Religion and Politics

 Worship on Earth as it is Where?

 

The Church is the society of faith that Jesus Christ founded through His Apostles on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost, the successor to Succoth the Jewish Pentecost) when in accordance with His promise given on the eve of the events through which He established the New Covenant that would become the basis of that society, the Father sent down the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, uniting them into one body, with Christ as the head.    Into this one organic body, was joined the Old Testament Church, the Congregation of the Lord within national Israel, whose faith looked forward to the coming of Jesus Christ and who were taken by Him, from Hades, the Kingdom of Death, in His Triumphant descent there after His Crucifixion, and brought by Him into Heaven when He ascended back there after His Resurrection.   The Church does many things when she meets as a community but first and foremost among them she worships her God.   In this, the Church on earth, or the Church Militant as she is called, unites with the Church in Heaven, also known as the Church Triumphant. 

Throughout her history those who have led, organized, and structured her corporate worship have been guided by the principle that our worship on Earth should resemble than in Heaven.   It is a Scriptural principle.   The Book of Hebrews discusses at length how the elaborate religious system given to national Israel in the Mosaic Covenant was patterned on Heavenly worship, the Earthly Tabernacle (the tent that was the antecedent of the Temple in the days when Israel was wandering in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land), for example, was patterned on the Heavenly Tabernacle.   Indeed, Hebrews uses language strongly suggestive of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the relationship between the Earthly Tabernacle and the Heavenly Tabernacle.   Since Hebrews also uses this kind of language to describe the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New the only reasonable conclusion is that if the worship of the Old Testament Church was to be patterned after worship in Heaven, how much more ought the worship of the New Testament Church to be patterned after the same.   Now the Bible gives us a few glimpses of worship in Heaven.   These are generally found in visions in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature.   The sixth chapter of Isaiah is the classic Old Testament example.   The vision of St. John in the fourth and fifth chapters of Revelation is the classic New Testament example.   In these chapters we find a lot of praying, a lot of singing, a lot of incense, an altar and a lot of kneeling.   The Scriptural depiction of worship, in other words, is quite “High Church”.   Indeed, since the book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus, in His role of High Priest, entered the Heavenly Holy of Holies with His blood, which unlike that of the Old Testament bulls and goats effectively purges of sin and the New Testament elsewhere tells us that Jesus on the eve of His Crucifixion commissioned the Lord’s Supper to be celebrated in His Church until His Second Coming, which was practiced daily in the first Church in Jerusalem and which is Sacramentally united with Jesus’ offering of Himself, the way the pre-Reformation Churches – not just the Roman, but the Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Assyrian and other ancient Churches as well – made this the central focus of their corporate worship is also very Scriptural.   

In the Reformation, Rome’s abuses with regards to the Sacrament and her neglect of the preaching ministry, led many of the Reformers to de-emphasize the Sacrament and make the sermon the central focus of their corporate worship.   The more extreme wing of the Reformation confused the New Testament ideas of a preaching ministry in the Church, which is a didactic ministry, teaching the faithful, with that of evangelistic preaching, which is the Church’s external ministry of proclaiming the Gospel to the world, and worse, developed unhealthy ideas about the preaching ministry, such as that the Word is inert and lifeless unless it is explained in a sermon, which are susceptible to the same charges of idolatry that the Reformers themselves made against Rome’s late Medieval views of the Sacrament.   More to my point, however, the glimpses the Scriptures provide us of worship in Heaven do not mention a Heavenly pulpit, and, indeed, the closest thing to a sermon in Heaven I can think of in the Bible, is the reference to the everlasting Gospel in Revelation 14:6.  The same verse, however, specifies that while the angel carrying it is flying in the midst of Heaven, it is to be preached “unto them that dwell on the earth”.   Curiously, the Bible does make mention of a sermon that was preached to an otherworldly congregation.   St. Peter, in the nineteenth verse of the third chapter of his first Catholic Epistle, talks about how Jesus “went and preached unto the spirits in prison”.   There is, of course, a lot of debate about what St. Peter meant by this.   Did he mean that Jesus preached the liberty He had just purchased them to the Old Testament saints when He descended into Hades?   Or that He preached to those who would be left in the Kingdom of Death when He took His saints with Him to Heaven?   If the latter, as the verses following might suggest, to what end?   We cannot answer these questions dogmatically, interesting though the long-standing discussion of them be.   My point, with regards to sermon-centric worship, is best expressed in another question.   Whoever thought that worship on Earth as it is in Hell was a good idea?

 

The State?

 

I prefer the term Tory to the term conservative as a description of my political views, even if that always requires an explanation that I do not mean “big-C party Conservative” by the term, but Tory as Dr. Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, a pre-Burke conservative if you will.   Today, the word conservative in its small-c sense, is mostly understood in its American sense, which is basically the older, nineteenth-century kind of liberal.   I don’t disassociate myself from this out of a preference for the newer, twentieth and twenty-first century types of liberalism over the older.   Quite the contrary, the older type of liberalism is far to be preferred over the newer.   I disassociate myself from it because the older type of conservatism, the British Toryism in which Canada’s original conservatism has its roots, is to be preferred over either type of liberalism.   

Some explain the difference between a Tory and an American type conservative by saying that the Tory has a high view of the state, the American conservative a low view of the state.   While this is not entirely wrong – Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary mentioned earlier defines a Tory as “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a whig” – it can be very misleading, because “the state” has several different connotations.   

The basic error of liberalism – classical liberalism – pertains to human freedom.   Classical liberalism was the theory that man’s natural condition is to be an individual, autonomous with no social connections to others, that this natural condition is what it means to be free, that society and the state were organized by individuals on a voluntary contractual basis in order to mutually protect their individual freedom, and that when society and the state fail to do this individuals have the right and responsibility to replace them with ones that do.   Liberalism was wrong about each and every one of these points, failing to see that man’s natural is social not individual – an individual outside of society is not a human being in his natural condition – that society and the state are extensions of the family, the basic natural social unit, rather than extensions of the marketplace based on the model of a commercial enterprise, and that attempts to replace old states and societies with new ones, almost always result in tyranny rather than greater freedom.   

Nor did the liberals understand how their view of things depersonalizes people.   “The individual” is not Bob or Joe or Mary or Sam or Sally or Anne or Herschel or Marcus or George or Bill or Leroy or Susie, each a person on his own earthly pilgrimage, distinct but not disconnected from others, but a faceless, nameless, carbon copy of everyone else, identifiable only by the rights and freedoms that he shares equally with each other individual, in other words, a number.   When our primary term for speaking about government is the abstract notion of “the state” this tends to depersonalize government in the same way liberal autonomous individualism depersonalizes people.   In twentieth century liberalism, which envisioned a larger role for government than the earlier classical liberalism, and in that offshoot of liberalism that has gone by the name “the Left” or “progressivism”, “the state” is very impersonal, a faceless bureaucracy which views those it governs as numbers rather than people, a collective but a collective of autonomous individuals rather than an organic society/community.   I would say that the traditional Tory view of “the state” in this sense of the word is even lower than that of an American style, classical liberal, neoconservative.   

What the Tory does have a high view of is government in the sense of traditional, time-proven, concrete governing institutions, particularly the monarchy and Parliament.   Note that Dr. Johnson spoke not of “One who adheres to the state” but “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state”.   What monarchy and Parliament, which complement each other, have in common, is that they are both very personal ways of thinking about government.   The king reigns as father/patriarch over his kingdom(s), an extension of his family, as his governing office is an extension of the family as the model of society and state.   Parliament is the where the representatives of the governed meet to have their say in the laws under which they live and how their taxes are spent.   The conversation between these two personal governing institutions has contributed greatly to the most worthy accomplishments of our civilization, and both have long proven their worth, so it is of these that I prefer to say that I as a Tory have a high view, rather than the impersonal state.   I have a higher view of the monarchy than of Parliament, and not merely because those who currently occupy the seats of Parliament leave much to be desired, but for the very Tory reason that if the Church should be worshipping on Earth as in Heaven, government ought to be modelled after the Heavenly pattern as well.   God is the King of Kings, and governs the universe without the aid of elected representatives.    Monarchy is the essential form of government.   Parliament accommodates the model to our human condition.    

 

Capitalism or Socialism?

 

There is a popular notion that unless one has no opinion on economics at all one must be either a capitalist or a socialist.   Those who have studied economic theory will point out that that this is a little like the dilemma posed in the question “Did you walk to work or take a bagged lunch?” – a capitalist, in the terms of economic theory, is someone who owns and lives off of capital, whereas a socialist is someone who believes in the idea of socialism.   Since, however, for most people, the term capitalist now means “someone who believes in capitalism” we will move on.   A more nuanced version of the popular nation postulates a spectrum with capitalism, in the sense of pure laissez-faire with no government involvement in the market whatsoever as the right pole, and pure socialism, where the government not only controls but owns everything, as the left pole, with most people falling somewhere between and being identified as capitalists or socialists depending upon the pole to which they are the closest.   The terms “left” and “right” in popular North American usage have been strongly shaped by this concept even though their original usage in Europe was quite different – the “left” were the supporters of the French Revolution, which, although it was the template of all subsequent Communist revolutions, was not a socialist undertaking per se, and the “right” were the Roman Catholic royalists, the continental equivalent of the English Tories.   To complicate matters there is the expression “far right” which is usually used to suggest the idea of Nazism, which makes no sense with either the old continental European or the new North American usage, although the less commonly used “far left” for Communists makes sense with both.   

The conservatives who think civilization began with the dawn of Modern liberalism and have little interest in conserving anything other than classical liberalism tend to accept this idea of a socialist-capitalist, left-right, economic spectrum and to identify as capitalists.   This makes sense because it is liberalism they are trying to conserve and the Adam Smith-David Ricardo-Frédéric Bastiat theory of laissez-faire that we commonly identify as capitalism is more properly called economic liberalism.   

With us Tories it is a bit more complicated and this has led, in my country, the Dominion of Canada, to the idea held by some that classical conservatives or Tories, unlike American neoconservatives, are closer to socialism than to capitalism.     To come to this conclusion, however, one must accept the American notion of a socialist-capitalist economic spectrum and the idea contained within it that any move away from laissez-faire is a move in the direction of socialism.   That idea is nonsense and does tremendous violence to the historical meaning of the word socialism.   Historically, several different socialist movements, popped up at about the same time.   What they all had in common was a) the idea that the private ownership of property, meaning capital, any form of wealth that generates an income for its owner by producing something that can be sold in the market is the source of all social evils because it divides society into classes, some of which own property, others of which must sell their labour to the propertied classes in order to make a living, and b) the idea that the remedy is some sort of collective ownership of property.   In the Marxist version of socialism, this collective ownership was conceived of as by the state, after it had been seized in violent revolution by the proletariat (factory workers).   In other versions of socialism, such as that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the state was viewed as unnecessary – Proudhon, as well as being a socialist, was the first anarchist - and collective ownership was conceived of more in terms of workers’ co-operatives.  Socialism, in both its diagnosis of the cause of social ills and in its proposed remedy, is fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity, which tells us that sin, the condition of the human heart as the result of the Fall of Man is the cause of social ills, and that the only remedy for sin is the grace of God, obtained for mankind by Jesus Christ through His Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and brought to mankind by His Church in its two-fold Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament.   From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, socialism, therefore, is an attempt to bypass the Cross and to regain Paradise through human political and social endeavours.   Even worse than that it is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, made to wear the mask of Charity, the highest of the Theological Virtues, and institutionalized.   It is therefore utterly condemned by orthodox Christianity and Toryism, the political expression of orthodox Christianity, in its rejection of laissez-faire liberalism does not step in the direction of socialism.  Even when Toryism supports state social programs for the relief of poverty, unemployment, and the like, as it did under Disraeli in the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and as it historically did in Canada, it was not for socialist reasons, not because it believed that inequality was the cause of all social ills and wealth redistribution society’s panacea, but for counter-socialism reasons, because it did not want poverty, unemployment, etc. to because the opportunity for recruitment to the cause of socialism which it correctly saw as a destructive force that unchained leads to greater misery, especially for those whom it claims to want to help.   

The main way in which Toryism has historically envisioned a larger economic role for government than laissez-faire liberalism has been that the Tory recognizes the genuine economic interests of the entire realm, such as the need for domestic production of essential goods so as to not be dependent upon external supplies that may be cut off in an emergency, along with the economic interests of local communities, families, and individuals.   Adam Smith argued that individuals are the most competent people to look out for their own economic interests rather than governments, especially distant ones, and Toryism doesn’t dispute this as a general principle – obviously there are exceptions.   Rather it agrees with this principle and adds that families are the most competent at looking out for their interests as families, and communities for their interests at communities – this is what the idea of subsidiarity, rooted in Christian social theory, is all about.   Toryism doesn’t accept Smith’s claim that individuals looking out for their own interests will automatically result in these other interests taking care of themselves, much less those of the entire realm.   The government, although incompetent at making economic decisions for individuals qua individuals, or families qua families, communities qua communities, for that matter,  is generally as an institution, the best suited for making economic decisions for the realm.   

This is compromised, of course, if the person selected to lead His Majesty’s government as Prime Minister is an incompetent dolt, imbecile, and moron.    The government of Sir John A. Macdonald, protecting fledgling Canadian industries with tariffs while investing heavily in the production of the railroad that would facilitate east-west commerce, uniting Canada and preventing her from being swallowed up piecemeal by her neighbor to the south is an example of government making the best sort of economic decisions for the realm.   Unfortunately, His Majesty’s government is currently led by the classic example of the other kind of Prime Minister.

 

Which Branch of the Modern Tree?

 

Not so long ago, when the fashionable, progressive, forward-thinking, and up-to-date began to tell us that boys or men who thought they were girls or women and girls or women who thought they were boys or men should be treated as if they were what they thought and said they were instead of what they actually were in reality, rather than indulge this nonsense we ought instead to have treated those making this absurd suggestion the way we had hitherto treated those who thought they were something other than what they were, that is to say, called those fellows in the white uniforms with the butterfly nets to come and take them away that they might have a nice long rest in a place where they would be no harm to themselves or others.   Instead we left them among the general populace where they proceeded to wreak maximum harm.   

It had seemed, at one time, that this madness had peaked when people started introducing themselves by their “preferred pronouns” rather than their names but, as is usual when one makes the mistake of thinking things can’t get any worse, they did.    The past few years have seen a major backlash finally starting to take shape against the aggressive promotion of this gender craziness in the schools, and no, I don’t mean the post-secondary institutions that have long been home to every wacky fad under the sun, I am talking about elementary schools.   It seems that teachers, with the backing of school board administrators, have taken to treating every instance in which a boy says that he is a girl, or a girl says that she is a boy, as a serious case of gender dysphoria rather than the passing phase it would otherwise be in most cases and responded with “gender affirmation” which is a euphemism for indulging and encouraging gender confusion – and forcing everyone else in the classroom to go along with it.   To top it off, they have been keeping all of this secret from the parents.    

The state of California in the United States has just taken this to the next level, as a bill has passed in its legislative assembly that would essentially make “gender affirmation” a requirement for parents to retain custody of their children.    It is worth bringing up at this point that there is a very similar and closely related euphemism to “gender affirmation” and that is “gender affirming care”, which refers to using hormones and surgery to make someone who thinks they are of the other sex physically resemble that sex.   The same lunatics that I have been talking about, think it appropriate to offer this “care” to prepubescent children.   In every single instance where this is done – every single instance – it is a case of child abuse.  Period!   

It is this aggressive war on the sexual innocence of childhood and the rights and authority of parents that has sparked the backlash on the part of parents who have had enough and are fighting back.   Some jurisdictions, like the state of Florida in the United States, and the provinces of New Brunswick and Saskatchewan here in Canada, have responded by requiring schools to notify parents when this sort of thing is going on.  The government in my own province of Manitoba has promised to do this if they are re-elected next month.    That, I would say, is the very least they ought to do.   I think that teachers that twist the minds of young kids in this way ought to be severely punished – a case can be made for bringing back the stocks and/or public flogging to do this.   

The progressives, including both Captain Airhead, Prime Minister of Canada, and J. Brandon Magoo, President of the United States, have denounced the policy of informing parents as if it were placing kids in mortal danger.   Progressive spin-doctors have even coined a new expression “forced outing” with which to vilify the sensible idea that teachers should not be allowed to continue to get away with this ultra-creepy business of sexualizing little kids and encouraging them to keep it a secret from their parents.   

Those whose conservatism seeks primarily or solely to conserve the older stage of the Modern liberal tradition tend to view this sort of progressive cultural extremism as a form of Marxism or Communism.   There is truth in this perspective in that sort of thinking among progressives in academe that leads them to embrace such nonsense can be traced back to academic Marxism’s post-World War I reinvention of itself along cultural rather than economic lines, albeit through the detour of a few prominent post-World War II thinkers who were heirs of Marx only in the sense of following in his footsteps as intellectual revolutionaries rather than that of having derived their ideas from his in any substantial way.   The phenomenon itself – the idea that one has the right to self-identify as a “gender” other than one’s biological sex, to expect or even demand that others acknowledge this self-identification and affirm it to be true, and even to force reality itself in the form of one’s biological sex to bend to this self-identification – does not come from Marx, and those countries that had the misfortune of having been taken over by regimes dedicated to his evil ideas seem to have been partly compensated for this by being inoculated against this sort of thing.   This is the autonomous individual of Locke, Mill, and the other classical liberals taken to the nth degree and it is the countries where liberalism has had the most influence that have proven the most vulnerable to this gender insanity.

The Convergence of Capitalism and Communism

In the eighteenth century, the harnessing of steam power, the rapid invention of labour-saving tools, and other related factors, came together in what historians call the Industrial Revolution, to give birth to the system of mechanized production in the modern factory. In the following century, this system and its theoretical advocacy in the writings of liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, would both be dubbed capitalism by their critics. Those critics, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen and Karl Marx, argued that capitalism led to an increasing and unjust gap between the richest and the poorest. They blamed this on the private ownership of the factories and mines and other means of industrial production and proposed that this be replaced with some form of communal ownership. Their models for communal ownership vastly differed from one another, but the general proposal of replacing private with public ownership in a modern, industrialized, economy was given the name socialism. When overtly allied with the forces of revolutionary destruction that had been attacking the Crowns and Churches of Christendom since the Puritan rebellion of the 1640s, as was the case with Marxism, it was called communism.

Many people have the idea that capitalism and communism are polar opposites and the mortal foes of each other. This was the prevailing view during the Cold War in which both the United States and the Soviet Union pointed to their belief that their own system was the best as a motivating factor in the conflict. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism. So was the fact that the remaining large communist power, Red China, avoided a similar collapse and even thrived in the post-Cold War era, by incorporating elements of the market economy. Others, however, saw all of this in a different light. If China had incorporated elements of capitalism, most of the proposals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had made in The Communist Manifesto for moving a capitalist society towards communism had long ago been adopted by the Western powers, including the United States. Dr. Tomislav Sunic summed up the alternative interpretation of the end of the Cold War when he wrote “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” (Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, 2007, p. 34)

There were those who were prescient enough to see that capitalism and communism were heading towards a convergence rather than a conflict even before the Cold War began. In 1941, for example, James Burnham, who had resigned the previous year from the Trostkyite Socialist Workers Party, published a book entitled The Managerial Revolution, in which he maintained that capitalism was not a sustainable, permanent condition, nor was it likely to be replaced by socialism proper, but that it was undergoing a social revolution that would transform it into a managerial society, that is, a society governed by a new class of technocratic “managers.” Burnham further maintained that the same thing was going on around the world. The socialist countries were moving in the same direction as the capitalist countries. The new managerial class would include both corporate executives and state bureaucrats, with the distinction between the two becoming blurry even in nominally capitalist countries. Their cohesion as a class and their power would both be derived from their possession of the technical knowledge pertinent to the management of large corporate entities. George Orwell, who wrote a well-known critique of Burnham’s theory in 1945, also incorporated large elements of it into his dystopic novel 1984. The totalitarian system in the novel was widely interpreted as a depiction of the kind of society that existed in the Soviet Union at the time Orwell was writing, and to an extent this is true, although that better describes Animal Farm. In 1984 the totalitarian society is located in the then future of what was the capitalist world at the time of Orwell’s writing. It was one of three, more-or-less identical, superstates, governed by totalitarian managers. This was the future Burnham predicted, depicted in its most negative light.

Even before Burnham, however, Hilaire Belloc had predicted the convergence of capitalism and what he called collectivism, which was socialism or communism. Belloc, the son of a French father and an English mother, was a well-known writer of poetry, biography, history and social criticism in the first half of the twentieth century. Today he is most often remembered for his collaboration with G. K. Chesterton. Both men were devout, traditionalist, Roman Catholics, Belloc by upbringing and Chesterton by conversion, and together they promoted an alternative to capitalism that was called distributism. The gist of it was that capital property – the means of production – should be privately owned as in capitalism, but spread out among many private owners rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. Like their social criticism in general, the idea drew heavily from the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum which spoke out for the rights of the working class, while attacking socialism and defending private property.

The most important book Belloc wrote articulating distributism was The Servile State, which was first published in 1912. In this book, he describes capitalism as an unsustainable system that had overthrown the more stable order of Medieval, feudal, Christendom and which was evolving, not into its collectivist rival, but into “the servile state.” The “servile state” would be a new order that would include aspects of both capitalism and collectivism, although in reality it would essentially be a new form of slavery. It would be a system in which the majority of the population would be proletarian wage slaves, providing the labour for the factories of the capitalists when needed, and maintained by the state when not. The only alternative to this future, Belloc argued, was distributism, because collectivism would merely lead to the same future by an alternate path.

Belloc’s book enjoyed a resurgence in popularity among post-World War II conservatives who saw in it a prediction of the welfare state that had been put in place to combat the Depression just prior to the war. This was not a wrong interpretation of the book, since many of the specifics Belloc gave of what he expected the servile state to look like do indeed match up with the programs of the welfare state. It might have been premature to declare the predictions of the book to be fulfilled already back then, however, when we consider what we are facing in 2020. Remember that Belloc saw the “servile state” as the destination of both capitalism and collectivism (socialism/communism) and as a form of societal servitude similar to slavery which sounds very much like what we call “totalitarianism” today.

Earlier this year, almost every government in the world, imposed measures upon their populations which mimicked the conditions that had existed in the Soviet Union when it was at its worst. They shut down the Churches, they closed all businesses that they deemed to be “non-essential”, forbade people to meet in groups larger than ten, five, or even in some jurisdictions, two, and imposed all sorts of other restrictions as well. They justified all of this by saying that it was necessary to fight the spread of a new virus and the harsh respiratory disease that it can produce. This justification was always nonsense. This writer was among those who recognized this right from the beginning. We knew all along that this virus is asymptomatic among a large number of those who contract it, that most of those who do experience symptoms experience mild to moderate flu like symptoms and require no hospitalization, and that the harsh form of pneumonia that it can produce is fatal mostly among people who are both very old and have multiple complicating health problems. What the situation called for, was a special effort to protect those most at risk, not an insanely draconian effort to protect everyone by imposing a universal quarantine. The governments that went to that extreme, did so on the recommendations of the World Health Organization that was itself passing on recommendations coming from the last communist superpower, which is the country where the pandemic originated, Red China. Based on recommendations that came ultimately from Red China, we recreated the totalitarian conditions of the Soviet Union. We began policing people more strictly over absurd statutes about how far apart they must be than over actual, mala in se, crimes. We treated our basic freedoms of assembly, association and religion as if they meant nothing in the face of disease and were merely privileges that belong to the state to bestow and withhold as it sees best.

What did the capitalist corporations do while all this was going on?

They jumped on board the totalitarian train, that’s what they did. Instead of telling the governments to shove their restrictions up their backsides and sending their high-payed corporate lawyers to challenge the constitutionality of these regulations in court, they complied with every rule and restriction, knowing that these would harm small businesses far more than it would them, and became active propagandists for the “new normal.” They encouraged the transition to a cashless market, long the favourite of totalitarians of every stripe. They stuck messages telling us to “stay home” on billboards and in their commercials. Companies whose business pertains to the flow of information, such as corporate media and the big tech companies, suppressed dissent to the lockdown and the spread of information that would support that dissent.
The capitalists supported the imposition of communism!

We are now in the midst of the second wave of communism, this year, and true to form, the second wave is proving to be worse than the first. There was almost universal outrage over what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. The anti-white, anti-cop, hate group, Black Lives Matter and the blackshirt thugs of Antifa took advantage of that fact to turn the incident into the casus belli for a race war. It began with the usual race riots of the sort that have been going on in the United States since the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A protest in Minneapolis turned into a spree of vandalism, arson, looting, and violence, and the same sort of thing began happening in other cities around the United States, and then spread into Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Then they kicked it up a notch. Politicians, civil servants, police officers, and every white person in sight, were expected to genuflect before the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Everybody in the public spotlight, especially those in offices of civil authority, in was expected to acknowledge that their country was guilty, both in the past and now, of “systemic racism” against blacks. “Systemic racism” is a concept of Critical Race Theory, itself an expression of Cultural Marxism. There was the demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: “Attacks on the police is an old communist tactic to eliminate law enforcement. The Bolsheviks successfully unleashed widespread attacks on the police leading up to the October Revolution.”


Then came the vandalism of statues and monuments – some of individuals who had owned slaves in the past, others of people who just happened to be prominent white historical figures, and even some ridiculously absurd cases people like Mahatma Gandhi – and the demand that all such monuments be removed and that streets and buildings named after these people be renamed. This attempt at erasing history, brings to mind the French Revolution, which similarly attempted to restart history afresh with “Year One.” The French Revolution, which itself took as its model Cromwell’s earlier rebellion in England, became the model for all subsequent communist revolutions. In Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over and declared it to be “Year Zero.” Read the history of the French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge while you are still able to do so. The former led to the “Reign of Terror” and the latter to the “Killing Fields.” This is not a pattern any sane group wishes to imitate.

Where are the corporate capitalists in this?

Again we find them, and again, especially the corporate media and the big tech companies, siding with the anti-white, race warriors. The corporate media has been telling everybody that the riots are just “peaceful protests” and that Black Lives Matter are just activists. They are also, of course, the ones who deliberately created the entire false narrative about institutional racism in the police force through their dishonest handling of the facts. Big tech has been suppressing dissent to this narrative, even more than it suppressed dissent to the COVID-19 narrative.

Capitalism and communism have converged into one, with the traits of the latter being the dominant ones.

Hilaire Belloc would not have been surprised.

Ethics and Economics

I seldom write on economic themes. There is a reason for this. Most political opinion writers overrate the importance of economics. This includes virtually all mainstream “conservative” writers. The economics of these “conservative” writers are, of course, liberal economics, because the field of political economy is almost entirely a debate between liberals on the one hand, who hold in one version or another, to the ideas of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Frederic Bastiat, and the various schools of socialism on the other, of which the discredited Marxism, is both the most popular and the least interesting. There is no such thing as economic conservatism – fiscal conservatism is not an economic theory but a budget policy. The closest thing to an economic conservatism is economic nationalism, the economic theory that the Republican Party in the United States inherited from the Federalists through the Whigs and adhered to until the late twentieth century and which the Conservative Party in Canada adopted under Sir John A. MacDonald and abandoned about the same time as the Republicans, who have since rediscovered it under Trump. Even economic nationalism is a form of economic liberalism, however, being essentially Adam Smith’s theory modified by men like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Friedrich List to favour industrial protectionism rather than free trade.

I usually describe my views as being Tory rather than conservative. While Tory is still in use as a nickname for the Conservative Parties of the United Kingdom and the Dominion of Canada, I use it to denote the ideas associated with the predecessor of the Conservative Party. The original Tories were the parliamentary supporters of royal monarchy and of the established, orthodox, Church of England when these things came under attack by the Calvinist Puritans in the seventeenth century. They were the British equivalent of the original political “right wing”, i.e., those who championed the monarchy and Roman Catholic Church in France during the period of the French Revolution. The Tories were reorganized into the Conservative Party by Sir Robert Peel in 1834. Twelve years later, with the support of the Whigs (Liberals) and Radicals (Leftists), Peel passed a bill repealing the Corn Laws. In doing so he abandoned the agricultural protectionism that had been the primary element in Tory economic policy and embraced the free trade doctrine of liberalism. This demonstrates the difference between a Tory and a conservative. A Tory stands for the traditions and institutions that liberalism attacks, a conservative is someone whom liberalism has put in the place of the old Tories to maintain the appearance of having an opposition.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the theory of political economy was still in its infancy and it was the opponents of the Tories and the continental Right who developed both the theory of economic liberalism and socialism. This shows that while the Tories had economic policies, such as the aforementioned agricultural protectionism, they were less interested in economics as a theory than their opponents, which in turn demonstrates that they did not regard it as being as important as their opponents did. This in itself is an important Tory economic insight – that economics is a lesser rather than a greater matter – and it is for the sake of this insight, that I try to devote to economics only such a fraction of my writing as is in inverse proportion to that which other opinion writers spend on it.

The ancients knew how and where economics fit into the larger scheme of things. To them, what we call economics was a part of politics, in the sense of the science or theory of statecraft. Politics in turn, was a subdivision of ethics, the science or theory of the rights and wrongs of human behaviour. (1) Ethics was primary, politics secondary, and economics tertiary. The fundamental error of modern economics, liberal and socialist alike, is to make economics primary, and to make ethics and politics subservient to economics. This produces a distorted view of human nature – one that has been dubbed the Homo oeconomicus model – and perverts ethics and politics, as well as economics.

I would not waste words addressing socialism were it not for the fact that I keep encountering people who seem incapable of distinguishing between socialism and the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ. I will make the distinction simple. Think of someone saying to others “all my possessions, are yours.” Then think of a group of people saying to someone “all of your possessions, are ours.” The former is an expression of the attitude of sharing which Christianity encourages us to practice. The latter is socialism. The former is one aspect of the highest Christian virtue, Charity. (2) The latter violates both the eighth and the tenth commandments (3), and is in essence Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins. (4). Envy is not merely jealousy, in the sense of wanting what is another’s, but goes much further and involves hating others for what they have and wishing to tear them down and destroy them. Socialism is worse than mere Envy, however, for it is Envy, attempting to disguise itself as Charity. It is thoroughly anti-Christian, and utterly repugnant in every way. About the only other thing worth saying about it, is that every other militant left-wing movement today – feminism, the anti-white racism that wears the mask of anti-racism, the alphabet soup movement – are simply versions of socialism in which the hated “haves” are re-defined in such non-economic terms as sex, race, and sexual identity/orientation, and everything that I have said about socialism in this paragraph, also applies to these in spades. See the thirty-eighth of the Anglican Articles of Religion for the above distinction between Christianity and socialism worded another way.

In our day and age, capitalism has clearly won the war with socialism that was such an important part of the last century. While there are many factors that brought this about, the main reason is that something that holds out the promise of becoming rich to everyone, will appeal to a lot more people that something that only promises to bring down the rich. It has frequently been observed that the “capitalism” that has triumphed includes a great deal of “socialism”, i.e., progressive income taxation, the welfare state, etc. in it. What is less often noted is that this has been true of capitalism from the very beginning.

Max Weber, the German sociologist, in his 1905 book The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, famously argued that capitalism was the product of Calvinist ethics. Objections have been made to this thesis, but their validity depends entirely upon the definition of capitalism as being the theoretical system of economic liberalism put into practice. If this definition is valid, then the fact that market based economies pre-dated the Reformation and that certain late Medieval thinkers anticipated the ideas of economic liberalism, would invalidate Weber’s thesis. History, however, does not support the definition. The term capitalism, has historically been applied to the industrial system, characterized by factories and mass-production. This system was not created by the theory of economic liberalism. Rather, it was the other way around. Economic liberalism, although some of its concepts had been anticipated by the aforementioned antecedents, was drawn up in the eighteenth century, as a theoretical justification of this system which the Industrial Revolution, building upon social, economic, and political changes of the preceeding two centuries, had already started to build. The system was given its name by Marxism, the rival theory formulated in the nineteenth century as a rationale for revolution which aimed at replacing capitalism with socialism. The ideas that contributed the most to the actual creation of capitalism, were those of the Puritans, who were the intellectual ancestors of both the liberals and the socialists.

Puritanism began in the reign of Elizabeth I in the late sixteenth century. Protestants, who had fled to Switzerland to escape persecution during the reign of Mary, returned, radicalized by the entire experience, and determined that the Church of England needed to be remade in the image of the Geneva model. This coincided in history with a period of rapidly increasing international trade, and Puritanism was most popular among the merchants and traders of the English middle classes, who were becoming rich through the new growth in commerce. It also gained the support of a younger faction of the aristocracy that was less concerned about the family honour and public duty traditionally associated with their class than with exploiting their estates for pecuniary gain. These latter, determined to throw off their inherited feudal responsibilities to their tenants, began procedures such as the enclosure of the commons, the result of which was that droves of peasants were driven from the countryside where they had lived for generations into the city to seek employment. That employment was provided by the new factories being built by the two aforementioned groups with their newly amassed fortunes. This is how capitalism was born. The process was well underway by the time Adam Smith's book appeared on the scene. As aforesaid, economic liberalism was an ex post facto rationalization of capitalism, not the rational foundation upon which it was built.

The Calvinism that the founders of capitalism were attracted to included theological justifications for property confiscation that, had they been made at a later period and applied to wealth gained through industrial capitalism, would be called socialist. Wealth-yielding property, in pre-capitalist Britain, largely consisted of land. Apart from the Crown lands, and the lands owned by the nobility and the local squires, the Church was the largest owner of landed property which was the source of the livings of the clergy. The Puritans wanted the government to confiscate these lands. In the seventh book of his magisterial response to the Puritan spokesman Thomas Cartwright, Richard Hooker exposes this as being the true motive behind their insistence upon replacing the historical and traditional episcopal government of the Church with the experimental presbyterian model that Calvin had introduced in Geneva. (5) In Geneva, this model had been a make-shift solution to the problem of church government in conditions which made the preservation of the episcopacy difficult, if not impossible and when Calvin attempted to make a case for it out of the Scriptures, this was more of an after the fact rationalization than a setting forth of solid convictions. The Puritans, living in England where the same conditions did not exist, took Calvin’s arguments, like they took all of his teachings, to an extreme and declared the Geneva discipline to be divinely ordained. (6) The elimination of the order of bishops would have made it much easier to confiscate the lands of the episcopal sees and liquidate them into commercial wealth.

Thus we see that the founders of capitalism had the same confiscatory attitude towards the wealth and property of the old Christian order that socialists would later have towards capitalist wealth and property. Which is one reason why capitalism and socialism ought to be regarded as two sides to the same coin – or two stages in the development of the same disease – rather than as rivals and opponents. By the time the Whigs got around to working out their elaborate rationalism of capitalism, in the eighteenth century, the calls for state confiscation were gone, but interestingly, the same contempt for landed property remains. Read Adam Smith’s remarks in the first chapter of the third book of Wealth of the Nations about how the landowner’s natural inclination to improve and cultivate his land stands in the way of the progress to be brought about if he invested his money in manufacture and trade instead, or his arguments for selling off the crown lands in the first part of the second chapter of the fifth book or any number of similar places throughout his magnus opus and take note how much his words seem to convey the same, smug, attitude that is so often, rightly, condemned in today’s tax-and-spend liberals and socialists, of “we know how to spend your money so much better than you do.” When we look back to the origins of capitalism in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, then we begin to understand the capitalism of today’s Western world, all of the countries of which now have as standard features almost all of the ten innovations proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the second section of the Communist Manifesto, and where capitalist corporations even more than progressive politicians are attempting to squash all dissent to the left-wing cultural, moral, and social revolution that is underway.

While what we in the twenty-first century call capitalism would be unrecognizable to its Puritan creators and its eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal apologists, both of whom, if they could see it today, would probably denounce it as strenuously as the socialists do, the aspects of it which warrant denunciation can be traced back to the errors of the Puritans and liberals, especially the prime error of modern economic thought, the removal of political economy from its ancient and traditional subordination to ethics. Note that the private ownership of property, the profit motive, or even the general idea of economic freedom provided it is not turned into an absolute, are not among those aspects. Generally speaking, socialists always latch on to the wrong things to criticize in capitalism, (7) being blind to its actual flaws because these are part of their own system too.


The removal of economics from its traditional subordination to ethics began prior to the eighteenth century when classical liberals established economics as a discipline in its own right. It began with Calvinism's modifications to traditional Christian moral theology. As with its innovations in so many other areas of Christian theology and practice, these were more extreme than those of any other form of Protestantism other than the Anabaptist sects. It is not that Calvin or his followers taught that what previous Christians thought was right was wrong and vice versa, although there is a very important and relevant exception to this that we will shortly look at. It was more a matter of emphasis. The most important virtues in traditional Christian ethics were the four cardinal virtues - Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude - prized by the ancient Greeks and Romans and regarded by the Church Fathers as the highest virtues attainable by human effort, and the three theological virtues attainable only by God's grace - Faith, Hope, and Charity or Christian love. While Prudence and Temperance retained their place in Calvinist ethics, or, perhaps were even given a promotion, they were joined there by thrift, industry and other similar virtues that had been recognized as virtues to be sure, as the Book of Proverbs would otherwise have to be thrown out of the canon, but much lesser virtues. These virtues, the ones stressed by the Puritans, have in common the fact that they facilitate the material gain of those who cultivate them. To put it another way, they serve man's economic interests, and this new emphasis upon them demonstrates that for Calvinism, in practice if not openly admitted in theory, ethics was subordinate to and served the interests of economics.


This can be seen in other ways as well. In the seventieth and seventy-first chapters of the fifth and longest book in Richard Hooker's work already alluded to, he rebuts the Puritan objections to the Church's festival days. One of their principal objections, and probably the real objection to which all the others were mere dressing, was that these were unnecessary days off from trade and labour. This is the same objection that Ebenezer Scrooge made against Christmas in Charles Dickens' story. The difference is that Scrooge, as far as Dickens tells us, objected only to Christmas, the Puritans attacked all festival and feast days. If the argument be raised in counter to this, that when it came to the weekly day off work, the Puritans were noted for their excessive strictness, for having a rather large stick up their backsides on the matter, for out-Phariseeing the Pharisees themselves, note that Puritanical Sabbatarian severity was directed not against working on Sunday, as there was no dispute over that at the time, but against people enjoying themselves on Sunday. These are the people, remember, who once put a man in the stocks for kissing his wife on the threshold of his own house when he returned from sea on a Sunday. Could it be that the reason they foamed and raged against the royal proclamations by which Kings James and Charles the First declared harmless amusements after Church to be lawful for their subjects on Sundays was because they couldn't stand the thought of anyone being happy when he wasn't working? H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the "haunting fear, that someone, somewhere, may be happy" and while he had a general attitude in mind, more than the historical ecclesiastical faction, it certainly seems to be a fitting description. Anthony M. Ludovici made an excellent case that Puritan revisions to worship - extreme simplicity, iconoclasm, stripping the churches of what was aesthetically pleasing in decoration and music, and basically reducing the liturgy to excessively long sermons, in which some jackass or another preached either sedition against the king, the virtue of hard work, or both, were all done for the purpose of making Sunday so horrible that everyone would regard normal work days as the relief from the day of rest. (8)


The most important change which Calvin and his followers made to traditional Christian ethics, however, has to do with usury. Perhaps you remember the episode of The Simpsons where Homer applied to his boss for a company loan. Mr. Burns, who to Homer's surprise handles the request personally, says "By the way, are you acquainted with our state's stringent usury laws?" Homer's response is to slowly repeat the word indicating that he was unfamiliar with it. Burns then says "Oh, silly me. I must have just made up a word that doesn't exist" and tells Homer to sign and the money is his, before giving one of his patented super-villainous laughs. Most people today are as ignorant as Homer as to the meaning of usury precisely because they think it means what Mr. Burns thought it meant. The modern, legal, definition of usury is interest in excess of the limit set by the civil authority. From ancient times, however, usury has simply meant the charging of interest - a rent on the use of a sum of money - regardless of the rate. Dr. Johnson defined it simply as “money paid for the use of money.” For as long as the word and the thing it denotes have been around, it has been condemned by the greatest moral thinkers as a pernicious, predatory, and utterly vile practice. Plato denounced it in his Laws, and Aristotle followed suit in his Politics. Twenty years before the death of the latter, ancient Rome outlawed usury altogether, and when the practice returned despite the law, it was railed against by the Catos, elder and younger, and by Cicero. Meanwhile, the Mosaic Law, in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, strictly forbade the charging of interest to members of the commonwealth of Israel, and while permission was granted to charge use on loans to Gentiles, the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures - which use a word derived from the word for serpent bite to speak of interest - speak of it in terms of absolute condemnation. The fifteenth Psalm lists as a trait of the one who "shall dwell in Thy tabernacle" and "rest upon Thy holy hill" that he "hath not given his money upon usury" and the denunciations of the Prophets, especially Ezekiel, of the injustice-generating usury that ranked with idolatry among the chief evils that brought judgement upon both the schismatic Samaritan kingdom and eventually Jerusalem and Judah are no less vehement than those of Cato. The Church Fathers, building upon both of these foundations, condemned interest on loans to the poor, forbade the clergy to lend on use in their canons and early Councils, including the first ecumenical Council of Nicaea, and decried its practice among the laity, to whom the aforementioned prohibition was extended early in the Middle Ages. The Scholastics such as St. Thomas Aquinas, developed the rational argument against usury, using Aristotle's arguments as their starting point. See the Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 78, especially Article 1.


To put the matter as simply as possible, you can transfer ownership of goods justly in one of two ways. You can sell it, that is exchange it for something both parties accept as being of equal value, or give it away. With some goods, you can sell or give away the temporary use of the good rather than the good itself. If you sell the use of the good, this is called renting, if you give it away without charge, this is called lending. If you sell the good itself, you cannot also sell its use. Not honestly and justly at any rate. You cannot sell a person a house and then charge him rent on it. Some goods cannot be rented or lent. All goods that are used up in consumption are like this. You cannot rent or lend an apple, for example, at least for its ordinary use, i.e., eating, because once it is used it is gone and cannot be returned. Money is like this. Its ordinary use is to be spent, and once it is spent, it is gone. You cannot rent or lend money, except when you rent or lend it for some reason other than spending, as you might with a rare coin, for example. When we speak of lending someone money, the transaction we are describing is actually the sale of money itself, with an agreement for payment at a later date. When I "lend" you five dollars, I am selling you five dollars today, in exchange for another five dollars at a later date. It is immoral and unjust to charge interest on such a "loan" because a) it would be selling both the item itself and its use, and b) it is an item the use of which cannot be sold.



The conclusion of the reasoning above, that usury, the charging of interest on loans of money, is inherently unjust and sinful was the consensus of pre-Reformation, orthodox, Christian moral theology. It is a consensus backed by the extremely negative way in which the practice is spoken of in Scripture. It also has the support of the consensus of the best thinkers of the ancient world, and if we look outside the Western tradition, we find similar support in the ancient Eastern traditions as well indicating its ample qualification for being considered to be among the universal precepts of the natural law, the "Tao" which C. S. Lewis discussed and defended in The Abolition of Man. (9) The Scholastics who articulated the reasoning behind the rule that usury is sinful, also made a casuistical - and I am not using this word in its pejorative sense (10) - exception for commercial loans. The reasoning behind the exception is as sound as the reasoning behind the rule - such "loans" are really investments in which the financier purchases equity in a profitable enterprise, with an arrangement for the entrepreneur to buy back the equity in instalments over a period of time in which the financier is entitled to his percentage of the profits, which constitute the interest on the loan. While the reasoning is sound, this exception does not have the same ancient and universal support as the rule itself and it could be counter-argued that this is an instance where semantics are very important and that while this kind of financial arrangement is just, using the language of an intrinsically unjust kind of transaction to describe it, opens up a slippery slope towards a more general acceptance of the latter kind of transaction.


Which is exactly what happened. In the Protestant Reformation of continental Europe, Dr. Luther and Philip Melanchthon, and indeed almost all the Protestant Reformers, upheld the pre-Reformation view of usury. Dr. Luther was, as with most matters, quite colourful in his denunciation of usury. In England, Henry VIII lifted the long-standing total ban on usury and set a legal interest rate, but this, like his seizure of the monastic property, was a matter of pure greed and not of a change in theology. His son, Edward VI, the first truly Protestant king of England, reinstated the ban. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and the other English Reformers upheld the traditional view and the greatest Anglican divines such as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes and Archbishop Laud condemned interest-taking in their preaching. It was John Calvin who took the next step down the slippery slope.


Calvin, in a letter in 1545, took the position that usury was not inherently wrong. He qualified his position, of course, by saying that it was wrong to charge interest on loans to the poor, loans for consumption, etc., and in fine, these qualifications left him basically in the same place as the Scholastic casuists - interest on commercial loans is acceptable, all other interest is bad. It made a huge and radical difference, however, that he arrived at that place from the opposite direction. When you start from the position X is right, except when Y you will find it a lot easier to justify specific instances of X than when you start from X is wrong, except when Y. Calvin’s English followers, who had a tendency to run with his doctrines in directions that would have brought them to the fate of Servetus had they done so during his life and within his sphere of authority, latched on to the usury is not inherently sinful part of his doctrine, and overlooked the many qualifications. It was in their interest to do so. The boom in international trade, from which they stood to make their fortunes, depended upon an ample and expanding supply of liquid wealth, either in the form of currency or of credit. By the eighteenth century, Whiggism, the secular heir of Puritanism, had in the doctrines of economic liberalism, lifted usury out of the depths of depravity to which traditional ethics had assigned it and elevated it to the level of a great benevolent virtue benefiting all of mankind.

Usury has been the lifeblood of capitalism from its earliest days. The enterprising individual looking to strike it rich, whether by trading goods abroad or by manufacturing a new product, unless he already had a fortune to stake, needed to borrow to raise the capital to risk in his venture. This is the kind of usury that the Scholastics saw as the exception to the rule, but which Calvin made the rule rather than the exception. Today, however, the usury flowing through the veins of globalist, corporate capitalism is the kind which Scholastics and Calvin alike, both unequivocally condemned – the lending of money at interest for the sake of consumption rather than production. For the capitalist system to work at all, people need to buy the goods it produces, which means that they need to be affordable. At first this was accomplished by manufacturing in bulk to keep the unit price low. Today it is accomplished by the financing of consumption. The major retailers have either gone online, where credit card is the simplest means of making a purchase, or they entice their customers with reward points to get and use a store credit card, or both. Such a system which encourages people to borrow money to buy items that will not help them pay the money back and which are used up in their use causing the debt to keep piling up, so that it is common for people to end up paying an amount in interest that exceeds by far the principal that they borrowed in the first place, surely deserves all the opprobrium which the ancients and the Christian Church heaped on usury.

Indeed, it is even worse than I have depicted above, for the “money” upon which interest is charged, is fake money. This requires a bit of an explanation.

Money is the means of exchange. Without it, all trade would have to be conducted on a barter basis – “I’ll give you my cow in exchange for a bushel of your apples.” In a commercial exchange, money is a symbol accepted as vicarious for the goods and services offered in a barter exchange. When Person A offers Person B x amount of money for a loaf of bread, x amount of money represents a good or service that Person A had earlier produced and received that money for, just as when Person B then takes that same money and offers it to Person C in exchange for a carton of milk, it now represents the bread of loaf which Person B had sold to Person A. That is how real money works. Its value is based entirely upon goods and services, already produced and sold. When usury was condemned as a mortal sin by the Church and condemned as a crime by the state, real money was the only money.

When usury was legalized, however, and much of the Church began to weaken in its moral opposition to it, this opened the door to fake money. Lending institutions, instead of handing over to their borrowers the coin of the realm, would issue notes of credit that could be exchanged for such. These were circulated as currency and became the first paper money. These promissory notes were issued far in excess of the amount of real money the lenders kept on hand to make good on them with. While Adam Smith praised this practice, called fractional reserve banking, in the second chapter of the second book of Wealth of Nations for allowing “twenty thousand pounds in gold and silver” to “perform all the functions which a hundred thousand could otherwise have performed” the flip-side to this is that a) it is the source, or rather the very definition, of inflation, which robs real money of much of its per unit value and b) the new “money” created in this way by usury, does not stand for goods and services already produced, but for those goods and services yet to be produced. It is money based on debt rather than production, and thus fake money. It is a gross understatement to say that the dawn of electronic financial transactions has made this problem much worse.

If it is wrong, and it is, to take real money, sell it to someone on a pay-at-a-later-date plan, while also charging rent on its use in the meantime, how much more so it is to do this with fake money. There is an economic case against this, as well as an ethical one, in that a system that runs on an ever-expanding currency based on future production – contemporary capitalism – is, like contemporary socialism, operating in accordance with the fraudulent insurance scheme that landed Charles Ponzi in prison a century ago and is therefore one big bubble that must inevitably burst. Just as the bankruptcy of Greece a few years back gave a foretaste of the collapse of the socialist Ponzi scheme, so the sub-prime mortgage crisis of twelve years ago foreshadowed the bursting of the capitalist bubble. I must, however, reiterate my main point, which is that modern economics, of which capitalism and socialism are but two sides to the coin, went astray when men began to make their ethics subject to their economics, rather than the other way around. By inverting the order of ethics above economics, they inverted the entire hierarchy of goods, placing the lowest of material goods, money, the value of which is entirely derivative from real material wealth, i.e., the things people need and use in their everyday lives, and the things which help them produce those things, at the top and making it something to be desired for its own sake, and ignoring entirely the realm of higher goods, whether they be the civil goods sought by the cultivation of the cardinal virtues, or the heavenly goods which can only be sought through the theological virtues. It is no wonder then, that in the midst of material abundance, the happiness that the ancients saw to be the true end of human activity, is as elusive as ever, or perhaps, more so than ever.

It is appropriate therefore, to close with the following words of wisdom, as true today as ever, and by which modern thought is weighed in the balance and found wanting:

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. 6:33)




(1) The eighteenth century Scottish Whig Adam Smith is regarded as the father of modern economics. His training was in moral philosophy, of which he was professor at the University of Glasgow where he succeeded his mentor Francis Hutcheson, and his treatise on that subject, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), predates his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by seventeen years.

(2) The term Charity has been debased to mean merely “giving to the needy” but originally it was the English term for the highest degree of love, the kind called ἀγάπη in Greek and caritas in Latin, which is also the highest of the three theological virtues (Faith and Hope are the other two), that depend on the grace of God. The thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians is a description of it.

(3) That is the eighth and the tenth as Protestants (and Jews) number them, “thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, etc.” By the Roman Catholic numbering three rather than two of the commandments are violated by socialism.

(4) The worst is Pride, but Envy is inseparable from Pride. These are the Satanic sins, the ones by which the devil fell from grace and brought evil into the world. (Wis. 2:24, 1 Tim. 3:6)

(5) Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book VII, chapters twenty-one through twenty-four, especially the first and the last of these, and in the latter especially paragraphs twenty-two to twenty-four.

(6) If any form of church government is of divine ordinance it is the episcopal. The “Scriptural evidence” for the Calvinist discipline, in which the church is governed without bishops, by a council or court of elders, some of whom are ministers (teaching elders) others of whom are elected laymen (ruling elders), consists entirely in the fact that the New Testament uses the terms πρεσβύτερος and ἐπίσκοπος interchangeably in the epistles to Timothy and Titus. These words, which have the literal meanings of “elder” and “governor”, are usually rendered by “priest” and “bishop” in English when used of offices in the church, these words being Anglicized versions of the Latinizations of the original Greek words. While it is true they are used of the same office in the New Testament, the conclusion that Calvin and his followers drew, that the New Testament knows only two orders, that of elder/overseer and that of deacon, rather than three does not follow. It ignores the fact that the Apostle Paul who wrote to Timothy and Titus instructions about choosing and ordaining presbyters and deacons, and Timothy and Titus who received those instructions, were themselves, obviously, of a third and higher order, one which is not named in the Scriptures, for the simple reason that during the time the New Testament was being completed it consisted, apart from Timothy and Titus, of the Apostles themselves. When, in the next generation after the Apostles, it was decided that the title Apostle should be reserved for those who had been called to that ministry by the Risen Christ in Person, a new title was needed for this order and ἐπίσκοπος was appropriated from the order of presbyters immediately beneath it, as being the most fitting description of their governing role. See Hooker, op. cit., Book VII, chapters four to fourteen as well as William Sclater IV, An Original Draught of the Primitive Church, London, Geo. Strahan, 1717, and Bishop John Sage, The Principles of the Cyprianic Age, London, Walter Kettilby, 1695 for the case from Scripture and early Christian literature that no form of church government other than the episcopal was known in the early centuries of Christianity.

(7) Socialists, amusingly, still attack capitalism as a violation of distributive justice, despite the fact that in the last century, the countries unfortunate enough to be subjected to experiments in the most extreme form of socialism, ended up with conditions where the bulk of their populace would have to stand in line ups for measly amounts of necessities such as bread, whereas consumer goods, essential and non-essential, were readily available even to the very poor in capitalist countries. When socialists talk about the “1%” controlling all the wealth of a capitalist country, they mean capital, the productive wealth. Stephen Leacock masterfully rebutted their way of thinking a century ago when he wrote: “’But,’ objects Mr. Bellamy or any other socialist, ‘you forget. Please remember that under socialism the scramble for wealth is limited; no man can own capital, but only consumption goods. The most that any man may acquire is merely the articles that he wants to consume, not the engines and machinery of production itself. Hence even avarice dwindles and dies, when its wonted food of “capitalism” is withdrawn. But surely this point of view is the very converse of the teachings of common sense. ‘Consumption goods’ are the very things that we do want. All else is but a means to them. One admits, as per exception, the queer acquisitiveness of the miser-millionaire, playing the game for his own sake. Undoubtedly, he exists. Undoubtedly his existence is a product of the system, a pathological product, a kind of elephantiasis of individualism. But speaking broadly, consumption goods, present or future, are the end in sight of the industrial struggle. Give me the houses and the gardens, the yachts, the motor cars and the champagne and I do not care who owns the gravel crusher and the steam plow.” Stephen Leacock, “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”, 1920, part six.

(8) Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defence of Aristocracy: A Textbook for Tories, pp. 189-190. Ludovoci wrote “Not only was all amusement forbidden, but the Church services themselves were made so insufferably tedious and colourless, and sermons were made to last such a preposterous length of time, that Sunday became what it was required to be by these employers of slaves — the most dreaded day in the week.” He had borrowed this insight from Nietzsche, the “well-known German philosopher” whom he then proceeded to quote as having said “It was a master stroke of English instinct to hallow and begloom Sunday to such an extent that the Englishman unconsciously hankers for his work and week-day again.” It is Nietzsche, rather than Marx, who ought to be considered to be the great nineteenth century critic of capitalism. Western man had two paths open before him, Nietzsche argued. One of these, the path he urged man to take, was that of the Ubermensch or Superman, his concept of which is illustrated by the heroes and heoines of Ayn Rand’s novels, not by DC Comics’ Clark Kent. It was far more likely, he lamented, that capitalism would lead man down the other path, the path of the Letzter Mensch or Last Man, a path of contentment and complacency, devoid of any sort of heroism whatsoever. While the history of the twentieth century has falsified the predictions of Adam Smith with regards to free trade and Karl Marx with regards to – well, everything he said – it has amply justified Nietzsche’s gloomy prediction about the Letzer Mensch, although his preferred alternative is just as loathsome. The only redeeming characteristic of Francis Fukuyama’s regurgitation of the Whig Theory of History is that he uses this insight of Nietzsche’s to call into question whether the outcome of the march of progress to universal democratic capitalism is all it is cracked up to be.

(9) Lewis does not include the prohibition on usury specifically in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man, which includes “Illustrations of the Tao”, although there are some more general principles that would cover it there, but he does mention it in Mere Christianity as “is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed.” He could have added quotations from the ancient Hindu Vedas, Islamic Koran and Buddhist Majjhima Nikāya to show just how universal the ancient moral consensus against usury was, abundantly qualifying it for inclusion as a natural law principle.

(10) In the non-pejorative sense, casuistry is the application of general and universal moral rules to specific instances. The English Common Law is a secular example. See Thomas Fleming, The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, Columbia and London, The University of Missouri Press, 2004 for a fuller description and defense of casuistry.

More Assorted Reflections

The first Assorted Reflections can be found here.

- Although Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the people against “tyranny”, it was King Charles I who had the love and support of the common people. The Jacobins, likewise, declared themselves to be the champions of the poor of France, even though in the cahiers detailing their grievances the poor of France had not called for the overthrow of the monarchy, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were in fact more popular than the men who deposed them, the Revolution was instigated by a cousin of the king, and most of its leaders were upper class intellectuals. Marxism considered itself to be the voice of the proletariat (factory workers) despite the fact that its founders were a pseudo-philosopher (Marx) and a factory owner (Engels), it has always been led by intellectuals, and has never drawn significant support from the actual working classes, who generally suffered the most wherever it came to power. Similarly, the feminist movement appointed itself the voice of the female sex, although it has never spoken for family oriented women who make marriage and children their top priorities and is overtly hostile to Christian women who believe the Sixth Commandment applies to both sexes. The claims of black activist groups to speak for all blacks and of the Anti-Defamation League to speak for Jews are further examples of the same.

- From its beginning feminism has drawn inspiration from both liberalism (classical) and Marxism, with some feminists leaning more toward liberalism, others towards Marxism, but with a general alignment to the liberal-left. The liberal-left has always been inclined towards democratic and small-r republican institutions of government – an inclination which in no way conflicts with its inclination towards totalitarianism. Within such institutions, feminism had to fight for the right of women to vote and to hold elected office. Conversely, we on the conservative-right have traditionally been inclined towards the institution of hereditary, royal, monarchy. This institution has allowed for reigning and even ruling queens and empresses since the dawn of human history.

- Feminism has strange priorities. On New Year’s Eve, 2015, gangs of migrants harassed, assaulted, and in some cases raped large numbers of women in Cologne and other German cities. The feminist outcry over this was insignificant, almost non-existent in comparison to the loud noise they are currently making over Brett Kavanaugh, the charges against whom are unsubstantiated and suspiciously timed. Indeed, most feminists have jumped on the “migrants welcome” and anti-Islamophobia bandwagons, proving that while politics makes strange bedfellows, intersectionality makes the strangest bedfellows of all.


- While I do not take the position that women ought to be kept barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, I do think a case can be made that this is what should be done to feminists. Especially the male feminists.


- It has been reported for a couple of weeks now that Her Excellency, Julie Payette, is less than happy with her position as Her Majesty's vice-regal representative in the Dominion government and that others are less than happy with her performance in that role. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that she was chosen for the position by the Liberal Party. The Grits, and especially the Trudeau branch of the party, have long lacked both an understanding of and an appreciation for the office of the Governor General and the grand, traditional, institution of royal monarchy it represents. So, when it falls to them to choose the next Governor General, they don't look for the person best suited to represent the Queen in Canada - which is the actual, constitutional, purpose of the office - but for someone to be the face of Canada, as they envision it, which is constantly changing, to the world. There is a simple solution to the problem. I have long maintained that while the Canadian Senate is badly in need of reform, the reform it needs is reform that respects and is consistent with the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation bequeathed to us in 1867. The complete overhaul of the Americanized, Triple-E, model proposed by the old Reform Party is unacceptable. The most necessary reform could be accomplished simply by removing control over who is recommended to be appointed to the Senate from the Prime Minister's office. Having the provinces, rather than the federal government, recommend the appointees to the Senate seats allotted to them would be an obvious way of doing this. Similarly, it should not be the Prime Minister who advises the Queen as to who her representative should be. Indeed, unlike the Senate, in the case of the Governor General's office it was not established in Confederation that the Queen would appoint based on recommendation from the Prime Minister's office, but rather, until the Statute of Westminster the appointment was made on recommendation by the Imperial Privy Council. In the Liberal Version of Canadian history this is regarded as a step forward in the evolution of Canadian nationhood. This is because the Liberal Version falsely superimposes America's story - the story of former colonies forging a new national identity after severing the imperial connection - upon Canada. Canada's true story is the exact opposite of this - the story of Britain's loyal North American colonies, English-speaking Protestant and French-speaking Catholic, coming together to create a new nation that would deliberately retain the connection, that would in time become more familial than imperial. Since so many Canadians do not know our own story, transferring the right of recommendation from the Canadian PMO back to London would not sell in this day and age, but that is not the only option that suggests itself. The Queen's Canadian Privy Council, minus the current Prime Minister and Cabinet, is the appropriate body to make the recommendation.


- Mazo de la Roche, at one time Canada's most popular novelist (she also wrote plays, short stories, and a memoir), had very strong views as to who was qualified to be Governor General. According to her biographer Ronald Hambleton she believed the office should be restricted to the aristocracy and preferably a member of the royal family. De la Roche is buried very close to the grave of Stephen Leacock in the churchyard of St. George the Martyr at Sibbald Point in Sutton, Ontario. Both were traditional Canadian Tories - royalists, who believed in Canada and her British institutions and connection, and were suspicious of American liberal republicanism. With her reverence for nobility and the aristocratic ideal, so obviously on display in her Jalna books, de la Roche was more properly the High Tory. Apart from his royalism and his views of race and sex, Leacock's dissent from egalitarianism was in the direction of individualistic meritocracy. He was, perhaps, the quintessential Canadian Low Tory.


- Canada's British institutions and familial connection have historically been means to the end of preserving Canada's independence from the United States. The reverse is also true, that the cause of maintaining Canada's independence from the United States has been the means to the end of preserving her British institutions and familial connection, valued as goods in themselves. The main weakness of Canadian Toryism, apart from the fear of being seen as too right-wing by the electorate that has led to far too much left-ward drift over the years, is that while it always recognized the first point, it seldom fully grasped the second, which is the more important of the two. John Diefenbaker was an exception to this. John Farthing, whose Freedom Wears a Crown articulated and defended the point, was another. Neither man was properly appreciated by the Conservative Party.


- Conservatives of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries looked back to the eighteenth century statesman Edmund Burke as their prophet. Ironically. Edmund Burke was a member of the Whig (liberal) Party. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. The ideas that conservatives most respect in Burke are his defence of the British monarchy and established Church, his condemnation of "armed doctrines", his revision of social contract theory to make the "contract of each particular state" into a "clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society" that is a "partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born," and the local patriotism of his "little platoons," all of which come from his Reflections on the Revolution in France, written late in his career, and which better reflect Tory convictions than those of his own party. Indeed, this sharing of ideas has gone both ways. Thomas Hobbes, who introduced social contract theory to begin with, and David Hume, the noted eighteenth century skeptic, are both recognized as significant contributors to the development of the ideas of classical liberalism, but politically both were affiliated with the Royalists/Tories. In Hume's case this only really comes out in his History of England. At any rate, excellent as many of Burke's "neo-Tory" insights in the Reflections are, conservatives would do better to look to his friend the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the oft-quoted Dr. Johnson, as their eighteenth century prophet. T. S. Eliot was one conservative who recognized this, and his famous statement "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics" consciously echoes Dr. Johnson's definition of a Tory.


- Canadian conservatism began as an adaptation of British Toryism. It was royalist, but, due to the greater denominational differences that have been here since before Confederation (French Canadians were predominantly Roman Catholic, English Canadians were traditionally English Anglicans and Scottish Presbyterians, with a sizable number of English Methodists and Baptists and Irish Catholics, and smaller numbers from other denominations) it was less associated with church establishment than its British parent, although it was far from being secular, and Canada, contrary to the claims of certain ignorant Grits, has no tradition of separation of church and state. Since the 1950s, and the birth of the American conservative movement (as recently as 1950 Lionel Trilling could write "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition"), Canadian conservatives have tended either to borrow ideas from American conservatives (Canadian neo-conservatives) or to emphasize the differences between Canadian Toryism and American conservatism and try to re-align the former with socialism, progressivism, and the left (Red Tories). Both tendencies are mistakes, in my opinion. Contrary to some clever arguments from the Reds and the examples of lovably eccentric individuals like George Grant and Eugene Forsey who were able to blend religious conservatism and the Tory love of Canadian institutions with otherwise left-wing views in their personal philosophies, there is no natural affinity between Toryism on the one hand and socialism, progressivism, and the left in general on the other. Canadian neoconservatives, however, have had the perverse tendency to pick out of the big tent of American conservatism, the ideas that are least compatible with our own Toryism and neglect those that are the most. That big tent originally consisted of classical liberals or libertarians (liberals in the nineteenth century meaning of the term), ex-Communist Cold Warriors, and traditionalists like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet. The traditionalists borrowed from British classical conservatism as many ideas as they could compatibly incorporate into a liberal republic. Obviously, these are the American conservatives most compatible with our own Toryism. They are also the most neglected by Canadian neo-conservatives. This is perhaps not surprising when we consider how neglected they are in their own movement. Their role in the big tent was largely supplanted in the 1970s and 1980s by the New Right and (American) neo-conservatives. The New Right was an alliance between populist-nationalists and the Religious Right. There was some overlap in position between the older moral and social conservatism of the traditionalists which corresponded closely to that of British and Canadian Tories but the predominantly evangelical/fundamentalist Religious Right more often seemed to be a revival of Puritanism, the theocratic Calvinism that had been the first form of liberalism before it went secular, and the Tories' oldest enemy. The American neo-conservatives were New Deal, liberal, Democrats who defected from the left when the New Left became pro-Soviet and pro-Palestinian. These became the arch champions of American, neo-imperialistic, militarism. It is from the classical liberals and American neo-conservatives that Canadian neo-conservatives have borrowed the most. The Religious Right has had much less of an impact, perhaps because of the large influence of social justice theology on our evangelicals, although interestingly the socially and morally conservative George Grant, usually considered a Red Tory, was willing to look on the Religious Right as allies in the fight against abortion and euthanasia. With the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency, the populist-nationalists, with the backing of a sizable portion of the Religious Right, rose to ascendency in the big tent of American conservatism, much to the disgust of the Republican Party elite, an alliance of the neo-conservatives, classical liberals (except the Trump-supporting paleolibertarians), and a minority of the Religious Right. Already in Canada we see signs of this impacting us, with Doug Ford leading the Ontario Progressive Conservatives to victory on a populist-nationalist platform, and now Quebec having given a majority government to a party which, like Maxime Bernier's proposed new federal party, blends classical liberalism with populist-nationalism. What this entails for the future of Canada and Canadian conservatism remains to be seen. I will still be holding on to my classical, Canadian, Toryism with a willingness, as always, to entertain worthy ideas from any of these other varieties.

- The elements of genuine moral and social conservatism are the beliefs: a) in an unchanging and universal moral order or natural law with fixed standards of right and wrong (C. S. Lewis’ “Tao” from The Abolition of Man), b) that tradition, through which the accumulated wisdom of the past is passed down to us, is a more reliable guide to these standards than private, abstract, reasoning, c) that the cultivation and nature of right habits of behaviour (virtues) is more effective than the imposition of rules at producing right decision-making and that while the information transmitted in the process of cultivating such habits necessarily includes some rules, the bulk of it cannot be codified as rules and can only be learned from example, which is best accomplished in the home with the support of the teaching ministry of the church, and d) that the government’s role is the “ministry of the sword”, by which it makes and enforces the laws that uphold the peace, order, and justice that provide the civilized framework for all of the preceding points. The popular perception of moral and social conservatism, however, has largely been shaped by the New American Religious Right, the most immediate direct ancestor of which was the Prohibition movement which grew out of the Temperance Movement supported by evangelical and fundamentalist revivalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is often forgotten today that Prohibition was considered to be a Progressive cause, both big and small p, at the time, and also had the support of the Social Gospel movement (theological liberalism) and first-wave feminism. Indeed, in Canada at least, the latter was largely responsible for Prohibition passing – the provinces generally voted Prohibition in immediately after feminism won the franchise for women in World War I and then voted it back out again once the men returned from overseas. While Prohibition did have its supporters among Conservatives, the most traditional Tories and the churches most associated with classical conservatism, the Anglican Church which at the time was still “The Tory Party at prayer” and the ultramontane Roman Catholic Church of pre-Quiet Revolution Quebec, opposed it. Stephen Leacock gave lectures against it pro bono public! There are significant differences, of course, between the Prohibition movement and the New Religious Right. The former sought to impose on society a new law, the complete abstinence from alcoholic beverages, which was not grounded in tradition, had not been part of mainstream Christian orthodox moral theology (it belongs rather to the Islamic tradition) and which, despite the best efforts of Rev. William Patton to prove otherwise, clearly contradicts the Scriptures. The latter was a response to a moral revolution that removed long-standing, traditional rules, which are supported by orthodox Christian moral theology. There is nothing in its opposition to abortion, euthanasia, and the ongoing sexual revolution with which genuine moral and social conservatism would disagree, but in its presentation it evokes the image of previous evangelical backed moral crusades, such as Prohibition and the seventeenth century Puritanism that would put a man in stocks for kissing his wife in public when he returned from a three year voyage on Sunday, an unattractive image to say the least.


- David Lane was a disturbed individual who rejected the Christian faith in which he was raised for a revived, Nordic, paganism and embraced a violent racialism and was eventually sent to prison for the crimes he committed as a member of the Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group that supported its activities with funds obtained through armed robbery. Obviously a man who any sane person would consider to be utterly repugnant. What is interesting, however, is that if you take the "fourteen words" meme attributed to him, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children", and substitute any other colour or racial identity for "our" and "white" you will end up with a statement that would be considered unobjectionable, non-offensive, acceptable, laudable, and even an essential goal of social policy by liberals, progressives, and other self-identified "enlightened" people. Make the substitution and you will see what I mean. This provides us with a challenge for the soi disant "enlightened." Either admit, that despite its unsavoury origins and associations, there is nothing objectionable in the content of the “fourteen words” meme or disavow all the other racial identity politics that you support.

- Another white nationalist meme is that of “white genocide.” It purports to explain the observable phenomenon that has sometimes been called “white death,” i.e., the vast shrinking, over the last century, of the Caucasian percentage both of the total world population and of the populations of historically white countries, that has accelerated after the post-World War II Baby Boom as white fertility has dropped and white populations have been aging without reproducing themselves, relying instead upon immigration to replace themselves. The explanation offered by the “white genocide” meme is that this is due to the plotting of some racial enemy. Although there certainly are leftists who express their hatred of white people in genocidal terms, an obvious example of which being Noel Ignatiev, and genocide would be an apt description of what is being done to the whites of Zimbabwe and South Africa, the phenomenon as a whole is probably better described as “white suicide.” The white nationalists are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking “who is doing this to us” they should be asking “why are we doing this to ourselves.” The answer is liberalism.

- Forty-five years ago, in the eerily prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, French author Jean Raspail warned of the coming death of Western civilization through an invasion of the masses of Third World poor aided and abetted by a suicidal white liberalism. The author was not a populist-ethno-nationalist, at least not primarily, but rather a traditional Roman Catholic and a legitimist royalist. Perhaps this explains his insightful prescience.


- Both the left and the right believe that ethnocentrism has both a healthy and a toxic form. Where they disagree is over what constitutes the difference between the healthy and toxic. The right would say that a healthy ethnocentrism is the kind of in-group loyalty that promotes and facilitates social cohesion, trust, and cooperation whereas toxic ethnocentrism is characterized by a paranoid distrust and violent hatred towards other groups. The left is more simplistic. For them it is a matter of skin colour. If you have the wrong skin colour, white, your ethnocentrism is toxic, no matter what form it takes, if you have the right skin colour, all others, it is healthy, even if it is expressed in paranoid and hateful terms.

- Today “enlightened” seems to mean “uncritically following the latest trends and fads in modern philosophy.” Come to think of it, that’s what it meant in the days of Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau, as well.


- Finding economic truth boils down to one question: who is the most competent to make the decision? If it is a decision that primarily affects the individual and his family, then the individual and family are under most circumstances the most competent to make the decision. There are obvious exceptions of people who lack the rational facility to make their own decisions, but for the most part this stands true. Conversely, if it is a decision that primarily affects the good of the country as a whole, the government is the most competent to make the decision. Again there are obvious exceptions, such as when the government consists of arrogant, egotists, obsessed with reading everything through the lens of the latest trend in progressive and politically correct ideology, but generally it is the case. The doctrine of laissez faire or economic liberalism is the error of thinking that the individual is competent to make all decisions (and that the common good of the whole country is thereby brought about through Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”). Socialism is the error of thinking that the government is competent to make all decisions, including those that individuals and families should be making for themselves. The latter is by far the worst error of the two, but they are both errors.


- When someone says "satire is dead" they generally mean that things so bizarre have been happening in reality that it would be pointless to parody them. Satire is dead, but for an entirely different reason - the widespread influence of liberal, progressive, and left-wing thinking. The left does not get satire, because the left is incapable of distinguishing between basic human imperfection and huge evils that demand immediate rectification. This is because they refuse to accept the basic Christian truth that human history, between the Fall and Second Coming, is the history of people with the fundamental flaw of Original Sin, and that perfection cannot be expected on this earth and in time. Therefore, their response to any perceived imperfection is "this is unacceptable, it must be smashed, crushed, destroyed, and replaced with perfection." The point of satire, however, is to help us live with our imperfections, by allowing us to laugh at them. The political, social, religious, and cultural institutions that make for the good and civilized life are not perfect, but they can never be perfect, so rather than smashing them, crushing them, and razing them to the ground, let us laugh at their imperfections, so that we can appreciate them, warts and all. This spirit is completely foreign to the progressive. This is also why the greatest satirists - Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Stephen Leacock, and Evelyn Waugh to give a few examples, have been Tories.