Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Moriarty!

Michael Moriarty, the award-winning actor who portrayed Assistant District Attorney Benjamin Stone on Law and Order in the early 1990s, has responded to Don Cherry’s firing last week by proposing that Canada join the United States of America. It is surely a rather unusual way of showing support for a patriot who was unjustly fired for displaying his patriotism, to suggest that his country be swallowed up by its neighbour.

The proposal that Canada abandon its Loyalist history, give up on the Confederation project, and join the United States is not a new one. Goldwin Smith, the nineteenth century arch-liberal journalist, made just this proposal in 1891 in a book entitled Canada and the Canada Question. This was the same year in which Sir Wilfred Laurier, leader of the Liberal Party and the author of the phrase “sunny ways” which the present ultra-woke, progressive, Prime Minister of Canada adapted as a motto of sorts four years ago, campaigned on a platform of reciprocity – free trade – with the United States. The Tories, led by Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation, in the last election campaign of his career, denounced this as “veiled treason”, an attempt to lure Canadians from their “ancient loyalties.” The economic integration of the two countries, Sir John warned, would lead to Canada being swallowed up by the United States, first economically, then culturally, and finally politically.

The Liberals were defeated that year and Sir John won his last Dominion election campaigning with the slogan “the old flag, the old policy, the old leader.”

Historically, the call to draw Canada closer to the United States, make her more American, and in extreme cases to make her part of the United States, came from the centre-left party, the Liberals, and was opposed by the centre-right party, the party of Confederation, the Conservatives.

This historical alignment is the natural one. When in the present day, we hear the historical call of Canadian liberalism echoed in the voices of those, such as Mr. Moriarty, who are considered to be centre-right, it has a most unnatural ring to it.

Consider Mr. Moriarty’s own arguments. He writes:

Canada has become, within the scandal of Don Cherry’s firing by CBC, a docile and obedient member of The New World Order.
The case against Don Cherry basically reveals that he is more American than Canadian!
More Donald Trump than Justin Trudeau.
Cherry’s cry for all Canadians to wear the Poppy, the symbol honoring the Allied veterans and dead from both World War I and World War II?!
It is actually a cry from the deepest guts of the Holy Bible and the Judeo-Christian Civilization!
The grandest child of which is, indeed, the United States of America!
The “Nation Under God”!
Meanwhile, the creator of dreams for “The New World Order”?
The United Nations!

Don Cherry, of course, was fired by Sportsnet, a subsidiary of Rogers Media, which is privately owned, at least to the extent that this description has any meaning when applied to large, corporate, conglomerates like Rogers, and not by the public broadcaster the CBC, which lost the rights to Hockey Night in Canada to Sportsnet six years ago.

That is a fairly minor error compared to the major ones in the remainder of the above quoted remarks.

For one thing, the reason the Canadian Left hates Don Cherry so much is not because he is “more American than Canadian” but because he is more Canadian than they are and thus a perpetual reminder that their claim to be the natural rulers of Canada is false and that despite the “revolution within the form” perpetrated during the first Trudeau premiership, the real Canada is far more Don Cherry than it is Justin Trudeau.

More importantly, however, while I certainly agree with Mr. Moriarty that we ought to choose Christian civilization over the New World Order, I find it hard to believe that he is unaware that the words Novus Ordo Seclorum are a motto that has been inscribed on the Great Seal of the United States of America since 1782 and printed on its dollar bill for almost a century. Or that this is a lot longer than the phrase “under God” has been part of the American Pledge of Allegiance, having been added in the 1950s.

Now, he might argue that as a motto of the United States, Novus Ordo Seclorum – “New Order of the Ages” or “New World Order” – does not have the negative connotations which the Right frequently attaches to it, i.e., the replacement of Christian civilization with secular liberalism and the swallowing up of all countries into a single, global, order. This is not an easy position to maintain, however, given that a) the United States was the first Western country to take a major step towards modern secularism with the non-establishment clause of its First Amendment and b) the United Nations was the brainchild of two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The New World Order of the present day is the result of a series of revolutions against the Old Order of Christendom. The Christian civilization of this Old Order was based upon the idea that Church and State both derived their authority from the same source, God, and were neither blended, as in a theocracy, nor separate, as in later, secular, liberalism, but had their own distinct roles, functions, and authority which complemented each other. To the civil state, headed by the king or queen, who upon coronation swore an oath to serve God and defend His Church, was given the ministry of the Law in which the sword was wielded in the administration of justice, the settlement of disputes, the punishment of crime, and the maintaining of the peace. To the Church, Whose head is Christ, Whose earthly deputies are those to whom the Apostles bequeathed their ministry, is given the ministry of the Gospel by Word and Sacrament, and a number of supporting ministries of charity, compassion, and good works. It is this Order, and the God it honours, against which progressivism has revolted, seeking to replace it with a New World Order of secularism, whether soft, like that of the original liberalism of the United States, or hard, like that of Communism.

The most important of the revolutions against Christendom were the Puritan revolts against the orthodox Church of England and the Royal House of Stuart in the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century, and the Russian Revolution, especially its Bolshevist phase, in the twentieth century. The last mentioned, which spawned imitation Communist revolutions all over the globe in the century that followed, took place in the first phase of the World War that reduced most of what was left of the Old Christian Order to rubble. In both phases of this War the United States was led by liberal Democrats who were determined that the war would result in a new world order. So it was that at the end of World War I, at Woodrow Wilson’s insistence, the Allies forced Kaiser Wilhelm and Emperor Karl I off of their thrones, with disastrous consequences, and created the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations. While it was a set of most unfortunate circumstances that forced us to ally ourselves with the greater of two evils, Stalin and his Soviet Union, to defeat the lesser of two evils, Hitler and his Third Reich, in the Second World War, it was the influence of FDR, after he successfully maneuvered the Empire of Japan into attacking his own country bringing him into the war that he so desperately wanted to enter in order to carry out his megalomaniacal messianic fantasies, that ensured that eastern Europe fell under Communist domination, that the Allies handed several million people who had fled Soviet repression back over to the Red Army, and the United Nations as we know it today was created. American re-education, imposed upon the defeated Germans by force and on the European Allies by bribery, became one of the largest, if not the single largest, contributing factors to the spread of the Cultural Marxim and political correctness that has in more recent decades been imported back to North America from Europe.

The United States, far from being the leader of the resistance to the New World Order, has been the most active and effective agent in engineering its construction.

In the Dominion of Canada, following the Second World War, the party of Americanization, the Liberal Party, gained a stranglehold on power in Ottawa just at the time that its own leadership had been captured by the hard left. They then proceeded to impose a far left transformation upon our country in which imitation of the United States was the means by which most of the changes were accomplished.

The two biggest examples of this took place during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.

In 1964, almost ten years after the Supreme Court decision that struck down segregation, the United States government, giving in to demands from a Communist-affiliated, heretical preacher who began his career as a civil rights activist only after the aforementioned Supreme Court decision, passed a bill which replaced the injustice of de jure segregation with the injustice of de jure integration. Pierre Trudeau decided that Canada needed to follow the United States’ example and in 1977 passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, which established thought police and a thought crime tribunal. By imitating the United States, Trudeau made us more like the USSR.

Closer to the end of his premiership, Trudeau decided that since the United States has its lauded Bill of Rights, we needed an equivalent, and gave us one in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Not only did this actually weaken our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms by giving both Parliament and the provincial legislatures the right to ignore them, it also saddled us with an autocratic Supreme Court, just like the American one, which then proceeded to wage war on our Christian traditions, customs, morality and heritage as SCUSA had been doing in the United States for decades prior to this. Six years later, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down all our abortion laws in R. v. Morgentaler. This was fifteen years after the equivalent American decision of Roe v. Wade and would not have been possible in Canada prior to 1982.

All attempts to move Canada closer to the United States have had the effect of shifting the country leftward. Consider the fact that our military, whose faithful service to God, King, Country, and Empire we rightly honour every November 11th, now serves as part of an international police force that serves the United Nations. An example of how this has led to our forces being woefully misused took place in the final decade of the last century when, with the blessing of then Prime Minister Jean Chretien, our troops participated in the ungodly UN/NATO campaign against the Orthodox Serbs on behalf of the Bosnian and Kosovan Muslims instigated by the Clinton administration in the United States. The placing of our troops in the service of the United Nations was initially due to the efforts of Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his actions, in itself a good indicator that they are worthy of opprobrium. These same actions led to the defeat of the St. Laurent government in which Pearson served because the Canadian public correctly perceived them to be a betrayal of Canada’s traditional loyalties. Pearson had taken the side of the Eisenhower administration against the British – and, for that matter, the French and Israelis – in the Suez Crisis.

Given everything I have observed above, and the fact that Mr. Moriarty himself acknowledges that the American Left and such elements of the Republican Party as the Bush family are open supporters of the New World Order, it makes zero sense for him to argue that for Canada to join the United States would be some sort of triumph of Christian civilization over the New World Order.

Indeed, Loyalism and Confederation, the foundations of Canada, were efforts to resist the New World Order in its earliest stages. While liberalism had already permeated much of the United Kingdom by the middle of the eighteenth century when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, Great Britain retained, and still retains to this day, the outward form of the Old Christian Order. As a result, British civilization was a mixture of the old Christian civilization and the new liberal civilization in which the old institutions of Christendom exerted a restraining influence on the excesses of liberalism. Sadly, that influence has waned as liberalism has gained the ascendency. In the American Republic, liberalism was wholeheartedly embraced and the outward form of the Christian Order was rejected. The decision of the Loyalists and later the Fathers of Confederation to remain a part of British civilization and resist the pull of the American Republic was a decision to choose a weakened form of Christian civilization over a soft form of the New World Order.

For all these reasons, we must say thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Moriarty, for your kind offer to join the United States. As admirable as the current American President’s stand may be, on many issues, he is far from typical. Indeed, he is the exception to a norm represented by the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas.

God Save the Queen!

The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode I

The Origin

Evelyn Disraeli Dryden Bonald Burke Carey Filmer Eliot Hyde Maistre Salisbury Johnson was known as Eddy to his family and his friends. His parents, disgusted at how Canada’s public schools had degenerated into left-wing indoctrination camps, had sent him to a private, church-run, school instead, and so unlike most young Canadians his age, he could read and write proper English and was capable of formulating a logical argument. His love and appreciation for his country, reinforced by his having been taught her history without either a Marxist or a Liberal Party interpretive lens, further set him apart from the majority of his generation. He was also a huge fan of superhero comic books and motion pictures based on the same but in this he was not so different from his peers.

Eddy liked to enter contests and occasionally even won a prize. His favourite contest was the annual snap-back-the-spoon contest at the frozen yogurt chain founded by legendary sports figure Jim Morton. Not that this has anything to do with our story, but for the sake of clarity, the Jim Morton in question is neither the Scottish soccer player nor the Australian football player but the Canadian star of the mixed-sport basket hockey, who still holds the all-time world’s record for the longest uninterrupted period spent dribbling the puck. Every summer, his frozen yogurt franchise holds a contest. Every frozen yogurt, ice cream, or gelato they serve comes with a special, contest, plastic spoon. When the customer has finished his frosty treat, he snaps back the handle of the spoon to discover whether he has won a prize or not. Eddy would play every day while the contest was on, although usually he won nothing more than another frozen yogurt.

One hot summer’s day, however, after he had enjoyed a particularly refreshing dessert, he snapped back the handle of his spoon and saw the words “mystery prize.” “Oh boy”, he thought, “this is going to be something really good.” So he took his prize-winning spoon to the counter, and his server congratulated him and took his contact information, telling him that he would receive an e-mail within the next couple of days telling him what his prize was and how he could claim it.

The next morning Eddy checked his e-mail and, sure enough, there was a message from Jim Morton’s corporate headquarters. He opened it and read that he had won a free tour of the Clock Museum. This dampened his spirits somewhat, as a tour of the Clock Museum ranked fairly low on the list of prizes he was hoping to win. To be precise, it was 97, 832nd on the list, right below an ear-wax removal and above a roll of non-stick masking tape. Like Priam of Troy, however, for whom the policy did not work out so well, he was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and, besides, he had nothing better to do on the date of the tour, which was the twenty-seventh of July.

“The twenty-seventh of July”, he noted, “is the ninth of Thermidor, the day of the Great Reaction, when the Reign of Terror of the French Cromwell, Maximilien Robespierre finally came to an end and he was condemned to the same bloody fate to which he had assigned so many others. It ought to be a day of celebration, and I am going to be spending it looking at clocks.”

He, nevertheless, marked it on his calendar, and when the day arrived, showed up at the museum to claim his prize. He was less than thrilled to find that his tour guide was Mona Monotone, widely considered to be the most boring tour guide in the entire Dominion, if not the Commonwealth. According to legend, she had led a group of hyperactive, twelve year old boys, who had just loaded up on sugar, on a tour of Video Game World, and had put them all to sleep within the first five minutes. The legend, Eddy was about to learn, was not exaggerated in the slightest.

When he woke up, hours later, curled up beneath a display of watches that had been made by Thomas Tompion, the famous seventeenth century English horologist he discovered that night had fallen, the museum was closed, and he had been locked inside.

“When it rains it pours” he said to himself.

All at once a flash of lightning could be seen in the sky which was followed by a loud boom of thunder.

“I didn’t mean it quite that literally.”

Eddy walked around the museum looking for a way out but could find none. He then tried to find a way of entertaining himself until the morning when somebody would come by to open the museum and let him out. All he could find was a radio, which he turned on. The only channel that was coming through was playing a marathon of Cher’s post-Sonny break-up-themed hits. “Believe” had just ended and “I Found Someone” was starting to play. Eddy sighed and tried to turn the radio off but found that the power button was jammed. Eddy tried jiggling the button for most of the duration of the song to no avail. He then got up and headed towards the workshop in hope of finding a pair of plyers. As he did, the Cher marathon segued into “If I Could Turn Back Time”

“Well”, Eddy thought, “At least it is fittingly ironic, considering that I am trapped in here among all these time pieces.”

As Eddy passed before the largest window of the museum, he tripped over something and fell into the giant grandfather clock which faced the window. He struggled to extract himself from the clock, but before he succeeded he looked up through the window and saw a shooting star. At that exact moment the song reached the chorus and the title line was running through his head as he saw the star. Also at that exact same moment a bolt of lightning came through the window and struck the grandfather clock in which Eddy was trapped. He immediately fell into unconsciousness again.

When he awoke again, he finally managed to crawl his way out of the clock. He felt strange, but that did not surprise him considering he had just survived a lightning strike. What did surprise him, was that he did not feel injured. He felt stronger, faster, and more clear-headed than before.

All of a sudden the front door to the museum swung wide open. Standing in the doorway, however, was not the museum curator, any of the other museum staff, the local police, or anyone else whom he might have expected to come by at that time of night. Rather it was a figure dressed in a monk’s robe, with the cowl pulled up over his face.

“Eddy Johnson, I presume?” the monk asked.

“Well, it isn’t Dr. Livingstone” Eddy joked. “Who are you and how do you know my name?”

“I am called Brother Whippet, and I have been sent from the ancient and holy Order of the Marshmallownians to find you.” (1)

“I’ve heard of you. You guys are the monks who make the Benedictines and the Franciscans look like the epitome of worldliness in comparison. You came all the way from Romania to find me? Alve-Say et-ay Ave-ay.”

“Etay ibi-tay. I’m impressed. Few outside of our order speak our tongue. Brother Moonpie and Brother Wagonwheel told me that you were an unusual young man.”

“How on earth do you guys know anything about me?”

“An ancient prophecy. Long ago, Christendom – Christian civilization – was defended by the brave knights who served its kings and defended the Church. It was foretold that on the anniversary of the Great Reaction a new knight would arise to fight for Christendom in her darkest hour. Today is that day, and you are that knight.”

“Me, a knight? Are you serious?”

“Very serious. Tell me, did anything unusual happen to you today?”

“I got trapped in the Clock Museum. That does not happen to me every day.”

“I meant apart from that. Did anything else unusual happen to you while you were trapped in this museum?”

“You mean like getting stuck in a clock that got struck by lightning?”

“Yes. The circumstances that converged around that event have given you the powers that you will need in your fight.”

“What sort of powers?”

“All of the usual superhero stuff – super strength, super speed, and flight, plus one power that is unique to yourself.”

“What is that?”

“Look at your wristwatch.”

Eddy looked at his watch and to his astonishment he saw that it was going backwards.

“What does this mean?” he asked.

“It means that your special power is the ability to turn back the clock. It is the most essential power of all for the hero who will champion Christendom against the evil forces of progress.”

“Who or what are these evil forces that you say I will have to fight?”

“Lucy the gender-confused devil has recently gone on a supervillain creating streak. We don’t have a complete list of who all he has bestowed the diabolical powers of progress on, but the ones we know of so far are Social Justice Warlord, Madame Diversity, Bleeding Heart, Egalitron, The Secularizer, Abortion Lady, Lezbo the Feminist Fatale, The Woke Millennial and his Aunty Fa, Veganator, small-r republican, Treehugger the Ecofreak, The Mad Democrat, The Forward Thinker and the Globalizer. You will have to face these and many other foes. Since you are a Canadian, it is almost inevitable that your crusade for Christendom will also bring you into direct conflict with Captain Airhead and it is not unlikely that you may have to face Lucy himself.”

“That is a lot of enemies – but I am ready to fight in this noble cause!”

“Then allow me to formally swear you in to your knighthood. Do you swear to loyally serve your Queen, country and Commonwealth?”

“I do so swear.”

“Do you swear to faithfully practice the Christian religion and to defend and protect Christ’s Holy Church against all its enemies?”

“I do so swear.”

“Do you swear to defend the weak, especially those who are picked on and bullied by anti-racists, feminists, vegans, the alphabet soup gang, and politically correct thugs and goons in general?”

“I do so swear.”

“Do you promise to fight Lucy the devil and the Liberal Party of Canada to your dying breath?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, as a brother of the Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow, I dub thee knight, and bestow upon thee thy superhero name of Reaction Man.”

So it was that Christendom gained a new champion and a new superhero was born.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode in the Adventures of Reaction Man.

(1) For more of the Order of Marshmallownians see Brother Moonpie and the Devil’s Apocalypse.

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!

Fruit and Nuts

I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels when I was in my early teens and before I had watched more than a couple of the film series that was inspired by the books. Thus I had read Thunderball before I watched either of the two film versions of it (the second film version, which like the first starred Sean Connery as 007, was Never Say Never Again). (1) I was disappointed, therefore, to discover that my favourite part of the book had been omitted from both films. In the story’s primary plotline Bond is sent to recover two atomic bombs that had been stolen by Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his terrorist organization SPECTRE. If you have seen either of the films you will recall that before even receiving this assignment, Bond had stumbled across a clue while he was hanging out at a health spa, breaking the rules and seducing the nurses.

What is not mentioned in either of the movies is the reason why Bond was at the spa to begin with. In the novel, however, this is spelled out at great length in a hilarious secondary plot that leads into the main story. Bond has just undergone his annual physical examination and, while the report indicates he is in prime condition, M, director of the British Secret Service is not satisfied. He, having just come back from a health retreat with all the fanaticism of a new convert, summons Bond into his office and gives him a lecture about eating right and his smoking and drinking habits and then sends him away for a mandatory stay at the health spa. The cab driver who takes him there comments on how odd it is for someone of Bond’s age and health to be going to a place that caters to a clientele of old men with bad backs. While Bond seems to utterly disregard the rules of the spa during his stay, he too comes away from the spa as a convert. He quits drinking, cuts back on his smoking, even switching to a lighter, filtered brand of cigarette, and subsists on a diet of yogurt, Energen rolls and other health foods. He is now so full of pep and energy that he drives his housekeeper, his secretary, and everyone else around him crazy. This all comes to an end when the blackmail message from Blofield arrives. Bond is summoned into an emergency meeting where M, who has already reverted back to his old habits offers him a smoke, and replies with a “Humpf” when Bond says “Thanks sir. I’m trying to give it up”. Having been made aware of the crisis and given his assignment, he returns home and orders his housekeeper to cook him up a real breakfast of bacon and eggs and hot buttered toast (“not wholemeal”), and is subsequently back to normal.

I have always read this as an excellent satire of health fanaticism, although it is apparently inspired by an actual clinic that Fleming himself had attended. Eight years before the publication of Thunderball, C. S. Lewis had mocked health fanatics in the first paragraph of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia books by suggesting that the reason the character of Eustace Scrubb was initially so disagreeable was because of the progressive, forward thinking, advanced views of his parents, who were among other things, teetotalers, non-smokers, and vegetarians.

These books appeared shortly after World War II which, if those who believe we are living in a “post-modern” era are correct, is the prime candidate for the event that signaled the end of the Modern Age. If the Modern Age is thought of as a project that had as its goal the replacement of Medieval Christendom with secular, democratic, liberal nation-states then this project was more or less completed around the time of the war. This is directly related to the fact that health fanaticism was becoming such a nuisance that it became a major object of satire.

Orthodox Christianity does not include elaborate dietary laws, of the sort that Judaism and Islam have, but rather takes a libertarian approach to the matter of food and drink. The development of this approach can be seen in the New Testament beginning with Christ’s statement that it is that which comes out of the heart and not that which enters the mouth that defiles a man, to St. Peter’s vision in which the animals the Old Testament forbade the Jews to eat are declared clean, to the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to St. Paul’s explanation of Christian liberty in his epistles. What the Christian church enjoins upon its members is something much more difficult than merely following a checklist of what you can and cannot eat and drink. Building upon an ethical foundation lain in both the New Testament and classical philosophy it encourages the cultivation of virtues, habits of good behavior that are typically characterized by the traits of balance and moderation. The Anglican catechism, for example, in the section which explains the Christian understanding of the Ten Commandments “according to their spirit and purpose as our Lord teaches in the Gospel” includes as part of our duty to our neighbour the following “To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity”. Temperance, as used here and in the New Testament where it is described as a fruit of the Spirit, means self-control and moderation.

The cultivation of virtue and character is the work of a lifetime and a path that lies between two ever present temptations. One of these is the temptation to give up and give oneself over to habits of excess. The other is the temptation to substitute a list of rules and to keep adding to it until you are buried under it. These temptations are never succumbed to in isolation from each other. Thus, when the North American descendants of the Puritans substituted a prohibition against the consumption of alcohol for Christianity’s traditional exhortation to sobriety a perverse culture of drunkenness began to develop.

Likewise, as the post-Christian Western world began to develop extremely unhealthy eating habits, such as the consumption of large amounts of fast food, pre-packed processed food, and junk food the health nuts began to crawl out of the woodworks, each with his own long list of what you should and should not eat. These lists frequently contradict each other - one health nut will prohibit fat, another will tell you to eat lots of fat and avoid carbohydrates, one will tell you to eat your food raw, another to eat it cooked, etc. What they have in common is that none of them recommend anything as simple as a balanced diet, and indeed one of the oldest versions, a pre-Christian pagan doctrine that was resurrected in the nineteenth century under the new name of vegetarianism for the new scientific era, prohibits the consumption of one of the major food groups entirely. Its most extreme adherents, vegans, prohibit the consumption of two of the major food groups while self-righteously proclaiming their moral superiority over everybody else.

Health nuts often believe that they have some special knowledge, that the medical establishment is conspiring to suppress and keep from the general public, which provides the secret to better health and a longer life. This resembles the doctrine of gnosis from which the Gnostics, the early enemies of apostolic authority and orthodoxy, derived their name. This too points to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christendom and Christian orthodoxy as the genesis of these ideas. Eric Voegelin argued that the very concept of a “Modern Age” had its origins in Gnostic eschatology and it is significant that he identified Puritanism, the extreme form of English Protestantism in which many of these lifestyle prohibitionist movements have their roots, as a form of Gnosticism.

As the Modern Age progressed and the Western world moved further away from orthodox Christendom, more and more of these legalistic health and lifestyle movements popped up. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the teetotal movement, vegetarianism, and sects that teach that Christians are required to eat kosher. It is not at all surprising that with the near completion of the secularization of the West by the end of World War II, the number of such movements exploded. I think the response of Ian Fleming and C. S. Lewis to these sorts of people – mockery, derision, and satire – is the right one, at least so long as they are merely an annoying, nagging, nuisance. When they try to enlist the government, which in the interest of reducing the cost of socialized medicine often seems inclined to listen to them, to compel us by law to conform to their wishes, it is a different matter and we should actively combat this sort of health tyranny. Otherwise, let us attempt to cultivate the virtues of self-control, moderation, and balance, which will do far more for our health than to follow the latest health fad, peddled by a bunch of fruits and nuts.




(1) Interestingly, Fleming had originally written Thunderball as a screenplay and adapted it into the novel, which was then in turn re-adapted into the movie versions.