What Word Would You Use?

What word would you use to describe a government that loudly proclaims its belief in and commitment to “democracy” but governs with contempt for the institution of Parliament and the idea that it, that is the government in the sense of the Cabinet of executive ministers, is accountable to Parliament for all of its actions and displays this same contempt regardless of whether it commands a majority or a small plurality in the House of Commons?   

 

What if that same government, while constantly evoking the “common good” when demanding total submission and obedience to every rule, regulation, and restriction it imposes even if these blatantly violate, and not in any way that could objectively be called reasonable or minimal, the most basic of the rights and freedoms that are supposed to be protected by constitutional law, conspicuously governs in a way that rewards those who tend to vote for it and punishes those who tend to vote against it?  

 

Let us say, for example, that a Liberal government on the one hand got itself embroiled in a huge corruption scandal for putting pressure on its Justice Minister to interfere in an ongoing prosecution on behalf of a large corporate donor to the Liberal Party located in the home province of the Prime Minister, and on the other hand did everything in its power to sabotage the energy industry of the province(s) least likely to elect Liberals to Parliament.      Let us add that this same Liberal government in the name of combatting the gun violence that is primarily a problem in urban areas that vote Liberal or NDP, introduced a new gun ban that was completely useless for that purpose in that urban gun violence is almost entirely committed with already illegal handguns, but, like most previous Liberal gun legislation, primarily affected rural gun owners who tend not to vote Liberal or NDP.    Let us also add that this Liberal government keeps targeting parts of the population – like pickup truck owners and prairie grain farmers – who traditionally vote against the Liberals with its tax policies.

 

In other words it displays utter disregard for that grand traditional principle of Parliament that it is the duty of those who hold executive office in government to serve all Canadians – this is what the common good is supposed to mean and what it was traditionally understood to mean – rather than favouring their own supporters, and especially not punishing those who voted against them.   Note that hindering the government from giving in to the temptation to do the latter is a major part of the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and of the reason why Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is an official standing in Parliament and not just a label for the runner-up in the last Dominion election.

 

Suppose that the same government was led by a Prime Minister who refuses to take action when protests conducted in the name of causes that he and his followers support such as the various causes associated with the Green movement or those of the so-called anti-racist – in reality anti-white would be a more accurate description – movement disrupt commerce, movement, and the everyday lives of numerous Canadians or even break out into violence and other destructive criminal behaviour.    Suppose that this same Prime Minister likes to lecture the governments of other countries on the need to allow peaceful protest and to listen to people who disagree with them.   Then suppose that this same Prime Minister, when faced with a protest against his government’s policies and actions and how they have infringed upon Canadians’ basic rights and freedoms and adversely affected the lives and livelihoods of the protesters and countless others, even though the protest is far more deserving of the adjective “peaceful” than any of those that the Prime Minister supports, instead of listening to them hides himself away and like a tantrum-throwing three year old hurls every nasty name he can think of against them, before bringing out the biggest tool available to the government, one designed for use against terrorism and never before used in its current form, essentially putting the country under martial law, in order to crack down hard on the protesters.    While all of this is still expanding upon our initial and primary question it is worth adding a second question here of whether, when this Prime Minister sets up an inquiry into his own just mentioned actions, we can expect this to be impartial and its results credible.

 

Now suppose that immediately after the events described in the previous paragraph the same Prime Minister goes on a foreign tour in which he lectures other leaders about the dangers of a rise in “authoritarianism”.   In his usage, “authoritarian” appears to describe leaders and movements he doesn’t like, whereas “democratic” appears to mean little more than leaders and movements he does like, and the purpose of the lectures would seem to be to encourage the governments of the world to join him in an attempt to recklessly escalate a volatile situation in a volatile part of the world that the Americans had foolishly been fomenting for years into something much worse.   Meanwhile, while condemning “authoritarianism” – again, meaning little more than those whose politics he disagrees with – his own governance displays many of the characteristics of totalitarianism.

 

The distinction between “authoritarianism” and “totalitarianism” was made by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would soon thereafter serve as American ambassador to the UN during the Reagan administration, in an article entitled “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that appeared in the flagship journal of American neo-conservatism, Commentary, in November of 1979 and was later expanded into a book that came out in 1982.   While the Kirkpatrick Doctrine is vulnerable to many of the same objections that could be made against American neo-conservatism in general, the distinction is not without merit.    The basic distinction is that an “authoritarian” government claims a monopoly on political power in the country it governs, but a “totalitarian” government claims a monopoly on every aspect of the country – political, economic, social, cultural – and the lives of those it governs.    Consequently, an authoritarian government, while bossier and far less tolerant of dissent than Western liberal democracies are – or like to think they are at any rate – does not attempt to dictate the every thought of those they govern, like a totalitarian regime.   People living under an authoritarian government were thought to be far less free than people living in a liberal democracy but far more free than people living in a totalitarian police state.   Programming the public to think a certain way about everything, spying on everyone’s every move, basically everything out of George Orwell’s 1984, these are the hallmarks of totalitarianism.   The term first caught on as a convenient way of describing the characteristics shared by both the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and the Fascist and National Socialist regimes in Italy and Germany.

 

Totalitarian governments like to rely upon fear to keep their populations under control.   Related to this, one of their favourite tactics to use against dissenters is scapegoating.   Scapegoating is when they point to an identifiable group of dissenters – it works best if the group is small and unpopular – and blames this group for whatever ills are afflicting the population, with these ills often being in reality the fault of the government, and tell the public that “they” are to blame, that these “spoilers” are the reason the regime’s grand and glorious programs aren’t working out as planned.   By doing this the totalitarian regime is able to identify its own enemies in the public mind as “enemies of the people” and turn the public’s fear against them.

 

Let us now return to the Liberal Prime Minister we had been discussing.   Let us imagine that this individual won the first term of his premiership in a Dominion election in which he accused his Conservative predecessor of employing the “politics of fear and division”.  The implication was that it was fear of ethnic and racial diversity and immigration that he was accusing the previous government of in which case the accusation was entirely groundless as that government was similar to his own on such matters.  The public did have good reason to think of the previous Conservative Prime Minister as engaging in the politics of fear in that he had exploited the fear of terrorism to pass a bill making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Canadians.   The Liberal leader, however, had been the only other party leader in Parliament to support this bill.   Perhaps his talk about the “politics of fear and division” was just an empty smokescreen.  

 

When it came to his own premiership, however, “the politics of fear and division” could be said to be its feature characteristic.   As one of the new “woke” breed of progressives, he has stoked the fear of such things as racism – racism on the part of whites, he doesn’t care about explicit and even violent racial hatred directed against whites by other people – sexism, homophobia, and more recently transphobia – in order to turn Canadians who have the “correct” opinions on such matters, i.e., those approved by the media and academic left, against Canadians who do not.   When the media generated an unnecessary panic over the spread of a new coronavirus he exploited the situation to get out from under the constraints of Parliamentary accountability which ordinarily would be enhanced by his having been reduced to minority status in the last Dominion election only a few months prior.   He made use of this new situation to spend like a drunken sailor, paying Canadians to stay home for months, so the provincial governments and their public health officers could follow the advice of the Dominion public health officer, which was to implement the experimental procedure of trying to control the spread of the virus by keeping everybody apart.   When this didn’t work, he scapegoated those who objected to the unprecedented curtailing of all our basic rights and freedoms.    Then, when the new mRNA injections were available, he, flip-flopping completely on his original stated position that they would be available to those who wanted them but nobody would be compelled to take them, jumped on board the idea of returning to most Canadians most of their rights and freedoms, converted by the whole process into permissions and privileges, while locking those who had refused the injection – or the required number of injections – out of the new re-opened society in a way that resembles nothing so much as the whole “show me your papers” trope from depictions of Cold War era totalitarian regimes.   His scapegoating of those who refused the injection – those, remember, who are distinguished from other Canadians only by the fact that they were not willing to give the government their unthinking, blind, trust and allow themselves to be injected with a never-before-used-on-humans substance that had not completed its clinical trials merely because the government said it was safe and was heavily pressuring them into taking it – was in language that we would normally associate with how the Bolsheviks talked about the kulaks, or the Nazis about the Jews.   Accusing them of all sorts of “isms” that had nothing to do with the issue, he suggested that we should be asking ourselves as a society whether we should be tolerating them in our midst.   Bizarre as may be to compare something said about the ultra-individualist Ayn Rand to this collectivist creep, his comment nevertheless brings to mind something Whittaker Chambers said in his famous review of Atlas Shrugged in the December, 1957 issue of National Review: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber-go!’”

 

Now suppose this Prime Minister also conspicuously displays another totalitarian characteristic – the urge to control what everyone else thinks.   Indeed, let us further stipulate that this trait was evident in his leadership of his own party before he even became Prime Minister.    Declaring by fiat that the debate about abortion was settled and over – a rather strange way of describing a status quo that exists merely because Parliament narrowly failed in the Mulroney premiership to follow the Supreme Court’s recommendation that it pass new abortion laws to replace those it was striking down and no subsequent government has had the gumption to do anything about despite the fact that there is overwhelming public support for neither the status quo nor the status quo ante – he forbade pro-life members of his own party from voting their conscience on the issue, and refused to sign the nomination papers of any future candidates that did not agree with him on the matter.   It is less surprising, therefore, that a leader who places strict limits on what members of his own party are allowed to think on a controversial issue like this, as Prime Minister would treat the country in the same way.

 

When it comes to Canadians, this not-so-hypothetical Prime Minister is single-mindedly obsessed with controlling both the information that they are allowed to access and the ideas they are allowed to share with others.    When his then-Finance Minister, who shortly thereafter would be forced to resign in disgrace to save the Prime Minister’s skin in a scandal in which both of their families were involved, announced a government bailout of privately owned newspapers, television stations, and other pre-internet media of communication, he declared that this was “to protect the vital role that independent news media play in our democracy and in our communities”.   Predictably, however, it had almost the opposite effect of this.   The newspapers, television stations, etc. that took this money – the vast majority of them – began echoing the same point of view expressed on the CBC overnight and thus could hardly be said to be “independent news media” at all anymore.   The Crown broadcaster itself, which had long been shamefully slanted towards the progressive left and the Liberal party, abandoned even the pretense of the impartiality that Canadians ought to be able to expect from a public, tax-funded, news company and began presenting a narrower range of perspectives on a broader number of issues, one that was coterminous with the spectrum of views the Prime Minister considered “acceptable”.    Yes, this Prime Minister has actually distinguished certain Canadians from others on the grounds that their views were “unacceptable”.    Unsatisfied, however, with over 90% of the Canadian media, public and nominally private, echoing his own point of view, the Prime Minister has taken a hostile, combative attitude towards the few media outlets that present an alternative perspective, thus displaying his true attitude towards “independent news media”.

 

The independent news media that resist conforming to the Prime Minister’s party line are primarily those that operate on the internet.    Before the last Parliament was dissolved the government had introduced a bill that would give the CRTC the same kind of regulatory control over the internet that it already has over radio and television.   Although they pitched this as a means of making streaming services and social media abide by the same Canadian content rules as traditional broadcasting media, it was clearly worded in such a way as to give the CRTC the power to censor online opinions which the government has deemed to be “unacceptable”.   The main target of this, and the government’s more overt attempts at licensing independent media, seems obviously to be the handful of online news companies that have a perspective independent of and often hostile to the Prime Minister’s own.   The government also failed to assuage the concerns of those who feared that the government was trying to tell individual Canadians what they could and could not say when using social media.   Although they insisted that they were not trying to regulate user generated content, they kept removing safeguards against this very thing.   They had also tabled a bill that would re-introduce something similar to Section 13.   Section 13 was the provision of the Canadian Human Rights Act that allowed those who belonged to groups protected against discrimination – although the Act is worded in such a way as to suggest that it protects everybody against discrimination on the basis of their race, sex, etc., it has been generally interpreted by the courts as protecting certain groups that are “vulnerable” rather than others, i.e., blacks but not whites, women but not men, etc. – to charge others with discrimination on the basis of words they had communicated over the telephone or over the internet.   It was so loosely worded that virtually anything negative said about someone from a protected group would fall under the umbrella and so a conviction was pretty much guaranteed.   Parliament repealed it after the public became aware of how bad it was.   The proposed replacement would be even worse in that it would allow for a court order to be taken out against someone before he had even said anything.    Both of these bills were re-introduced after the government won re-election.   The new versions are worse than the ones that failed to become law in the last session of Parliament.

 

As if all that were not thought control enough, among many other non-budget related items included in this year’s federal budget – the turning of budget bills into omnibus bills ought to have been banned decades ago, it is far too easy a way for government to smuggle things into law that would not withstand Parliamentary scrutiny and debate if introduced separately on their own merits – was a provision that would criminalize publicly expressing an opinion that disagrees with that of the Prime Minister about historical events of eighty years ago.   To be more precise it will criminalize the denial, condoning, and diminishing of the Holocaust.  Germany, France, and a number of other European countries had introduced similar laws decades ago but this was a very bad example to follow.  (1)  It is not government’s place to tell people what they can and cannot think or say about historical events.   When they attempt to do so they merely set up their understanding and interpretation of the historical event as a dogma in a new state religion.   The very expression “Holocaust denial” illustrates the point.  (2)  When someone denies that a historical event took place this may, depending upon the evidence for the event, call into question his intelligence, but “Charge of the Light Brigade Denial” is an expression that would not carry the moral undertones that “Holocaust denial” does.   This tells us that to those who are obsessed with condemning the latter it involves the denial of an essential tenet of faith.     Yet it is an essential tenet of neither any orthodox form of Christianity nor Islam.   Nor is it an essential tenet of Judaism in any traditional understanding of that religion.   This was a point that the late academic rabbi Dr. Jacob Neusner frequently made when bemoaning the fact that for many American Jews remembering the Holocaust had replaced remembering Moses, the Exodus and the Sinaitic Covenant at the core of their identity.  (3)  If it is not an essential tenet of any of these religions, it is not an essential tenet of any traditional religion.    Surely members of all traditional religions, the tenets of faith of none of which are similarly protected against denial by law, ought to object to such protection being extended to a new state faith and by the party, none the less, which in Canada has been most historically identified with the American doctrine of “separation of church and state”.   (4) I hope that you note the irony – those who think that the appropriate way of responding to “Holocaust denial” is to pass laws of this sort which essentially boils down to telling people with a view they find loathsome “shut up, shut up, or I’ll make you shut up” by doing so make themselves far more closely resemble the Nazi dictator, at least as he is depicted in Hollywood films, than do those they are attempting to silence. (5)

 

This Prime Minister has a habit of condemning opinions that differ from his as “denial”, thus making his own opinion out to be an essential tenet of faith.   With regards to both the climate and the pandemic, for example, he speaks of those he disagrees with as “science deniers”.   Ironically, of course, since it is the very nature of science not to speak dogmatically – to be scientific at all, a theory must be open to being questioned and tested – “science denier” is an epithet that is only meaningful as it rebounds upon the one who uses it.   More to the point, however, when the same Prime Minister justifies his attempts to squash the few remaining independent Canadian media sources that do not dance to his tune and bring the online platforms where Canadians express their thoughts and speak their minds under government regulatory control on the grounds that the spread of “misinformation” and “disinformation” – information, that is, with which he disagrees and of which he disapproves – online causes “harm”, can there be any doubt that having outright banned one form of “denial”, he is moving in the direction of similarly suppressing all of these “denials” he hates.   He does all of this in the name of liberal democracy, although it looks more and more like totalitarianism every day.

 

As an old-fashioned Tory, of course, who believes in time-proven institutions like the monarchy and Parliament and distrusts abstract ideals like liberalism and democracy, this does not seem as contradictory to me as it would to a neo-conservative, since I see the seeds of totalitarianism in both liberalism and democracy.    In the Prime Minister in question and his sycophantic Cabinet these seeds are rapidly coming to a full bloom.

 

So again, I ask, what word best describes such a Prime Minister and such a Cabinet in which such an appalling combination of self-righteousness, arrogance, hypocrisy, disrespect for the constraints of Parliamentary tradition and constitutional law, and totalitarian impulse can be found?

 

A new one might be needed to really do the matter justice.

 

(1)   It might surprise some to learn that such a law was not already on the books in Canada.   The trials of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra in the 1980s are among the most famous legal cases involving “Holocaust denial” in history and both took place here in Canada.   In both cases, however, the complaints were based on laws that did not speak about “Holocaust denial” specifically.   In Zündel’s case, for example, the law was Section 181 of the Criminal Code which prohibited the deliberate spread of false news.   He was charged twice under this law, and convicted twice.   The first conviction was thrown out on a technicality, but after the second conviction the Supreme Court struck the law down on appeal as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  

(2)   Both words in the expression contribute to this.   Holocaust is ultimately derived from ὁλόκαυστος, the Greek word for “burnt offering”.

(3)   Dr. Neusner argued that the Holocaust was filling a vacuum created by the abandonment of Jewish traditions, beliefs, and practices on the part of many American Jews.    Indeed, he was talking about this decades before the fact became obvious in polls like the 2013 Pew Research Poll in which “remembering the Holocaust” was identified as the main essential to being Jewish by most of the Jewish American respondents.   He spoke of the theology developing around the historical event as the “Holocaust myth”, which, had he not passed away six years ago, could have rendered him susceptible to prosecution as a Holocaust denier on visits to Canada under the proposed law, although he was using “myth” in an academic sense that has nothing to do with the truth or falseness of the story in question.

(4)   I do not believe in the doctrine of “separation of church and state” in either its Anabaptist or its American form.   On one of the last occasions I spoke with my late friend the Reverend Canon Kenneth Gunn-Walberg, he spoke critically of “conservative” support for “religious liberty”, noting that support for clerical reserves for the orthodox, established, Church was the more authentic Tory position.   I agreed, of course, although I might have pointed out that one of the earliest tracts advocating broad religious liberty, not in the form of Church-State separation but that of tolerance of a wide spectrum of opinion (within the limits of the Apostles’ Creed) within the Church and peaceful co-existence with heterodox sects, was penned by none other than the great Carolinian Divine, the Right Reverend Dr. Jeremy Taylor, who based his arguments upon the demands of the highest of the Christian theological virtues.   That having been said, the American doctrine that has historically been associated mostly with the Liberal Party in Canada (the NDP’s predecessor was a “Social Gospel” party, founded and led by a former Methodist minister J. S. Woodsworth, and while the NDP has moved about as far away from Christianity as possible, its first and most famous leader was a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas, with other prominent NDP MPs including United Church ministers such as Stanley Knowles and Bill Blaikie), which Liberals in the past have frequently mistaken as part of Canada’s tradition, while theoretically unsound, is much to be preferred to the establishment of left-wing dogma as a new state creed to which no public dissent is tolerated.    This is but one of several examples of older liberal – classical liberal – ideas which, while objectionable from the standpoint of a sounder perspective, are nevertheless preferable to what the newer kind of “liberal” is offering.

(5)  The government is pointing to claims that anti-Semitism is on the rise as its justification for doing this.    Almost 70 Christian church buildings were burned or otherwise vandalized last summer, but I see no action being taken to curb the Christophobia behind this largest single spree of hate crimes in Canada’s history, nor would I expect it from a government that seemed to be doing everything it could to throw fuel on the fire of that hatred.   Nevertheless, suppose we cede for the sake of argument the claim that anti-Semitism is the largest growing hate problem in Canada. Even if we also ceded that outlawing the expression of opinions was capable of justification, a concession I am by no means willing to make, this would be an extremely poor justification for this kind of law.  Similar laws have not prevented a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the European countries that passed them.   I suspect that you will find that the countries which passed such absurd laws are also the countries which have experienced the largest growth in anti-Semitism in the years since the laws were passed.   This is because the sort of progressive mindset that thinks banning “Holocaust denial” is a good thing to do rather than an insane, draconian, attack on freedom of speech that involves persecuting a tiny minority for holding an unpopular opinion, is also the same mindset that thinks bringing in immigrants from all over the world without any sort of screening for cultural compatibility – that would be “racist” to these dolts – is sound policy, and consequently, with floods of immigrants coming in from countries with either a deep-seated cultural animus against the Jews or perhaps just a more recent animosity based upon Middle Eastern conflicts of recent decades, finds its cases of anti-Semitic incidents exploding.   Rather than placing the blame squarely where it belongs, on the latter idiotic policy, they pass the former draconian law in order to scapegoat a tiny minority for the consequences of their own stupidity.    The government expects to get away with this because most people will think something to the effect of “This law will only affect neo-Nazis and who cares, they have it coming.”    That is stupidity at its worst.   Laws that the public accepts on the grounds that they only affect such-and-such a despised group never end up only affecting the group in question.   In this instance, I have already demonstrated (vide supra, footnote 3) how the most respected academic rabbi of the Twentieth Century could have run afoul of this law.   He was hardly a neo-Nazi.   Nor is Dr. Norman Finkelstein, the American academic and pro-Palestinian activist who has been accused of “Holocaust denial” although his book The Holocaust Industry makes no revisionist claims about the historical event but rather talks about people whom he sees as exploiting the event (both of his parents had been interred in the Nazi camps, incidentally, his mother in Majdanek, his father in Auschwitz).   It is unlikely that Noam Chomsky’s famous protégé would be prosecuted under the new law should he visit Canada but not out of the realm of possibility.    Almost a decade ago, at a Canadian conservative blog I witnessed a well-known progressive activist and blogger pedantically lecture the others present on the difference between “concentration camps” and “death camps” and how the latter were only on Polish soil.   That is a distinction that is made in every serious and mainstream history class and textbook that deals with the subject but he was accused of “Holocaust denial” for this.   The people making the accusation were not generally ill-informed people and perhaps made the accusation tongue-in-cheek because this man was a noted supporter of banning “hate speech”, but the point is that if something that is part of the mainstream narrative can be confused with “Holocaust denial”, a law against the latter, even if were justifiable to make such a law against those it is intended to be used against which it is not,  makes possible the prosecution of a lot of people who have not committed “Holocaust denial” in the conventional meaning of the phrase.   Ironically, had the United States passed such a law in the 1950s or even 1960s, and had it not been struck down immediately for violating their First Amendment, even if only actual “Holocaust deniers” in the conventional sense of the word were rounded up, if all of them were arrested there would have been more Jews than white supremacists arrested.   At that time, “Holocaust denial”, and World War II revisionism in general of which it is a subset, was most widespread among libertarians for the simple reason that these arch anti-statists recognized that the military expansion the United States underwent in World War II, and which continued after the war because of the Cold War, was a massive expansion of the American central state and therefore a threat to the liberty of American citizens.   Therefore the claims of the American government during that conflict were suspect to them.   There were far more libertarians than Nazi sympathizers, then as now, and a large percentage of libertarians were and are Jewish. 

Election Time Grumbling

During the last Dominion election, four years ago, I made the remark that the three major parties were offering us a choice between the Dragon, the Beast and the False Prophet. After the election I added that the False Prophet had won. I think the last four years have justified that assessment rather well.

To make the above joke about the last election, of course, required speaking as if a misconception, that has lamentably become almost universal in Canada, were in fact true. Dominion elections are not about who the next Prime Minister will be. They are about who the next Parliament will be. You and I do not vote for the Prime Minister. We vote for who will be the Member of Parliament for our constituency. The job of our Member of Parliament is to represent our constituency, the portion of the country that includes the neighborhood in which we live. If our MPs remembered that their job, first and foremost, is to speak in Parliament on behalf of the constituencies that elected them – the places and the people living in those places whether they voted for or against the winner, they would do that job much better. Note that if we were to adopt the electoral reform that the Liberals promised four years ago, mercifully reneging on that promise, this would not help our MPs to do that job better, but rather hinder them from doing it. Proportional representation would make for a more partisan, more ideological Parliament. Only fools would want this, which is why proportional representation is so popular. The eponymous principle of Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule, the first in his Sword of Truth fantasy series and the last before these books achieved the unachievable and became an exposition of Ayn Rand’s ideas even more tedious and tiresome than her own, is “people are stupid” and this is absolutely correct. But I digress. In an election, we choose the representatives for our constituencies, these make up the next Parliament, and the person who becomes Prime Minister, who leads the government in the sense of the Cabinet, the Crown Ministers who carry out the actual day-to-day administration of the Queen-in-Council, is the person who has the most support in Parliament. That we have come to treat every Dominion election as a nation-wide plebiscite on who would make the best Prime Minister is an unwelcome intrusion of Americanism into our system.

I also declared during the last Dominion election that I likely would not be voting in it at all. The Conservatives, I vowed, would never have my vote again as long as Stephen Harper was their leader. Harper, while admittedly the best Prime Minister Canada has had since 1963 – this is not saying much as the entire lot of post-Diefenbaker Prime Ministers were horrid and rotten and abominable – had ticked me off one too many times. He had capitulated to the liberal-left on abortion and immigration and was absolutely horrible on freedom of speech. While Section 13 was abolished on his watch, he deserves no credit whatsoever for that fact, for the bill that repealed it was a private member’s bill that a Conservative MP had introduced and which had received enough support from both Conservative and Liberal Members to pass, despite the active opposition of the Prime Minister. It was that crazy bill, authorizing the government to invade the privacy of ordinary Canadians in the name of “fighting terrorism” that finally made me wash my hands of Harper altogether. Since the usual alternatives to the Conservatives in my riding were the NDP and Liberals, neither of which I would ever consider voting for, the Greens, and fringe parties even further to the left, I thought I would have no-one to vote for, and was fine with that, citing the precedent of Evelyn Waugh, who, after years of voting Conservative and having them fail to turn the clock back by even a second declared that he would abstain in the future on the grounds that it was presumptuous for a subject to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers. In the event, the Christian Heritage Party ran a candidate in my riding, for probably the first time ever, and as the candidate was a friend, I had someone to vote for after all.

This Dominion election is not shaping up to be any better than the last. The Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, aka Captain Airhead still has an astonishing amount of support considering that he has accomplished nothing in the last four years except something which should not have been done, i.e., the legalization of marijuana, that he has spent Canada hopelessly into debt, has aggressively sabotaged the economy of one of our provinces and seriously undermined national unity, has gone out of his way to sour our relations with India, the Philippines, China, the United States, and perhaps other countries that I don’t remember off the top of my head, has been found guilty of major ethical violations, been hit with three major scandals within the space of a year any one of which by itself would have ended the career of virtually any other Prime Minister, and been proven to be a total hypocrite on three matters that he is constantly preaching to other Canadians about.

When the Conservatives were contemplating whom they would choose to replace Stephen Harper as leader I offered my opinion that they should pick Don Cherry. Granted, he was not actually seeking the position, but I said they ought to draft him. Had they followed my semi-serious suggestion they would be way ahead in the polls right now. They did not, of course, nor did I expect them to and they put in Andrew Scheer instead. Commenting on that at the time, I said that it was a mix of the good and the bad, the good being that Scheer, in a survey of the potential leaders, had taken the strongest royalist stand, and that he was a staunch opponent of the carbon tax by which Trudeau pretends to be saving the world from “climate change” while in reality doing nothing but unnecessarily increasing the cost-of-living for those least able to afford such an increase. The bad was that Scheer was a Harper-style neo-conservative, which meant that he would probably wimp out on social issues and on free speech. Look at his performance in this election campaign so far and tell me that these predictions have not been borne out.

Consider Scheer’s response to attacks from the left on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.

With regards to abortion, Scheer has told the press that while he, a Roman Catholic, is personally opposed to abortion, a government that he leads will neither move to limit abortion nor support any efforts by backbenchers to do so through means of private bills. This is the very definition of wimping out. Saying that you are personally opposed to abortion means absolutely nothing if you not only will not initiate any legislation on the matter but will deny your support to members of your party who wish to do so. Indeed, there is no difference between this and the position that Justin Trudeau has held until very recently when, realizing that it was self-contradictory, he rejected the personal opposition to abortion and came out as being entirely pro-choice. Trudeau’s position, although it amounts to openly declaring his allegiance to the forces of evil, is the more honest of the two.

What Scheer should have told the press – and the Liberal, NDP, and Green leaders when they all ganged up on him and tried to pressure him into affirming the Satanic dogma that a woman has a right to choose to have an abortion – is the following:

You claim to be worried that I am going to re-open the debate on abortion but the truth is that there is nothing to re-open because the debate on abortion never occurred in the first place. Abortion was completely illegal in Canada until 1969, and I affirm what previous generations of Canadians believed, that taking the life of an unborn, innocent, baby is nothing less than cold-blooded murder and nobody, man or woman, has the right to commit murder. The present status quo, in which there are no legal restrictions on abortion whatsoever up to the very moment of birth and the taxpayer is required to pay for it, would have been regarded as abhorrent by previous generations of Canadians, and would be rejected by most living Canadians if they actually understood what the status quo is. We did not arrive at this status quo by means of a debate in which the pro-murder side, as the so-called pro-choice side ought properly to be called, won. We arrived at where we are today, because the father of the current Prime Minister changed the law in 1969 to allow for abortions in exceptional circumstances, and then turned our Supreme Court into an American-style kritarchy in 1982, which then used the changes he had made to our abortion laws as a pretext for ruling those laws to be unconstitutional. That Parliament, which the Supreme Court in the same ruling said ought to pass new abortion legislation, has failed to do so for thirty-one years, is not due to there being any sort of general consensus in favour of the status quo but to the bullying tactics of the leaders of the progressive parties and their echo chambers in the media. These tactics are designed to prevent the debate that you falsely claim is over from ever happening. It is your tactics and not my views that are unacceptable in a civilized country like ours and I am and here and now calling you out on them and demanding that you cease and desist immediately. We are going to have that debate whether you like it or not and the fact that you are so desperate to prevent it from happening shows that you are not at all as confident of the claims of your own side as you pretend to be.

That is how Scheer ought to be talking. The same speech, mutatis mutandis, is also the appropriate response to the progressive attacks on him for his views on same-sex marriage.

Michael Wharton, who wrote the “Peter Simple” column for the Daily Telegraph for decades, frequently referred to what he called the “Great Semantic Shift” by which opinions on several matters “which were once held by the majority and described as ‘moderate’, ‘of the centre’ or merely ‘patriotic’ have gradually come to be described first as ‘right-wing’, then as ‘extreme right-wing’, then as ‘lunatic fringe’ and finally as ‘fascist’” (1) Others would describe the same phenomenon as a leftward shift in the Overton Window. The kind of bullying described above is the means by which this shift has been accomplished and right-of-centre parties have a duty to confront it head on and call it out for the thuggery it is. Otherwise, they will themselves be constantly drawn further to the left. As John O’Sullivan famously put it “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” (2)

The leadership of the Conservative Party evidently believe that doing the opposite of what I have been suggesting is the strategy that is going to put them back into government. That is absurd. Either you present the electorate with a real alternative to progressivism or you end up competing with the Liberals, NDP, and the Greens for the progressive vote which would far more naturally go to one of these other parties. With Trudeau’s dismal record as Prime Minister, the humiliating collapse of his reputation from one of international celebrity to that of the laughing stock of the whole world, and scandal after scandal after scandal, the Conservatives ought to be so far ahead in the polls as to make their victory in the upcoming election a foregone conclusion.

Of course, it does not help matters that Scheer has gotten himself embroiled in a scandal of his own with regards to his citizenship. When the Toronto Sun’s Lorrie Goldstein asked him recently “On dual citizenship, why wouldn’t you have dealt with that before the election?” he answered:

Honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal … I know many, many people have dual citizenship for many different countries … The very first time I was ever asked that question I answered it truthfully and honestly.

I believe Scheer when he says he didn’t think it was a big deal. Sadly, that is the problem. For most of my lifetime (3) Canada has permitted dual citizenship with the United States. This change was made by a Liberal government – the government of the present Prime Minister’s father – and is an example of the decay of the very national principles for which the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to stand.

Here is how I worded the problem in a comment on a post at the Patriactionary blog the other day:

The law should not allow for someone to have this kind of dual citizenship. It is a contradiction. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy built on the sound, pre-modern, Christian principle of allegiance to our reigning Sovereign. The United States is a republic built upon the evil, Satanic, and thoroughly modern anti-principle of rejection of that allegiance and arrogant assertion of the “sovereignty” of an autocratic “people”. (4) No one can be a true citizen of both. Dual citizenship between Canada and any other Commonwealth monarchy is no contradiction. Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction, shocking as that will be to most Americans to hear. Dual citizenship between these two sets of polities is an absolute contradiction and the Conservatives, of all parties, ought to look on this particular kind of phony dual citizenship with repugnance. (5)

I don’t have much else to add on that subject and so will leave it at that and move on to my final observation about this election.

Two weeks prior to the last Dominion election I posted an essay entitled “The Election Issue That Wasn’t”. The issue in question was immigration. In it I said the following:

It is not an election issue for the same reason it has not been an election issue in previous elections – no party dares raise the issue for fear of being labelled racist…The only way this matter will ever be brought to a vote is if one of the parties breaks with the consensus of the others and makes it an election issue. Despite there being plenty of reasons for the Conservative, New Democrat, and Green parties to do so, none seem to possess courage enough to weather the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did, and so immigration remains the election issue that wasn’t.

This time around someone has decided to make it an election issue. That someone is Maxime Bernier who was narrowly defeated by Andrew Scheer in the Conservative Party’s leadership race. Subsequent conflict between Scheer and Bernier over the latter taking far more right-wing positions than the former was comfortable with led to Bernier leaving the Conservatives and founding a new party with an unfortunate, Communist/American-sounding name, the People’s Party of Canada.

On Sunday, someone slipped a card outlining the party’s platform under my windshield while at church. Which is good, because the media have been conspiring to keep the public uninformed as to that platform. The entire platform on the card is exactly what I would have liked to see from the Conservatives. Here is the section on immigration:

“On Immigration the PPC will:
*keep Canada safe and say “no” to illegal immigration;
* focus on what unites Canadians instead of on diversity;
*respect Canada’s constitution, history, and heritage;
*focus on Canada’s economic needs when setting immigration policy;
*reduce immigration to 250, 000 per year; and
*increase resources to vet immigrants.

To all of which I give a hearty amen.

My church is in the next riding over from the one in which I live and vote and in which I have seen no sign of a PPC candidate. It is nice to know that someone is finally taking a stand for all the right things however, whether I have an opportunity to vote for them or not.


(1) I have taken the words quoted from a column entitled “Extremism” reprinted on page 36 of Peter Simple’s Century, The Claridge Press, 1999, but he made this observation far more than once.
(2) John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law”, National Review, October 27, 1989. Also extremely relevant is (Robert) Conquest’s Second Law, which O’Sullivan cites in the article “The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies”
(3) I am five years younger than Justin Trudeau and three years older than Andrew Scheer. The law recognizing dual citizenship went into effect a couple of months prior to my first birthday.
(4) This is very strong language but I stand by it. Fr. Seraphim Rose, the American Russian Orthodox hieromonk wrote the following “We have already seen, in the preceding chapter, that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical, social structure. We shall see in the next chapter, on the other hand, how a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and undertand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’ society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government.” Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1994, 2018, p.28. This entire book was originally the seventh chapter of Rose’s never-completed magnus opus The Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God. The “preceding chapter” and “next chapter” referred to in the quote are the preceding and following chapters in the larger work. This was written before his ordination and so the book is credited to him as “Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose”.
(5) Upon further consideration, I would have to revise the statement that “Dual citizenship between the United States on the one hand and any Communist country on the other, is no contradiction”, for while the principles of the American republic and Communist “peoples’ republics” are far closer to each other than either is to the sound, royalist, Loyalist principles on which our country was originally founded, it occurs to me that with republics of any sort, it is probably a contradiction to be a citizen of more than one.

Ethics and Economics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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



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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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