By: Liz Do
20 Nov, 2023
How the Rule of Law could solve our anxious times: a Q&A with CIFAR President Stephen Toope
November 20, 2023
Stephen Toope, President & CEO of CIFAR, discusses his new book A Rule of Law for Our New Age of Anxiety, CIFAR and more.
When Stephen Toope, President & CEO of CIFAR, began writing his new book, the world was in the grips of fighting COVID-19. While the crisis brought together unprecedented global collaboration towards a vaccine, it also illuminated the world’s collective panic and a sense of uncertainty.
Toope’s new book, A Rule of Law for Our New Age of Anxiety, delves into the subject and argues that a renewed faith in the Rule of Law — a principle of governance in which all persons and institutions are accountable to laws, equally — could help address current and future troubling times.
In this interview, Toope sat down with CIFAR to discuss his new book, how his ideas align with CIFAR’s work, and whether he thinks our world can overcome this new age of anxiety.
CIFAR: Your book uses the poem, “The Age of Anxiety” by W.H. Auden as a leitmotif, and you began work on this book during the pandemic. Tell us why this particular poem resonated with you during that time and how it became its theme.
Toope: I’ve loved the poetry of W.H. Auden since I was in high school. In the middle of the pandemic, I had this really overwhelming sense that we were living in an age where people were getting more and more anxious about a whole range of issues. And so I thought: I’m going to go back to this poem and read it really carefully to see whether there are things one could extract that might be helpful in framing the way we think about our current times.
When I did that, I was surprised at how many things Auden had to say back in 1947 that seem to still resonate. I was also surprised that it was a poem written at the end of a war, and yet it wasn’t filled with optimism. It was a poem that actually tried to capture what Auden felt was a kind of shift in the way the world works. This shift was causing a lot of nervousness. Now, we know in retrospect that the 1950s had relative stability. But it didn’t feel that way at the end of the war, apparently. I thought that there were many nice insights, which I’ve tried to draw out, so I use parts of the poem as epigrams throughout the book.
CIFAR: You argue that a renewed faith in the Rule of Law can address the anxieties and troubles of our time. What is the genesis of this argument? Has this been a longstanding philosophy of yours?
Toope: E.P. Thompson, who’s a renowned English historian, was not particularly positive about the evolution of the world in the 20th century. But he always made the argument that the Rule of Law was perhaps one of the great human creations of the last 100 years — and I actually always believed that, too.
The belief is not that the “law solves everyone’s problems.” Actually, a really important theme of the book is that a Rule of Law has to be relatively modest in its aspirations. But I do believe that, when carefully considered, the Rule of Law can help us work our way out of some of our contemporary anxieties. It creates a framework for our society that is more stable, but also allows for evolutionary change.
CIFAR: Practicing the Rule of Law means applying a pragmatist approach. But what does that look like — how do we apply it in our everyday lives and as a society? How do we apply it as an organization?
Toope: Individuals can’t really apply details of a Rule of Law every day, because that would turn all interactions into legal forms. I absolutely don’t think that’s how the world works. But when we think about institutional organizations, institutional design — and that’s in government, but also in organizations like CIFAR, or business corporations — it’s largely about procedure. Process helps us think through what is likely to create a healthy organization.
And so, when we’re building organizations, we should be thinking about some of the legal principles that are embedded in the Rule of Law. I think that can help us design institutions that are robust, open, transparent, likely to lead to better decisions and, therefore, at an individual level, give people greater confidence in the institutions in which they’re participating.
CIFAR: As President & CEO of CIFAR, you are leading an organization that looks to address some of the biggest and most uncertain challenges of our time. What role do you see for CIFAR and research in addressing anxious times, and how does this align to the ideas put forward in the book?
Toope: We’re currently thinking through our new Strategy for CIFAR, and one of the things we have to think about is: what are our organizational capabilities to deliver on that Strategy? If you think about some processes that are related to the Rule of Law, they would be for example, transparency, principles of fairness and rules that aren’t retroactive.
In terms of research, I discuss in the book that one of our sources of anxiety today is the combination of really creative new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), and powerful network platforms that are controlled by large corporations. We’ve seen in the public discourse lately that there is a lot of nervousness about what AI means for the future, and what AI controlled by corporations means for the future.
Even though I didn’t quite know this was going to emerge when I wrote it a year and a half ago, I do think for CIFAR — and indeed for the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, and for the country as a whole — we must think about those issues and figure out how law can help shape the successful frameworks that don’t allow our greatest nervousness and fears to come to fruition.
CIFAR: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
Toope: Even though the world looks really worrisome with climate change, populist nationalism, minority groups being attacked in many parts of the world, the war in Ukraine, and now, again, in the Middle East — we’re not without the resources to address our contemporary problems. What I tried to do in the book is say: here are the places where we have to ensure that the processes of law are upheld. If we do that, and we fight for it, we can actually find our way out of the current malaise.
The book is available for purchase at Cambridge University Press and Amazon.
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