Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth

 

Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.   Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths.  Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine.  This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.

 

What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?

 

Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God.   Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.

 

Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace.   This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.

 

Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin.   Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed.   Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths.   Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.

 

Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?

 

If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree.  Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have.   Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice.   This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it.   God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will.   Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.

 

Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created.   When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin.   The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect.   They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation.   When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness.   Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery.   The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh.   This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.

 

God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness.   Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity.   He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form.   The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good.    If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection.   This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962)    The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person.  In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique.  (1)

 

I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed.   I wish to expand upon that idea here.   Think again of Burgess’s novel.   The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it.  Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true.   This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.

 

If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding.   By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit.   In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.  

 

These come in two forms.   The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”.   The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”.   This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex.   Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth.   Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.

 

The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”.   The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful.   Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred.   This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate.   The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print.   The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit.   The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing.   The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree.   Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990).   More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott.   Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female.   Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant's biological maleness.   Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.

 

That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth.   Further analysis confirms this.  If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth.   If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth.   The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth.   Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say. 

 

Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth.   As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.

 

The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856).   It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them.  “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”   In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words,  Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more.   He wrote:

 

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

 

In what he stated here, Mill was quite right.   Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T.   Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought.   Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today.    It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts.  By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”.   In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals.   Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence.   In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature.   Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.     Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought.   If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would.    It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed.    Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”.   He wrote:   

 

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

 

On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power.    In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power.   Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control.   The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform.   The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet.   Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were.   The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added,  in a more burdensome manner than ever before.

 

Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones.   Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak.  Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it.   When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it.   Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do.   Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.

 

 (1)   The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.

(2)   The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction.    The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this.  Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him.  In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie.  Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.   William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth.    None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind.

Still Standing - a Reactionary Tory in 2022

After the second of two anni horribiles in a row, the Kalends of January is upon us once again.   In the civil calendar this is New Year's Day and in the sacred Kalendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.    When I began to write I borrowed a custom from one of my favourite writers, the late Charley Reese, a curmudgeonly, common-sense conservative, op-ed writer from the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly syndicated column.   At the beginning or end of each year he would write a column in which he talked about himself, his  positions, the causes he supported, and the organizations to which he belonged.   He encouraged other writers to do the same because he felt they owed it to their readers to regularly disclose these things so their readers would know where the opinions they were reading were coming from.   Reese's column would come out in late December or early January on a day his column was scheduled to appear.   Since I self-publish my essays on a blog and can keep my own schedule I have always timed mine to come out on New Year's Day.

I am 45 years old.  I have lived in the city of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba, of which Winnipeg is the capital, in the Dominion of Canada all my life.   I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, and studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, about a half-hour south of Winnipeg.

There are two words that I regularly use to describe my general point of view in all of its aspects - political, theological, philosophical, cultural, etc.   These are reactionary and Tory.  The former has long been a term of abuse by progressives or leftists and I learned the habit of self-applying it from the late historian John Lukacs.   When I do so, I use it more in the sense in which he used it, and in which Michael Warren Davis uses it in his just published The Reactionary Mind: Why "Conservative" Isn't Enough, than in the sense that in which Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug, et al, use it, although by making this distinction I do not mean to disparage the latter who have written much that is worthy in criticism of the Modern and what has followed it.     In this sense it means someone who looks back to the social, civil, and religious order of Christendom, the civilization that preceded Modern Western Civilization, and rather than finding there darkness from which he thanks Modernity for rescuing us, finds goodness and light and a solid place to cast his anchor so as to keep from being tossed adrift on the stormy seas of Modernity and Postmodernity.   A reactionary then is very different from a conservative.   The latter is usually someone who values Western Civilization only for the achievements of Modernity, distinguishing himself from progressives merely by the fact that the strain of Modernity he prefers, is the older, somewhat saner, form of liberalism, rather than that of the increasingly looney left.

From what I have just said about being a reactionary, it should already be clear that when I describe myself as a Tory I don't mean a small-c conservative, although I usually agree with small-c conservatives in their disputes with progressives, much less a big-C Conservative.     I mean it in the sense of Dr. Johnson's famous definition as "one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig" and of T. S. Eliot's description of himself, which reads like an update of Dr. Johnson's definition, and goes " an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

When it comes to the political aspect of being a Tory, the "royalist in politics", I have been one all my life.   Although a subtle distinction can be made between a royalist and a monarchist - the former denotes loyalty to royal blood, the latter denotes loyalty to and belief in the institution and office of the monarch - I will use the word royalist to encompass both meanings.   I have always been glad that my country is a parliamentary monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as our head of state and the head of the family of nations, the Commonwealth, to which we belong, rather than a republic.   Like Anthony Burgess, one of my favourite novelists who had similar views, "I hate all republics", although I might make the long defunct Confederate States of America the exception that proves the rule, if only because the kind of people who would be most offended by my doing so are also the sort of people who irritate me the most.  As I learned the history of my country, I was very pleased - I don't like to use the word proud because Pride is the worst of all sins and vices - to know that Canada's history diverged from that of our republican neighbour because we chose the way of the older virtues of Loyalty to the Crown and Honour, over that of rebellion and sedition in the name of new-fangled abstract ideals.   I very much despise the way Modern man prefers abstract ideals over time -proven concrete institutions.    I am very much the opposite of that in my thinking, which is why I will defend parliament, the time-honoured institution that legislates under the reign of the Crown, but not democracy, the abstract ideal, and insist that this distinction is crucial.   It always infuriates me when certain small-c conservatives speak gushingly about democracy and disparagingly about the Crown.   The Honourable Eugene Forsey was raised Conservative, but became a socialist, was one of the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (predecessor to today's New Democratic Party), worked as research-director for the Canadian Labour Congress, and was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal by Pierre Eliot Trudeau.   There were a great many issues on which his position was the polar opposite of mine.   Nevertheless, he was a great defender of Canada's constitution, about which he knew more than any other Canadian in history except the Fathers of Confederation, and of the monarchy and always called himself a "Sir John A. Macdonald Conservative".   I gladly acknowledge him to have been a brother Tory.  I would not extend the same courtesy to such small-c conservatives as Anthony Furey, Lorne Gunter, J. J. McCullough and Spencer Fernando who have expressed their preference for the republican form of government, even though on a wide battery of other issues I would agree with them.   I would recommend that they all read John Farthing's Freedom Wears a Crown.  The most totalitarian governments in history have been republics, the freest have been headed by monarchs.  The more I have read and reflected on political science over the years, the more confirmed I have become in a royalism that was at first instinctual.   A country needs a hereditary, unelected, head of state who is above partisan politics, and so can truly fulfil the role of the office of head of state, which is to represent the country as a whole, including not just all the various factions of those living in the present, but those who have gone before and who are yet to come as well.  Only a king or queen can do this.

I had what for Canadians of my generation was a fairly typical mainstream Protestant upbringing.   My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my grandmother on my father's side subscribed to the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Brandon diocese, we were read Bible stories and said the Lord's Prayer in school, and celebrated the two main Christian holidays.   From the New Testament the Gideons gave me when I was twelve and Christian books I borrowed from the library, I gained a fuller understanding of Who Jesus Christ was, and why He died on the Cross and rose again.   When I was 15 I placed my faith in Him as my Saviour.   I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half later and a couple of decades after that was confirmed as an adult in the Anglican Church.  Several years ago, Michael Coren, a writer who had been a prominent social and religious conservative, left the Church of Rome and joined the Anglican Church in which he was later ordained.   Nowadays, whenever he appears in print, he can be depended upon to consistently take the wrong position on whatever hot button topic he has been invited to address.   For Coren the move from Romanism to Anglicanism was a move from conservatism to liberalism, a move that I had suspected that he would one day take ever since I had seen him take the republican side in a in-print debate about the monarchy in the National Post years earlier.   My decision to join the Anglican Church was very different from this.   For me, it was the outcome of a deepening of my theological conservatism from a mere Protestant fundamentalism to a High Anglican orthodoxy.

There was an instinctual element to my theological conservatism as there was to my political royalism.   Even before my conversion theological liberalism had repulsed me.  By theological liberalism I don't mean the making of theological arguments for politically liberal positions.  I mean the approach to Christianity of those churchgoers who either pick and choose from the Creed what they want to believe and discard what they don't (keeping heaven and getting rid of hell is an obvious example of this) or profess a "belief" in the articles of the Creed that looks more like unbelief in disguise (think of the sort of person who says he believes in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ but means by it something that did not require Jesus' body to return to life and leave the tomb).    This sort of thing disgusted me before I was  a believer, and the disgust intensified when I became a believer.   Over the years I have come to recognize in what I call hyper-Protestantism something that is akin to theological liberalism in attitude and spirit and arguably its immediate ancestor.   Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond Protestantism's rejection of what can be clearly demonstrated from Scripture to be the errors of the Church of Rome and rejects everything it associates with the Church of Rome which is not absolutely required by Scripture even if it is genuinely Catholic, that is to say, held by all the ancient Churches that go back to the unbroken Communion of Churches of the early centuries, from those early centuries to this day.   I have come to be as repulsed by this attitude as by liberalism and as a consequence my theological conservatism has deepened and matured.

I hold to the fundamental truths of the Reformation as much now as ever.   The first of these is that the Holy Bible, Old and New Testaments, is the inspired written Word of God, and as such its authority is infallible.   The Church, whether it be the actual Catholic Church - all Churches that were once part of the unbroken Communion - or a particular Church, such as the Roman, that falsely claims to be the entire Catholic Church, is not infallible.   The Bible, therefore, is the infallible standard of truth, to which the Church is held accountable.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, takes this way too far.   Rather than merely saying the Church is not infallible, it assumes the Church - not just the Roman Church but the actual Catholic Church - to be wrong about everything, unless it is clearly, in the most literal way possible, proven by Scripture, and takes the position that it is better for the individual believer to ignore the Church and rely directly upon the Holy Spirit for understanding the truth of the Bible.   This, however, in effect, treats the private interpretation of the individual believer as infallible, which is a far worse error than that of Rome.   The promise of Christ that the Holy Spirit would guide to all truth, was not made to the individual believer but to the collective society of believers the Church, in the persons of the Apostles whom He had set as governors over the Church.   This did not make the Church infallible, but it means that personal interpretation must be subject to the teaching of the actual Catholic Church, just as the latter must be subject to the corrective authority of the infallible Word of God.

The second fundamental truth of the Reformation is that salvation in its spiritual sense of the restoration of the sinner to God's favour, including such things as eternal life and bliss, pardon for sins, and righteousness in God's eyes, is something that is utterly beyond the reach of our own efforts - we cannot achieve it for ourselves, earn it, or exchange anything for it - and so it has been freely given to us in the gift of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who in His Incarnation, life, suffering, and death did everything necessary to accomplish that salvation and in His Resurrection and Ascension demonstrated it to be complete.   We merely receive our salvation as the gift it is in the only way a gift of this nature can be received - by faith, which is believing and trusting, believing the Gospel message that proclaims to us that God has given us a Saviour Who has taken away our sins, trusting Him to have accomplished for us what the Gospel says He has accomplished, which are, of course, the same thing stated two different ways.   Our own works - our efforts to please God by what we think, say, and do - as important, essential and necessary, as they are, contribute nothing to our salvation, but rather flow out of our salvation as the effect of its liberating and transforming aspects and our way of thanking God for it.    Our works cannot please God in any way, even the sense in which He graciously accepts the imperfect works of believers, if they are done with the intent of contributing to our salvation.   The Reformers stressed this truth which is so central to the Johannine and Pauline writings of the New Testament against the the teachings of the Church of Rome which, by the sixteenth century, had fallen so far from the grace of God, that not only did its teachings make salvation resemble a carrot dangled in front of a horse from a stick, but its Patriarch even stooped to the sacrilege and blasphemy of trying to sell salvation as a fund-raiser.   Hyper-Protestantism, however, in the name of this fundamental truth, rejects what the Scriptures and Catholic - not just Roman - doctrine clearly teach about the ordinary means God has appointed through which He works to bring the freely give grace (favour) Christ obtained for us on the Cross to us and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   In the New Testament, Jesus Christ establishes a religious society called the Church, which people became members of through the initiatory ritual of baptism, appointing His Apostles as governors over the Church and committing to them the ministry of the Gospel, which included both teaching and preaching and the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper, the Gospel Sacraments.    The Church, her Apostolic government, and her Gospel ministries of Word and Sacrament are the appointed ordinary means through which God works to bring the grace of Christ to us, and to create in us the faith by which we receive it.   Hyper-Protestants reject this in the name of the Reformation truth of the freeness of God's saving grace, but place themselves in a quandary with regards to the New Testament verses that taken literally, as hyper-Protestants usually claim they prefer Scripture to be taken, tell us that baptism unites us with Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4, Col. 2:12) and that the food that sustains our spiritual life is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ (John 6:53-58) which, of course, is offered us as food only in the Eucharist.   Since they see baptism and the Lord's Supper as works, things we do in obedience to God in order to please Him, rather than Sacraments, things through which God works to bless us, they see works salvation in the literal meaning of these passages, and must twist them to fit their theology.   Ironically, hyper-Protestants are themselves susceptible to the charge of works salvation.  If they are Arminians, they make faith itself into a work by making it into an act of our will by which we meet God's condition for salvation.   If they are Calvinists, they teach that God gave Christ to save only a limited few elect, and that we can only know we are of this elect by seeing the evidence of it in our holy lives, thus essentially telling us to place our faith in our works instead of Christ.   By contrast, the Catholic doctrine based on the literal meaning of the above passages is entirely consistent with the freeness of God's saving grace if Sacraments are understand, as they have been since the Church Fathers - see St. Augustine especially - as a visible, tangible, way of preaching the Gospel, and if it is understood that God works through extraordinary as well as ordinary means.

In both of the above examples of hyper-Protestantism twisting fundamental Reformation truths to attack genuinely Catholic doctrine as well as Roman error it is obvious that hyper-Protestantism is fundamentally rebellion against the legitimate authority God has placed in His Church and not just the exaggerated claims of Rome.    In rejecting the Patriarch of Rome's claim to supreme authority over the entire Catholic Church, the Reformers were actually taking the Catholic position for early attempts by said Patriarch to assert such supremacy were clearly rebuffed in the Ecumenical Councils.   Hyper-Protestants, however, reject the entire Episcopal College's claim to authority over the Catholic Church.   That claim, however, is founded in the Bible.   Jesus Christ gave the government of His Church to the Apostles, which governing authority could only be passed on to others from those who had it before, which is precisely what we see the Apostles doing in the New Testament when they admitted others such as Timothy and Titus to their government over the lower Orders they, on their Christ-given authority had created, the Presbyters and Deacons.   Dr. Luther taught the New Testament truth of the universal priesthood of all believers.   Hyper-Protestants conclude from it that if all Christians are priests, then Christ could not have established a more specific priesthood and set it over His Church.   This logic, however, would condemn the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament, because national Israel was also described as a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6).   The accounts of the Last Supper, especially those of St. John and St. Luke taken together, make it quite clear that Christ established His Apostles as the new priesthood of His Church.   Compare the ritual footwashing described by St John at the beginning of his account (13:3-18) with the ritual washing when the Aaronic priesthood was established (Ex 40:12, 30-31).   Then note the institution of the Eucharist, the bread and wine of which clearly allude to the grain and drink offerings of the Levitical system, and which are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, the One effective sacrifice to which the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament pointed.   If it were not already obvious that when the Lord told the Apostles to perform this rite  He was telling them to do something only priests could do, note that the word St. Luke uses for "this do" in instituting the Sacrament while generally meaning "make this" or "do this" has a ceremonial meaning of "offer this".  The hyper-Protestant position smacks of the rebellious attitude of Dathan, Korah and Abiram.

The more I studied this the more I came to see how hyper-Protestantism led to theological liberalism, because the rejection of the legitimate albeit not-infallible authority Christ had placed in those He set over His Church and not just the false supremacy claimed by the Roman Patriarch was a step towards rejecting the infallible authority God had placed in His written Word.   Latitudinarianism paved the way for deism and rationalism, and Puritanism became the ancestor of both political liberalism (the Whigs began as the successors to the Puritan party in Parliament) and leftism (the French Revolution, the template of all subsequent Communist totalitarian revolutions, was itself inspired by the Puritan rebellion against the godly King Charles I).   This led me to place a much higher value on the ancient Creeds, the teachings of the Fathers, and the Councils of the early Church than I had before, and my theological conservatism matured into High Anglican orthodoxy.

The last two years have put a strain on these theological convictions, as the leaders, not only of the Anglican Communion, but the other Communions with an Apostolic ministry, have with few exceptions, submitted to the tyranny of the new false religion of Antichrist that has made an idol out of physical health to which it has demanded that spiritual health and wellbeing as well as psychological health and the health of society, economy, and community all be sacrificed.   Abusing the Keys Christ gave to the Apostles - not just St. Peter - they have locked people away from the Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament, not because of unrepentant open sin, but because a respiratory disease that resembles the flu far more than it does cholera, the Black Death, or any of the other far worse historical plagues that nobody ever behaved this stupidly over has been going around.   When they opened the Churches again, they imposed all sorts of "safety protocols" such as capacity limitations, social distancing, wearing masks, and in some cases, mercifully much fewer, vaccine passports , all of which are completely contrary to the example set by Him Who healed the sick that were brought to Him, including the infectious lepers, rebuked His disciples for sending the little children away, and promised that whoever comes to Him He would in no wise cast out.  Some of these, especially the masks and vaccine passports, are chillingly reminiscent of St. John's prophecy of the Mark of the Beast.   Christ promised, however, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church, and I pray that He will rescue her from this apostasy soon.

It is difficult to be a classicist in culture today in a practical rather than a merely theoretical sense because of the aforementioned false religion of Antichrist.   The medical Beast has locked me out of museums, the Centennial Concert Hall where I used to attend the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and Manitoba Opera, or anywhere else where edifying culture might be found, except libraries, because I refuse to be bullied into taking his vaccine.   Even if I were fully persuaded that the vaccine was 100% safe and effective I would not take it because the bullying manner in which it is being imposed on people is behaviour that ought not to be either rewarded or even tolerated by the civilized.   When I look at what the Winnipeg Art Gallery currently has on exhibition according to its website, and the current season of the Manitoba Opera, the loss becomes somewhat more bearable.   Having to miss Beethoven's Fifth a little over a month ago and Haydn's final symphony later this month is rather stinging however.   On the popular culture front I am also shut out of the movie theatres.   That is perhaps something to be thankful for.  Movies and television shows have been noticeably declining in quality for decades and this has recently accelerated.   Look at everything that is now being released through the online streaming platforms.  Or better yet don't.   It is all trying to preach the message of "wokeness", i.e., the racial superiority of people of colour, the sexual superiority of women, the normality of homosexuality and transgender identity and abnormality of heterosexuality and cisgender identity, the impending doom from climate change unless we all stop burning fossil fuels and start eating vegan, and other nonsense of the sort.   On the plus side, plenty of  classic older films, Shakespeare plays , and the like are readily available to stream as well, although the habit of spending all of one's time watching a screen is not one that ought to be cultivated.

Happy New Year

God Save the Queen!

Bad Politicians Pass a Bad Bill

As anyone who has followed my writings for any significant length of time will know when I identify my politics and general philosophy as Tory this is not in reference to the Conservative Party.   This is something that I wish to emphasize in light of the disgraceful behaviour of that party in the last couple of weeks.   To me, being a Tory means being loyal to and supporting traditional institutions that have proven themselves over long ages of time.   In the political sense the primary such traditional institution is hereditary royal monarchy.   The second such institution is parliament.   True Toryism means placing these institutions ahead of abstract ideals like democracy, equality, and even freedom although freedom is not just an abstract ideal but also a basic human good, a good which over the long run is better protected by traditional institutions than by political crusades launched in its name as an abstract ideal.   It also means suspicion and skepticism towards the utopian schemes of those who think that either such ideals or what they consider to be "science" should be the basis of a new, re-ordered, engineered society.    It is a confidence in traditional institutions over the long term, rather than the people who make them up in the short term.   This needs to be stressed especially in regards to parliament.   Earthly human institutions, even traditional ones, are not infallible.  They are of necessity made up of people, and therefore fallible due to the flaws in fallen human nature.   Parliaments are made up of politicians, who have more than their fair share of those flaws.

 

The recent actions of our Canadian Parliament alluded to above in reference to the disgraceful behaviour of the Conservative Party illustrate the point.   In passing Bill C-4, a bill which is objectively not only evil but insane, Parliament failed big time.   This was not because of some flaw in the Westminster System as it evolved over time that can be fixed by social and political engineers.   The problem is entirely in the character of the human beings who make up both the House and the Senate.  

 

Bill C-4 is a new version of a bill the Liberals introduced in the last Parliament which failed to pass the Senate in time to become law, itself a re-worked version of an earlier bill that had expired when Parliament was prorogued last summer.   It was introduced on the twenty-ninth of November, passed the House of Commons on the first of December when all parties extradited it, and passed the Senate on the seventh of December.    The bill that had been introduced in the last Parliament had been quite controversial and this new version, rather than remove the objectionable elements, made them worse.   Therefore, for the Conservatives led by Erin O'Toole to help the Grits pass this bill unanimously was for them to abdicate their duties in the role of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.   For the Senate to pass the bill so quickly was for them to abdicate their duty as the chamber of "sober second thought".  The Liberals, in this Parliament as in the last, are a minority government.   Even if they were a majority, they ought not to be able to fast-track controversial legislation like this.    Something is very, very, wrong here.

 

Bill C-4 amends the Criminal Code to forbid “causing another person to undergo conversion therapy”, “doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that the child undergo conversion therapy outside Canada”, “promoting or advertising conversion therapy” and “receiving a financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy”.   Now, some explanation may be required here.

 

There are people who, like almost everyone else, were born either biologically male or biologically female but who, unlike most other people, either a) think that they are of the other sex than what their body would indicate, b) think that they are some option other than male or female, c) identify as their biological sex but are sexually attracted to members of their own sex either instead of or in addition to members of the opposite sex, or d) are some combination or minute variation of the above.   Those among these who have politicized their gender/sexual identities – or allowed ideologues of the cultural revolutionary far-left to politicize these for them - and who collectively refer to themselves by an ever-increasing stretch of letters standing for the various labels they identify themselves with and which currently goes something like LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY, have demanded that “conversion therapy” be banned. 

 

Now, among those in the aforementioned group who believe their true “gender” to be different from the biological sex they were born with, some seek out reconstructive surgery that would make their bodies, at least in outward appearance, conform to the gender with which they identify.    This is not what is meant by “conversion therapy” and those who have been pushing for the ban on “conversion therapy” would be appalled at the thought of banning this sort of thing.   Indeed, many of them wish to see it available to young children with or without parental approval or consent.

 

No, “conversion therapy” could be said to be the opposite of the above mentioned procedure.   Whereas gender reassignment surgery is cosmetic surgery that makes the appearance of the body conform to the self-image, that makes the physical conform to the psychological, on the assumption that the physical is “wrong” and the psychological “right”, “conversion therapy” is psychological treatment aimed at correcting the psychological so that it conforms to the physical, on the opposite assumption, the assumption that the physical is right and the psychological wrong.

 

Now, among those who support legislation like Bill C-4 that bans “conversion therapy”, there seem to be many who base their support on the assumption that “conversion therapy” entails something like the Ludovico technique that features into Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film of the same title featuring Malcolm McDowell.   In that story, you might recall, Alex – the character portrayed by McDowell in the film – is the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” youth that he calls his “droogs”, who, after robbing and beating an eccentric elderly woman, the last in a string of such thuggish acts, is abandoned by his friends, arrested, and charged for the murder of the woman who dies from her wounds.   In prison, he is offered the chance to get out early if he will undergo the experimental Ludovico technique that would make him incapable of reoffending.   The jumps at the opportunity.   The technique involves strapping him in a chair, with his eyes propped open, and forcing him to watch hours of extremely violent film footage, while he is injected with drugs that cause pain and nausea.    He is thereby so conditioned to experience pain and illness at the slightest thought of violence that he cannot even defend himself.   Proponents of Bill C-4 have certainly encouraged people to assume that this is how “conversion therapy” works.   The legislation itself, however, is worded in such a way as to cover a lot more than just this sort of thing.

 

The bill introduces into law a definition of “conversion therapy” as meaning:

 

a practice, treatment, or service that is designed to

(a)    change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual;

(b)   change a person’s gender identity to cisgender;

(c)   change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth;

(d)   repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour;

(e)   repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or

(f)    repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.

 

Notice the following about this definition:

 

First, if someone were to create something like the Ludovico technique designed to turn a heterosexual person into a homosexual person, or a cisgender person into a transgender person, it would not meet the definition of “conversion therapy’ introduced in the bill.   Thus, although this sort of legislation has been sold to the public as a ban of a harmful technique akin to brainwashing it is no such thing.   No technique that has been used in “conversion therapy” in the past is banned by this legislation and remains legal under it provided the conversion is in the opposite direction of what the bill forbids.

 

Second, the definition is broad enough to take in any sort of counselling or advice that encourages people to recognize, acknowledge and identify as their birth sex and to live within the limits of traditional sexual ethics.   Indeed, (d) could be interpreted as banning the teaching of traditional sexual ethics altogether.   It would not surprise me if the clowns that now occupy Her Majesty’s bench in most jurisdictions in the Dominion were to interpret it in just this manner.

 

So what we have here is a definition that errs by being too broad and too narrow at the same time.   It is too broad in that it takes in things that government has no business legislating against – traditional sexual ethics and counselling based on the same.  It is too narrow in that it does not ban what the public has been told it bans – coercive and abusive techniques qua coercive and abusive techniques.

 

In its previous incarnations as Bill C-8 (first attempt) and C-6 (second attempt), this legislation met with opposition on precisely the grounds that the definition of “conversion therapy” was too broad and could take in professional and pastoral counselling, pulpit teaching and preaching, and even ordinary conversation in which traditional views of sexual identity and ethics are expressed.   The present bill has done nothing to assuage such concerns and, indeed, is worse than its predecessors in that whereas the earlier bills were attempts to ban “conversion therapy” for children the bill which actually passed Parliament also bans “conversion therapy” for adults.   The earlier versions were bad enough in that given the broad definition of “conversion therapy” they would have made criminals out of parents who seek out help for their children in accordance with their own consciences and beliefs rather than those of the left-wing ideologues in the Liberal Party of Canada.   With the passing of this bill, however, when it comes into effect the state of the law will be such that those who identify their gender as something other than the biological sex with which they were born will have no problem obtaining the kind of “conversion therapy” that consists of physical surgery to make the body conform in appearance to “gender identity”, and should someone for some reason or another want professional help in converting from heterosexuality to homosexuality or from cisgender identity to transgender identity  (1) the law would not prohibit some quack from providing this service even if it involves dangerous, pain-inducing, methods, but those who want help in accepting their biological sex or controlling same-sex desires that they believe it is wrong to act upon will be prevented from finding such help and anyone offering such help, even in the form of conversational counselling, will face criminal punishment for doing so.

 

A bill of this sort is fundamentally and thoroughly rotten legislation that is clearly aimed at imposing “woke” ideology as it pertains to sex and gender on Canadians at the expense of traditional religious and moral beliefs as well as personal freedom of choice.   It ought never to have passed Parliament at all, much less without debate and with unanimous support in both chambers, and with Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the Upper Chamber of “sober second thought” both patting themselves on the back for refusing to do their jobs.    Parliament is an institution that has stood the test of time and proven itself over and over again, but if we keep sending to it the sort of people who currently fill its seats – and I include those on the Opposition bench as well as those in government in this – then cruddy legislation like this will keep making it into law.

 

(1)     A case can be made that what goes under the name “education” today in most schools (other than private and parochial ones) and universities amounts to little more than just this sort of “reverse conversion therapy” inflicted upon unsuspecting youth.

If We Must Take Away Guns From People Start With the Police

This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.

Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.

A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.

I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.

According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.

All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.

Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.

The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.

Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.

You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.

Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.

There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.

The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.

The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.


(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.

Government Hubris

Last December, at the annual pre-Christmas open house at the Manitoba legislature, I shook Premier Brian Pallister’s hand, congratulated him on his re-election, and told him to keep up the good work. Today, I wish I could take all of that back. Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative party of Manitoba. I voted Progressive Conservative in the last provincial election, and have voted Progressive Conservative in every provincial election since I was old enough to vote. I do not think that I will be voting for them again for as long as Pallister leads the party. Indeed, I am contemplating actively and aggressively campaigning against their re-election. It is not that I think any other party would govern better. I do not. It is not that I wish to see Wab Kinew become premier of Manitoba. The very thought of that happening turns my stomach. I regard Kinew and the socialist party that he leads with greater disgust and contempt than anything that ever fell to the ground from the backside of a horse. It is rather that in my opinion the way Pallister has been talking and behaving over the last three weeks demands punishment. I am getting really, really, sick and tired of the arrogant, drunk-with-power, threatening tone of Brian Pallister and of his chief public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin

Pallister ought to have listened to Her Majesty’s marvelous speech on Sunday and learned from her how to speak to the public in a time of crisis. Indeed, all of our provincial premiers and the Dominion premier should have done so. That, of course, assumes that they have the capacity to learn. This is a very big assumption indeed. Our Sovereign is a lady of class and breeding, whereas our politicians, at the risk of unfairly insulting livestock, all give the impression of having been raised in a barn. I have many times written about the distinction between authority and power. Here we have that distinction perfectly illustrated. The Queen in her address to the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth spoke with authority. Brian Pallister and Brent Roussin, who never open their mouths without bossing us around, slapping further restrictions down on us, and threatening us, only understand power.

Brian Pallister declared a provincial state-of-emergency at a much earlier stage of the COVID-19 outbreak than his counterparts in most other provinces. This occurred on Friday, March 20th, at which point in time Manitoba had seventeen confirmed cases of the virus, all of whom were people who had contracted the virus while travelling out of province. In declaring the state of emergency Pallister and Roussin limited gatherings to fifty people, required businesses to impose an one to two metre gap between patrons, limited the number of people theatres and dining facilities could seat, and closed all bingo and gaming, as well as gyms and other “wellness centres.” Roussin threatened everyone who did not obey these rules with fines up to fifty thousand dollars – five hundred thousand for corporations – and six months in prison. Pallister, in a truly odious press interview, in which he acknowledged but brushed off concerns that these measures were draconian, encouraged Manitobans to spy and snitch on each other.

Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the province has climbed slowly. It is only very recently at the beginning of April, that Roussin announced that the early stages of transmission within the community, as opposed to bringing it in from the outside, had been detected. At that time there were one hundred and twenty seven confirmed cases. It was before that, however, that he and Pallister had begun tightening the existing restrictions and imposing new ones. Indeed, that very day a two week order for all businesses and services that the provincial government deemed “non-essential” to close came into effect. The order had come down a couple of days earlier. Even prior to that, the government had decreased the number of people allowed to gather to ten. This took place about the time that the first death from COVID-19 in the province occurred – there have been two as of the time of this writing. The first death was of an elderly woman who had been in Intensive Care since the first phase of the provincial shut down. Her death would not have been prevented had Pallister and Roussin imposed the ten person limit on March 20th. Her death would not have been prevented had “non-essential” businesses been ordered to close on March 20th. Tightening the restrictions was not a rational act, but rather a sign that the exercise of absolute power had gone to the chief public health official’s head.

By the first day of this week the confirmed cases in Manitoba had risen to two hundred and three. On Monday, one additional case brought the number to two hundred and four. Eleven people have been hospitalized, seven of whom are in Intensive Care. The very same day, Roussin’s tone jumped to a whole new level of arrogant, totalitarian, bossiness. Issuing threats of police enforcement, this Grinch-like creature stole Easter and the Passover from Christians and Jews. Having already closed the Churches and synagogues, he now ordered the faithful not to have “family dinners and get togethers.” “Everyone needs to adhere to the public health orders” he said “and that includes faith-based organizations.” Which is simply another way of saying that he thinks that his commandments overrule those of God.

That doctors, in the sense of physicians, think they are God has long been a stereotype and, like most stereotypes, contains a great deal of truth. For this reason, it is dangerous to give them any sort of civil authority. It goes to their heads a lot quicker than it does other people.

To those, like this writer, who grew up reading novels by George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Anthony Burgess, and others warning us against totalitarianism, as well as the non-fictional accounts by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest of the very real totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain, it is hugely offensive that today, Her Majesty’s free subjects in this province of Manitoba, in the Dominion of Canada, cannot go to the grocery store without being forced by authoritarian goons to wait, six feet apart, in a line outside the store until they are told to enter. Once inside the store, their every move is policed by the store Gestapo, until they enter a similar line at the checkout. These conditions belong in Communist countries like the former Soviet Union, not in a Commonwealth realm.

Dr. Roussin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is furthermore a huge violation of medical ethics. The fact that everyone else is doing it in no way excuses him. What principle of medical ethics could be more fundamental than primum non nocere, which principle is enshrined in the vow to abstain from harm in the famous oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos? (1) Yet every conceivable form of harm – psychological, spiritual, ethical, social, civil, and physical, including death itself - is the inevitable result of a lengthy, enforced, universal shut down of society.

The tighter the restrictions become, the more rules are imposed upon us, the longer we are kept from our friends and family and Churches, and forced to violate our nature as Aristotle’s “social animal”, the greater the harm caused by the anti-COVID measures will be. There will be this significant difference, however, between the deaths from COVID-19 complications that these measures might be preventing and the deaths from domestic violence, suicide, and murder that these measures will cause if maintained for too long. Nobody, except perhaps the government of Red China, could be legitimately blamed for the former. The blood of the latter will be upon the hands and heart and soul of Dr. Brent Roussin and Premier Brian Pallister forever.

(1) The principle, in the familiar wording, comes, interestingly enough, from another work of Hippocrates entitled Of the Epidemics. In the Oath, of course, it is turned into a vow: ἐπὶ δηλήσει δὲ καὶ ἀδικίῃ εἴρξειν

The Nature and Origin of Evil

Since ancient times, it has been the practice of the Christian church to observe a forty-day fasting period in preparation for Easter, the annual Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Christian Passover in commemoration of the redemption of the world that inaugurated the New Covenant, of which the Passover of the Old Covenant was an anticipatory type. In the English-speaking world we call this period Lent. (1) In the Western church, this period begins on Ash Wednesday (2) which, as the name indicates, is a day set aside for the sober business of remembering our morality, and repenting our sin, (3) setting the tone for our reflections during this period. It is a very appropriate tone, since our sin and morality, are both the reason for Christ’s entering the world on His redemptive mission, taking our humanity, our mortality, and, as He died on the cross, our sin, upon Himself, and the enemies over which He triumphed when He rose victorious from the grave.

It is also ancient custom for the church’s lexicons to assign readings from the Pentateuch, and especially the books of Genesis and Exodus, to this period. The readings assigned to the daily offices (4) in the Book of Common Prayer begin Genesis at the start of Shrovetide (5), the two and a half weeks just prior to Lent. The book of Exodus is very fitting for this period, of course, because it tells the story of the redemption of national Israel from slavery in Egypt, the first Passover foreshadowing the Christian one. The book of Genesis prepares for this by explaining what the Israelites were doing in Egypt in the first place, but it also goes back to the beginning of the story, to the entrance of sin and death into the world with the Fall of man, and to Creation itself. St. Basil the Great’s Hexaemeron, a series of lessons on the six days of Creation, were originally a set of homilies preached during the Lenten season.

The juxtaposition of meditations upon Creation with reflections on sin and mortality, brings to mind the conundrum that theologians and philosophers have been struggling to answer for centuries. That is the question of evil. Why is there evil in a world created by a good and all-powerful God?

Framed that way, the traditional and orthodox answer to the question is that God gave man and the angels free will in the sense of the ability to make moral choices, i.e., choices for which they are responsible and can be held accountable, and that implicit in such free will is the possibility of evil. We shall return to this answer, but first let us look at a different angle of the question. What is evil?

This is actually a trick question, which requires some elaboration to explain. Everything that exists, is either a substance – in the philosophical sense of the term, which includes non-material substances such as spirit and energy – or an attribute– a quality, like colour, for example, that exists, not in itself, except in a transcendental realm like Plato’s realm of the Forms, but in substances. The existence of attributes, is secondary to that of substances, on which it is dependent, and a further distinction must be made between real attributes, whether properties or accidents, (6) in which the qualities are positively present in their substances, like sweetness in sugar, and “unreal” accidents that are only negatively present, i.e., absences, wants, and defects. The latter, while present and observable, do not “exist” in the same sense that substances and real attributes do. Everything that does exist, in this sense, must either be eternal, the source of its own existence, or created, dependent upon something prior to itself for its existence. As the existence of attributes is a secondary form of existence to that of substances, so the existence of all created substances and attributes, is secondary to that of the eternal. Only God, as the First Cause, is eternal, truly possessing existence in Himself that is not dependent upon another. (7) Everything else that exists derives its existence from Him as part of His Creation, either as substance or attribute. Since God Himself is Good, evil therefore, must either a) be part of His Creation as a substance, b) be part of His Creation as a real attribute, or c) not exist. Evil is certainly not a substance created by God. Nor is it a real attribute of anything that He made. Throughout the account of Creation, God looks upon the things that He has made – Light, Earth and Sea, plant life, the sun, moon, and stars, the birds of the air and fishes of the sea, and land animals – and sees that they are good (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Finally, after creating man in His own image, He “saw everything that he had made: and behold, it was every good.” (Gen. 1:31) Therefore evil does not exist. The orthodox answer to the question what is evil is that it is not.

It should be clear from the above, that the assertion that evil does not exist is not a denial of its presence in the world, the evidence of which presence abounds wherever we look, but that evil, being neither a substance nor a real attribute, has no being, essence, or, the title of this essay notwithstanding, nature. Evil’s presence in this world is like the presence of the shadow that is cast when some object blocks the light. Light is something, it exists, it has an essence, whereas the darkness of the shadow does not, it is simply the absence of the light. St. Basil, therefore, introduces the subject of evil in the second homily of his Hexameron, in commenting on the words “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” in the second verse of Genesis. Just as the darkness in this verse, is neither a created nor an uncreated essence, but is the “shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for some reason deprived of light” so evil is “neither uncreate nor created by God” but is “is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.” (8)

St. Basil was addressing heresies here, primarily the dualistic heresy of Manichaeism in which darkness and evil are real essences, almost equal to those of light and goodness. St. Augustine, who had been a disciple of this heresy prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, declared that “What is called Evil in the Universe is but the Absence of Good”, illustrating the point with bodily diseases and wounds which “mean nothing but the absence of health” and which are not substances but defects “in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils— that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents.” (9) Similarly St. John of Damascus declared that “evil is not any essence nor a property of essence, but an accident, that is, a voluntary deviation from what is natural into what is unnatural, which is sin.” (10) The writer whose works were attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite devotes much of the fourth chapter of his book on the Divine Names to addressing the question of evil, concludes that “The Evil, then, is not an actual thing, nor is the Evil in things existing. For the Evil, qua evil, is nowhere, and the fact that evil comes into being is not inconsequence of power, but by reason of weakness…[the demons] aspire to the Good, in so fa as they aspire to be and to live and to think. And in so far as they do not aspire to the Good, they aspire to the non-existent; and this is not aspiration, but a missing of the true aspiration.” (11) St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil is, in some way or other, engendered from within, springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of the soul from the beautiful. For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition between virtue and vice. It is, in fact, not possible to form any other notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue. For as when the light has been removed the darkness supervenes, but as long as it is present there is no darkness, so, as long as the good is present in the nature, vice is a thing that has no inherent existence; while the departure of the better state becomes the origin of its opposite. (12)

If evil is not something that exists, in either a created or an uncreated essence, but denotes an absence of goodness in created beings, how, since God created all things good, do we explain the presence of this absence?

We return to the orthodox answer of free will – the ability, of men and angels, as rational, responsible, moral beings to make choices for which they are accountable. If free will explains the presence of that void in the souls of men and demons that we call evil, then this raises some further questions. If God created moral, rational, beings with the attribute of free will, then free will itself must be good. How then, can free will, being good, result in evil?

In considering this question it is important to observe that evil is the result of free will, not its product or creation. This is related to what we have already considered about evil not being a substance or a real attribute but a defect or absence. When men and angels exercised their free will in disobedience to God, the evil that ensued was not the entrance into existence of a new essence called evil, but the diminishment of their own being, through the loss of the quality of goodness. Which is why this event is referred to as the Fall. Mankind fell away from what he was to become something less.

The question, therefore becomes, one of how it can it be the nature of free will, an attribute that is itself good, to make choices that result in such a diminishment of being, such a loss of goodness possible. To add another dimension to the question, remember that according to the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, the choice to sin resulted in the diminishment, not only of our created goodness, but the freedom of the will itself, which then became bound in slavery to sin. The answer is that what was included in the nature of free will, was not the inevitability of this result, but its possibility.

This leads to the question of how, if it is the nature of free will to include the potential for evil choices, for falling away from goodness and its own freedom, free will itself can be considered good.

Here, the orthodox answer is, that while it is the nature of free will to include the possibility of choosing evil, free will is necessary for moral goodness in created, rational, beings. Free will, again, is the quality of being able to make rational, moral, choices for which one can be held accountable. This is a quality which must exist in created beings who bear the image of their Creator, which is the first thing predicated of man in the Scriptural account of his Creation. (13) It is only this quality, which includes the potential for sin, that allows for the possibility of goodness that is chosen.

The influence of his orthodox Catholic upbringing is clearly visible in the novels of John Anthony Wilson Burgess, who wrote under his two middle names. He is most remembered, due to Stanley Kubrick’s film version, for his novel A Clockwork Orange, and the very point of orthodox theology that we have been considering is at the heart of this novel. The main character of Alex, leader of a gang of “droogs”, is caught, arrested, and sent to prison after a string of “ultra-violent” crimes, including the home-invasion of a writer who is beaten half to death and forced to watch the rape of his wife, and the murder of a wealthy, elderly, woman. He is offered the chance of early release from prison, when he learns of the government’s experimental new “Ludovico technique” for curing people of violent, criminal, tendencies. He volunteers to undergo the technique, which consists of his being conditioned, by being forced to watch images of violence while being injected with drugs that cause pain and sickness, to become extremely ill whenever a violent urge arises within him. The prison chaplain objects to the technique and, speaking as the voice of the author, explains that the removal of free will, and the possibility of evil, does not thereby create goodness. The state officials ignore him and proclaim their new technique to be a success, but the chaplain’s commentary is born out as the released Alex finds that he has not been cured of his violent tendencies, so much as robbed of the ability, not just to act on them, but also to defend himself against the violence of others. There is a lesson in this, that our government, which, responding to the demands of the ignorant following the recent string of school shootings south of the border, has just introduced more gun control legislation, legislation which only ever diminishes the ability of the law-abiding to defend themselves and never keeps guns out of the hands of criminals, might learn, if it had ears to hear and eyes to see, but as long as it is led by the Trudeau Liberals, it will remain as blind as a bat and as deaf as a post.

For man to be a good being, not just in the sense in which rocks and trees, fish and birds, are good, but in the sense God intended, of a rational, moral, being who freely chooses the good, required that he be created with the potential of choosing wrongly, of turning away from God and the light, from Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, to the void that is darkness and evil. Man having so chosen, the events that we are about to commemorate in Holy Week, from Jesus’ presentation of Himself as the Christ in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, through His death on the Cross on Good Friday, His burial and the Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday, culminating in His triumph over death on Easter Sunday, are the story of how God set about to rescue man from his own choice and free him from the bondage of sin, that he might finally be the being God intended him to be.





(1) As with “Easter”, “Lent” is a term that indicates the season of the year in which these occur. In the languages first spoken by the church, and modern languages derived from those languages, the celebration of the Resurrection is called Pascha (the Christian Passover) and the preceding fasting period is called by words designating its length, “from the fortieth.”
(2) The Western church does not count the six Sundays as part of the forty days of Lent because Sundays, on which the church meets in remembrance of the Resurrection, are weekly Easters or Paschas. The Eastern church, however, counts the Sundays in the forty days and so begins them on a Monday.
(3) The “Ash” of “Ash Wednesday” alludes to the ancient practice of donning sackcloth and heaping ashes on oneself to mourn over one’s sins, and to the dust and ashes, to which everything temporal is ultimately reduced.
(4) From Latin “officium”, meaning “duty” or “service”, this refers to the Hours of Prayer. There are traditionally seven of these. The Book of Common Prayer assigns readings and liturgy to the two most important, Matins or Morning Prayer, and Vespers or Evening Prayer which, when chanted or sung, is commonly known as Evensong. Elements of two other of the offices, Lauds and Compline, are incorporated into this liturgy.
(5) The period that begins on Septuagesima and ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day prior to Ash Wednesday.
(6) A property is an attribute that arises out of an essence or substance so that it cannot be changed without the substance itself becoming something different, an accident is an attribute that can be altered without altering essence.
(7) Note that God, when asked by Moses: “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you: and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” answered “I AM THAT I AM...Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Ex. 3:13-14.
(8) St. Basil of Caeserea, Hexaemeron, Homily II.4.
(9) St. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion, XI. Enchiridion is Greek for “handbook”, and this handbook is on the subject of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Chapter XI falls in the “faith” section, which is rebutting various heresies. The chapter prior asserted that “The Supremely Good Creator Made All Things Good”.
(10) St. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV.20.
(11) The Divine Names, IV. 34. Dionysius the Areopagite was the convert St. Paul made at Mars Hill (the Areopagus – hence the Areopagite) in Acts 17. The works attributed to him, are almost universally considered to be much later than the first century, and so the true author is unknown.
(12) St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, II.5.
(13) Genesis 1:26.