A Man of 2015

It is only just that we award credit to those to whom credit is due and a certain amount of credit is due to Justin Trudeau. It is less than a month since the Shiny Pony became Canada’s shiny new Prime Minister and he is already living down to our lowest expectations. It is too early, perhaps, to declare him to be our worst Prime Minister ever. It will take him longer than this to break his father’s record in that respect. He is well on the way to getting there, however.

On November 4th, David Johnson, who as Governor General is the Queen’s Canadian viceroy, swore in Trudeau and the thirty people selected to be the Crown Ministers who, along with the Prime Minister, will make up the Cabinet. Fifteen of these were men and fifteen were women because the new Prime Minister had decided it was important that the Cabinet have an equal number of penises and vaginas. “Gender balanced” was the way he described it. At one time it was understood that people have sexes and words have genders, but no longer.

Now, if a Prime Minister were to submit to the Crown a list of choices for Ministerial appointments that consisted entirely of men, he would, of course, be denounced as sexist. Let’s think about that for a moment. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the word sexist actually means something and is not just a verbal weapon used by liberals, progressives, and social justice warriors – a rather dubious assumption - what is it about a list of appointees that consists solely of men that would make it sexist?

Those who are capable of intelligent and sane thought would answer that it is the fact that those on the list were chosen on the basis of their sex, or, to put it a bit more precisely, that sex was a criterion in the selecting of those who would be on the list. If this, however, is what makes a list that contains only men sexist, then Justin Trudeau’s “gender balanced” Cabinet is also sexist, because sex is just as much a criterion for selection in the one as it is in the other.

This conclusion can be avoided by saying that it is not the use of sex as a criterion of selection, per se, that would make an all-male Cabinet sexist, but rather the fact that it is men who are chosen, but to say this would be a more overt admission of misandry than most progressives, except perhaps the most radical of feminists, are usually comfortable with because they like to operate under the delusion that they are morally and intellectually superior to other people. Similarly, American anti-racist liberals are unlikely to admit that in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected President of the United States on the grounds of his skin colour, and that they were the ones to so choose him on those grounds.

When asked why he choose a “gender balanced” Cabinet, Justin Trudeau answered “because it’s 2015”. While it is good to know that our Prime Minister is capable of reading the date on a calendar, showing a level of intellectual achievement of which he had previously given no indication, what is implied in his answer is the idea that in 2015 we have attained some sort of enlightenment that previous generations lacked so that of course we now know that it is absolutely vital for the health of our country that half of its Cabinet Ministers – at least – be women. Almost a century ago Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis coined a term for this way of thinking. They called it “chronological snobbery” and if there were an award for the most chronological snobbish remark of the year, “because it’s 2015” would certainly deserve to win it. Ironically, however, Mr. Trudeau’s chronological snobbery is itself clearly behind the times. It is indeed, 2015, the year in which the most recent quantum leap forward in the socially progressive enlightenment of mankind took place. I refer, of course, to the apogynosis of Bruce into Caitlyn Jenner. The earth-shattering consequences of this event are still unfolding in school divisions across North America as tough decisions have to be made about who should be allowed to enter which washroom or locker room, a question which was not a significant puzzler up until now. Even feminist icon Germaine Greer has come under the wrath of the next generation of more-enlightened-than-thou social justice warriors who recently circulated a petition to have her invitation to lecture at Cardiff University revoked on the grounds of her “transphobia”. Yet Mr. Trudeau’s choices for lady Cabinet Ministers are all cis female to the best of my knowledge. That is so 2014!

Now given the events of this weekend perhaps it is time we questioned whether the kind of attitude that comes out in expressions like “because it is 2015” is really what we want in our leaders. Friday, November 13th, proved to be a very unlucky day indeed for the residents of Paris when, on that evening, ISIS launched a multipronged terrorist attack on their city that has left 129 dead, so far, and almost 400 wounded. At least one of those who carried out this act of jihad on behalf of the Islamic State had entered Europe claiming to be a Syrian refugee.

One of the first things Justin Trudeau did after winning the federal election last month was to announce that he would be withdrawing our bombers from the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trudeau is doing it for all the wrong reasons. Throughout the entirety of his political career he has demonstrated a sappy and juvenile naivety about terrorism, Islam, geopolitics, war, and all things military. In a speech this March, explaining his opposition to the previous government’s intention of expanding Canada’s military efforts against ISIS into Syria, he gave as one of his reasons that such a mission “could very well result in Assad consolidating his grip on power in Syria.” As obnoxious as the previous government’s hawkishness could be, at times, at least Stephen Harper could tell the difference between an enemy of Canada and of all Western civilization, like ISIS, and a regime that, however unpleasant it may be, is no enemy. A month ago, just before the election, Trudeau said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “irresponsible and harmful” in the Middle East, when, in fact, Putin has demonstrated far better sense with regards to that region than any other world leader. In his election campaign Trudeau promised to bring 25, 000 “Syrian refugees” into Canada by the end of the year and a representative of his office told the press, this weekend, that the Paris attack has not altered his intention to follow through on this. Why let a small thing like a terrorist attack ruin a perfectly bad idea?

What the attack on Paris is telling us, if we have the ears to hear, is that if Justin Trudeau is a man of 2015, what the countries of the West do not need, is the leadership of men of 2015. What we rather need is the leadership of men of 732. Whether there are any of that vintage yet to be found remains to be seen.

Fighting the Invasion in Fiction: A Comparison Between C. S. Lewis and Jean Raspail

C. S. Lewis, the Oxford and Cambridge professor who wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, is mostly remembered as an author for his novels. These, like his works of non-fiction, articulated and defended Christian truth. The most popular of these are the seven novel fantasy series for young readers in which children from England have adventures in a magical world called Narnia. The BBC adapted the first four of these for television in the 1980s and Walden Media produced the first three of them as big screen films starting with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005. Another company is currently working on the fourth.

Both sets of adaptations followed the order in which the books were originally published. Had the BBC continued the series The Horse and His Boy would have been next. It is highly unlikely that any movie company would be willing to make a movie version of this and if, by chance, one were to do so, the original story would almost certainly be unrecognizable in the film.

In this underrated novel, first published in 1954, the Tisroc, ruler of Calormen, a desert country populated by turban-wearing, scimitar-wielding people of dark complexion plots the conquest of Narnia and Archenland with his heir Prince Rabadash who desires to make Narnia’s Queen Susan his bride by force. Narnia and Archenland, situated to the northwest of Calormen, are free countries, populated by talking animals, magical and mythological creatures of various sorts, and governed by people of light skin and fair complexion. Narnia and Archenland are loyal to Aslan the Lion, while Calormen is an idol worshipping land, the chief idol of which is the demon Tash. The title characters are Bree, a Narnian talking horse, and Shasta, a highborn Archenlander boy. Both were captured and taken to Calormen when very young and are now attempting to flee to the lands of their birth. They join forces with Aravis, a Calormene princess who for reasons of her own is trying to escape her own country, and her talking mare Hwin. When they discover the Tisroc’s plot, their escape attempt becomes a race to keep ahead of Rabadash’s army so as to warn Narnia and Archenland in time.

For obvious reasons The Horse and His Boy is not going to win any awards for political correctness. It is interesting to compare and contrast this book with The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The original French edition of this latter volume came out nineteen years after The Horse and His Boy was first published. The largest similarity between the two is that in both, civilized, free lands with light-skinned people are threatened with invasion from lands to their southeast populated by dark-skinned people. There is a major difference in how the story turns out, however. At the risk of giving away the endings to both books, in The Horse and His Boy Shasta succeeds in his mission, the forces of Narnia and Archenland defeat the invaders, and Rabadash receives his comeuppance, but in The Camp of the Saints, Western civilization succumbs to the invasion and disappears.

Some might explain the significance of this difference as being that between an optimistic and a pessimistic outlook, others that it is the difference between an idealistic and a realistic outlook. I suggest that the real significance is that it is a difference in how the real world in which we live is meant to be reflected in the fictional worlds of the two novels. Narnia is a world of the imagination, the France of The Camp of the Saints is a fictional version of the France in our world. This, of course, means that Narnia is a step further removed from our real world, but it is nevertheless the case that Lewis intended for us to see truths about our world through the imaginary world he has portrayed for us. In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, for example, we are obviously intended to see the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in that of the Lion Aslan.

To the extent that the Narnia and Archenland of Lewis’ imaginary world reflect the Western Civilization – or better yet, Christendom – of our world, they are pictures of our past, inspired by history. When the early Islamic Caliphate sought to conquer Europe, and the forces of Abd-er-Rahman were decisively defeated by Charles Martel’s Franks in the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD and when the Ottoman Turks marched against the Holy Roman Empire to be defeated before the gates of Vienna in 1683 AD – these historical events from our world have an echo in the defeat of Rabadash in the world of Narnia.

It is a different episode of history that is fictionally re-enacted in Raspail’s novel. When, at the end of the story, Western Civilization has been reduced to twenty faithful defenders besieged in a small village overlooking the Riviera, among them are a Constantine Dragasès and a Luke Notaras – the names of the last Byzantine Emperor and his military commander when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 AD. The vision of our world that we are presented with in The Camp of the Saints, is not of our past but of what, at the time, was a possible future, one in which all of Western Christendom falls as Constantinople did.

Today, the novel reads not so much as a picture of a possible future but of an all too real present. Much of it is coming true before our very eyes. Minister Jean Orelle’s press conference in chapter seventeen, in which he announces that France is ready and willing to “assume the humanitarian obligations incumbent upon all men of good will in these truly unprecedented times” by taking in the migrants from India, and “asks only one thing…that she not stand alone” has taken on flesh in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s throwing open Germany’s borders to the migrants claiming to be Syrian refugees, while expecting other European countries to help cover the cost of her compassion. The media’s one-sidedness, dishonest coverage, and emotional manipulation have been so close to what Raspail described that one can almost hear Albert Durfort telling us “we are all from Kurdistan now”.

Sadly, the church too has been behaving as if Raspail’s novel were a script to follow. Pope Francis’ lecture to the American Congress last week sounded like it was lifted from the papal Good Friday address in the thirty-third chapter of the book. The Protestant churches are behaving no better. Virtually every official ecclesiastical statement on the “refugee crisis” conveys an attitude of “we are rich and they are poor therefore we need to bend over and take it” that is enough to make one vomit. It comes straight out of the pages of The Camp of the Saints.

In The Camp of the Saints, Raspail depicts a church that is walking around after it is already dead. Corrupted by liberalism and leftism, her clergy have abandoned her old ways, traditions, and faith and her people have abandoned their churches. When the Ganges fleet approaches the Suez canal the Muslim world take to their mosques and call upon Allah. Raspail’s narrator muses about what would have happened if the people of Europe had returned to their churches and begun to call upon God in earnest once more. Only twelve Benedictine monks are faithful to the old ways and march to the sea carrying the Blessed Sacrament in the hope that it will repel the invaders. These are all that remain of the religion that moved men like Charles Martel and Jan Sobieski to take up arms and fight off the invaders of Christendom in the past.

The spirit of that religion, or at least of its fictional otherworldly counterpart, is alive and well in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia which is why, when Shasta arrives in the nick of time, King Lune of Archenland does not then sit down with Lord Darrin to discuss the ways in which they can make Rabadash and the Calormenes welcome, but instead sets about defending his castle and fighting off the invading army.

In Lewis’ novel, the invaders come on horseback armed with swords. In Raspail’s novel, and in real life today, they come armed with their own poverty and seemingly desperate conditions, which are much harder weapons to fight against as they are effectively designed to penetrate our defences and hit us where we are weak. We will never be able to fight such a weapon unless we recover the old-fashioned Christianity of C. S. Lewis, with its fighting spirit and will to live and abandon the sappy, liberalism that has taken its place, that apologizes for the Crusades, and embraces the cultural and ethnic death of the peoples of the West and their civilization.

Bad Medicine

If you were to ask someone who believes strongly in an alternative form of medicine, especially one that markets itself as being natural and holistic, he will tell you that conventional treatments for cancer basically operate in the following way: you take something that is harmful to the body such as radiation or toxic chemicals and bombard the cancer with it in the hopes that it will kill the cancer before either it or the cancer kills the body. It occurs to me that this way of describing conventional anti-cancer treatment - one lethal enemy of the health of the body killing another – could also be used to explain what occurred in Paris on January the seventh.

You probably already know all about the event to which I refer. Media commentators have been talking about very little else for days now. On the morning of Wednesday, January the seventh, a pair of Algerian jihadists, wearing masks and screaming “Allahu Akbar”, invaded the office of the smutty French trash rag Charlie Hebdo and began shooting the place up. About 24 people were hurt, half of whom died. What had twisted the terrorists’ knickers into a knot was the newspaper’s publication of cartoons that depicted Mohammed in an unflattering manner, much like those published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten in 2005, against which riots broke out all over Europe.

Since then entertainers, politicians, newspaper columnists, television talking heads, bloggers, and countless other assorted people have jumped on the “Je Suis Charlie” bandwagon, either expressing their solidarity with the victims of the attack or, to paint their motives in a more cynical light, trying to capitalize on the public’s outrage over the massacre. Whatever their motives, people who would ordinarily agree on nothing have come together for a moment, however brief and fleeting, behind the besieged journal. To such people Charlie Hebdo has become more than just a lewd and irreverent publication. It has become a symbol of the highest values that are held dear by France and, more broadly, all Western societies. Thus, the terrorist attack in turn is seen as an attack on those French and Western values.

Now, should we inquire as to what specific Western values came under attack the answer we would inevitably receive would be freedom of speech. On the surface this makes a certain amount of sense. The newspaper printed something which was considered to be offensive to Muslims and for that they were punished and silenced with lethal force. If we pursue the matter further, however, by thinking a little about what freedom of speech actually entails, some inconsistencies in the Charlie Hebdo = free speech = Western values under attack from Islamic jihad position appear.

What we understand “freedom of speech” to mean, depends a great deal upon whether we relate it primarily to the power of government or to the rights of the individual. If we think of freedom of speech in terms of the power of government we think of it in negative terms, as a limitation upon government power, as the idea that it is an inappropriate abuse of the state’s coercive and legislative power, to tell people what they can and cannot think and say. If we think of freedom of speech in terms of the rights of the individual, we think of it as a positive right that each individual possesses to say whatever he wants.

Both understandings of freedom of speech can be either absolute or limited. If we think of freedom of speech as a limitation on state power, the absolute form of this concept is that the state must under no circumstances forbid or punish any speech whatsoever. A more limited version of this understanding would be that while the state should not outlawing thoughts or their spoken expression it is within the state’s rights to forbid words that incite other people to commit crimes, violence, and sedition. If we think of freedom of speech as a right belonging to the individual, the limited version would be that an individual has the right so say whatever he wants provided he is willing to pay the consequences of his speech, such as, perhaps, a punch in the nose for insulting someone’s mother. The absolute version of this understanding, however, is that the individual has the right to say whatever he wants under any circumstances and that this right should be protected by the state.

I should note, here, that to my mind, freedom of speech only make sense when thought of in the first sense, as a limitation on state power.

To accept, however, that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on Western values, and that the particular Western value that came under attack was freedom of speech, requires that we think of freedom of speech as an individual’s right to say whatever he thinks because whatever else the terrorists might have been, they were not representatives of the power of the state. It is not necessary to hold the absolute version of this because being murdered is not a reasonable consequence that anyone should expect to have to pay for freedom to speak. Nevertheless, a problem is apparent in that if freedom of speech is a right belonging to the individual, it is a right that Charlie Hebdo sought to deny to those who disagreed with them. Indeed, the far left newspaper attempted to have a popular right-wing political party banned and outlawed for their political views. Ironically, it was the party’s stance on immigration and multiculturalism to which the newspaper, now a victim of the consequences of their own liberal position on these matters, objected.

This brings me back to the illustration with which I started. If Charlie Hebdo must be seen as a symbol of anything, it is best seen as a symbol, not of France, the West, Western values in general, and especially not of the freedom of speech that the newspaper claimed for itself but would deny to its opponents, but rather as a symbol of the disease that has been eating away at Western civilization since the beginning of the Modern Age – liberalism. Like all illustrations this one breaks down if pushed too far. Whatever else might have been going through the minds of the Kouachi brothers as they plotted their murderous attack, they were certainly not trying to save Western civilization from its fatal disease and so only fit their assigned role in the allegory, in that what they represent is as deadly to the West as the liberalism represented by their victims.

Since its origins in Renaissance humanism, “Enlightenment” rationalism, and Scottish empiricism several centuries ago, liberalism has spread throughout the Western world and, in the last century triumphed completely over its competitors. Unlike a fine wine it has not improved with age and, as Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne pointed out in an insightful speech to the Athenaeum Club about ten years ago, its principles and pieties have become degraded to the point where it now threatens the very freedoms it once championed. We do not need to look far for an explanation of this. In the days of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, liberalism was one of many competing doctrines and it operated in what was understood by all, liberals and non-liberals alike, to be a Christian cultural climate. While constrained by the context of this climate liberalism was at its best and was able to accomplish such reforms as are to its credit. At the same time, however, its ideas corroded that same cultural context. Around the time of the Second World War the corrosion reached the point where the Christian cultural climate could no longer provide a constraining context.


Liberalism, in other words, has undermined everything which made its own worthy accomplishments possible. In doing so, it has made Western civilization vulnerable to the kind of attacks liberalism itself fell pray to on January the seventh. The Christendom that understood itself as Christendom and produced such leaders as Charles Martel and Jan III Sobieski was not vulnerable in the way the postmodern, liberal, West is. Charlie Hebdo represents the worst form of liberalism possible – a smug, self-assured nihilism, that attacks the very idea of the sacred in any form that it might take. To identify ourselves and our countries with the representative symbol of this liberalism is to commit the very cultural and civilizational suicide that such enemies of the West as those who committed this atrocity wish for us.

Je ne suis pas Charlie!

Common Law or Sharia?

Countries within the British family of nations, such as Australia and my own country of Canada, have reason to be thankful for the many priceless civil and social institutions that we have inherited from Great Britain. Through these institutions, we benefit from over a thousand years of civil, social, and political evolution prior to the establishment of our own countries and do not have to attempt to remake the wheel. The parliamentary monarchy form of government is one such priceless institution. The common law is another, one from which even the family prodigal, Uncle Sam, continues to benefit.

The common law is the legal and judicial system that evolved in England in the Middle Ages. Its principles are basically these: there is one law of the land that is embodied in the customs and traditions of the people who live in it, that the Sovereign’s main duty is to uphold and defend this law, that the unity of the law means that the law must be applied in the same way in cases with similar circumstances and so the courts must rule in accordance with past precedents, and that the role of Parliament in the passing of statutory laws is primarily one of tweaking the system when needed. It is a legal system that has served the English-speaking world well and which harmonizes well with our parliamentary system of government. Attempts by politicians to monkey with it have been generally quite ill-conceived and usually ended up working out for the worse.

Late last month, John Bingham, Religious Affairs editor of the Telegraph reported that the Law Society of England and Wales, the professional association of English solicitors, has been instructing its members on how to draw up wills that comply with sharia, i.e., Islamic law. A day later he reported that this had prompted members of Parliament to demand an inquiry as to the extent to which sharia law has been integrated into the British legal system.

It should be pointed out that this is not the first time Britain has accommodated sharia law. Several years ago it was reported that sharia courts had been established in the United Kingdom for the arbitration of certain kinds of disputes among Britain’s Muslim community. This was made possible by a bill passed by the British Parliament almost twenty years ago that allows for disputes to be mediated by an arbitrator agreed upon by both parties rather than going through litigation before a court of law. Muslims here in Canada attempted to get similar legislation passed in Ontario about a decade ago but then-Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty opted to get rid of all religious based arbitration tribunals rather than to allow sharia tribunals to be established. There is an important difference, however, about this more recent development. While the Arbitration Act brought about the establishment of sharia courts, it did so by basically allowing for any third party, that both sides in a dispute agree upon, to act as an arbitrator under certain general guidelines. The Law Society’s guidelines, however, are for the drawing up of legal documents to be recognized in Her Majesty’s courts.

Perhaps you are asking yourself what the big deal is. Surely Britain’s solicitors will only be drawing up sharia wills for Muslim clients who request them. If a Briton has the right to draw up a will disposing of his possession as he pleases then does it not follow that if he wishes to follow the dictates of sharia in doing so that is up to him?

It is important that we be clear what the cause for concern here actually is. Several voices have been raised in opposition to the introduction of sharia wills that ground their objections on the “sexism” of sharia, its barbarism, or its incompatibility with the objector’s abstract understanding of human rights. Whatever validity these complaints may or may not have, the most important issue here is that if the British courts are to follow the common law tradition most of the time but to follow sharia law when dealing with Muslims then the whole point of having a common law, a law of the land that is the same for everybody, is pretty much defeated. If the common law ceases to be this, then one of the greatest of British institutions will have fallen. A country is an entity composed of a land, its people, and their traditional political, social, cultural and legal institutions. Forty six years ago, the great Tory statesman Enoch Powell warned that through a combination of large-scale immigration and legislation that aggressively favoured new immigrants over native Britons, Great Britain had become a nation “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” When sharia law begins to replace common law in Her Majesty’s courts that indicates that the nation has gone beyond piling up logs and is now holding a match to the kindling.

In economics, Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. In this situation, a similar remark could be made about bad law. Introduced into Britain as an alternative to the courts in arbitrating disputes among Muslims, sharia has now entered the British courts as an alternative standard for the drawing up of certain legal documents. It would be naïve in the extreme to think that this is as far as it will go. What will happen when a dispute arises between a Muslim and a non-Muslim and the former wishes it to be settled in accordance with sharia and the latter in accordance with common law?

There are many who would look upon this development and see it as a step towards the transformation of Britain into an Islamic society in which Christians and Jews will face the experience of dhimmitude. Others would condemn such fears as Islamophobia, a term of recent coinage that would seem to denote an irrational fear of Islam. I confess to being among those who consider the former point of view to be by far the more sensible of the two. Words like Islamophobia are a dime a dozen, being coined on what sometimes seems like a daily basis to demonize those who object to rapid, massive, and irrevocable changes being made to the people, culture, institutions and traditions of Western countries. Ironically, those who shout the loudest about the evils of Islamophobia are also those who have the most to lose from Islam gaining strength and power in the Western world. The growth of Islam in the West is incompatible with virtually every other pet project of the progressive left which almost tempts me to cheer it on. Instead, I would remind those who see the crumbling of a thousand years’ worth of barriers between Christendom and the Islamic world as an unmixed positive development of G. K. Chesterton’s principle that would-be reformers who do not know or understand why a fence was erected in the first place, should never be allowed to tear it down. Go out and learn a proper appreciation for what the Frankish armies of Charles Martel accomplished at Tours in 732 A.D. and what the Holy League led by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland achieved at the Gates of Vienna in 1683 A.D. and then maybe you will be in a position to explain, if you still think so, why those who would rather live in a nominally Christian country than an officially Islamic country are displaying an ignorant and irrational form of bigotry.

Do not misunderstand me. We are required to behave justly to the stranger in our midst and indeed to behave justly to all men everywhere. Justice does not require, however, that countries in the British family of nations suspend the common law in favour of sharia when dealing with Muslims. Indeed, I would suggest that it would be far more in accordance with justice that we insist that Muslims in our countries answer to the common law just like everybody else.

It would be both an injustice and a terrible shame if the common law tradition were to be broken in the country that bequeathed it to the rest of us.