ἐνταῦθα ἵστημι

It is the Kalends of January once again.   On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year's Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us.   On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when "eight maids a-milking" is one's true love's gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law.   This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters.   As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up.   I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features.   Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same.  I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese's recommendation in this matter.

This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest.   It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required.   It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say "see last year's essay".  The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation "Here I Stand" from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue.   It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023.

I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by "Canada" is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year.   If anyone is offended by this mention of our country's founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it  no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further.   I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated  pretty much smack in  the middle of the country.  While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger.   I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province.   In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College.   This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour's drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.   

I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old.   That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour.    This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being "born again".   Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus' nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term "believe", so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus' introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as "invite Jesus into your heat" and "make a commitment to Christ".   Infer from that what you will.   My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles.   I had had some religious instruction as a child.   My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord's Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us.   No, this is not because I am extremely old - I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister.   The Bible and the Lord's Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier.   At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons' New Testament that I had been given - in school - when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library.   I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things.   We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour.   When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.

While I was still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor.   Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church.  Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions.   I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism - a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith - they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously.   Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church.   That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles.   I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: "In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est", which means "So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all."  Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School.   In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent's canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole.    While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church - and God has established authority in the Church - and her traditions - beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad - are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism.    Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches - the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth - and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic as well - a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman.   It holds the same view of Church history - that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history - that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah's Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call "cults", although ironically what distinguishes the "cults" from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son.   I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith.    Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian.    Nobody has been able to devise a  better form of Church government than that established in the New Testament.   Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood - this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood - and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the  title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself  soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve "Apostle" for those directly commissioned by Christ.   This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement.    Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient  sources.   While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don't would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference,  traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric - or perhaps autocentric - focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and  encouraging familiarity over reverence.

I describe myself as a Tory.   I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada.   There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance.   When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism.   As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance.   It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned  about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election.   Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about "our democracy" but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory.  While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal.   Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course.   The "Forms" that feature so prominently in Plato's dialogues could be described as abstract ideals.   An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes.   While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another - Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his  modified version of the Forms, were not in some other realm but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied - for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world.    Modern abstract ideals are not like that.   The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals.   I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the "democracy" that is this kind of ideal.   In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about "our democracy" have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want.   Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase "our democracy" more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election.   Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because "democracy" as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be.   No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.

Since this - believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality - is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution.    I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.

Parliament needs monarchy.   The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him.   He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests.   There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party.   Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by "proportional representation" - another abstract ideal - which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time.   Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it.   He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty's Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament.   While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border.   In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.   

When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term.   This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives.   This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by "conservative" the way they are essential to what I mean by "Tory".    What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.    

The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals.   While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age.   Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century "Whig Interpretation of History" associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title.   Indeed, the very concept of "progress" when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme.   This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed.   Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril.    Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world - in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation.  Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man's fall into Original Sin.    Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise.  While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God.   In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history's end.   Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God.   It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking.   I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most  valuable parts of our civilization's heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity.   Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth.   The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get.   The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas.   In the early twentieth century a new "liberalism" emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas.   The conservative movement that  arose in the United States after World War II  was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new.   It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.

There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree.   I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own.   The first is the following:

- Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called "medical assistance in dying".

- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.

- There are three genders - masculine, feminine, neuter - but these are properties of words not people.

- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being - not so difficult to define now, was that?)

- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.

- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.

- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.

- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.

- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic.   If a child fails to learn he should be held back.   If he learns he should be rewarded.   If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked.   If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized.   The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.

-  The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone.   If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty.   He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation.   Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with.   It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true "cruel and unusual punishment".

-  The guilt for crimes - again, real crimes of the type just listed - is the perpetrator's and not society's.

-  Drugs of the type that alter one's mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem.   While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.

- Government policy should be natalistic - encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population - and friendly to the traditional family - encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together.   It should not do the opposite - promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional.   It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.

- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people.   If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system.   If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.

That was the first set.   The second is the following:

- Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.

- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.

- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.

- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake.  If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if  the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production.   Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.

The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two.    Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around.    This is yet another reason why I prefer "Tory" as I have explained it, to "conservative".

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

Some Good Reads

All of my writing time for the past couple of weeks has been occupied with material for publication elsewhere. I anticipate this will be the case for a couple of more weeks as well.

In the meantime I have some reading recommendations.

Mark Moncrieff of the blog "Upon Hope" has posted an essay entitled "Homosexuality and Conservatism" which I highly recommend. In a succinct manner, he discusses the radical change in public attitudes towards homosexuality, how this has come about, how the past status quo has been misrepresented as have the consequences of the revolution, and what the appropriate conservative attitude towards all this is.

The "Alt-Right" has received much media attention lately, thanks to Hillary Clinton's attack on them earlier this week. There have been several excellent responses to this from the Alt-Right itself, an online assortment of right-wingers who, as their label would suggest, present an alternative to mainstream conservatism - or cuckservatism - that is actually right wing. The blog Alt-Right has posted a video entitled "We Are the Alt-Right" with a descriptive paragraph that I will reproduce in full here:

Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different. Morality matters and degeneracy is real. All cultures are not equal and we are not obligated to think they are. Man is a fallen creature and there is more to life than hollow materialism. Finally, the white race matters, and civilisation is precious. This is the Alt-Right.

That seems to pretty much sum up what the Alt-Right - or at least the Christian segment of it - stands for and while progressives, liberals, and neoconservatives will no doubt be aghast that in the Current Year anyone would dare express, let alone hold, such beliefs, they seem to be pretty basic truths to me. Of course, to all of that I would add the even more important point that royal monarchy is the best form of government and that government by elected politicians ought only to be allowed when, as in the Westminster parliamentary system, the position the politicians are elected into is that of a servant - the literal meaning of the word "Minister" - of a royal master. The position of servant to a royal master is humbling, which elected politicians need the most. The position of servant of the people or the public, brings out all of their natural hubris.

Which leads me to my final recommendation. The royalist sentiments in my last paragraph are those of a Canadian High Tory, and while I am a representative of the right-wing of that species, there is a left-wing too. The best representative of it is Professor Ron Dart of the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbottsford, British Columbia. My essay, "High Tories, Left and Right" a couple of years ago was a review of an older book of his entitled The Canadian High Tory Tradition. The American Anglican Press has just released his The North American High Tory Tradition . I have reviewed this new volume for the upcoming issue of the Anglican Tradition and you can order the book which, despite its left-of-centre leanings at times is still well worth reading, directly from the publisher here.

High Tories, Left and Right

The Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the Unspeakable, by Ron Dart, Dewdney B.C., Synaxis Press, 2004, 221 pp.

As someone who self-identifies as a “High Tory” I have on occasion been asked to explain what exactly a High Tory is. I usually respond by explaining what a Tory is first and then explaining what is suggested by the qualifying adjective High. While Tory can be simply a nickname for a member or supporter of the Conservative Party I use the term to mean someone who holds to a certain set of principles and convictions and a certain way of looking at life and the world. The expression “small c conservative” is also used by those who wish to identify themselves as being conservative other than in the partisan sense but I prefer the word Tory because it hearkens back to an older form of conservatism, that exemplified by the eighteenth century poet, biographer, essayist, and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson. A Tory is someone who supports the traditions, institutions, and constitution of his country, especially against radical innovations mercilessly derived from absolute, abstract ideals. A Tory looks upon his country and society, not as an aggregation of individuals who happen to live in the same place and time, but as a corporate identity in which individuals and families are connected, in many different ways and at many different levels, to form communities, classes, and all sorts of other social layers that ultimately come together to make an organic whole that includes past and future generations along with the present. A Tory is someone who sees the institutions of church and state as existing to promote the common good of the organic whole of his society which he understands as a collective good rather than in the utilitarian terms of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Having established the meaning of the noun Tory, we now turn to the qualifier. In the writings of T. S. Eliot, who was to the twentieth century what Dr. Johnson was to the eighteenth, i.e., the definitive Tory, we find in his statement “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics” the key to understanding what the “High” in High Tory refers to. Anglo-Catholic is often used interchangeably with High Church and while both expressions usually denote a liturgical style today, both originally referred to a form of ecclesiology, i.e.,, the theology of the church, that correlates with the Tory’s organic view of society, by stressing the importance of Apostolic Succession as an organic and organizational link between the church in the present and the church founded by Christ through His Apostles. Classicism looks to Greco-Roman civilization as the font of the tradition of excellence in the humanities, i.e., arts, philosophy, literature, etc., which excellence is often called High Culture. Royalism is support for the high office of the king or queen and it is the sine qua non of what it means to be a Tory politically.

The High Tory tradition has been an important part of Canada since before Confederation, having inspired the United Empire Loyalists and ultimately, of course, going back to the United Kingdom. In Canada, the question has arisen of whether the High Tory is left-of-centre or right-of-centre. I would answer by saying that the High Tory is right-of-centre, being both a High Tory and very right-of-centre myself. One High Tory who is not so certain of that is Ron Dart.

Ron Dart is a professor at the University College of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia where he teaches in the Department of Political Science, Philosophy and Religious Studies. Professor Dart is a devout Anglican, a Canadian nationalist, and a prolific author who has written several books about the thought of such Canadian Tories as Stephen Leacock and George Grant. He identifies himself both as a High Tory and a Red Tory and indeed uses the terms more or less interchangeably. In 1999 he published a collection of essays under the title The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes. Most recently he published Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism. The book that I wish to discuss here, however, is one that he published ten years ago with the title The Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the Unspeakable. Ten year ago, when this book first came out, the current Conservative Party had just been formed by the final merger of what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance, which had itself been formed by an earlier attempt to merge the Progressive Conservatives and the Reform Party. The completion of the merger seems to have been the catalyst that prompted the writing of several of these essays and their compilation into this book.

Professor Dart took a very dim view of the movement to “unite the right” and the party that emerged from it describing it as a form of American colonization that was replacing Canada’s indigenous Tory tradition with American republicanism. This, I think, was a valid concern, and one which I shared to a large degree, but I do need to point out that my own scepticism towards the merger was based upon the expectation that it would combine the worst in both parties rather than the best. I need to point this out because many of the ideas that I would regard as the best in the Reform/Alliance party – in which I had a membership until a few months before the merger in 2003 – are ideas that Professor Dart would associate with American republicanism.

I say this because throughout the essays in this book, Professor Dart has stressed the differences between the High Tory tradition and the right-of-centre, small-c conservatism of the Canadian Alliance (which he calls the Alliance Party indicating his view of it as an American import), maximizing the distance between the two, while making the most of points of convergence between the High Tory tradition and the left-of-centre views of socialism and second-generation liberalism, minimizing the distance between these. In doing so, he says much that I would affirm and some things that I would question.

He begins his first essay by pointing to the American Revolution, in which the founders of the United States consciously broke away from the English tradition to build a republic on a foundation of liberalism. American conservatism, he is right to observe, has largely been an attempt to conserve the principles of an earlier form of liberalism whereas Canadian conservatism is directly derived from the English High Tory tradition of which it is a continuation. The High Tory, in England and Canada, has traditionally had a high view of the State and its “essential role in building and creating a good and just society” (p. 8), he writes, whereas it was the liberalism upon which the American Republic was built which spoke of a “lighter State” and “less taxes.”

This is all true and factual and this is the essence of both the chasm Dr. Dart sees as existing between the High Tory tradition and that of the Reform/Alliance/present Conservative Parties and the ties he sees between the High Tory tradition and socialism and welfare liberalism. The High Tory does indeed have a high view of the State, regarding it as a positive good rather than a necessary evil. I do not, however, see any necessary contradiction between this view of the State and the idea that the burden of regulations and taxes which the State lays upon the people it governs should be as light as is consistent with maintaining law and order.

It needs to be pointed out that there is a huge gulf between the rhetoric and reality of liberalism with regards to light government and taxation. The original English liberals, the Whigs, declared themselves to be on the side of liberty and against tyranny but the actual result of their campaign to transfer the power, privileges, and prerogatives of the Crown to the elected legislative assembly was to increase rather than to decrease the size and scope of the State and to cause taxes to go up rather than down. The American Revolution, fought with the same rhetoric, had the same results.

This is important because we do not want to make the mistake of thinking that freedom or liberty is a new idea or value that liberalism introduced into the world. This is liberalism’s own way of thinking about it and one of Dr. Dart’s most important and valuable insights, to which I will shortly return, is of the need to question liberalism at the level of its most basic ideas which are often taken for granted today. St. Paul the Apostle, in his epistle to the Romans asserted both the liberty of the believer and that the civil authority was the minister of God, clearly not seeing these as contradictory ideas and King Charles I, who is arguably the patron saint of the Tory, in his final speech before his martyrdom said that he had taken his stand for the true liberty of the people, consisting not of democracy but of laws which secure their lives and goods. The equation of liberty with democracy was, of course, the liberal position and the fact that the historical triumph of liberalism has led to the exponential multiplication of laws and taxes rather than their reduction shows the liberal view up for the lie that it is. Ironically this idea that freedom is a concept for which the world owes liberalism and/or the American revolutionaries is itself the idea that I found most objectionable in the Alliance Party where it tended to take the form of an obnoxious anti-patriotism and is a good part of the reason I let my membership drop.

I would argue that keeping the burdens of law and taxation as light as possible is actually essential to Tory support for the State as a positive institution necessary for the common good of society. Excessive laws and taxation have historically been one of the two biggest sources of popular discontent that demagogues have been able to exploit against the social and civil order and it is therefore in the State’s own interests not to err on the side of too much law and taxation or even to approach the line.. The other source of discontent is widespread misery throughout the populace. It was to combat this second potential threat to the civil order that Tories like Disraeli and Bismarck first devised a modest social safety net in the nineteenth century.

There is a paradox here in that while Disraeli and Bismarck introduced these social reforms to combat socialism it is because of these reforms that Dr. Dart can make a case for common ground between the High Tory and the socialist. It would have been interesting to see a discussion of how Toryism, liberalism, and socialism each separately moved towards support of a State social safety net for different reasons and to accomplish radically different ends. The only one of these changes Dr. Dart discusses as such is the evolution of “second generation” liberalism which he also calls “social liberalism” an expression which he uses to denote welfare liberalism rather than the moral permissiveness with which it is more commonly associated. Socialism too had to evolve before there could be any talk of common ground between the Tory and the socialist because in its original form socialism was the doctrine of levellers and revolutionaries, the very antithesis of the Tory, and it’s central concept was the common ownership of wealth, goods, and property, a doctrine explicitly rejected by the Anglican Church in the Thirty-Eighth of the Articles of Religion.

Even in its evolved form, I confess that I fail to see much in common between socialism and Toryism. It was George Grant, Canada’s finest conservative philosopher, who said that socialism was more conservative than capitalism, prompting Gad Horowitz to dub this view “Red Toryism”. I have always felt that Grant, whom Dr. Dart rightly gives a prominent place in this book and whom I, like Dr, Dart, hold in high esteem, was only half right on this. He was right to say that capitalism is the source of dynamic change and the uprooting of families, communities, and traditions, hence a revolutionary rather than a conservative force. He was wrong to say that socialism was any better. Second generation socialism, which harnesses the power of the State to accomplish progressive ends, if anything exacerbates what the conservative finds objectionable in capitalism.

Dr. Dart also gives a prominent place to Stephen Leacock, another traditional Tory for whom Dr. Dart and I share a high regard. Dr. Dart does an excellent job of showing Leacock, about whom he has written extensively, to have been much more than a humourist, but an economist and political and social scientist as well, but his reading of Leacock on the matter of socialism somewhat puzzles me. In his doctoral dissertation, to which Dr. Dart devotes one of the essays in this book, Leacock analyzed and was highly critical of the doctrine of laissez-faire, and rightly so as it takes the idea of private enterprise to an absurd, individualistic, extreme. This does not amount to a wholesale rejection of private enterprise, however, and Leacock’s take on socialism, in “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice” was that it was an unworkable scheme, designed for a race of angels rather than men, life under which would be like life in a penitentiary, and which amounts to slavery. It seems to me that Leacock supported private enterprise but not in the extreme form of laissez-faire, and supported a social safety net for precisely the same reasons Disraeli and Bismarck did, i.e., as protection against the threat of socialism. These are my own prejudices, however, and I am not even remotely close to knowing as much about Leacock as Dr. Dart.

Although the evolution of socialism from the idea of collective ownership into the idea of an expansive social safety net is not discussed, Dr. Dart does discuss competing perspectives on the Left. Several essays in the first section of the book discuss American militarism and imperialism and two of these are devoted to the influence of American linguistics professor Noam Chomsky on the Canadian Left. Dr. Dart points out parallels between how the Alliance drew inspiration from the American Right and how the Canadian Left draws inspiration from Chomsky, lamenting that both Left and Right look so much outside their own country’s traditions to those of the United States, and further pointing out how the rhetoric of the self-declared anarchist Chomsky and that of the American Right have a common source is the liberal, republican, ideology of the American Revolution. Dr. Dart’s nationalist call to Canadians, Left and Right, to look to our own heritage and traditions is one which I loudly applaud.

Here, however, I feel compelled to point out that the High Tory tradition has long had an anarchist wing. This is paradoxical, of course, and quite deliberately so on the part of those involved, but it is made possible by distinguishing between two different States. The first, supported by all High Tories, is simply the Crown and Parliament as the governing institutions in the overall traditional order. The second, is a faceless collective, consisting of corrupt politicians and soulless bureaucrats, constantly interjecting itself into our everyday lives, throwing its weight around, bossing us around, burying us beneath a pile of useless and insipid regulations, and taking a huge chunk of our income as payment for its bullying behaviour. It is quite possible to love the first while hating and despising the second.

Novelists, for some reason or another make up a disproportionate part of this wing of the High Tory tradition, examples of which include Evelyn and Auberon Waugh and Anthony Burgess, who in the same breathe declared himself to be both a Jacobite and an anarchist, declaring his hatred of the State even as he recommended to the Americans that they find themselves a Stuart king. This is perhaps more common in Britain than in Canada but there is an obvious Canadian example, himself a novelist, who is even quoted by Dr. Dart in this book. I refer, of course, to Robertson Davies, who as a staunch monarchist, High Anglican and Canadian nationalist was clearly a High Tory despite his mild inclination to vote Liberal and who, in the introduction to The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, put a most amusing justification of the synthesis of royalism and anarchism into the mouth of his well-known fictional alter-ego. Need I say that it is this wing of the High Tory tradition with which I myself would most identify?

I will make one final observation with regards to the State. Early in the book, Dr. Dart points out that American republicans and their counterparts in the Alliance emphasize the role of society in creating the common good at the expense of the State, a form of thought he traces back to Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense. Paine depicted society, consisting of voluntary, intermediate, associations as good and the State as a necessary evil. The High Tory view, as Dr. Dart explains well, is that both society and State have a role to play in this. My observation is that there are pitfalls on both sides of the Tory position. If Paine exalted society at the expense of the State the other pitfall is to be found in the way second generation liberalism and socialism have expanded the State at the expense of society. First generation liberalism fought to transfer power from the Crown to the legislative assembly, expanding the State in the process, and second generation liberalism has sought to concentrate the authority and in many cases the roles of society’s other institutions and associations in the same legislative assembly, thus expanding the State further at the expense of society. Since both the modern liberal and the socialist seek to harness the power of the democratic assembly and its bureaucracy which they have vastly expanded at the expense of a weakened Crown and society to accomplish modern progressive ends this seems to me to be the more deadly of the two pitfalls.

This brings me back to Dr. Dart’s insight of which mention was made earlier about the need to question liberalism at the deeper level of its basic principles. As the institutions of society, including the Church and family, were weakened a number of debates over contentious issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay rights, to list but three examples, arose. Dr. Dart aptly calls these “culture wars” and astutely notes that it is pointless to engage in these debates if we are not willing to examine and understand the deeper principles that lie beneath these issues He further observes that “we live in an age dominated by liberalism” (p. 114), that it is a sort of “matrix” into which we are born, and that there is an ironically illiberal unwillingness to question liberalism’s own fundamental principles.

This is all just from the introduction to the first of the three essays which resonated with me the most in the entire book, all of which are found in the fourth and final section. This is not to slight the other sections in each of which one of Dr. Dart’s most impressive talents is on prominent display. I refer to his matchless ability to see connections between the lives and thoughts of various individuals, to point out where they intersect in ways that have often been overlooked by biographers, historians, and scholars who have made one of these individuals the focus of their study, drawing comparisons or contrasts. It is in this final section of the book, however, that he turns to deep thoughts, principles, and philosophical structures and I suspect that he consciously arranged the book in this way in order to illustrate his point about the importance of looking at the underlying ideas beneath the personalities, conflicts, and issues.

In the first of these three essays which is also the first in the section, Dr. Dart traces the history of the formation of the liberal matrix through seven phases, first identifying the basic principles of liberalism – “liberty (freedom), individualism, equality, fraternity (solidarity), conscience, historicism, and the quest for meaning, happiness or authenticity” (p. 114), observing that liberalism will take different forms depending upon how these principles are prioritized and showing how even deeper than these principles, lie the root of liberalism in its view of human nature as “open and weak on boundaries and limitations…a project in which we make ourselves.” (p. 115)

I was pleased to see that, despite a visible preference for Plato, he argues against the simplistic Plato v. Aristotle model that traces the origins of liberalism back to Aristotle, instead pointing, like Richard M. Weaver and the Radical Orthodoxy movement within Anglican theology (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, et. al.), to the shift away from universals in the nominalism of Occam and Scotus as the source of liberalism. From nominalism, he traces the development of liberalism through the Reformation, the emerging individualism of the seventeenth century which saw the English Civil War, the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the Victorian era, the early twentieth century, to the post-modern era, tracing how liberalism in each phase took the same basic principles one step further, turning them against the traditional Church in the Reformation, then against Christianity itself in the Enlightenment, until finally we arrived at the present where “the language of rights, diversity, process, tolerance, pluralism and openness is very much the sacred speech, script, and shibboleths of the liberal drama”. (p. 120) After giving us this outline of the advancement of liberal thought, he identifies the question -“What is the good in liberalism and what are its limitations” – which requires us to do what so many find difficult to do, or even to think of doing, which is to take a step back from the liberal worldview and to think outside its box. Indeed, in the conclusion to the essay, which comes after a critical examination of the attempt of one liberal, appropriately Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, to think outside the box and a brief discussion of the older alternatives to the liberal view of the self in the contemplative traditions within western and eastern religions, he says “If we have not learned to think outside this matrix, we probably have not yet learned to truly think.” (pp. 127-128).

The second of the three essays comes almost immediately after the first, with a short review of a Charles Taylor book in between. In this essay, Dr. Dart contrasts the High Tory way and the older Western tradition from which it is derived with eight “Marks of Modernity”. Where the modern world values the vita activa, i.e., the life of “labour, work and action” (p. 133) over the contemplative life, Martha over Mary to use Scriptural imagery, the older tradition valued the contemplative life higher. Perhaps value is not the right word, however, for the second mark of modernity is the shift away from the classical emphasis on virtues to an emphasis on values, to what is chosen by the self rather than what is fixed. These reversals have brought about a further shift from wisdom to knowledge, manifested in the abandonment of the classical understanding of education as to “awaken the soul to the good, true and beautiful” (p. 135) to the modern understanding of it as job training. The fourth mark of modernity is that the individual has come to “trump the rights of the community, nation, and commonweal” (p. 138) and the fifth is the shift away from memory and the past to a “preoccupation with the present and immediate” (p. 139) which Dr. Dart very accurately characterizes as a turning away from the humilitas to hubris. The sixth mark is a turn away from thinking of our relationships in terms of covenant built on loyalty to contract based upon mutual advantages and interests. Modern man, Dr. Dart then points out, has gone from thinking of self as a gift, “something we discover through being open to the grace and goodness of existence” to thinking of self as a project, something “that we make and write as an artist might write a drama, poem, or novel” (p. 141). Finally, he talks about how modern man has embraced equality to the point of rejecting hierarchy, the “notion of good, better, best and bad, worse, worst” that “resists the dumbing down of all things to the level of opinion” and means “that the self can aspire to higher things, greater and grander quality.” (p. 144)

In making these contrasts, Dr. Dart gives an outline of the High Tory way - the life of contemplation, the classical virtues, wisdom as the end of learning, the commonweal, memory of the past, relationships as covenants, self as gift and hierarchy – with which I would wholeheartedly agree, although as a High Tory of the Right, I would probably put much more emphasis on the last item. That Dr. Dart’s emphasis is on the first item is evident in the essays following this one, particularly the ones about C. S. Lewis and Thomas Merton (from whom he borrowed the subtitle for the book). This is a good emphasis too, and it brings us to the third of Dr. Dart’s essays that I wish to discuss, which apart from two book reviews is the last in the book.

In this essay Dr. Dart talks about the Anglican Church, at one time called “The Tory Party at prayer”, which I am pleased to see he traces back further than the break with Rome in the sixteenth century to the arrival of Christianity in Albion. Describing the tradition as “deeply Celtic, firmly Catholic, thoroughly Reformed, generously Liberal, eagerly Evangelical and openly Charismatic” (pp. 199-200). He identifies as the eleven foundation stones of the Anglican Tradition, the wisdom of Tradition, the Bible, “experience, spirituality, mysticism and the contemplative way” but not a spirituality that demonizes institutional religion, the magisterial Tradition (by which he means the speaking of the Church to political, economic and social issues), a high view of the arts and culture in which “the good, true and the beautiful are means of grace, and must be seen as such”, “a profound respect for Nature as a good”, a middle way between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, education in which the heart and head are integrated, rejection of the “split between the sacred and the profane”, tension between a conservative respect for the wisdom of the past and the old ways and liberal concern for the matters of the present, and the localism of the parish. (pp. 200-204).

After this beautiful portrait of the breadth and depth of the Anglican tradition he discusses the contemporary situation in the Anglican Church – the way liberalism has come to dominate the leadership, the response of the conservatives in the conferences of the Essentials movement, the discussion (or lack thereof) between the two sides, how Bishop Ingham of New Westminster took liberalism to the next level with a reductionist form of pluralism in a book released in 1997, and the critical response it received the following year (modestly, Dr. Dart does not mention that he co-wrote the response).

There are obvious parallels between what is happening in the Church and what is happening in modern society as a whole, illustrating perhaps, both the wisdom of what Dr. Dart has to say about refusing to divide the world into the sacred and profane and how important it is that the Church speak prophetically into the whole of society rather than uncritically submitting to the spirit of the age. There are no easy solutions to the crisis in the Church, but just as with our country and with Western civilization as a whole, there is a clear need to think deeply and critically about modern principles that have gone unchallenged and to find refreshment from traditional wells and streams as we seek to walk the old paths anew. This is the High Tory way, and on that High Tories, Left and Right, can surely agree.

If I have not already said this in this review, I would like to conclude by giving my hearty recommendation that you read The Canadian High Tory Tradition but with the warning that you will not be able to stop at this book, which discusses so many other interesting writers and books that my reading list has not gone down by one with the reading of it, but expanded immensely. That, by the way, is what I consider the mark of a truly excellent book.