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The Current Transcript for February 20, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Were you pressured by the prime minister's office? Were you pressured by the prime minister's office?

VOICE 2: Still working with my lawyer.

VOICE 3: Why did you resign?

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: So many questions, so few answers. Jodie Wilson-Raybould was back in the House of Commons yesterday as a regular MP, though she spoke privately to her former Cabinet colleagues. And despite the frenzy around her appearance in Ottawa, we still don't know what we don't know in the SNC-Lavalin labyrinth that saw lobby efforts to avoid criminal prosecution seem to fail, saw her demoted and then resign from Cabinet and then saw the PM's top adviser Gerald Butts resign. It has consumed the Liberals and their opponents in this election year. In a moment, we're asking how it will play on the ballot. Also today, that man who resuscitated high fashion and influenced generations down on the street.

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VOICE: The world we live in is not the small world anymore. Everything has changed and nothing has changed more than the world of fashion.

AMT: For decades, Karl Lagerfeld held global sway over the direction of the multi-billion dollar world of fashion. Now that he's gone, is the era he's so embodied lost with him? We'll hear more on that in half an hour. And Julia Shaw really doesn't like it when she hears people use the word evil to describe other people, no matter what they've done or who they've hurt.

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VOICE: I think it's really easy for us to simplify human behavior and label it evil. I think it's really difficult to hold up the mirror and say what do I perhaps have inside myself that could lead me down a dark path?

AMT: Hear her on the idea of confronting the fears that lurk inside us in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

With Canadians 'confused' by SNC-Lavalin affair, no party is controlling narrative: pollster

Guests: Darrell Bricker, Omar Khan, Kate Harrison

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Of force I respect the justice would be, I will hear, but as I said, I'm still in discussions with my council about the various priviliges and confidences that I have.

AMT: Jody Wilson-Raybould in Parliament Hill yesterday and some of her first comments since her resignation from the Liberal Cabinet. The former justice minister told the CBC she would be willing to speak before the Commons justice committee. Later in the day, the committee invited her to do just that. It is investigating reports that the prime minister's office pressured Ms. Wilson-Raybould to intervene in the criminal prosecution of the Quebec-based firm SNC-Lavalin. Though it remains to be seen how much the former minister will be able to say.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We put a motion on notice requesting that solicitor client privilege be waived, that we ask it to be waived from the prime minister, prior to Madame Wilson-Raybould coming in to discuss because we know, we want to have more of a discussion than I can't speak to that. I can't speak to that, I'm bound by solicitor client privilege.

AMT: That is committee member and Conservative deputy leader, Lisa Raitt. To talk about what could happen next and what bearing it may have on the Liberal Party going into the next election later this year, not to mention by-elections in five days, I'm joined by three people. Darrell Bricker is CEO of the polling firm, Ipsos Public Affairs. He's joining us from London, England today. Omar Khan is vice-president, public affairs at Hill + Knowlton Strategies, also vice-president for the Ontario Liberal Party. He's in Chicago. And Kate Harrison is a vice president at Summa Strategies and a former Conservative staffer. She's in Ottawa. Hi everyone.

KATE HARRISON: Good morning.

DARRELL BRICKER: Hello.

OMAR KHAN: Quite the international panel today.

AMT: Yeah, there you go. Kate you're the one who's placed right in the middle of it, but I'll get everybody to weigh in. Omar, I'm going to start with you. What do you think the Liberals who control the Justice Committee are trying to accomplish by inviting Jody Wilson-Raybould to testify?

OK: Well you know I think what we've seen so far on this story is a case where perhaps the issues management could have been a little bit tigther up front. What we've seen is you know a drip drip drip of information rolling out and I understand these issues are complex and there's a lot of legal precedents at play, but what I think they're trying to achieve is you know finally and once and for all have Ms. Raybould come appear in a public setting and have her say. And you know, to the issue of privilege, you know I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for an attorney general in Ontario, I'm sure if, you know I'm sure she's going to get good legal advice, but I'm not sure if this would be, this would constitute an issue of solicitor client privilege, in that it's not about the advice, the legal advice she gave to the crown. It's more about her interactions with the prime minister's office vis-a-vis a potential criminal prosecution.

AMT: Why do you think she went before cabinet yesterday, what was that about do you think, Omar?

OK: So you know I suspect she wanted to to have her say and explain herself before her colleagues. You know at the end of the day, what we have here is a political problem, not necessarily a legal problem. We have one unnamed source or we have unnamed sources. I personally believe it's probably one unnamed source that's actually alleging any wrongdoing. But really other than that all we have in the public domain is the fact that potentially there was a discussion between the prime minister's office and the minister asking her to look at issues relating to the public interest, relating to 9000 jobs and 9000 families, that could potentially be at risk and not providing any direction, but perhaps asking her to consider a legal mechanism that exists in law, which would allow the chief prosecutor of Canada to take into account what is you know I believe is actually quite a big public interest issue. 9000 jobs.

AMT: OK, but Omar, let's stop there because it's not about what you think it's about what went on, iinfluence. Let's stick to that. Let's just stick to it for a minute here. Kate Harrison, what do you make of the fact that she has been invited to testify now?

KH: Well it's a really dramatic about face and her shift in position. You know we started hearing a bit of that change in tone over the weekend in terms of well you know we should really, there was a few ministers out there saying maybe she should speak. I don't think it's necessarily coincidental that with the departure departure of Gerry Butts, now there's been this change in tone. It's really hard to look at those two things in isolation, but I suspect that the wait and see how this plays out wasn't simply playing out in the way that the Liberals wanted it to. I think that they faced a lot of pressure and rightly so for being seen to muzzle Jody Wilson-Raybould. And so by having her come to committee and share her side of the story, hopefully she's in a position to do that when she actually appears, by allowing her to do that the Liberals are maybe buying themselves a bit more favour than what they've had so far in terms of having her share her side of the story. I don't think keeping her quiet is playing well with the polls.

AMT: So Kate Harrison, what do you think the Conservatives want or need to hear in that committee?

KH: I think they're just looking to get some basic answers on timing and who was involved. And you know in the absence of that clarity, there's been a ton of speculation. Perhaps why Jody Wilson-Raybuold went to cabinet was to share her side under cabinet confidence at least with her immediate colleagues. But I think from the Conservative perspective, they want to know who is involved, you know why this resignation had to happen on the part of Gerry Butts is going to be a major line of questioning the Tories have because he was so close with the prime minister. And the timeline of events as I say is really important, there's a new story out today talking about the fact that the prime minister may have spoken with Jody Wilson-Raybould after a decision was already taken on SNC. So I think that timing is going to be very critical for the opposition.

AMT: Do they need to hear from Gerald Butts? Do they need to hear from executives of SNC-Lavalin?

KH: I think they should be hearing from everybody and I think you know the committee has already shown that they are willing to change course and I think rightly so. They should be looking at who else should appear. I think the fact that the allegations involve the prime minister's office necessitates the need for somebody from the prime minister's office to be there. So hopefully that change in tone continues and they expand that witness list.

AMT: And Omar, I will circle back to you on the wider thing about the company. So I didn't mean to cut you off completely there. But Darrell Bricker, let's bring you in to this. What message did Gerald Butts' resignation from the PMO send to voters?

DB: Well I think it made people pay even more attention to something that was already a problem for the government. I mean as we went into this year, an election year, the government should have been in a position for a fairly easy re-election. I mean the opposition that they're facing is not strong. Economic circumstances should have been good for the government. They should have been going into a fairly easy re-election year. They were already in trouble coming into this year for a whole series of things. This has just kind of tipped it over, this most recent incident. And the more the public is focused on all of the difficulties that are being experienced by the prime minister's office, including the resignation of Mr. Butts, the less they're focused on what the government wants them to focus on, which is their record of achievement. So in our most recent polling we've actually seen the race, which should have as I said before, had been an easy situation for the Liberals, actually turned into momentum for the Conservatives who are now ahead by a couple of points.

AMT: OK and we've got an election this year. We also have a byelection on the 25th.

DB: Yeah and that certainly doesn't help it. The more people are focused on what seems to be disruption in the prime minister's office and difficulties within the government, the more it looks like they're not managing the country well. They're not managing themselves well. So they have to get back onto an agenda in which they can talk about what they would say is their agenda of accomplishment over the space of the last few years. So if they're not talking about that, it all sort of plays into a Tory narrative, which relates to or an opposition narrative more generally, which relates to a government that's not really doing what Canadians need it to do.

AMT: Omar Khan then, let's talk a little bit more about this. Even as he resigned, Gerald Butts said he denied the allegations at the core of all of this. How do the Liberals convince the public they didn't do anything wrong or is that the issue or is the issue what you were talking about is how do the Liberals change it to you have to save a company? Like what's the messaging and what do you think of it?

OK: Well I think the messaging should have been a little bit clearer upfront, which was that there is a legal mechanism that allows the criminal prosecution service of Canada and the Attorney General of Canada, the justice minister, to take into account public interest. And 9000 jobs seems to me or the potential to lose 9000 jobs seems to me, to be a very legitimate public interest issue. It doesn't mean that direction should be given and we haven't seen any evidence to suggest that direction was given, but what it does mean is that those types of conversations can happen and are completely normal, between cabinet and the justice minister. You know to the greater fallout of this, I think the big tragedy right now is that you know political Ottawa and the media so consumed with this issue, nobody is really paying attention to the fact that the leader of the Conservative Party yesterday, shared a stage with several prominent white nationalists. So we're talking about this issue when I feel that there's many larger issues at play here that deserves public attention and they're not necessarily getting the attention that they deserve.

AMT: Kate Harrison, what do you say to what he's saying?

KH: Well I would agree with Omar that the Liberals have been taken off message. I think that's a lot of their own doing. The opposition does deserve some credit for that of course, but to Darrell's earlier point as well, the more the Liberals are on the defensive, they can't push out their own message and you know only a pretty narrow election period where you want to be leading all the time with your own key messages, this is totally taken that ability away from the Liberals. You know we have a federal budget forthcoming perhaps in a few weeks, still everybody is talking about this issue. So it has not given the Liberals an opportunity to be proactive at all and I think that that's the real challenge for them moving forward. Yes an opportunity for the opposition, as long as they don't overplay their hand, but the Liberals are going to have a very very difficult time trying to get their message out there to voters when the only thing people are hearing about is this negative story about interference.

AMT: And Kate Harrison, how do you as a strategist see that playing with the you know the United We Roll convoy was there along with the yellow vest wearers and like another movement on the Hill yesterday. How do you see that in relation to what Omar just said about Andrew Scheer?

KH: Yeah I mean I think it's clever spin from Omar, but you know nobody is really talking about that. Everybody's talking about this and you know he mentions the drip drip drip of news, that is really what has killed the Liberals on this is that there's been something new every day to discuss, whether it's Jody Wilson-Raybould's appearance yesterday, whether it's today's story in The Globe and Mail, next week it'll be Jody Wilson's appearance at the Justice Committee. So had the Liberals wrapped their arms around this 12 days ago or 14 days ago when the story first broke, we might be having a very different conversation and the convoy may be getting more attention and the participants of that convoy may be getting more attention, but they didn't do that. They didn't wrap their arms around this in the way they needed to and take ownership of it and it's their own fault for not doing so.

AMT: So this story is definitely the talk of the town in political circles. We were interested however to hear what Canadians outside of those circles think. So we asked a few. Listen to this.

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VOICE 1: It's very complicated, but I'm not blaming anybody for anything. Nobody's perfect.

VOICE 2: Any time there's that level of controversy in the political system, at some point it will hit my radar, but I again just default to other people take care of it, unless it really like directly impacts me.

VOICE 3: I don't know too much about it. It just seems that there's some secrets there.

VOICE 4: I just read briefly that Trudeau's a friend of them, but if it's the case, I think it's not correct, but I'll continue reading.

VOICE 5: Clearly I'd like to know whether there was actually political interference with the attorney general. That's the bottom line.

AMT: Darrell Bricker, what do you hear when you hear those clips?

DB: Well I hear what we're seeing in our polls. That you've got people's attention. They're not really sure what's going on, they're confused and the signals that are coming out of the prime minister's office make them even more confused. It's not a nothing kind of a situation when the attorney general quits cabinet, justice minister quits cabinet and the prime minister's doppelgänger decides that he's going to leave as a result of what's going on as well. So what you're hearing right now in those clips is Canadians saying, I know this is significant, but I don't really know how to interpret it. And just as the other two panelists have mentioned, you know trying to create the interpretation of what's going on is the challenge that's in front of the parties right now and whoever wins that process over the next little while is going to control the narrative that the people who are looking for some information are going to hear. And the problem with the government has, which usually really has a strong advantage in this situation, is it looks like they don't know what they don't know. There's a new thing that erupts every day that catches people's attention, that creates drama, that moves beyond just you know the boring process of government to a real human drama here now. Where you've got one person saying one thing, you got another person saying another thing and reinforcing their points of view with their actions. It really is confusing I would say to Canadians in those clips and really underscore that point.

AMT: And one of the three byelections in five days, we know that the views, certainly the editorial view from ews organizations, but a lot of the view in Montreal is less damning than the rest of the country. Could this actually help them in the Quebec byelection?

DB: Well the one thing I know about byelections is they are incredibly hard to predict. They're low turnout affairs. It really comes down to the local organizations and their ability to get things done. I think if the Liberal Party is distracted as much as they are right now, that might hurt their ability to organize and get the message out, but lets face it, I mean prior to the NDP having some success there with Thomas Mulclair, that's been one of the most Liberal ridings in the country, so you know the Liberals obviously have a big advantage there to begin with.

AMT: So Kate Harrison, what do you think? How much will this have an effect could this have in the byelections and the later general election?

KH: In the byelections, I'm not sure that it will play out really there. It's hard to see a manifestation of a national issue like this in to such a local race. In the general, I think that it could mean a couple of things. I wonder what impact this has had on women and their support for Justin Trudeau. I think that the treatment of Jody Wilson-Raybould is something that you know passers by in politics or those that are following the story may take issue with and I think that that's part of why we saw the change in tone in approach. Maybe it wasn't sitting well with women, so it could play out there. At the end of the day in isolation, this one particular case will it move people on the ballot? I'm not sure that it will, but if it's the beginning of a pattern and if it makes people feel less good about voting for Justin Trudeau than they did in 2015, that might keep people at home a little more than they would be otherwise likely to come out and support him.

AMT: The opposition is calling for a public inquiry, what would that accomplish, Kate?

KH: I think they're using any mechanism they can to try and get to the bottom of this. I think the most public mechanism to do that would have been at the Justice Committee. So again I kind of come back to that change in approach that they've had in the last 24 hours to now hear from Ms. Wilson-Raybould and hopefully they keep extending that. You know I think they're investigating whatever they can to try and get the answers out there in a public way, in a way that the Ethics Commissioner investigation, which will take a very significant amount of time may not accomplish or at least in a timely fashion. So I think they're hitting the right notes in terms of pursuing whatever avenues they can to get the answers out there publicly.

AMT: And Omar Khan, what's your view on a public inquiry?

OK: Look, I think whatever form it may take, whether it's through the parliamentary committee or something else, we need to get all the facts on the table as quickly as possible because you know, from what I've seen, I don't think there is a lot there. But we need to get the facts on the table so that we can actually start talking about real issues. You know and I'll go back to yesterday's rally, real issues like the fact that Andrew Scheer made a decision to share a stage with an organisationm, one of whose leaders used racially derogatory terms to describe our Immigration Minister. A rally where he shared a stage with Faith Goldy, who's appeared on neo-nazi podcasts. I think that's the real issue Canadians need to be concerned with.

KH: The only people the Liberals have to blame for not controlling their message right now is the Liberals. That's all I would say to that.

AMT: Darrell, what do you think?

DB: Well I think the problem even with a public inquiry it's the easiest thing to say, but Anna Maria, you and I are old enough to have lived through the Gomery Inquiry. These things can go sideways really really fast.

AMT: You'd think the Liberals have a bit of a historical memory there.

DB: Yeah and the problem with all of this is I don't think the Liberals know what they don't know. SNC-Lavalin was all over of the governmen.t A lot of these conversations were happening in French for example and this was an Ontario PMO. I mean they don't have, they don't even really speak French, a lot of the people who are in the senior position. So there's a lot of stuff that was happening around this file that they really don't know or so they focused on this one thing that's involved Gerald Butts and the former minister of justice. That's just one part of this. There's a whole bunch of stuff that people are going to be asking.

AMT: Do we also need to know, Darrell, from the NDP leader and the Conservative leader, what their conversations with SNC-Lavalin were about because they were also lobbied.

DB: Yeah I think there's going to be a lot of people who are going to be asked to talk about what they talked about, but the difference between the leaders of the opposition parties and the government, is the leaders of the opposition parties can decide nothing. The government is the only group that actually has any decision making authority here. So the question is what actually happened after all of these lobbying efforts, across all of these departments. Surely somebody kept some notes. Surely somebody has some memory of something.

OK: The point is nothing has actually happened. The criminal prosecution is moving forward.

DB: Omar please.

AMT: Okay, you know what, we have to leave it there because we know that there are more questions as you say, Darrell. We don't know, what we don't know.

DB: Ministers don't leave and senior advisers dont quit because there was nothing.

KH: Precisely.

AMT: Okay, we have to leave it there. Thank you all of you.

KH: Thank you very much, Anna Maria.

OK: Pleasure.

DB: Thanks.

AMT: That is Darrell Bricker, CEO of the polling firm, Ipsos Public Affairs. He's in London, England today. Omar Khan, vice-president, public affairs at Hill + Knowlton Strategies, vice-president for the Ontario Liberal Party. He's in Chicago. Kate Harrison is in Ottawa. She's a former Conservative staffer, vice-president at Summa Strategies. Let us know what you think. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us.

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Back To Top »

Karl Lagerfeld's death is end of an era, and end of a 'particular vision of women': fashion critic

Guests: Robin Givhan, Jeanne Beker

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, the term evil is very easy to toss around, especially when it comes to seemingly heartless killers, such as Bruce McArthur or Paul Bernardo, but maybe evil is too easy a term. Psychologist Julia Shaw says so-called evil people people are more complex than that. She joins me to talk about the science behind humanity's dark side in half an hour. But first, rest in fabulous.

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VOICE: I did what I wanted to do and even in a way more than I expected I could do, but you know I'm never pleased with myself. I always think I could do better, I could make an effort. I'm lazy. I mean it's ridiculous, I know. The good thing is that I get never like the old Rolling Stone song to any satisfaction of what I'm doing. I always thinkg it could improve, I could do better and I could do more.

AMT: Well it is hard to imagine Karl Lagerfeld having done much more than he did. Into his 80s, the fashion designer was still launching 14 new collections a year on average and in an industry built on constant change, he endured. He led the fashion houses of Chanel, Fendi and his own line and even if you don't give a hoot about fashion, you'd probably recognize him in his ever present sunglasses, fingerless gloves, silver ponytail and high starched collar. Karl Lagerfeld cut an image that jumped off the runway and into the realm of pop culture. For more on his legacy in fashion and culture, I have two guests joining me. Robin Givhan is the fashion critic for The Washington Post. She's joining us from Washington D.C. Jeanne Beker is a fashion journalist, author and style editor. She was host of Fashion Television for 27 years. She's with me in our Toronto studio. Hello to you both.

JEANNE BEKER: Hi.

ROBIN GIVHAN: Hi there.

AMT: Jeanne, I'm going to start with you. You knew Karl Lagerfeld for a long time.

JB: A long time, yes. We started covering fashion in 1985 with Fashion Television and I met him shortly thereafter. 1987 was my first big sit down interview with him and I had the pleasure of interviewing him countless times over the years.

AMT: Is there a memory of him that sticks out for you then?

JB: Wow. There are so many. I mean I would have to say that very first time I met him, a swelteringly hot day in Paris in July, the eve of his couture show and I was in the couture studio and all his little assistants were dressed in black and white looking very chic and bustling about and I was very very very pregnant, like really pregnant, wearing like an olive green muumuu or something. You know in those days, we didn't want to show off the baby bumps and I just didn't feel very chic at all. And Karl is the type of guy, he could keep you waiting for hours and hours for an interview, like seriously. But he would always deliver. So he would always show up. So that was very nice. So I was waiting for hours and hours, Karl wasn't there yet and his assistant said you know what we're going to put you in one of the Chanel dresses, something from our you know the archives. And I went are you kidding me, nothing's going to fit me. And they went no, no I think I have just the perfect thing. We went into this little room and they found the perfect little a line black and white dress, so chic, so fabulous and actually fit my new form. So I was delighted. About another hour later, Karl finally showed up and you know remarked on the dress and said how nice it looked and we had this wonderful warm lengthy conversation and I just fell madly in love with him of course and you know at the end of the interview he said you know that dress is so fabulous on you. I'm giving it to you as a cadeau, a cadeau, that's the magic word that you want to hear in fashion houses because that means a gift and he gifted me with this dress and it was my very first bona fide designer dress and I have it still complete with pearl buttons. Fabulous.

AMT: Robin, did he ever give you a dress?

RG: No.

JB: Robin, has too much integrity. You know she works for the Washington Post. You can't gift her with things.

AMT: So did he give you the dress because he liked you or did he give you the dress because he didn't like what you were wearing and wouldn't talk to you if you didn't dress differently?

JB: Well no. He gave me the dress because I think Karl is the most generous spirit. Karl is very very sensitive. I know it sounds crazy because he's very mean and mischievous and wicked in fact in terms of things that he said about some women. However, I think Karl felt that I was feeling you know a little frumpish at the time and he just saw me glowing in that fabulous dress and I think he just wanted to make me feel good. He's a very kind big hearted person.

AMT: Robin, what was going on at Chanel when Karl Lagerfeld took over in 1983?

RG: Well I think it's hard to imagine now, but you know Chanel had been an extraordinary brand, certainly during their heyday of its founder, but it had gotten you know dusty and a bit sleepy and while it's fragrance Chanel No. 5 had lived on and continues to live on, it wasn't thought of as you know the sort of the centrepiece of fashion. And Karl was really the desginer who kind of led the way in what's now considered just almost a matter of form, which is that any sort of dusty old fashion house can be revived, if you just bring in the right designer. You know every house thinks that it can be the next Chanel and you know in his wake came Tom Ford and Gucci. I mean there's this long legacy that he essentially started by coming in and reviving Chanel.

AMT: So did he revive all of high fashion by doing that?

RG: Well I mean I think that's an interesting extrapolation from that. I don't know that I would necessarily say that. I think Chanel is unique in that it is a privately held company as opposed to a brand like Gucci, which is a publicly traded one. But he's certainly helped sort of create this template for recreation and he created a template for I think sort of the contemporary fashion designer, which is that of someone who is deeply immersed in the popular culture, who is somewhat of a celebrity in his or her own right. It's a kind of you know public face brand ambassador for their work and I mean that's certainly was something that you know he really set the standard for.

AMT: And Jeanne, what did he do to revive the Chanel brand? What do you see as his big contribution?

JB: Well again as Robin said, Karl really poised himself as a rock star and that was an age where designers, we started to think of them on par with rock stars and Versace was doing wonderful things running around with Elton John and there was Madonna and Karl had front rows just constantly filled with celebrities and he drew a lot of media attention and media was changing so dramatically as well and he was just perfectly poised to capture the hearts and minds of a whole generation. I think the magic of Karl or part of the magic of Karl, was certainly magical in so many ways, was he managed to reinvent the wheel time and time again. He was always so true to the hand writing of Coco Chanel. Yet with some little nuance and little intonation, each season he managed to give us a new riff on it, a new take on Coco's original vision and that I think was pretty wonderful. And also you know he really set the standard for a whole generation of designers who realized they were more than dressmakers. He was such a Reniassance man and he was so adamant about criss crossing various cultural forms and his love of music and his love of art and literature and everything just was presented in this fabulous kind of mash up that I think really had an indelible mark and a great influence on the fashion world in general.

AMT: You know Robin, we know this is a multi-billion dollar industry and there are still people who say why should I care about him? Why should I care about fashion?Why does it matter what he did? What do you say to that?

RG: Well I think it's human nature to want to feel relevent to want to fit in to aspire. And I think part of what keeps people fascinated with fashion is because at its core that's really what it's all about. It is tapping into that desire to be a bright, shinier more spectacular version of ourselves. And he certainly enabled that, but I also think that's one of the reasons that we you know care about fashion is because it's also the sort of embodiment of a cultural moment in you know one single product, in one single photograph. I mean I think we can look back at particular instances throughout history and if it's the right fashion photograph, it can tell you a complete story about a decade in you know in that one instant. And one of the things that Karl was able to do was to keep telling a new story about a different moment in time through the vocabulary of Chanel. And the other thing about it is that it's simply exquisite. I mean when you look at some other work that he did particularly in couture, where that the goal is to create something that exudes perfection. I think that's a noble goal to create something that is rhatextraordinary.

AMT: The people who work behind the scenes, the seamstresses, the people who spend their time with the beads and the feathers were safe by Chanel in many ways, were they not?

RG: I mean they were through a large degree because so many of them were in danger of kind of becoming obsolete. cCouture was shrinking as an industry certainly and without them, couture couldn't really continue. So you know it was all sort of entwined and Chanel purchased many of them in order to guarantee that it would have the use of those skills, but it also you know didn't keep them all for you know the house of Chanel. Any other couture company could use those same and so it really sort of created this lifeline for this industry that's been around for generations.

AMT: Jeanne, is his death marking the end of an era? Has fashion changed or had it already changed?

JB: I think it already changed. I mean many people are saying it's the end of an era. You know kind of a cliche. I think it was the end of an era when Alexander McQueen died. It was the end of an era when John Galliano fell from grace with the house of Dior. We're always seeing these ends of eras in fashion. But that being said, I always used to say for all those years running around in fashion's trenches, you know the day Karl Lagerfeld leaves, I'm out of here. Because for me he was the cherry on top. I mean he was really just the bright light in fashion that made my job as a fashion television reporter so exciting and he just really knew how to stir it up and to create that frenzy and that excitement and he'd leave everybody you know waiting, all the press waiting for little interviews and sound bites. At the end of his show, he'd leave them waiting and then he'd come out and it was disorganized chaos and he wanted to do that. And I would plead with the PR people saying can't you organize something here, this is crazy because it was a free for all. It was like survival of the fittest. Luckily, he and I have this rapport, this relationship that you know I would you know be there with my microphone trying to shove it into his face and the minute he saw me he'd grab my hand and pull me in and at least hold on to me until he'd finished with the interview he was doing, so he could you know address me. And that was really nice and really lucky, but it was a zoo. It was a jungle, but we loved that because that's what made it so exciting. Now you know I think there's still frenzy, obviously at fashion shows, but we see so much of the same going down runways. Certainly there are some interesting young designers and some very creative talents out there and you know senior designers still doing magnificent things, but somehow the scene has lost its luster. It's just not that elitist private world anymore. There's so much access.

AMT: And that's a bad thing?

JB: Well it's a double edged sword.

AMT: Am I right in thinking that you know he was a designer who became a celebrity and now we have celebrities who are designers and what does that mean to somebody who actually covers the industry?

RG: Well I think it changes the way that you cover it because you recognize that in many cases the reason that people are attracted to a particular brand is not necessarily because of the creativity or the clothing or even the quality of the clothing, it's because of the name that's on the label. And certainly that plays into the attraction to many of you know the old houses as well, it certainly plays into the attraction of Chanel, but there was at the core, this attention to craft, which I think when you have a celebrity coming in to a design realm, that is not always the case. I mean sometimes it is certainly and I think when you have celebrities who have decided that the next chapter in their life is going to be design and I'm thinking of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. I think their work is extraordinarily beautifully well made, but they made a conscious decision that design is what they now do. They're no longer in this other world.

AMT: They changed careers.

RG: They changed careers.

AMT: As opposed to other who just lend their name, right?

RG: And the other thing I will just sort of say about kind of the end of an era, I mean I do think that it marks the end of a particular train of thought and in some ways I think that's a good thing because I do think that Lagerfeld was in an era that had this particular vision of women and what was chic and what was sophisticated and I think that often came out in some of his less diplomatic remarks about women. I mean he had this vision that the ideal you know body type is thin and certainly that's something that is being rethought within the fashion industry and some younger designers.

AMT: I've got some of the you know some of the things he said. He made outrageous and often insulting comments. He called Adele, a little too fat. He said he didn't like Pippa Middleton's face, that she should only show her back. He said that Princess Diana was sweet and beautiful, but stupid. Did those comments tarnish his legacy?

RG: First some people maybe, for others who knew and loved him, I think you know as outrageous as they were, it was him trying to stir it up. You know often spoke without really thinking just because he wanted to be that kind of naughty boy, you know. Yeah when you take it out of context and say it like that, yeah it's like how creepy and how could we be celebrating a man who said such things.

AMT: Well you know he also weighed in to the question of Muslim migration to Germany in 2017. He said, I'm quoting here, "One cannot, even if there are decades between them, kill millions of Jews, so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place. That didn't get a lot of attention at the time, did it? Did it? I don't know.

RG: My recollection is that it didn't. I don't know how much you know weight people were willing to put on his comments that were outside the realm of style and aesthetics. But I think that certainly is someone in his position who had the kind of clout that he had in Paris or in France. You know it should have been, those comments should have been given weight. And I think that you know people are complicated and it's possible to absolutely admire the output, the work that he did and also be deeply offended by many of the comments that he made. I mean I tend to you know think that you know this is someone who was extraordinarily adept at media. So he knew exactly what he was saying and you know and I think you have to sort of take that and decide how much that is going to impact you know his legacy in your eyes or in ones eyes.

AMT: Where do we see his influence today? Where do you see it, Jeanne?

JB: I think the whole attitude of street style, street wear, athletic leisure wear that's been so over the last few years. I mean one of the first runways, high fashion runways that I saw sneakers on you know was the Chanel runway. His mix, his reverent mix, that high low mix, that everyone has embraced so wholeheartedly now. That was something that that he introduced early on and certainly the whole attitude about rules are made to be broken. Like break the rules, that's something that he always went on about. He thought women should really just beat that reverent, be playful, have fun with fashion, kind of agelessness in fashion. You know granted it wasn't like Chanel was using a lot of older models for their ad campaigns or Karl used older models in his show, but there was just the very fact that he would be working and truly working till the very end as passionately as wholeheartedly as he was, I think that's very inspiring for a whole generation now, you know wondering like when is it time to really you know hang up the sketchpad. I think it's great to think that you can go on as long as you feel that you are tuned in, tapped in and it was very important for him to hang out with young people. He always looked to the street and to kids and to the clubs and he was you know bestfriends with deejays and wanted to know what the current music was. It was very important for him to learn from others, just as it was important for him to mentor others. The fact that he looked at models as more than mere mannequins, he really loved those girls. And many of them really looked at him as this avuncular kind of figure, who would really teach them, help them, mentor them and he certainly opened up worlds for them.

AMT: And where do you see his influence today, Robin?

RG: Well I think he certainly had an impact on the business of fashion and you know I don't necessarily think that you can separate that from the aesthetics of it, to what you know Jeannie was saying that he had this skill of being able to inject contemporary culture in to this venerable brand and that I think allowed a lot of his customers to dabble, to feel like they were engaged in a world in which perhaps they weren't truly, but it gave them that feeling of relevance. And I think he was also extraordinarily really smart about creating fashion that had its aspirational qualities to, but was also extraordinarily wearable. You know he was not engaged in sort of avant garade ideas, you know at the end of the day he was really creating clothes that you could wear if you know if you were of that demographic, meaning if you had the money.

AMT: If you could afford it. What did his couture clothes go for? What are we talking in prices?

JB: The most expensive, probably of all the houses, I would say you know $150,000 for a suit easily.

AMT: For a suit?

JB: Yeah Yeah I mean just crazy, really crazy. One other thing though that I'd like to complain about, you know you go into a Chanel store, you know talk about sometimes having these sad experiences at the retail level, the skill sizing is so small for Chanel and even smaller, like a lot of American brands especially do this vanity sizing where they size up you know just so you can feel good, like hey I can still fit into a size 8.

AMT: What was that Robin?

RG: I said, Chanel does tough love sizing.

JB: Exactly.

AMT: Tough love sizing, try to get your arm in this/.

JB: Anything beyond a size 2 is almost verboten and that can really you know victimize one however.

AMT: Okay well we're going to leave it on that sad little note. Thank you both for weighing in on this.

RG: Thank you.

AMT: That is Robin Givhan. She's a fashion critic for The Washington Post. She joined us from Washington D.C. Jeanne Beker is a fashion journalist, author and style editor. She was host of Fashion Television for 27 years. She joined me in our Toronto studio.

[Music]

AMT: Tomorrow on The Current, I'm speaking to Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI. He's making headlines with comments about his interactions with U.S. President Donald Trump, investigations into the president's ties with Russia and how far the American intelligence community was willing to go to learn the truth. He was speaking to 60 Minutes first in an interview that aired on Sunday.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and won the election for the presidency and who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our nost formidable adversary on the world stage. And that was something that troubled me greatly. I think the next day I met with the team investigating the Russia cases and I asked the team to go back and conduct an assessment to determine where are we with these efforts and what steps do we need to take going forward. I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground in an indelible fashion that were I removed quickly or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace. There were a number of things that caused us to believe that we had adequate predication or adequate reason and facts to open the investigation. The existence of an investigation doesn't mean someone is guilty. I would say Scott, if we failed to open investigation under those circumstances, we wouldn't be doing our jobs. I can't describe to you accurately enough the pressure and the chaos that Rod and I were trying to operate under at that time. It was incredibly turbulent, incredibly stressful.

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There may be no difference between your brain and Hitler's, psychologist says

Guests: Julia Shaw

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current.

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VOICE 1: The beginning of the sentencing hearing. Laying out how Bruce McArthur preyed upon his victims. He gained their trust, betrayed their trust. The judge went on to say that the horrifying crimes continued even after Bruce McArthur murdered these men. How he dismembered them.

VOICE 2: It's the work and the words of Robert William Pickton, Canada's deadliest serial killer, a former pig farmer who's in a maximum security prison in BC. He was convicted of killing six women, but confessed to killing 49.

VOICE 3: The accused showed no emotion as he stood to hear his fate. After more than seven days of deliberations, the jury had just one word for each of the fight counts against Luka Magnotta, guilty.

AMT: Some of the most notorious killers in recent Canadian history. You could add other names, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, a lot more from around the world. Their very names are enough to leave you cold because these are killers who seemed to be without empathy. They seemed to personify evil itself, but that's not exactly how Julia Shaw sees it. She's a Canadian scientist, based in England at University College London's department of psychology and she works extensively with the legal system as an expert in criminal cases and evaluating offender diversion programs. And despite or perhaps because of all that exposure to humanity's worst side, she says we should be careful about labelling anyone as evil because it is seldom so black and white. Julia Shaw's new book is entitled, Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side and she's with me in Toronto. Hello.

JULIA SHAW: Hi.

AMT: Why is it too simple to say someone who commits murder is evil?

JS: Because I think that it overlooks the important nuances and context of that behavior. So I think it's really easy to pull out the E word and say this person is evil and effectively say within that statement that this person is so different from me, that I will never really be able to understand them and they don't require humanity and they don't require sort of what I would assign to a normal non-evil human being, in terms of my respect and understanding.

AMT: Would you call that person a murderer?

JS: I would, that's a good question. I think that we can fall into traps of labels in general and I think that when someone chooses to do something once, even if it's a terrible act, even if it's something that's heinous, even if someone murders somebody, if they've done it once, we need to be careful that we don't define that person by that one act alone. And so I would still be cautious with that term. I mean serial killers we get into repeated behavior, where it might be more appropriate, but I guess the biggest piece of advice I think that I've learned from I mean from philosophy to science to political scientists, I mean there's so much discussion on evil and when we shouldn't label people and how we just need to be very very cautious.

AMT: So let's talk a little bit more about what you say about treating them like a human with many layers. Why is there a pushback against trying to understand or show empathy to the serial killer or the pedophile or the Nazi?

JS: I think it's really easy for us to simplify human behavior and label it evil. I think it's really difficult for us to introspect and hold up the mirror and say what do I perhaps have inside myself that could lead me down a dark path and that could lead me to committing these kinds of crimes for example. And I think it's really difficult to engage with yourself on that level and to really think through your own morality and to challenge yourself to accept that you probably have darkness lurking inside you. And how do we prevent it from getting out. And it's much easier to just say I am a good person, other people are evil.

AMT: That person is evil, ergo I don't have to treat, I can treat them as another.

JS: I can treat them as another and I don't need to critically reflect on my own behavior and thoughts.

AMT: Why don't we talk more about evil head on? What makes it taboo?

JS: We over use the term evil, I would say. I think we use it for to define politicians, we use it to describe people we don't like, we use it to describe people who commit crime.

AMT: But we never explain it, right, we just use it as a shorthand.

JS: As if it's this objective truth. And I think that's another problem is that we assume that we're all talking about the same thing when we're talking about evil and that's just not the case. I mean one only needs to go back in history or to travel or to talk to people who have different religious or other belief systems to see that everybody has a subjective version of what this thing they call evil is. And so we need to be careful not to treat it as this objective reality.

AMT: Are there differences between the brain of, I was going to say a sadistic killer, but I'm going to use your language, the brain of someone who has killed in a sadistic way and someone who would have like what we would call a normal brain, is there a difference in their brains?

JS: So there are predispositions that make it easier for some people to commit crime. And one of those things and probably the most famous is psychopathy people who have a diagnosis of psychopathy or who are psychopaths they have a diminished capacity generally for empathy which makes it harder to. For example I feel sad when somebody else is sad and so it makes it easier subsequently to do harm to others. Now most psychopaths despite us dont commit crime. So there is still a huge gap in understanding that just because you are predisposed to something doesnt mean that youre going to act on it. And we need to always always always remember that and also no excuse bad behavior pointing at the brain and saying look there it is. Theres a really fun study byDr. Fallon where he was looking at the brains of convicted murderers who were diagnosed with psychopathy and he was comparing brain scans of the head of these psychopaths with the controls. So people who are in prison who weren't psychopaths who were sorting through them going psychopath not so well psychopath announcing a path and he held up one of them and said This is definitely the brain of a psychopath and it was his own brain. Even for him as a scientist I think that there is a lot of exploration that he then did in terms of what does it mean when we talk about psychopathy and maybe my brain is built in a way that makes it easier for me to commit crime, but I'm not acting on it.

AMT: You're talking about James Fallon, the University of California neurobiologist.

JS: Exactly.

AMT: So he surprised himself.

JS: He surprised himself and I think it's a really fun example of how even he was probably othering psychopaths, saying well that's not who I am. And then finding out that actually maybe it is, but maybe we've got psychopathy all wrong.

AMT: Haven't checked lately, he hasn't murdered anyone?

JS: No, but he had lots of fellow members who had And so I think also interesting to go exploring in your own family history and see what you find because I think we all have, if you go back far enough, you're going to find some some murderers and some psychopaths and some people who did pretty harmful things.

AMT: So instead of thinking of some people as good and others as bad, we should be exploring the idea that we all have evil tendencies?

JS: Yeah, we're all capable of great harm, again to try and sidestep the word evil, even though it's on the cover of the book. I am aware that that seems counterintuitive.

AMT: So why do you think we need to understand those tendencies better?

JS: I think we need to understand our own problematic fantasies, our own problematic behavior, our own hypocrisies, because if we don't, I think we are much more likely to fall into traps where we become, if you will, the monsters we fear. So I think we are as humans generally entirely underprepared for bad situations and situations where you know let's say war breaks out, who knows what suddenly you're capable of when you're not safe and you're not fed and you're highly anxious and you're in danger. And if you haven't, I think, thought about the kind of person you might be able to become, you might follow a totalitarian, authoritarian leader into a disaster.

AMT: I've always been fascinated by that. I mean we have very contemporary examples. We have the case of ISIS in Syria, where you have a lot of people who when ISIS came to town would join, they would do the terrible things, they would behead, they would do all of that. Then you have the other people, we interviewed a man in our program, early 30s, they come to his city, they go to Mosul in Iraq and he decides to document what they're doing and write about it and upload the blog. But I've always been fascinated. So what makes a 30 year old who grows up in the same city., one goes one way, one goes the other and I would have used evil. What makes allows one to make the evil choice and one makes the other choice?

JS: I mean it's never quite that simple unfortunately.

AMT: Well it's not simple right, but that's the fascinating thing.

JS: And it is the fascinating thing and this is why I think what's interesting is to try and break down lots of the different factors that probably contributed to that. And so I mean everything from sadism and aggression to how we deal authority to how structures and systems make it easier for us to go along with dangerous situations too. I mean how money changes are morality. I mean there's lots and lots and lots pieces that I think we can only ever understand that kind of behavior if we understand lots of these different pieces. And I think it's tempting to look for an easy answer and to say oh it's because for example he was lonely or he was aggressive or he was ideologically driven or to pick one of those different things but we all know deep down that that is insufficient as an explanation. I do think that that terrorists probably are people we label terrorists because of Chris Spector the sort of notion of subjectivity but people who become terrorists often I think we ask the wrong questions and I think it's sort of the again othering of how did that person become a terrorist and not how could we all potentially be seduced into this kind of situation.

AMT: In to the lead up to the Holocaust the Nazis portrayed Jews as vermin and that dehumanization has been repeated in other genocides. What's the connection between dehumanizing people and the actions that many refer to as evil?

JS: It's when we dehumanize people that we're really capable of the worst things that I think humanity has done and especially at scale. I think that there's never a better time than now to reflect on the way in which also current political leaders describe immigrants for example as snakes or use this intentionally dehumanizing language to describe this "other" who is a threat or a perceived threat to our current way of life, whatever that means.

AMT: We're hearing that a lot lately, not just in the United States, we're hearing that in Canada.

JS: We're hearing it in Canada, we're hearing it in the UK. I mean this sort of idea of divisive statements and intentionally dehumanizing language I think is, I mean it's been a part of humanity unfortunately since the beginning of humanity, but we need to be very very conscious I think as soon as someone uses that kind of language, we need to wonder what it is they want us to do and what they think that they might be capable and what they might make us capable of.

AMT: What role does aggression play in driving what most people would consider to be an act of evil?

JS: So all of us have aggression in us in various forms. I also think that our brains are generally built for sadism for example. So this idea that we are capable of enjoying harming somebody else. I think on the most basic level, if you're familiar with the kinds of schadenfreude, a sort of enjoying someone else's suffering.

AMT: That's right enjoying someone's misery yeah.

JS: Yeah, a solid German word. Whether it's at work or you know your ex is dating someone else and they're, something negative happens to them, they lose their jobs and then you somehow derive pleasure from that. I mean that's a minor form of sadism. So I think that we assume that only murderers and serial killers have this kind of enjoyment that they get out of harm, but that's not the case. As with sadism, with aggression, we all have aggression in us, it's about how we control and monitor our aggression how it manifests in our behaviour towards others.

AMT: And what have you learned in your work about the difference in gender, men and women because we know that men commit more murders and they tend to be more violent. Does that mean men can be more evil?

JS: I mean if you look at the people who have overall perpetrated the most violent crime and as you said murder, it's so disproportionately male, but that doesn't surprise anyone. We do remember that the victims of most violent crime are also men. But I think it does point to some fascinating research and some fascinating myths that we have around gender norms and that we need to challenge urgently and one of them is this idea that testosterone causes aggression and aggression causes violence and violences leads up to things like murder and men because they have more testosterone are effectively built for murder, which is simply wrong. That's not how it works. We need to stop echoing this back because effectively it excuses bad behavior and I think it lets us out in terms of how we socialize our boys and sort of saying oh that's just how boys are. There's different social factors, there's different context, there's different ways in which we raise and socialize them. That is what ultimately helps people modify their behavior and control themselves.

AMT: And arguably we often excuse women, we don't judge them by the same standards. So if we look at suicide bombings, one of the first suicide bombers was a woman, documented obviously. And also if you again go back to the issue of ISIS, the women who left to join ISIS are seen in a different light than the men who went to join ISIS often and we've had experts on these issues pointed out to us.

JS: I think it's fascinating how sexism also goes into our rhetoric around female offenders and how often not always, there is a stereotype for the evil woman. But mostly we see women as because they're lady like and soft and empathetic and warm and nurturing. If they commit harm, either they are totally mentally ill, effectively they're not really acting out of a place of understanding and control or they're the victims of some structure that's somehow taken them off the rightful womanly path. Whereas with men there's the assumption of agency. There's the assumption that this person chose to do this.

AMT: I want to talk to you about the US Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. Christine Blasey Ford told the committee what she remembers most about an alleged sexual assault decades earlier by Brett Kavanaugh. Listen to what she talks about.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Indelible, in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two and they're having fun at my expense.

VOICE 2: You never forgotten that laughter. You never forgetten them laughing at you?

VOICE 1: They were laughing with each other.

VOICE 2: And you were the object of the laughter?

VOICE 1: I was you know underneath one of them, while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another.

AMT: Julia Shaw, why would it be the laughter she remembers the most?

JS: So there's something that Baumeister who is a criminologist referred to as victimization gap, which is the difference in position between the victim and the perpetrator of a crime. And when you are being victimized it's really easy to interpret the situation only from your perspective and so to see laughter as a sign of sadistic pleasure because there's this magnitude gap there's the suffering that you are experiencing will never be matched by feel especially in the moment by the suffering that come with that person. So laughter is of course really jarring and seems incredibly out of place. Well Baumeister also said that because we often unfortunately with things like rape we feel to sympathize with victims disproportionately compared to some kinds of crime, but we are often asked to sympathize with the victims and not think about the perpetrators. And what's fascinating specifically with research on laughter and crime and I mean if you think of horror movies you think of the stereotypical depictions of evil, laughter features quite readily, the evil laugh.

AMT: You can hear it in your head, as soon as you said that I can hear it from movies.

JS: Exactly. And that's because it seems so jarring, it seems so out of place, it's this gap. But if you turn around, when you look at why people because people do sometimes laugh and it's not just enjoyment that is one explanation, but disproportionately people laugh when they're doing harm to others because they're nervous. So it's more of a nervous laughter. So there's been research on people laughing when they're doing harm to others and asking them afterwards why did you laugh, why did you smile and they said, I didn't know how to deal the situation and it just happened.

AMT: So it's something that it's like an emotional trigger that they don't even control?

JS: Exactly so it's called a dimorphous display of emotion and what research on this shows is that we automatically have this responses that if we are extremely nervous or extremely sad or extremely anything really, your brain shoots out the opposite emotions so that your brain doesn't overload effectively. For example when you laugh or smile at funerals because you're really sad or you cry at a wedding, it's the same thing. It's that your brain has too much of one emotion and it's shooting out the opposite so that your brain doesn't get fried. It's more of than we think often not an indicator of sadistic pleasure, but I think we do need to make sure that we are looking at both sides and understanding both why and how people commit crime and also the victims experience and not just focus on one or the other.

AMT: It's interesting because that can affect sentencing. That can affect a lot of things.

JS: Oh absolutely. I mean it just has consequences for so many aspects of our justice system.

AMT: How is it that people can believe that something is evil and then go ahead and do it anyway? You point out that most people would find torturing an animal to be an evil thing, but will eat meat from a factory farm where animals suffer.

JS: Yeah or we buy cheap stuff, but we don't believe in underpaid labour or we consume porn, but we don't believe in prostitution. I mean the hypocrisies are so deeply rooted in our human experience and it's always fascinating to expose and to see how people react. I think my favorite right now is the vegan movement, which is a wonderful case study of humans trying to excuse their bad behavior. So I'm not vegan and the mental gymnastics I have to do every time I eat a piece of meat, I think I even surprise myself at times and the explanations are anything from, oh but I enjoy it so much too, well this animal was not a factory farm to it's probably fine to it's something we culturally do and otherwise I'm going to, it's going to be rude to my host, if I don't eat it. I mean there's lots of different.

AMT: But you're talking about the meat eater excusing what you call bad behavior, not the vegan?

JS: The meat eater, exactly sorry. The meat eather excusing.

AMT: Just want to know who's going to complain about what you just said. Not the vegans, okay.

JS: In reality I feel guilty every time I eat an animal and I think that probably it's harming the world and my body and is ethically the wrong thing to do. And yet I do it anyway. The cognitive dissonance that we experience when we do things that we know are kind of or are very bad, it's really interesting to see the excuse to come up with post hoc to try and justify the behavior that we engage in anyway.

AMT: I've got another one for you. Ted Bundy, Magnotta, are identified as killers and there's all this attention on their Looks. In fact Ted Bundy movies are out now and there are women, there are people falling in love with him again, like what's that about that attention to the looks?

JS: So I find the fetishization of serial killers really interesting and I think that there's been a lot of talk about it this year around who we cast in roles to play serial killers and whether they're allowed to be sexually attractive. But I think that in terms of why woman from other people. It is disproportionately women who are attracted to and write love letters to offenders and prisons but perhaps it's the ultimate expression Sunway is not ultimately a good way but ultimately the most extreme form of masculinity and breaking rules and sort of going outside that bar. So mean you are killing us sort of the ultimate taboo in that way and it does seem that there is this niche subculture of people who are specifically attracted to that but you're also seeing sort of why people who are attractive how how we feel about that. So there's something called the halo effect which is that generally we think that people who look good are good and it can distract us from people who are harmful to us. And it can also distract us from appropriate conversations around convicted felons. Do you remember Jeremy Meeks?

AMT: No, I do not.

JS: The hot felon? Jeremy Meeks became famous because he had a mugshot which was posted online and went viral because he was "so hunky" that he was nicknamed "hot felon" and it's sort of this picture of him sort of staring into the camera with a teardrop tattoo and he ended up getting a modeling contract and has a whole new life now. But he was quite a serious offender when this went viral and all people were talking about was how attractive he was. We need to be very careful that we don't get distracted by attractiveness.

AMT: But in a way that's how a serial killer can function, right? It's our bias that a person who like a serial killer never looks like the devil or no one would go near them.

JS: Exactly, which is why they go undetected for multiple murders. I mean there's sometimes a joke that the people who are in prison are bad at offending because they got caught. So this idea that I think often our creeping radars and our trustworthiness radars go off for certain kinds of people and if they look the part and act the part then we detect them quite readily and if they don't then sometimes we detect fear and and problems where there aren't any. For example wrongful convictions. A good case for example, stereotyping, people who are a certain ethnicity or who look a certain way as offenders and then there's the serial killers who get away with things for really long time because they don't look like what we think an offender should look like.

AMT: During war time, war criminals have often said they were following orders. Can authority figures make ordinary people commit acts they once believed were evil?

JS: Yes I think the important aspect of the just following orders line of argument is that we can never excuse outsourcing or immorality. That is never something I will accept as an explanation. I think that it's really easy for us to hand over our morality to somebody else and say well I am not in charge of this particular situation someone else has the authority here. And so it's not really me who has to also fall if there is blame or if there's harm done to somebody else it's the other person even of where the actors who are carrying out the harmful behavior. And that's just not good enough. And I think we need to be on our toes at all times to realize that it's easy to do and it's a trap that we can fund quite readily. And humans have repeatedly unfortunately. And that's how again some of the worst possible atrocities have happened, that combined with dehumanizing people. I just think that we need to be very careful and assume that we are capable of following orders that we disagree with morally and that we need to constantly fight against them.

AMT: If we fast forward to today, we live in an age of artificial intelligence. So if you can have artificial intelligence, can you have artificial I'm going to use the word again, can you have artificial evil?

JS: No. So I think until artificial intelligence becomes sentient at least, you can't have the equivalent of wrongdoing or evil that we would ascribe to human beings in technological form. I mean in a dystopian future narratives we usually see technology as the culprit of what's wiped out humanity. Something gets sentient and humans are no longer needed.

AMT: It's how the computer.

JS: Yeah. So it does feature in our fears. So it's important to discuss and I think it's ever more part of our reality, how technology can influence democracy, how it can influence our thinking. I dont think technology itself can ever be evil at least not in its current form, but I do think that it can bring out the worst in us and it just makes it very easy for people who might not have otherwise committed crime to do so. There's so many ready victims effectively all in once, if you will space and where we're mostly totally underprepared. I mean criminologists and psychologists do not spend enough time talking about cyber crime, even though it's the single most common type of crime right now. That is the bigger issue ethically as well in terms of getting us into trouble because we're not preparing and not trying to understand how technology makes it easier for us to hurt people.

AMT: So what do you want to leave us thinking about when we think about ourselves and that kind of behavior?

JS: Assume you're capable of the worst. Stop calling people evil. It's both lazy and uninteresting frankly. And third, I think that we can all benefit from seeing the humanity in everyone and no matter what someone has done or you think they're capable of, never, never, never dehumanize them.

AMT: Julia Shaw, thank you.

JS: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Julia Shaw, scientist in the department of psychology at University College London. Her new book is called, Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side. She joined me in our Toronto studio. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Mick Jones and Lou Gramm of the band Foreigner will talk to Tom Power about their new musical, Juke Box Hero. Remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio. Browse through past episodes of our show, start listening in just a few seconds. Listen live to your local CBC station right from your smartphone or app, free from the App Store or Google Play. And remember to go to our site, cbc.ca/thecurrent and look at our survey there. We're changing up our podcast and we want your opinion. Finally after our discussion around the late designer Karl Lagerfeld, we're going to leave you with music from Lady Gaga. This is Fashion! I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Fashion!" By Lady Gaga]

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Feb, 20, 2019 episode transcript

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