Convictions and Contrasts

The year 2020 Anno Domini, an annus horribilis if ever there was one, has finally and mercifully come to an end.   It is the first of January once again, New Year's Day on the civil calendar, and the octave day of Christmas, dedicated to the Circumcision of our Lord, on the ancient liturgical kalendar.    This means that it is time once again for my annual essay about myself and my personal views, a tradition that I borrowed from one of my own favourite op-ed writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.

I grew up on a farm near the hamlet of Bradwardine, the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, one of the prairie provinces of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full constitutional title and name of my country, one of the Commonwealth Realms of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.   Growing up, I received the basic sort of minimal, religious instruction that is generally available in the mainline Protestant denominations - I was taught the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Golden Rule, and made familiar through the format of children's Bible stories with the most significant events in the life of Jesus Christ and of the major Old Testament figures, but not in such a way as to instill the conviction that this was meaningful truth rather than mere storytelling with moral lessons attached.   Late in the summer after my fifteenth birthday, I had an evangelical conversion in which I came to faith in Jesus Christ as He is presented in the Scriptures and the ancient Creeds - the Son of the True and Living God, Who is equal to and One with His Father and the Holy Ghost, Who without ceasing to be fully God became fully Man, through the miracle of the Virgin Birth, and Who came into the world that He had made so that He might be betrayed, unjustly condemned, and die a cruel and unjust death at the hands of men in order to take the sins of the whole world, including my own, upon Himself and offer His sufferings, shed blood and death on the Cross as the one final and true sacrifice that would atone for sin and reconcile the world to God, and Who rose again from the grave, victorious over sin, death, and hell, to bring new and eternal spiritual life to all who believe in Him.   I was baptized about a year and a half after this and after high school took five years of formal theological training at what was then Providence College and Theological Seminary in Otterburne, Manitoba, but which has since grown into Providence University College.   I have lived In Winnipeg, the capital city of Manitoba, where I have worked in inner-city Christian outreach ministry ever since.   In this time I have been confirmed in the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of my paternal forebears, and while I have no more use for the theological liberalism that plagues my Church than I did when it infested the denomination of my maternal ancestors, the United Church of Canada, I am theologically most at home in orthodox Anglicanism.  By orthodox Anglicanism I mean the Anglicanism of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer, that is Catholic in its affirmation of the ancient faith stated concisely in the Apostles' Creed and in its fullest expression in the Athanasian, and in its retention of the Apostolic ministry in its three-fold orders, the Gospel Sacraments, and the ancient liturgy as translated into beautiful English by Thomas Cranmer, and Protestant in its rejection of those later errors that are distinct to the patriarch of Rome rather than Catholic (belonging to the whole Church, "everywhere, at all times, and by all").

For as long as I can remember I have loved  my country and admired her history, traditions, and institutions.   What I came to admire about her in childhood is what I still admire about her now.   Whereas our friends and neighbours to the south take pride in the fact that their republic was born out of rebellion and revolution and built upon ideals drawn from eighteenth century liberal philosophy, what I admire most about the Dominion of Canada is that the historical path that led up to her birth in Confederation began by diverging from that taken by the Americans at precisely this point.   For differing reasons, the British Loyalists, the French Canadians who had been guaranteed their language, religion, and culture by the British Crown when they were ceded to the latter at the end of the Seven Year's War, and the Red Indian tribes who had treaty alliances with the Crown, chose loyalty and honour, the virtues of the older, pre-Modern, tradition of Western civilization over rebellion, revolution, and the ideals of the newer, Modern, and liberal form.   This choice, first made at the time of the American Revolution, was made again in the War of 1812, and indeed, in the very process of Confederation, and the choice of loyalty and honour continued to light the Dominion's way through two World Wars.   This is the part of our history which ordinary Canadians admired the most when I was growing up and likely still do.   The Liberal Party of Canada has tried its worst to erase and eradicate the older, Loyalist, Canada and her heritage, traditions, and history, for which reason I despise, have always despised, and always will despise the Liberal Party.  The New Democrats, who differ from the Liberals in this regards only in the sense that they wish the erasure and eradication were more complete and more quickly accomplished are even more abominable in my eyes than the Grits.

If you are familiar with the party system in Canada you might conclude from the last two sentences in the previous paragraph that I am a Conservative.   While I describe my political outlook as Tory I do not mean this in the sense of a Conservative Party supporter.   The old Conservative Party, as it was from the time it was led by Sir John A. Macdonald, the leading Father of Confederation and Canada's first Prime Minister until the time the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker led it in Opposition in the early years of the sweeping changes being brought in by Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, the two Communist traitors who led the Liberals in government from the 1960s through the early 1980s, was a party I could have called my own had it not been before I was born.   After Diefenbaker was ousted as leader, the party veered off in all sorts of wrong directions, which it would be too much of a rabbit trail to specify here.   In the late 1980s, populists of the Western, prairie provinces, founded a new party, the Reform Party of Canada, that purported to be more conservative in its platform, policies, and philosophy than the Conservative Party.   That they chose the name by which the Liberal Party had been known prior to Confederation was a good indicator that this was not the case.   I supported this party in the 1990s, because it had many policies and ideas with which I agreed, but eventually I got fed up with the way these good ideas were constantly being wed to an anti-Canadian attitude, hostile to our history, traditions, and institutions, which looked with envy towards those of the United States, an attitude which is as repugnant to me as everything I loathe in the Liberals and NDP.   The present Conservative Party was formed out of a merger of the old Conservative Party and the Reform, and while some of the best aspects of each party were incorporated into the new, overall it gives more of an impression of combining the worst of both.

Therefore, when I say that I am a Tory, I do not mean this in the partisan sense but in the sense of Dr. Johnson's definition "One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig" or, as T. S. Eliot described himself, in what seems to be a paraphrase of Dr. Johnson's definition "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics".   I use Tory, which was the name of those who defended the royal prerogative and the established Church in Parliament in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before Robert Peel founded the Conservative Party that took their place in 1834 rather than small-c conservative, the more common way of distinguishing one's centre-right political philosophy from Conservative partisanship.   This is because small-c conservatism is generally understood to mean support for law and order, government fiscal responsibility, property rights, low taxes, and economic freedom.   While these ideas are not bad - I generally agree with them - they are all what I would consider secondary or even tertiary ideas and there is nothing in them to distinguish conservatism from what was called liberalism up until the early twentieth century.   By contrast, Tory as I use the term, stresses the importance of the older virtues such as loyalty, particularly as directed towards the institutions that have come down to us, albeit in a highly diluted form, from pre-liberal Christendom and which constitute a link to the Christian civilization of the past, and the classical civilization of the pre-Christian ancient world, the best elements of which had been absorbed by Christian civilization.   While obviously, when it comes to civil institutions, I primarily mean royal monarchy, I also would include Parliament as that legislative assembly, in which a voice in government is given to the Commons as well as to the lords spiritual and temporal, evolved out of the king's council fairly early in the history of Christendom, centuries prior to the Modern Age.   Whereas the typical small-c conservative is indistinguishable from a liberal or socialist in his support for democracy, an abstract ideal and hardly of the first order of abstract ideals, my support as a Tory, is for Parliament, the concrete institution, which has been tested and proved by time.

As a Tory in the twenty-first century, I am more of a reactionary than a conservative.   Reactionary is a term more often used as a label of abuse by the progressive Left than as a self-description.  I learned to embrace the term from John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American, Roman Catholic, historian who was, along with the Canadian Tory historians, Donald Creighton and W. L.  Morton, the latter a fellow Manitoban, one of my favourite writers of history.   You can read his account of how he came to self-apply it in the first volume of his memoirs, which is the best-titled autobiography I have ever come across, Confessions of an Original Sinner.  The difference between a reactionary and a conservative is usually understood this way - a conservative wishes to keep things as they are, a reactionary wishes to make them what they were in the past.   I would prefer the distinction to  be much more nuanced than this.   The conservative, an advocate of present day Western Civilization against those who wish to destroy it, whether from within or without, sees the merits of Western Civilization as consisting primarily or even entirely of elements and aspects introduced by liberalism in the Modern Age.   The reactionary, on the other hand, believes that what is of greatest value and most worthy of defence in our Civilization, is what has come down to us from Christendom and classical antiquity.   Furthermore, the reactionary acknowledges that the transition to modernity involved loss as well as gain, and is willing to contemplate the possibility that the loss exceeded the gain or even that it was too high a price to pay for the gain.   This is why for liberals, socialists, and all other stripes of progressive, reactionary is the worst possible insult.   Their most basic faith is in the idea of progress, that the present, whatever its faults, is far better than the past, and that improvement can only consist in moving further away from the past.

While one can be a Tory and a reactionary without believing the Christian faith - Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Charles Maurras and Anthony M. Ludovici are among many examples that could be named - and a Christian believer without being a Tory or reactionary, orthodox Christianity and reactionary Toryism are complementary each to the other.   Before my conversion and baptism, I already had certain Tory convictions - I have been a lifelong royalist from the moment I learned the difference between a monarchy and a republic and that my country was the former rather than the latter - and what could be called a sort of instinctual reactionary skepticism towards fashionable, progressive, and forward-looking trends.  These were certainly augmented by my coming to faith and growth in small-o orthodoxy.   Orthodox Christianity teaches us that two human institutions are essential to human society in the truest sense of the word - they are not artificial creations of our own, but gifts given to us by God in Creation, and belong to the very nature of our esse, our being.   These are the family and religion.   However literally or figuratively we may understand the first two chapters of Genesis, it is clear that they teach the family to have been part of human nature from the beginning. Genesis 1:27-28 tells us God created man "male and female" and instructed him to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" whereas the second chapter provides us with the more detailed account in which God, having created Adam and declared "it is not good that the man should be alone", forms Eve out of Adam's own flesh and unites the two in the institution of marriage (2:22-24).   That religion is also part of human nature, something God gave us from Creation, is evident in the account of the Creation of the sun, moon, and stars "for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years" (the calendar's religious function is antecedent to its other functions such as civil) and the communion between God and man in the Garden prior to the Fall.   The Fall changes the nature of religion by introducing the requirement of an offering when man approaches God, but the basic need for communion with God that is the essence of man's religious nature is there from Creation, from man having been created in God's image.   By contrast, the two institutions which are fundamental - in the original sense of being the foundation upon which something is built - to civilization, the market, the place where men meet to trade goods and services, and the state, the civil authority that enforces the law and administers justice, do not go back to Creation but enter history after the Fall.  This does not make them bad things - the state is clearly stated to have authority from God Himself, both in the account of its institution after the Flood (Gen. 9:5-6) and by St. Paul in Romans 13 - but they are not essential in the way the family and religion are, a fact of which we all could use a reminder after the nauseating events of the previous year in which the state declared itself to be more essential than family, religion, and the market.   The ancient debate between royalism and republicanism reduces to a debate about whether the state should be patterned after the essential institution of the family (the role of king and queen is that of father and mother to the city or country or nation or empire as a whole) or be organized according to the principles of the artificial (although fundamental to civilization) institution of the market (a republic is a state organized along the lines of a business corporation).   Christian orthodoxy supports the royalist side because pious as the Calvinist republican's "no king but King Jesus" may sound, it is spoken with the voice of heresy, denying to Christ His Scriptural title of "King of Kings and Lord of Lords".   Perhaps the best argument for the Westminster System is not merely that it is a concrete example of the mixed constitution ideal of classical antiquity (pre-Socratic Athenians, Aristotle, Polybius), or even that it is a better guardian of freedom than republicanism as John Farthing so excellently argued, but that it incorporates the strengths and advantages of republicanism into the more natural, royal constitution.   Or as the great Stephen Leacock put it, it solves the dilemma of the old debate by "joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy".   Christian orthodoxy reminds us that Kingship, taking its pattern from the essential family, is the more important part of this union.   C. S. Lewis worded it as a question in "Myth Became Fact", but his other writings on the matter leave no doubt that he held it as a fact that "monarchy is the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship, loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour,  ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dust bowl of modern economic statecraft".

Furthermore, Christian orthodoxy complements reactionary Toryism in its account of the present state of Creation which is utterly at odds with the false doctrine of Progress.   The overarching narrative of the Christian Scriptures begins with man being placed in Paradise at the beginning of Genesis and ends with him being brought back to Paradise at the end of Revelation.   The Paradise to which man is restored, like the Paradise which he lost in the Fall, is the gracious gift of his loving Creator.   The gift of Paradise in eternity future is made possible by the gift of God in human history - the gift of His Only-Begotten Son in the Incarnation, Who became man that He might raise man back up to God, by defeating the enemies of the devil, sin, and death that brought about man's Fall and expulsion from Paradise.   In all of this - man being placed in Paradise originally, man being given a Saviour in the Son of God, man's being reconciled to God by that Saviour, and finally man being re-admitted to Paradise - God's favour - His grace - is freely given by God, out of the goodness and love of His own heart, and man's part is to receive that favour by faith, never to earn it.   Indeed, the repentance that is the reverse side to the coin of faith, consists primarily of the humble contrition of admitting we cannot earn or deserve God's favour.    The Church, the institution that Christ founded through His Apostles, which is in some ways a form of the institution of religion that goes back to Creation, in other ways is something completely new that transcends it - see G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for an excellent discussion of this - was not given to man as a ladder with which to climb his way back into Paradise, but as the instrument through which God works in her Ministry of Word and Sacrament to bring the grace given to us in Jesus Christ at one particular moment in history, to us that we might receive it by faith in the time allotted to us on earth. The doctrine of Progress in its myriad forms, is the idea that man can regain Paradise through his own efforts, whether they be technological development, moral reform, restructuring society, or whatever.   As George Grant put it, the idea of Progress is the heresy that replaces the eschatological Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man.  It is a scheme doomed to fail horribly.  As David Warren recently reminded us "Dystopia and Utopia are really the same place".

As a small-o orthodox Christian and a reactionary Tory I oppose many of the same things small-c conservatives oppose, including those that they opposed a hundred, fifty, twenty, or even as recently as five years ago, but oppose no longer.   My grounds for opposition usually differ from those of the conservative.  Often the difference is in what we would prioritize, although in some cases it amounts to opposing the same thing from different directions.   A comprehensive list would make this essay far too long so I will select three as being representative - socialism, environmentalism, and anti-racism.

Before addressing socialism it is necessary to say a few words about capitalism.   Whereas the market - as defined a few paragraphs above - is as old as civilization, capitalism is a Modern phenomenon.   Its advocates and its foes have never agreed as to what exactly it is, just the when and where of it.   Karl Marx its avowed enemy, gave it its name, which the economic liberals promptly adopted for the laissez-faire system they recommended and advocated.  Oddly enough, the Marxists and liberals are largely in agreement that they are talking about the same thing, even though their descriptions and definitions of it are almost as different as their attitudes towards it.   Conservatives are big believers in capitalism as classical liberals understand and explain it.   As a Tory I am a critic of capitalism on the grounds that it involves a basic inversion of value and makes  the market more important than family and religion.   The market is a good thing and it is fundamental to civilization but it is not more important than the family or religion.   

Conservative advocates of capitalism oppose socialism, as do I.   Conservative opposition to socialism, however, tends to be based upon pragmatic grounds - it is less efficient, it just doesn't work.   Or,  for conservatives who are not satisfied with pragmatic arguments, a higher case against socialism is made that it is contrary to freedom and amounts to universal slavery.    While I don't disagree with any of this, it all falls short of the most damning indictment of socialism that can be made.    In the Seven Deadly Sins, which  being behaviour patterns rather than single acts are actually vices, Pride is traditionally ranked as the worst, followed closely by Envy.   Whereas the lesser of the Seven Deadly Sins - Avarice, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth - are merely natural human desires that have been indulged to the point of excess - Pride and Envy were the source of Satan's rebellion against God.   While envy sometimes is used to mean mere covetous jealousy - as I used it when talking about the Reform Party above - the Envy in the Deadly Sins is not so much wanting what others have as hating and wishing the destruction of those who have what one wants.  Whereas the lesser and human vice of Avarice or Greed is frequently linked to capitalism, the most that can really be said in this regards is that capitalism provides an environment in which Greed can flourish.   By contrast, Envy, the greater and Satanic vice, is the very essence of socialism - the hatred of the Haves for being Haves.   The Satanic nature of socialism is doubled in that just as the devil disguises himself as an angel of light (II Cor. 11:14) so the Envy of socialism hides its true face behind the mask of Charity - Christian love - the highest of the three theological virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity).    It pretends to be about helping the Have Nots, but assisting them would never satisfy it if the Haves were not torn down in the process.   Whereas capitalism must be criticized, socialism, which is thoroughly Satanic, must be opposed..   All of this pertains, of course, to socialism as the socialists themselves beginning with Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Marx have understood it, the repudiation of private property and not what such well-meaning Christian royalists as F. D. Maurice, Eugene Forsey, and George Grant have romanticized it to be out of their well-founded criticism of capitalism.

Conservatism is less united in its opposition to environmentalism than it is in its opposition to socialism.   Conservative views range from a full embrace of environmentalism (rare) to moderate acceptance tempered with the recognition of the need to balance other concerns to opposition on the grounds that the movement has been taken over by its lunatic fringe.   Those who hold a more negative view of it generally do so because they perceive it to be a threat to capitalism and the livelihoods of those who depend upon capitalism for their employment.   Environmentalism is this, but perhaps more importantly, it is a movement the agenda of which, if allowed to succeed, would accomplish the exact opposite of the good it claims as its end.  Environmentalism purports to be a movement advocating for things that no sane person could possibly oppose - clean air, clean water, the conservation of limited resources, the preservation of beautiful surroundings and threatened forms of plant and animal life.   It is not entirely wrong in perceiving a threat to these things in capitalism  with its technological industrialism but it goes completely off by embracing the socialist attack on private ownership as the solution.   Aristotle observed two and a half millennia ago that private ownership is generally more conducive to the conservation of resources and the upkeep of the aesthetical quality of places than public ownership and the history of the last century, in which the Soviet Union and Red China by implementing a socialism that included all of the polluting industrialism of capitalism without the safeguards of private ownership produced a level of ecological devastation no capitalist country ever came close to matching, a fact that pro-socialist environmentalist Ronald Wright conveniently omitted from his Massey Lectures on A Short History of Progress.   When we look more closely at environmentalism's agenda, we find that they envision a future in which the human population has been radically reduced, what remains of it has all been herded into big cities, where they work and socialize from home in an entirely artificial, virtual, environment.   The materialization of such a vision would completely defeat the purpose of preserving clean air, clean water, and beautiful surroundings.    Sane people want these things not as part of a "nature" untouched by man from which we are forever locked away in an artificial environment resembling the Matrix but as the actual environment in which they live their lives.    Environmentalism is essentially a theological error - or rather a curious combination of every different sort of theological and philosophical error.   It sees its cause as a crusade to save the world from an impending Apocalypse, which is a form of the Millenarian heresy.   It is also a form of idolatry which makes the earth and nature into objects of worship, sometimes with the mistaken notion that it is reviving a form of pre-Christian paganism.   It makes what it thinks is science into an object of faith, contradicting the essential nature of true science.   It represents a complete failure to understand that fighting pollution and preserving the environment is primarily a matter of aesthetics, the pursuit of beauty, and that the ideal of a completely wild nature untouched by man is itself an invention of the human mind and not true natural beauty.   Had it understood these things it would not be trying to imprison mankind in a thoroughly ugly artificial environment for the sake of protecting what it wrongly considers to be nature from what it foolishly considers to be a pollutant, carbon dioxide, the food that sustains all plant life.   Ironically, in its attempt to seal man away in this prison, its destination converges with that of the very technological, industrialism that has played the villain in its narrative from the beginning.   It is as if, to take an illustration from J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, the Ents, in the name of protecting the forests from Saruman, were to drive the hobbits from the Shire and lock them away in the dungeons of Isengard. 

If conservatives are less unified in their opposition to environmentalism than in their opposition to socialism, they have more or less capitulated completely to anti-racism.   The braver among them may decry the methods of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, but few would dare to criticize the movement itself in terms of its goals and ideals, except, perhaps, to say that the movement has failed to live up to them.   I condemn anti-racism totally and completely for being the very thing it claims to oppose.   Racism is understood by most people to mean either the belief in the superiority of one's own race or the contempt or hatred of other races or both.   The liberals of sixty years ago considered racism to be  evil because it violated one of their basic ideals, human equality.   This ideal is a false ideal, a substitute, and a poor substitute at that, for what the ancients called justice,    Nevertheless, liberals of that era at least conceived of the evil of racism as lying in the act and attitude itself, and not in the race of the perpetrator - or accused perpetrator.   Today's anti-racists, whose hatred of what they call racism is far more intense than that of the liberals of decades ago, consider racism to be something which all people of white skin and European descent are guilty, whether they are conscious of it or not, and which only white people are guilty of.   A white person who says something that most people would consider innocuous is said by the anti-racists to have committed a "microaggression" if somebody of another race takes offence at it, regardless of how irrational that taking offense may be, whereas explicit expressions of hatred towards white people, including calls for violence and even genocide, are not considered to be racist by anti-racists despite fitting to a tee what ordinary people consider that term to mean.  Last year we saw the anti-racist movement demand that all white people show their full support for anti-racism, confess to their part in "racism"  whether they were conscious of any such thing in the normal sense of the word or not, and make a gesture of submission to the "people of colour" they have supposedly wronged, as the movement erupted into orgies of violence and vandalism in its demands that white men of the past be erased from history in Cultural Maoist "Year Zero" fashion.   All of this, of course, constitutes racism - racism directed towards white people - and not just the relatively mild "we don't want your kind in our club" type racism, but the  violent racial hatred that is usually associated with the Third Reich.   That regime had made idols out of race and nation, idols that proved to be devils which like the Chemosh and Moloch of ancient times demanded human sacrifice.   Liberalism, recoiling in repugnance against this, tore down the idols of race and nation and replaced them with the idol of equality.   That idol has now proven itself to be just as  much a devil as the others and it is now demanding its human tribute.   The orthodox Christian answer to racism, whether of the National Socialist variety or the kind that wears the mask of opposition to itself, is to call all men to turn from idols - race, nation, equality, whatever - to serve the True and Living God, of Whom, as St. Paul told the philosophers of Mars Hill in calling them from idolatry, we are all offspring.

Happy New Year

God save the Queen!