“Society Evolving”
I have a very good friend who talks about “society evolving” in almost every conversation that we have about Canada and the world. One of my retorts to him is always about casinos being put in small communities across Ontario like the one in Dresden, my hometown. I always ask him whether that is society evolving or society de-volving? Needless to say I’m not a big fan of people losing their life savings.
So is it all about “society evolving”? I think so. What we are talking about here are not necessarily the great economic issues of the day. Every week I try to bring those to you and for the most part they are very black-and-white with such variables as interest rates, economic growth, supply and demand dotting these pages. The harder part in our economic world is understanding why the world does what it does and closer to home why we do what we do as human beings. At the end of the day our behaviors change and so do our economic habits because of what my friend calls the evolution of society.
Let me give you an example, which really bothers me. In Ontario there is no “common rest” day. Some of you may be old enough to remember Sunday in Ontario when it was closed shut. I grew up in that time when most people went to church on a Sunday morning and the rest of the day everybody took it easy. Some people even slept most of the day. If you took part in recreation there was very few retail outlets open to buy anything. So that meant that everybody had to stock up on whatever they wanted for Sunday because nothing was open.
At the time I would play a lot of basketball in Chatham on Sunday. I also did a lot of canoeing and played a lot of tennis. It might be hard for people to imagine it now but we had a hard time finding a place to buy a soft drink when we got thirsty. Long story short, Sunday was a day of rest and I would argue our economy needed it.
Today, Sunday is wide-open much like our American friends. So it means that everybody is working and if you’re not working, maybe you feel obligated to work. I know I find myself going shopping and doing almost everything that I would do in any other day of the week on Sunday. So the people that once have the day off are now working to service me. It is what it is and my friend would say that is an example of “society evolving.”
There are other issues. The Canadian charter of rights enshrined in our Constitution protection for Canada’s gays and lesbians. If you have brought that up to me on those sunny hot days playing basketball back in the 1970s and 80s, I would’ve wondered what you were talking about. However through the rule of law and several years later justice was done as our gay and lesbian citizens enjoy close to the same rights as anybody else in society. It’s been a journey and a just one at that. Of course in the back of my mind I could hear my friend talking about “society evolving.”
It is hard to say what is the in between on all this. For instance there was something very wrong with denying gays and lesbians their rights but was it necessarily wrong to shut down Sunday like we did back in the 1970s? Or in the interest of denying somebody making a living, did society evolved to the point where our Ontario courts felt compelled to grant retailers wide open Sundays? It certainly changed our society forever. However whether that change was a good one or not I don’t know. I certainly don’t like it today when everybody feels compelled to work on Sunday and the idea of a “common rest ” day, which former Premier Bob Rae purported, is deemed as heresy.
To me, “society evolving” has come to mean having society do what is right. In other words at the end of the day, “what’s right” wins the day. So what’s next? How will society evolve in the next 20-30 years to affect our personal, social and economic life? Will it evolve to a point where people will be expected to work more for less and recreational time will become less and less important? Or will it be the opposite, a re-balancing of our world, which enhances our lives?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do know that they are very relevant. I’ve come to believe that the term “society evolving” is one of the most important economic phenomena of our time. Defining it though, is our greatest challenge.