Outlook at 50 years

BASYA LAYE

“In Outlook, we try to present a variety of political and cultural features, including both Jewish and general themes in a way which we think could be found in few other publications in Canada, which we think helps make Outlook the special publication that it is,” said Carl Rosenberg.

Speaking at the annual Outlook fundraising supper on March 18, Rosenberg, who has been editor of the bimonthly magazine since 1998, thanked managing editor Sylvia Friedman, members of the local and national collectives and various local volunteers, and articulated the magazine’s mission and its plans to expand its online presence, as well as creating a program to pay first-time writers.

Founded in 1962, Outlook has collectives in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, and bills itself as “Canada’s progressive Jewish magazine,” publishing leftist perspectives on issues that include the labor movement at home and abroad, Canadian politics, arts and culture, Israel and Yiddish culture and scholarship, among others.

“One thing that makes Outlook special,” Rosenberg told the approximately 100 people gathered at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, “is that we give a home to important voices of activists all over the world, both in Canada and elsewhere, such as the Occupy Movement and the ongoing nonviolent resistance in Israel and Palestine, all of which we’ve reported on in our pages. We think of ourselves as part of the community of similar publications, both Jewish and general progressive publications, both in print and online, in Canada and elsewhere.”

Before the supper itself, which traditionally consists of lasagna and is prepared and served by volunteers, attendees heard from the Diggers, a labor/folk group trio featuring Earle Peach, Regina Brennan and Dan Keeton.

The evening’s guest speaker was Dr. Gabor Maté, the Vancouver physician and bestselling author of four books, including Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder (1999) and the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction (2009). Maté received an Outstanding Alumnus Award from Simon Fraser University in 2009 and an honorary degree from the University of Northern British Columbia in 2011. After several years of family practice, among other roles, Maté was the resident physician at the Portland Hotel Society on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for 12 years, where he attended to residents and patients suffering from mental illness, addiction and HIV/AIDS.

Introduced by Richard Rosenberg (no relation to Carl Rosenberg), Maté spoke on Illness and Health in a Toxic Culture: How Materialistic Society Makes Us Sick.

“The question of health in our society is not simply a scientific one,” Maté began. “It is also an ideological one. As much as we like to think of medicine as a scientific discipline, it is at least as much ideology as it is science. So, the assumptions of the ideology, as with any ideological pursuit in a society, reflects the perspective of the dominant group. Rather than thinking of medicine as somehow pure science, we have to understand that its practices are very much shaped by the demands of our culture, in which a few people economically dominate and most people are left out of the loop as far as actual participation in decision-making.

“Now, that may not seem obvious,” he continued. “What does cancer have to do with decision-making? Well, if you look at North America today ... 50 percent of adults have a chronic illness, 50 percent: diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, or such chronic illness in which the immune system actually turns against the body itself. On one hand, we have the most sophisticated medical technologies and techniques [and] imaging modalities available to us and, on the other hand, half the people are sick. This is actually increasingly true of children, as well. The rates of autoimmune disease are going up, the rate of childhood cancer is going up, the rate of childhood mental illness is going up.”

Maté’s talk centred on the dislocations experienced by human beings as a result of Western capitalist society’s tendency to separate mind from body, the individual from the environment, and people from each other.

“In short,” he summarized, “when it comes to health, we have to look at the larger picture. When it comes to promoting health, we have to promote social equality, we have to promote justice, we have to promote connection and community, we have to promote the ending of the blind separation of mind-body and the individual from the social environment, which is the ideological legacy and burden of Western medicine, which, again, reflects the dominant ideology of the society.”

He echoed Carl Rosenberg’s call to support Outlook, saying, “I don’t know of any other tradition that incorporates, in such a significant, fierce way, the critics ... because the prophets were critics ... [they] spoke truth to power.” Outlook, he concluded, follows in this Jewish tradition of “standing against the idea that the dominant ideology is sacred.”

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