms of power do they encourage?  Marshall McLuhan, then a young English professor at the University of Toronto, was inspired by Innis and took up these questions.  After he published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962, he modestly said that his celebrated book was but a "footnote" to Innis.  A series of influential works followed, notably Understanding Media, and McLuhan's reputation spread.  The University of Toronto established the Centre for Culture and Technology to further his work and keep him in Toronto.  After McLuhan's death in 1980, the university tried to close the centre, but protests from around the world and a determined local effort by McLuhan's inheritors kept it open.  In 1987 two of these inheritors, David Olson and Derrick de Kerckhove, convened a major conference on "Orality and Literacy," bringing together many of the scholars who had contributed to the school of thought that Havelock, Innis and McLuhan had founded.  Eric Havelock attended in what proved to be the last year of his life.  Walter Ong, another major contributor to this school, was expected but had to withdraw at the last minute.  I covered the conference for Ideas, establishing a temporary studio in the basement of Emmanuel College, where the meeting was held, and interviewing the speakers in whatever intervals the proceedings upstairs allowed.   The result was a three hour series, broadcast in 1988, which I called "Literacy: The Medium and the Message."  "Orality and Literacy," the conference's title, would have better represented its contents, but I was afraid that orality might be an unfamiliar term to some listeners, and might call to mind thumb-sucking rather than non-literate ways of life.

The gathering that inspired these programmes was momentous for me in two ways.  The first was the result of my preliminary explorations into the subject, which made me realize for the first time in my life just how deeply I am a reader - someone who depends on the sense of stablility and permanence that writing imparts to my words and ideas.  It wasn't that I didn't know how much time I spend reading and writing, but that I had never really considered that there might be an alternative.  Illiteracy, in modern societies, is generally treated as a state of deprivation, rather than as a different form of consciousness.  Thinking of oral society, and of the possible emergence of a post-literate society, I grew more aware of some of the unique, curious and possibly transient features of the island of letters on which I have lived my life.  The second momentous happening was re-encountering Ivan Illich, someone I hadn't seen since I had helped to organized a lecture by him in Toronto in 1970, though I had continued to be an avid reader of his books.  He was at the conference because he had just co-authored a book with Barry Sanders, who was also there, called ABC:  The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind.   Meeting him again led me into a relationship that continues to preoccupy me to this day.  Out of it came two long radio series - "Part Moon, Part Travelling Salesman," and "The Corruption of Christianity" which you can find elsewhere on this site; two books - Ivan Illich in Conversation and The Rivers North of the Future; a tender friendship; and connections to a number of other thinkers who would also become my radio subjects, among them Barbara Duden, Nils Christie, John McKnight, Wolfgang Sachs, Uwe Poerksen, Gustavo Esteva, and Majid Rahnema.   I am currently at work on an intellectual biography of Illich.  So, as well as producing what I think is still an interesting radio series, those three days at Emmanuel College in the summer of 1987 also changed my life.

The participants in the programmes are as follows:

Part One: David Olson, Eric Havelock, Jan Swearingen, Derrick de Kerckhove, Jerome Bruner, Carole Feldman, Rangaswamy Narasimhan, Ann Bennet

Part Two: Brian Stock, Ivan Illich, Paul Saenger, David Olson Barry Sanders, Derrick de Kerckhove

Part Three: Eric Havelock, Ivan Illich, David Olson, David Patanayak, Suzanne de Castell, Jan Swearingen, Barry Sanders, Derrick de Kerckhove