THE WEBSITE OF THE COUCHICHING ('cooch', not 'couch') Institute on Public Affairs boasts that it is "a civil place to disagree". It was that when The Register sent me to cover its 1961 summer conference. I had sampled CIPA style in February, when the three-day winter conference in Toronto discussed "The price of being Canadian" after thoughtful introductory talks by Frank H. Underhill, Douglas V. LePan, and Hugh MacLennan. The week-long 30th summer meeting was held on a wooded peninsula in Ontario's Lake Couchiching, hence CIPA's name.
Both conferences were presented in cooperation with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which gave network coverage to the debates and discussions, and attracted international attention through Radio Canada International. (RCI spoke 14 languages in those days.)
The site -- the YMCA's Geneva Park, a youth camp for a maximum of 250 persons -- made CIPA's summer gatherings such an unique way to spend holidays that world-renowned speakers eagerly accepted invitations. Everyone stayed in spartan single or double rooms with unpainted plywood walls, joined in short rows to fit among old pine trees. Washrooms were shared (but not uni-sex). One rustic lodge held the camp's office, a kitchen and dining room, and another had a large room for plenary sessions, and small lounges.
Land and water sports supplies (rowboats, sailboats, motor boats and water skis, canoes and paddles) were free of charge, but most people faithfully attended sessions because they were too interesting to miss. I wrote nine articles. Speakers provided reporters with full texts, but we had to check against delivery.
The 1961 theme was "Diplomacy in Evolution". The first speaker, about "Change!", was Ritchie Calder, professor of international relations at the University of Edinburgh. The speed of travel is a determining element in diplomacy, he pointed out, "causing great stresses in international affairs because statesmen and politicians, rushing from one crisis conference to another, never have time to make the necessary psychological adjustments. Everything has a crisis-urgency which does not give time to think about the fundamental nature of the crisis itself....
"Science has helped to change the mechanics of diplomacy, but it has even more drastically changed the world with which diplomacy has to deal. The instruments of mass communication -– radio, television, films and the printing press -– have completely altered the approach to people and to problems."
In the U.K. he was Lord Calder but at Couch he asked everyone to call him Ritchie. He reminded us that "the White Man dropped the atom bomb on the Yellow Man — a fact which the White Man can never disavow to the satisfaction of hundreds of millions of colored people -– especially since, in the meantime, whenever we have wanted to test a bigger and more dangerous bomb, it has always seemed to be at the risk of colored peoples: the Americans [test] in the Marshall Islands, the Russians behind the Urals, the British in the South Pacific, and the French in Africa".
Newly independent nations had to cope with the "dangerously intoxicating effect of democratic freedom on people unprepared for it.... People discover that freedom has been robbed of its meaning; that they are just as hungry, or more hungry; just as poor, or more impoverished; just as sick, or more disease-ridden; and just as frustrated in their seeking for a better way of life, and that there are so many things which they never knew they wanted but now know that they need".
Yet "With all our scientific advances, it seems that 'unto them that hath shall be given.' The advanced countries are becoming richer and more prosperous and the underdeveloped countries are becoming poorer.... We are showing people what [riches] they could have if they had the means to get them, but we are not giving them the means. They are just pressing their noses against a plate glass window".
Ritchie was not only amazingly prescient but a universal man. At Couch I bought a copy of his Men Against the Frozen North, written after he did five "sweeps" of sites in Canada's Arctic in 1955, wearing his explorer's hat. Preparing to write GLIMPSES I saw that in that book he alerted us to global warming! Both "Eskimo" and white residents of Canada's North told him that the first signs were reported by aboriginal elders at least a generation earlier.
Count back a generation from 1955 and you get the 1920s, meaning that we are approaching the centenary of warnings about climate change. In '55 no one paid attention to Native peoples or to Ritchie Calder. In '62 no one paid attention to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The more it appears that climate scientists such as David Suzuki are right, the more they're ridiculed, an effective political tactic.
The cold war actually dominated the conference. Economist Andre Philip, professor of social politics at the University of Paris, said "The real fight between the West and Russia is for the good will of people." H.R. Vohra, Washington correspondent of The Times of India, told us that India found after achieving independence in 1947 that "neither the United States nor Russia seemed to believe much in friendship. Instead, they were anxious to draw us into their respective webs of alliances", and that "One of my strongest impressions about the United States is her inability to read events correctly".
He also said "The Soviet Union is often so brusque and crude in its approach to international affairs that it shocks the public opinion of noncombatants in the cold war.... Soviet speakers [at the UN] are unable to understand, and probably never will, why we insist on decency in our dealings with each other."
In the Q&A after he spoke, Mr. Vohra criticized the United Nations for having political overtones whereas countries such as India wanted apolitical aid. That, I wrote, was when "Ritchie Calder...objected emphatically to Mr. Vohra's reasoning and said that one of the UN's chief aims is to provide 'decontaminated' aid. Mr. Calder, who has traveled for the UN to study conditions in various parts of the world, said 'the organization has proved itself time and again, and representatives from both sides of the Iron Curtain work together on technical teams without any political friction. The world should appreciate the number of occasions since 1945 on which it has been the UN alone which has prevented war'."
He added that Mr. Vohra's line of thinking was "precisely of the kind which weakens the UN as an international force".
Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, then merely the director of a couple of programs at Harvard University, spoke on "The realities of war". I wrote that "He began by reminding his audience of the different stages of the nuclear era: The first, until about 1950, when the United States possessed a monopoly on atomic weapons and the means of delivering them; a second, which ended around 1956-57, when the U.S. no longer had a monopoly on weapons, but did...have a monopoly on means of delivery; the third, during which the U.S. possessed great superiority provided it dealt the first blow; and a fourth, which we are now entering, when both Russia and the U.S. possess such powerful arms that neither side can hope for meaningful victory without inviting crippling blows."
Speakers shared ideas, listeners commented, there was agreement or disagreement, but at all times the discourse was informed and civil. I couldn't help remembering the depressing chaos on "Faith Day" during the VIIth World Youth Festival in Vienna just two years earlier.
The Couch series ended with an article published on October 14:
"It was the task of James Eayrs, assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, to offer a critique of the week-long 1961 Couchiching Conference.... He recalled that mankind has often thought itself to be in a next-to-hopeless mess; that once the crossbow was thought to be a Doomsday mechanism. Progress has led the world into an era of terrifying risks and instability and greater danger than ever before, he admitted, but it should comfort us to know that our ancestors also experienced crises.
"In his analysis of several of the lines of thought broached at the conference, the professor first deplored 'the Couchiching view of how human beings behave.' The talk had been too theoretical and some of the realities of human nature had been ignored, he said. We must not expect that when newly independent peoples gain their freedom they will know any better than ourselves what to do with it. They will fear freedom as we fear freedom. And when they look for refuge, as they will, it is the totalitarian society, not the open society, which offers shelter. [my emphasis]
"He remarked further that 'Arms races of any kind are evidence of the failure of diplomacy...there's something profoundly depressing about the two great powers, each professing its desire to improve the lot of ordinary people, expending immense sums on weapons of mass destruction.'
"Further, the professor bluntly accused 'the public' of responsibility for the cold war. 'The prevailing notion of the arms race is of a society of innocents manipulated and held hostage by the merchants of death. But it is not so easy as that. We must go back again to the realities of human nature, to our craving for crisis, our fascination with war, our addiction to violence. The most important effect of public opinion upon diplomacy lies in its volatility, in its whims and inconstancies, long periods of apathy punctuated by bursts of anger...'.
"He berated some conference speakers for favoring increased consultation among free nations, reminding us of Churchill's words: 'The most sure way to lose a war is to require that everyone is consulted before anything is done.'
[Doesn't that sound like today's international debate about climate change?]
"...'We don't need unity in negotiation, we need diversity,' Professor Eayrs declared. 'We need more, not less, experimentation in the laboratory of coexistence'."
And so he knocked down almost everyone who had stood up to speak, but politely, ensuring that a good time was had by all.
The week really stimulated me, helped me prepare for another impressive gathering, the second quadrennial national Canadian Conference on Education. Big stories like Couch and the CCE were assigned by Bill.
For Father Hanley I wrote features of the kind that keep humans connected with reality: Pope John XXIII's 80th birthday, a high school presentation of Pride and Prejudice, a priest serving the mentally ill at Kingston's Ontario Hospital. "A flawless grade-school teacher" retiring after 39 years, white-haired Almon Doolan recognized and remembered all the names of former pupils who attended her farewell party.
Another teacher and Register columnist, Sister Fleurette of Belleville, ON, was awarded RCAF navigator's wings by two squadrons at Trenton Air Force Base because for a decade she kept her pupils in four different schools praying for aircrew. Her class in the first of those schools had seen the wreckage of a plane that crashed in their schoolyard.
Aside from all that, I had a real life that was too full. Early in 1961 I'd become engaged to the news director of one of Kingston's two radio stations. Charles and I had met at a Hotel Dieu Hospital press conference about a month after I moved to Kingston. When Mom saw what was coming she invited her own Mother to come from Poland for a year. After Babcia arrived in Toronto in August, I commuted there almost every weekend to get to know her.
Bill found a few interview subjects for me in Toronto, and Dad loaned me his portable Underwood so I could write during the four-hour train rides. During some trips I dozed or day-dreamed. Gazing out the windows as we passed farms and fields, Lake Ontario and long stretches of virgin woods, I wished I could get off and wander for even a little while without thinking about countless things I must do.
CHAPTER 18 OF GLIMPSES -- 30