By Joe Mancini
Published in March 2015
ED note: We were sad to learn that Jim Lotz died in early January. Despite a gloomy cancer prognosis he had continued to write and live a full life. Over the years, Jim was a regular visitor to The Working Centre engaging conferences, workshops and lectures where he would share his unique community development knowledge. We will miss Jim’s ever cheerful and witty faith in humanity.
The Moral Equivalent of War, a phrase Jim Lotz borrowed from William James, explained how Lotz lived his life. It was a journey that started at 12 years of age when young Jim fled his Liverpool working class house as bombs blew away the neighbourhood he called home.
“I still remember the sound of the bomb that hit three houses next to ours, demolishing them and setting then ablaze. Six neighbours died and were buried in a mass grave with other nameless dead,” he wrote.
After spending two years in the Royal Air Force and graduating from Manchester University with an Honours Degree in Geography in 1949, he found himself in Kano in Northern Nigeria as a Special Constable, in the middle of a civil war where no one was safe from the looting and killing. Jim received the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct for his role in rescuing an African man from a murderous mob, during these riots in northern Nigeria in 1953.
His own father had miraculously survived when his regiment, the Liverpool Scottish charged the German lines at Hooge on the Western Front in 1915, while being shelled and machine gunned by their own. For Jim, war and militarism were inescapable realities.
Having grown up through the horrors of war, Jim liked to quote Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent who claimed he heard many soldiers lament that, “If only we could have created energy for something good.” Jim kept searching for the possibility of a better world.
Jim wasn’t interested in settling back in England and he boarded ship to Canada. It did not take long until he had completed his Master’s Degree in Geography at McGill University. Raised on stories of Shackleton and Franklin, Jim signed up with Operation Hazen, a major part of Canada’s International contribution to the Third International Geophysical Year, during which nations cooperated on studying Artic natural phenomena. He worked in the Artic on three summer expeditions, two as a glacier meteorologist exploring icecaps of Northern Ellesmere Island.
While preparing to leave, he walked into the library of the Artic Institute, and asked about a line of poetry that was humming in his head. Pat Wicks, an expat Brit from Brighton who had come to Canada as a nanny for the British Trade Commissioner, completed the poem, and they became travelling partners, married in December 1959.
Jim joined the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources as a planner and research officer between 1960 and 1966, and then taught community development at St. Paul University, Ottawa until 1971. During that time he became director of the Canadian Research Centre for Anthropology where he directed studies on unemployed youth in Ottawa and squatting in Canada.
Working on Glen Gould’s radio and film series, the Idea of the North, Jim found himself on an Expo 67 panel with Buckminster Fuller, futurist John McHale and Moshe Safdie, designer of Habitat. He kept expecting to be told, “Out, you don’t belong here!”
Pat and Jim thought of settling in Nova Scotia and when Jim was offered a teaching position in Community Development at the Coady Institute at St. Francis Xavier University, he took it.
Jim would spend the next 40 years helping Canadians decipher community development. Ironically, it was partly the lessons he learned confronting the university administration that focused his attention on how to teach about the complexity and simplicity of structures that enhance human cooperation. He set about demystifying theories that explained mutual aid and interdependence between humans. He wanted to lessen the gap between government and people.
For Jim, this meant teaching these ideas with less class structure, less reliance on class exams and more in-the-field practice. Unfortunately, the university did not condone the experiments and Jim often proudly described how he was shown the door.
It was at this point that Jim became a writer and independent researcher on subjects that range from the Canadian Artic, Canadians at war, to Moses Coady, the Canadian Pacific and community development. Jim classified his books as Community and Regional Development, Canadian History and Murder Mysteries/Thrillers. His novels were another way to explore human nature.
NC Press in 1977 was the publisher for the first of a trilogy of Canadian community development books. Understanding Canada, Regional and Community Development in a New Nation was an attempt to trace the “concept of community development from its beginnings in colonial Africa to recent attempts at self-help in Canada.” The highlight is Chapter 13 called Doing It: Twenty Suggestions for Effective Community Action.
The Lichen Factor came 20 years later and as its title suggests, Jim was teaching a lesson derived from the Artic about how humans can learn the skills of cooperation by understanding the symbiotic relationship that lichen has with other organisms. Community development is not mysterious; there is common knowledge in all communities of the work that needs to be done. It is not dominating experts, but the subtle energy of multiple exchanges that increase meaningful participation. The ambitious subtitle, The Quest for Community Development in Canada is an attempt to make this book a comprehensive survey and a compendium of practical advice, while recognizing the underlying nature of Canada.
In 2012, The Moral Equivalent of War, The New Role of Social Entrepreneurship in Community Development, updated Lotz’s ideas by offering a fresh understanding of the new fad of social entrepreneurship. His main point was to emphasize the importance of staying rooted in and enhancing the democratic culture of communities. He ends the book with a litany of recent failed development schemes and projects. He saw hope in grassroots social and community entrepreneurs who do development differently, serving as seed beds for new ideas, demonstrating new ways of being and acting.
Lotz did a service to the Antigonish movement by updating the biographies of Moses Coady and Jimmy Tomkins, interpreting the spirit and drive behind the cooperative movement they founded in the 1930’s. In every speech, Jim Lotz would remind people how Moses Coady helped people believe they could do ten times more than they thought they could. He was involved with international development, taking on volunteer consultation roles in Slovakia, Nain, Egypt and Lesotho.
Jim led a disciplined writer’s life, which for him meant early to bed in order to be up at 5:00 am to exercise and then write for 4 hours; the rest of the day was spent on doing what needed to be done.
He was happy to let technology adapt around him. With no computer or cell phone the only way to reach Jim was by land line which he always answered with, “Lotz here.” Each of his manuscripts was composed on a typewriter, a lost art. He hardly cared when scanners became powerful enough to convert his typing into digital characters.
A few years back on a visit to Kitchener, when Jim was almost 80 years of age, the airporter dropped him off at the wrong hotel, far from the Kitchener downtown. When I finally tracked down the hotel I found out he had already walked 7 km to the downtown. “I am a geographer, I just asked which way to the downtown and I enjoyed the walk.”
Jim had a way of summarizing common sense actions into pithy phrases. If you want to change the music, you talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey. Government is not your enemy, it is your servant. It is the steady rain that soaks. You had better write your story or someone is going to write it for you. He had a storehouse of sayings and for many years contributed his Axioms, Aphorisms & Anecdotes for Activists to Good Work News.
His favourite quote by Blake was a motto to live by, “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.”
One of Jim’s final books, Pilgrim Souls, Caring for a Loved One with Dementia documented how he took care of his wife Pat as she sunk into dementia.
In this book, Jim described what it is like to be a fulltime care giver. He was committed to helping Pat live in their house together as long as he could manage. As Pat’s memory faded, he was determined to walk with her as he knew her values, her loves, her fears, her life experiences. The journey started at the turn of millennium until Pat passed away in February 2012.
Jim candidly described the Alzheimer journey as similar to the Monty Python dead parrot sketch as the sufferer denies what is obvious to you: “This is not my shoe!”
“Those with dementia have memories of old joys and good times that can be awakened. Scientists have dismissed learned practice in caring as subjective and ad hoc. As a caregiver you operate in a subjective, ad hoc world as you struggle to make sense of what the sufferer needs, what he or she is struggling to communicate. You discover what works for them, and for you, by trial and error, through love and compassion, not scientific analysis.”
The reader is guided through the human emotions of anger and joy that come from a commitment to journey with those suffering a debilitating illness.
As Pat drifted into a world where no one could reach her, Jim found solace watching Pat mark-up magazines and newspapers as if she were still an editor. Their journey that started together in a library at McGill came to an end with Pat still living at home.
For Jim, The Moral Equivalent of War was the personal and community practice of developing human relationships. On the day Pat died, he received a phone call from the President of St. Mary’s University who wanted to personally tell Jim that the university was granting him an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law.
Jim was a wonderful letter writer. In a final letter, he was philosophical after noting that he had just completed his 30th book, Sharing the Journey.
“I came across John 3.18: “Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions in truth.” Another axiom as a guide, as the way to live what Coady called “the good and abundant life.” And he never saw abundance in material terms.”
Jim is survived by his daughter Fiona and his grandson Peter.
