Death and Doctors

Human fertilization occurs when the two human gametes, the sperm provided by the male and the egg provided by the female, combine to form a zygote.   The gametes, formed by the process known as meiosis, are haploid, which means that they each possess half of a full set of human chromosomes.   The zygote is diploid, which means that it possesses a full set of human chromosomes, half from the sperm, half from the egg.   With the formation of the zygote, the process whereby it grows through the ordinary cell replication known as mitosis into a multi-celled embryo and then a foetus, begins.    What this demonstrates is that a) the zygote is alive and b) it is human, therefore c) it is already a human life.    The ethical implication of this is that the deliberate termination of a pregnancy, unless it can be shown to fall into any of the recognized categories of justifiable homicide, such as self-defence against criminal assault or in execution of the sentence of a court of law after a conviction, following due process, for a capital crime, is an unjustifiable homicide, or, to use the plain English word for this, a murder.

This fact was recognized by Canadian law until relatively recently.   It was Pierre Trudeau, who after contributing to the overthrow of the traditional Roman Catholic cultural establishment of his home province in his career as a Communist propagandist in the 1950s was brought into the Liberal Party at the Dominion level by Lester Pearson in the 1960s and groomed to be Pearson’s successor as leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister which he became in 1968, who changed this.    In 1969, Trudeau altered the Criminal Code to allow for abortions in cases where three physicians would attest that the pregnancy was endangering the life of the mother.    This, however, was small potatoes, compared to the effect of his addition of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to the constitution in 1982.   This gave the Supreme Court of Canada powers similar to those of the American Supreme Court.   The consequence was that in 1988, the Supreme Court struck all remaining laws against abortion from the books, telling Parliament that it would have to pass new legislation restricting abortion that would conform to the Court’s interpretation of the Charter, which Parliament has failed to do to this day. 

Now, as bad as Pierre Trudeau’s role in creating this unprincipled exception whereby the protection of the rule of law against murder is withheld from the most vulnerable undoubtedly was, it was not exactly out of character for him either in his role of Communist radical or his role of sleazy, dirtbag, politician.   The same cannot be said for those who have the task of doing the dirty work of abortion – the physicians.   The first principle of the ethics that supposedly binds the medical profession is primum non nocere – first do no harm.    The deliberate termination of life is a fairly obvious and extreme violation of that principle. (1)   Yet abortion is not the only procedure in Canada today in which those who have sworn the oath attributed to Hippocrates of Kos intentionally put an end to human lives.

 

Physician-assisted suicide was against the law in Canada until very recently.    In was only in 2014 that the province of Lower Canada became the first to pass “right-to-die” legislation.   In February of the following year the Supreme Court gave its Carter ruling on the constitutionality of the law against physician-assisted suicide.   In the Morgentaler decision in 1988 in which the abortion laws were struck down, the Court had invited Parliament to pass new legislation that would restrict abortion without violating the Charter, which they never did.   In the Carter decision in 2015, the Court gave Parliament one year in which to fix the existing law before it was struck down absolutely.   Not only did Parliament fail to do this, but in passing Bill C-14 the following year, it legalized the procedure and, under certain circumstances, allowed for physicians to go even further than what the word “assisted” implies.  

 

The old expression for this sort of thing, where a physician kills or helps to commit suicide, a patient who is suffering from an incurable condition that causes excruciating pain, was "mercy killing".   This has long gone out of style, since its supporters are squeamish about acknowledging the reality that it involves "killing".   It was replaced years ago with the neologism euthanasia, formed from the Greek words for “good” and “death.”  Euthanasia is an example of a euphemism, a word with which it shares a component part.   Euphemism combines the word for "good" with the word for "talk" or "speech" and refers to inoffensive or at least less offensive words used as substitutes for more offensive ones.    George and Sheila Grant wrote an excellent essay about the euphemistic language of euthanasia - not just the term itself but the accompanying rhetoric such as "death with dignity" and "quality of life" - that first appeared in Care for the Dying and Bereaved, edited by Ian Gentles and published by the Anglican Book Centre in 1976, and which was subsequently republished as the second last chapter of Grant's Technology and Justice published by Anansi in 1986.   The Grants focused on the language surrounding the practice because they believed, rightly, that confusion with regards to terminology was creating confusion in the public debate about the issue.   They made this important distinction:

 

It must be forcefully stressed that the proper refusal to prolong inevitable death is quite different from deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying.  Only the latter is euthanasia.

 

Confusion over this point, they maintained, was what was generating sympathy for the practice:

 

If the public rightly disapproves of the abuse of technology on the dying, yet wrongly identifies euthanasia with letting the dying die, then our attitude to euthanasia inevitably becomes more positive.

 

Imagine what they would have said could they have seen ahead to 2020 in which physician-assisted suicide was embraced while letting the dying die was condemned to the point that it was deemed necessary to take away everybody's most basic rights and freedoms in order to prevent the latter from happening.   Actually, maybe we don't need to imagine.   Here is the concluding paragraph of their essay:

 

The three ideas which have been discussed - "death with dignity" and human autonomy, the distinction between "persons" and "non-persons", and "quality of life" judgements - all have something in common.   They are all used dogmatically, leading to great confidence in our right to control human life.  These are areas where the great religious tradition at its best has been restrained by agnosticism and a sense of the transcendent mystery.  Some believers have tried to combine these two views of life in a crudely simplistic manner.  They have identified the freedoms technology gives us with the freedom given by truth.  The result in the public world, if policy flowed from this identification, would be the destruction of cherished political freedoms.

 

Although decades have passed since the Grants warned us about where the paths of abortion and euthanasia were leading us, decades in which we, ignoring those warnings, proceeded down those paths at an accelerating pace, never have their words been more timely.

 

Today, the battle, for many of the sane remnant who think that an MD should not be regarded as the real life equivalent of a Double-O designation with a licence to kill in one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, has shifted from protecting human lives from the threats of abortion and euthanasia, to protecting the rights of physicians to refrain from performing or taking part in these gruesome slaughters against their consciences.    This is unfortunate, because it sends the message of a retreat from, if not a concession to, the advancing foe, but it cannot, perhaps, be helped due to the many indications we have seen over the last decade or so that toleration of dissent to abortion and euthanasia within the medical profession is shrinking and short-lived.    In Upper Canada, for example, there is a requirement that physicians who do not want to take part in an assisted-suicide provide an “effective referral”.   If you don’t know what that means, think of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer comes up with a scheme to gain a whole lot of extra weight to qualify as clinically obese so he can work from home.   When Lisa tells him that “any doctor” would tell him that obesity is unhealthy, he says “well, we’ll just see about that little miss smart guy” and goes to see his family physician Dr. Hibbert.   Dr. Hibbert says “My God, that’s monstrous!  I’ve never heard of anything so negligent.  I’ll have no part of it”.   Homer, unperturbed, asks “Can you recommend a doctor who will?”  Dr. Hibbert replies “yes” and the next thing you know Homer is seeing Dr. Nick, who after his usual greeting of “Hi everybody”  tells Homer “Now there are many options available for dangerously underweight individuals like yourself.   I recommend a slow, steady, gorging process combined with assal horizontology…You’ll want to focus on the neglected food groups, such as the whipped group, the congealed group and the chocotastic.”   The point, before I end up quoting the entire episode, is that Dr. Hibbert performed an “effective referral”.  

 

Last November, the National Post’s Barbara Kay, writing for The Post Millennial, informed us about the case of Rafael Zaki, a young man who had been a student at the College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba here in Winnipeg.   He had written an essay against abortion for his Sunday School - he is a devout Christian of the ancient Coptic communion whose parents came to Canada fleeing religious persecution.   He posted the essay to Facebook, which prompted a number of anonymous complaints to the school.   The school investigated and, in Kay's words, this "led directly to a remediation process, during which Zaki was summoned to seven meetings with Dr. Ira Ripstein, the Max Rady College of Medicine associate dean for undergraduate medical education".   Kay's description of this "remediation process"  confirms what I assumed upon reading that expression - that it was euphemistic for the kind of nasty Communist official intimidation and reeducation process that hides behind the smiley-face of fake, outer "niceness" that evokes the image of Dolores Umbridge, the authoritarian bureaucratic educator from the Harry Potter books and which is ubiquitous on campuses all across Canada.   Kay drew the parallel with what had happened to Lindsey Sheppard at Wilfred Laurier University four years ago.   Although Zaki wrote letters of apology for giving offence - he should have refused to do so and read what the late Sir Roger Scruton had to say about the difference between giving and taking offence - this was not good enough for Ripstein because he, that is Zaki, did not recant of his views.   He was expelled from the College, appealed, and, despite any number of policy violations, procedural irregularities, and such, on the part of the school on top of the blatant injustice of it all, his appeal was turned down.   He has filed an application to have a real court, the Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench, conduct a judicial review, although he was denied an injunction staying the expulsion until the outcome could be determined.   Kay's focus in her commentary on this entire episode is on the growth of a totalitarian climate on the campuses of academe, suppressing freedom of thought in what until recently was considered to be its bastion.   The story, which does indeed, illustrate this well, also tells us that in at least one College of Medicine, the next step in the corruption of the medical profession has begun, the weeding out of dissenters to abortion and euthanasia before they can be licensed, so as to eventually produce a profession monolithic in its support of this blatant repudiation of basic medical ethics.  

 

The high esteem in which the medical profession is held has long brought to its members temporal rewards both social, in the form of respectability, and pecuniary in the form of very comfortable salaries.   Society has bestowed this esteem upon this profession based upon its image of learning put to the service of mankind in the alleviation of suffering, promotion of good health, and sustaining of life through the treatment of injury and disease.   That the putting to death of the vulnerable at both ends of life, the unborn in the womb on the one hand and the aged and the infirm on the other, is now also a part of this profession clashes with this image.   That the majority of the profession see no fundamental contradiction here is good cause for us to stop blindly trusting these overpaid rectal orifices, when they tell us that we must sacrifice our rights, freedoms, social lives, communities, jobs, and businesses in order to “save lives.”

 

(1)   This is obvious in any language, but interestingly to say “first do not kill” in Latin you would say primum non necare.   The second conjugation nocere – to injure, harm – and the first conjugation necare – to kill are both derived from a common root, believed to be the word for death in Proto Indo European, also the source of the cognate words nasyati, which means “perish” in Sanskrit and nekros which means “corpse” in Greek.

The Witch Doctors

Ross Bagdasarian Sr. was the most famous Armenian-American in show business prior to the Kardashians, if show business is the proper term for what the latter do.   He got his start in acting before switching to singing and song-writing in the 1950s.   Late in that decade, he thought up the gimmick of speeding up the voice track on recordings to make the singers’ voices sound high and squeaky as if they had been performing in a studio full of helium.  He began recording songs using this technique and giving the attribution to a trio of cartoon chipmunks – Alvin, Simon, and Theodore.   Needless to say, it was successful and fairly soon a television series featuring his cartoon band premiered.  Bagdasarian would interact with Alvin and the Chipmunks as a cartoon version of himself who acted as their manager and went by the name David Seville.

 

Immediately prior to creating Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bagdasarian, already using the stage name David Seville, released a single which soared to the top of the charts.   The song’s title was “Witch Doctor”.   In the song, Seville as narrator addresses the object of his unrequited affection, and tells how he went to a witch doctor for help with this situation.   The witch doctor offers him the following advice:

 

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla, bing bang,

ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang, walla walla bing bang.

 

Who was this person with such lucid and helpful advice?

 

A witch doctor or shaman is an important figure in most tribal societies, and in a few that have developed well beyond the tribal stage as well.   These are the people to whom the members of the tribe traditionally turn when they need healing and for a number of other reasons.   The healing the witch doctor offers involves him performing rituals and entering into a trance to make contact with the spirit world.   In the language that has become de rigueur in our age of political correctness, this would be described as an “alternative” form of medicine.   Being a traditionalist, I prefer the language with which both testaments of the Christian Scriptures condemn this sort of thing, terms like “witchcraft” and “sorcery”.

 

We, in our advanced technological civilization, like to think that our medical system bears no relationship to this sort of thing.   Our medicine, we keep telling ourselves, is scientific, and therefore based upon logic, facts, and evidence.   To compare it to shamanism is like comparing apples and oranges – or rather, since apples and oranges are both fruit, like comparing apples and thumbtacks.

 

I think, however, that we are very much deluding ourselves about the amount of witchcraft present in our own medical system.

 

If you turn in your Bible to St. Paul’s epistle to the Church in Galatia, and go to the fifth chapter, you will find, starting at the nineteenth verse, a list of the manifest “works of the flesh” which the Apostle contrasts with the fruit of the Spirit listed in the twenty-second and twenty-third verses.   After “idolatry” and before “hatred” in the list of the “works of the flesh” is “witchcraft.”   The Greek word translated “witchcraft” in the Authorized Bible here is φαρμακεία.   This word is also found in the ninth chapter of the Revelation of Jesus Christ given to St. John the Divine, in the twenty-first verse where it is translated “sorceries” and listed alongside “murders” “fornications” and “thefts” as among the things which the idol worshippers did not repent of, despite all the plagues that have been sent on them so far (at this point they are up to the sixth trumpet judgement).   Later in the same book, in the twenty third verse of the eighteenth chapter, it is again rendered “sorceries” and said to be the means by which Babylon deceived the nations of the world.

 

If you are unable to read the Greek alphabet, φαρμακεία is transliterated into English letters as pharmakeia.   Does that look like any English word you are familiar with?

 

You have undoubtedly answered that it looks like “pharmacy.”   Unlike with the word ai, which in English means “a South American three-toed sloth” and is a word borrowed from Portuguese, but in Japanese and Chinese has the meaning “love”, this is not a case of two different language traditions having developed words that are identical in spelling and pronunciation but completely different in meaning.   Pharmacy in English is derived from the Greek word.  

 

If we look up φαρμακεία in the venerable and trusty Greek-English Lexicon of Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott we find that the first definition given is “use of drugs, esp. of purgatives”, which is supported by references from the Aphorisms of Hippocrates.  Specifically they cite where Hippocrates says “use purgative medicines sparingly in acute diseases, and at the commencement, and not without proper circumspection” and “Persons in good health quickly lose their strength by taking purgative medicines, or using bad foods.”    It would sound, from these references, like Hippocrates of Kos – this is the Hippocrates to whom the oath which physicians are required to swear is attributed – was not exactly a fan of φαρμακεία.   Remember that, because we will return to it and draw out its significance later.  Liddell-Scott, continue the definition by clarifying that emetics are the type of purgatives specifically meant, adding that the term also has special reference to abortifacients, i.e., drugs that induce abortions, before saying “generally, the use of any kind of drugs, potions, or spells” of which usage they give multiple examples from Plato.   The second definition offered is “poisoning or witchcraft”.  

 

It might seem at first glance like the translators of our Bible used the same words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” to translate words expressing different concepts in the Old and New Testaments.   In the Old Testament, witchcraft and sorcery clearly refer to trafficking with the spirit world, and if the roots of the Hebrew words are not always clear about this, the context will generally spell it out.   The most famous example of a witch in the Old Testament is the witch of Endor, who summons up the spirit of Samuel the prophet for King Saul in the twenty-eighth chapter of I Samuel.   She was what is most often called a medium today.  The New Testament, as we have just seen, uses a word that has the use of drugs as its primary meaning.   The word for witchcraft used in the verse which prescribes the death penalty for it in Exodus is כָּשַׁף and its origins are unclear.   James Strong in his concordance and Wilhelm Gesenius in his Hebrew lexicon appear to be of the opinion that it originally meant to “whisper” or “mutter”, and so referred to softly chanting an incantation.   Others see it as being derived from the word for herbs and having a meaning almost identical to the Greek φαρμακεία.   The translators of the LXX evidently were of the later opinion for that is how they consistently rendered it.

 

The difference in meaning is not as great as it first seems.   What brings the idea of trafficking with the spirit world together with that of using drugs is the altered state of consciousness that is common to both.   Many drugs put a person into an altered state of consciousness, opening that person up to the spirit world.   Given the Biblical prohibitions against this sort of thing, it is evident that the spirit world that people enter in this state of consciousness is the demonic rather than the angelic.    Apart from use in their own making contact with the spirit world, of course, witches traditionally had a sort of apothecary business going on the side in which they dispensed drug concoctions to those who sought their aid, whether to heal their ailments or poison their enemies.

 

Now my point, if you recall, in bringing all of this up, was to argue that we are deluded, in our modern, technological, civilization, in thinking that witchcraft or sorcery might have been part of the medicine of the shamanism of primitive societies, but has nothing to do with our modern, “scientific” medicine.    On the contrary, our modern medicine is thoroughly dominated by the pharmaceutical industry.  

 

There are those who will counter by saying “yes, but the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t practice witchcraft, it uses science to manufacture drugs that help people.”    This is similar to, although not entirely the same thing, as the idea that drugs come in two types, the good, which are legal and used for medical purposes, and the bad, which are illegal narcotics used for recreational purposes.   Both viewpoints are incredibly naïve.

 

Drugs are, essentially, poisons.   All drugs have side effects, and while these vary, of course, in their nature and severity, all drugs, even the popular pain killers acetaminophen, ASA, and ibuprofen, are potentially fatal.   Medical drugs work, not by doing positive good to your body, but by doing harm, albeit harm that impedes not only the ordinary functions of your bodily systems, but also the condition that you have been diagnosed with.   The physician who prescribes them, does so in the hope - a reasoned, evidence-based, hope if the physician is at all competent - that the harm done by the drugs, will be less than the harm that would otherwise have been done by the condition, if left untreated.   Or, to put it more morbidly, they hope that the poison administered will kill what is killing you, rather than killing you.   That this is the essential nature of drugs has been recognized since ancient times, and the ethics of such an approach to healing was debated as far back as Plato’s Protagoras.

 

Which brings us back to Hippocrates of Kos.   As the quotations from his Aphorisms given above demonstrate, this legendary physician and medical ethicist, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, who is remembered as the “Father of Medicine” was not a fan of the medical use of drugs.   He stressed the harm that they did, and in his own practice emphasized techniques that maximize the body’s own natural healing properties.   Although the maxim often attributed to him – primum non nocere (first do no harm) – does not actually appear in those words in his extent corpus, it does represent the basic principle of his medical ethics, and his famous Oath includes a pledge to inflict no harm.

 

The significance of this cannot be stressed enough.   Today, those who promote healing techniques that rely upon the body’s natural healing powers, like Hippocrates, and eschew the use of drugs in most situations, also like Hippocrates, are labelled “unscientific” by the medical establishment, and lumped together with the shamans.  Yet to the extent that there is a medical tradition in Western Civilization of which it can be truly said that it is based on a scientific foundation rather than witchcraft, that tradition began with Hippocrates of Kos.   Meanwhile, the very medical establishment that regards naturalistic and holistic approaches to medicine as “unscientific”, has for a very long time existed primarily to peddle the poisons of the pharmaceutical corporations, which, other than the big tech companies, are by far the most corrupt and shady sector of corporate industry, and which make their billions in profits from the technologically updated production of the very things which traditionally defined witchcraft’s approach to healing.

 

In other words, within the larger tradition of medicine and healing, the modern day heirs of the witches and sorcerers, who employed drugs and trafficking with demons to provide healing, have stolen the scientific credentials of the tradition which begins with Hippocrates and have become the establishment within the medical community.   That those credentials have been stolen has been very obvious this year, as the medical establishment has constantly told everyone who applies logic in questioning the totalitarian restrictions and public health orders that have been imposed upon their recommendations to “shut up” and “listen to the science” or “listen to the evidence.”   Obviously, those who talk this way, as if “evidence” and “science” were authorities that speak with a monolithic voice, demonstrate thereby that do not have even the most basic understanding of what these terms have historically meant in the intellectual tradition that goes back to Socrates and Plato.   They also illustrate precisely what the great Oxbridge don C. S. Lewis meant when he warned that the popular attitude towards science, already ubiquitous in his day, made people incredibly susceptible to being duped, because they would believe anything coming from the experts if dressed up in the language of science, and that therefore, when the next tyranny came, it would come in the name of science.  (1)

 

Indeed, by its behaviour this year, the medical establishment had clearly demonstrated that it is following the tradition of witchcraft rather than that of Hippocrates.   Primum non nocere has obviously been completely defenestrated since everything the medical experts have recommended this year has done an incredible amount of harm, and only very questionable amounts of good.   Keep in mind that all of this has been done in order to prevent the spread of a coronavirus which produces mild-to-no symptoms in the vast majority of people who contract it, is a significant threat only to those who are both very old and very sick, and which has failed in every way to live up to the alarmist hype surrounding it.

 

Shutting down every economy on the planet, threatening the global food supply and potentially starving millions if not billions of people, destroying people’s businesses, livelihoods, and savings, taking away everyone’s most basic rights and freedoms and placing them all in what amounts to a universal house arrest, without arrest, charge, trial, conviction, or even a crime having been committed, all constitutes harm on a colossal scale.   They shut down all the Churches – the ancient foes of witchcraft – all around the world, weeks prior to Holy Week, and left them closed for months.    The Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other ancient religions were similarly persecuted.  They left the abortion clinics open, of course, declaring the horrific procedure to be an “essential service.”   The resemblance between this physician-performed procedure and the ritual sacrifice of infants to devils is so obvious that further comment seems unnecessary.    Most recently, they have been telling everyone to wear face masks everywhere they go.   These masks are dangerous for some people (such as those with asthma or COPD) all the time, and for all people some of the time (such as when engaged in strenuous exercise), always have the effect of lowering the amount of oxygen and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air you breathe in and so are not safe for anybody when worn everywhere and all the time, and, furthermore, breed and spread infectious microorganisms when protocols such as washing your hands before and after putting them on, not touching them while wearing them, and discarding them as hazardous material after each use, are not followed.    The medical experts are now claiming that they significantly reduce the spread of the coronavirus, based upon what they call “new evidence” but which is merely a selective cherry-picking and re-interpretation of old studies in order to fit them into a new narrative.  Actual new evidence which conflicts with that narrative, such as that which the Danish study from this summer presumably contains, is being suppressed.   Even if we accept these claims, however, the good done is far outweighed by all the harm they do.  The masks are intended as symbols, symbols of acceptance of and submission to, the totalitarian “new normal”, and ultimately to the author of the “new normal” who is Satan.   All of this is witchcraft. 

 

Furthermore, the direction in which all of this is heading, seems rather obvious.  At some point, probably in the next few months to a year, the medical establishment will announce that their puppetmasters in the pharmaceutical industry have concocted a witches’ brew that will save us all from the Big Bad Coronavirus if we allow them to inoculate us with it.   The ingredients of that witches’ brew will probably make Shakespeare’s “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing” recipe seem positively wholesome in comparison.   Adjuvants and preservatives in previous vaccines have included aluminum salts, which are suspected of contributing to Alzheimer’s, MSG, formaldehyde and thermerisol, which contains mercury, all toxic, none of which any sane person wants injected into his bloodstream.   Will the bat flu vaccine contain aborted foetus cells, like the vaccine commonly used for measles, mumps, and rubella?   Will it contain some sort of nanotechnology brewed up in Bill Gates’ cauldron?   Whatever it contains, judging from the immense pressure being placed on people to conform to the mask requirements, there will be a push to make it mandatory.    Whether they make it mandatory outright by passing a law requiring everyone to get the needle, or sneakily by getting every public service outlet and business to require proof of vaccination, it will constitute forcing people to receive the injection of foreign substances into their bodies against their will.   Such a universal rape would be the ultimate culmination of the long list of evils done in the name of protecting us from the coronavirus.   It would be a lot easier to fight against that evil, if more people were firmly opposing the tyrannical measures that are already in effect.

 

If there is any good that has come out of this scam it is that it has divided the sheep from the goats, so to speak, in the medical community.   The true heirs of Hippocrates are the dissident physicians, speaking out against the lockdowns, the masks, and all the other tyrannical measures.   The others are the heirs of the ancient witches, taking their orders, through the intermediary of the pharmaceutical industry, ultimately from the devil himself.

 

If, of course, you prefer to follow the advice of a witch doctor, that is your choice.   I recommend, however, if that is your choice, that you consider the advice of David Seville’s witch doctor.   “Ooo eee ooo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang” makes a heck of a lot more sense than forcing people to practice social distancing, stay at home, and wear masks.

(1)   Lewis addressed this attitude towards science, usually called “scientism”, in many places.    The third of the King’s College, Newcastle lectures, that were published together as his The Abolition of Man in 1943 is particularly worth mentioning here.   In this lecture, which bears the same title as the published work as a whole, Lewis discussed modern applied science as “man’s conquest of nature.”   He drew out the totalitarian implications of this, noting that the exchange man make’s in return for this conquest of nature is a “magician’s bargain.”   From here he launched into a discussion of how science and magic sprang out of the same impulse.   “The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins.”   He pointed out the similarities between Sir Francis Bacon and Faustus as the latter appears in Marlowe’s play, noting that neither man valued knowledge as an end in itself, contrary to much misrepresentation.   Bacon “rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician” he wrote, and, especially relevant to my topic here “In Paracelsus the characters of magician and scientist are combined.”   The man to which he refers was a sixteenth century Swiss physician who is known as the “father of toxicology.”   He practiced both medical science and various forms of occultism, including alchemy and divination, being an important transition figure between alchemy and modern chemistry.   He was also one of the earliest of modern pill pushers among Western physicians, liberally prescribing laudanum long before the use and abuse of opioids became common.    For a fuller discussion of C. S. Lewis’ insights into both science and scientism, see John G. West, ed., The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, published by the Discovery Institute in 2012.

Plagued By Dictators

For almost two months now our public health authorities, Dominion and provincial, have been acting like dictators. They have suspended our basic rights and freedoms, denied us access to public facilities such as libraries, gyms and parks, forced businesses that they consider to be “non-essential” even though they are hardly such to the livelihood of the owners and employees to close, locked up the Churches, synagogues and other places of worship, and otherwise acted as if they were the second coming of Joseph Stalin. Our provincial premiers have been no better. Even those I previously had a degree of respect for, such as Upper Canada’s Doug Ford, whose late brother Rob must be spinning in his grave right about now, have shown their true tyrannical colours. The worst of all has been Captain Airhead, the Prime Minister in the Dominion government. While Liberal Prime Ministers since Mackenzie King have behaved like autocratic control freaks rather than the humble servants of Queen-in-Parliament that they are supposed to be, the Trudeaus, who never met a Communist dictatorship they did not admire and fawn over and strive to imitate, have been by far the worst.

Many of those who, like this writer, were fed up with all of this the first hour into the lockdown, might be surprised to learn that creating a dictatorship in response to a plague is not a new phenomenon. Universal quarantines are new – previously, we quarantined only the sick or those we had good reason to suspect might have contracted the contagion. Plague time dictators, however, go back to the very first dictators, those of ancient Rome.

The eternal city was originally a monarchy. Its legendary founder, Romulus, was its first king. Romulus’s fourth successor and Rome’s fifth king, Lucius Tarquinus Priscus, was an Etruscan. Beginning with his reign, the Etruscans gained more and more influence over Rome and this created a growing division between the monarchy and the Senate, the Council of the patriarchs of the noble Roman families which Romulus had established to help him govern the city. In the reign of the seventh and last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who seized the throne through the assassination of his predecessor, his arrogance – which is actually what his cognomen signifies – and his crimes, along with those of his son, Sextus, pushed that division to the breaking point. When Sextus, through threats and blackmail forced himself upon Lucretia, the wife of the nobleman Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, leading to her taking her own life in shame, her husband and father, along with Lucius Junius Brutus and Publius Valerius, drove the Tarquins out of Rome after which the Senate declared the city to be a republic.

This was the first occasion in which the word republic was used to signify a government without a king. Res publica, which literally means “the public thing”, was one of two Latin expressions commonly used to translate the Greek politeia, which simply refers to the institutions which are constitutionally set up to look after the business of the public regardless of whether they be monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or a mixture, and is best rendered in English by “state”, “commonwealth” or even “constitution.” When the Roman Senate borrowed this Latin expression to refer to their new type of constitution, small-r republicanism was born.

As much as Tarquin the Proud deserved being deposed, the problem stemmed from who he was as a person and not from his office of authority. The Roman nobles of the sixth century BC were not thinking of this, however, when they drove him out, and so they created an inferior constitution, a republic. There are many roles and duties in the constitution of a state that can only properly be filled and performed by a king or queen. I do not intend to argue this point at length here, having made it many times in the past, and mention it only by way of introducing the observation that the Romans themselves quickly figured out that they had created a constitutional vacuum that would need, on certain occasions, to be filled. Thus they created the office of dictator.


Today the terms dictator and tyrant are more or less interchangeable but his was not the case back then. The term tyrant was used to refer to a ruler who was the opposite of a king. Whereas a true king came to his office lawfully, a tyrant was generally a usurper. The term tyrant comes from a word that originally referred to usurpation and it came to be associated with the heavy-handed abuse of power because someone who unlawfully seizes power does so because he thirsts for power and is therefore inclined to abuse it in a way that is not generally true of a lawful king. Note that Tarquin the Proud, who became "king" by assassinating Servius Tullius, was properly a tyrant rather than a king. When the Romans created the office of dictator, the term did not carry any of the opprobrium that would later be attached to it and was already at that time attached to the term tyrant.


The Roman office of dictator was a temporary position. The term was six months, half of that of the consuls, the two co-presidents of the Roman Republic, the first of whom were the aforementioned Brutus and Collatinus. When an emergency arose in which the Romans perceived the need for a single individual to wield the undivided supreme Imperium, the Senate would ask one or the other of the consuls, or both in the event that neither was off on a military venture somewhere, to name a dictator. Sworn into office, his first duty would be to name a magister equitum - master of horse. This was his lieutenant, his second-in-command, his "vice-dictator." The title obviously derives from the expectation that he would lead the cavalry that would accompany the unified army led by the dictator. This points to the fact that the emergencies that prompted the appointment of a dictator tended to be military in nature, when some powerful enemy threatened the city.


The first time this happened, at least according to Livy, was in the ninth year of the Roman Republic. War with the Sabines seemed imminent and the Senate asked consul Postumus Cominius Auruncus to name a dictator. He named his co-consul Titus Lartius Flavus, who appointed Spurius Cassius Viscellinus, one of the consuls of the previous year, to be his master of horse. Although war was declared, no fighting ensued, and Lartius laid down his powers before his six months expired.


The final Roman dictator was Gaius Julius Caesar, who was made dictator for life. That life was cut short on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when he was stabbed to death in the Senate by a gang of conspirators, one of the leaders of which was his former friend, Marcus Junius Brutus, a descendant of the Brutus who had been the first consul of Rome. His death brought the office of dictator to an end because that office existed to fill the vacuum in the Roman constitution that had been created by the absence of a king. A new Roman monarchy would soon be established when Caesar’s biological nephew and adopted son and heir, Gaius Octavius was declared by the Senate to be the sole ruler of Rome and given the titles of Augustus (1) which means “exalted one”, Princeps, which means “first, chief, prince”, and Imperator, which had been a military term meaning “general” but from that point on would also mean “emperor”, a connotation the family name “Caesar” would also soon take on.


In between Lartius and Ceasar, the most well-known dictator, and the one who is the most admired, was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who held the position twice. In 458 BC, war with the Aequi left one of the consular armies besieged and the other powerless to help. Cincinnatus, an elderly farmer, was at his field, the legend says, when a delegation from the Senate arrived to tell him that he had been named dictator. With Lucius Tarquitius as his master of horse, he conscripted a large army, marched to the relief of the besieged consul, quickly forced the Aequi into submission at the Battle of Mount Algidus, and returned to his plow in a fortnight plus one day. His second dictatorship was almost as short, and involved putting down an internal conspiracy against the city.


Usually the emergencies were military in nature, but this was not always the case.


It can be amusing, when reading the ancient Roman historian Livy's multi-volume history of Rome from its beginning down to his own era, the Augustinian, to note the many occasions on which the Romans appointed a dictator in order to pound a nail into a wall. This, of course, sounds to the modern reader like a ridiculous thing to do and it is made all the more absurd by the way in which every time this happened the dictator would name a master of horse even though the task for which he was appointed sounds very much like a one-man job and was not military in nature.


Perhaps you are wondering what sort of bizarre carpentry emergency was constantly arising that required a dictator to take up the hammer. This is the funniest part of it all because it had nothing to do with carpentry at all but was done whenever the city was threatened by a plague.


Now if your next question pertains to what they were smoking in ancient Rome and/or where you might acquire some of it, allow me to assure you that while promising to legalize the abuse of mind-altering substances helped Captain Airhead to seize power, it had nothing to do with the Roman custom of nominating a dictator to drive a nail into the wall to stop a plague.


What I have been talking about was a religious ceremony. The nail, a symbol of the goddesses of fate, destiny, and necessity, would be ceremonially driven into a wall once a year, upon an important anniversary, in a number of Roman temples. The most important of these ceremonies was the one that took place in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. Tarquin the Elder had begun construction of this Temple in his reign, but it was not completed until the period in which Tarquin the Proud was driven out and the Republic established. It was consecrated on September 13th in either 509 BC or 507 BC. The reason for the uncertainty is that while the ancient authorities are in agreement that Marcus Horatius Pulvius, the uncle of the famous Horatius Cocles who figures in to story about “Horatius at the Bridge”, was the consul who consecrated the Temple, they do not agree as to whether it was while he was suffect consul in 509 or during his second consulship in 507. At any rate, each year on that date the Epulum Jovis banquet would be held in honour of the temple’s patron deity. On the same day the clavis annalis would take place, in which one of the consuls would ritually attach a nail to the wall of the Temple, on the right side near the shrine to Minerva. Horatius was probably the first to perform this ritual.


The law governing this ritual was itself written out and attached to the wall where the ritual was performed. It specified that only the praeter maximus, or chief magistrate, could perform it. For the annual ritual, this meant one of the consuls. Whenever the Senate decided that there was an emergency calling for a special extra performance of the ritual, only a dictator would suffice. The first time this happened, according to Livy, was in 363 BC. A plague had been ravaging the city for a couple of years. Lucius Manlius Capitolinus Imperiosus was named dictator (Lucius Pinarius Natta was his master of horse if you wish to know) for the purpose of performing this ritual. After he had hammered the nail into the wall the plague stopped. On several subsequent occasions when Rome was threatened by a plague this was repeated.


Exactly why the Romans thought this would work is unclear because the original significance of the ritual has been lost to the sands of time. The seeming success of the first performance might explain its having been repeated but not why it was done in the first place. One explanation is that the nail was thought to be symbolically driven through the spirit behind the plague, fixing him in place and preventing him from doing harm, but nobody really knows for sure.


Today’s epidemiologists would scoff at such an unscientific and superstitious manner of dealing with a plague but I see little evidence that would commend their own approach as being superior. Science and superstition are a lot more closely related than they would like us to believe. The methodology of each involves about an equal amount of guesswork, blind leaps in the dark, hit and miss, trial and error, and sheer dumb luck. Science is more respectable only because it has shinier, fancier, equipment and more impressive technical terminology. Where Roman superstition is truly vulnerable to critique is on the religious grounds. A far better religious response to a plague is to do as the king of Nineveh did in the book of Jonah, and call upon the nation to turn to the true and living God in humility, confessing our sins, and repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Our superstitious medical dictators obviously want none of that, however, as evidenced by their locking up all the Churches during Lent, the annual season of pre-Paschal repentance.


Indeed, the ancient Roman technique has this to commend it in comparison with today’s medical dictatorship. It at least complies with what has been recognized as the first rule of medical ethics since Hippocrates of Kos, who died seven years before the first time a Roman dictator was called upon to stop a plague with a nail. Whether it did any good or not, it could not conceivably do any harm. Shutting down society and the economy and putting everybody under universal house arrests does immeasurable harm – economic, moral, legal, political, social, spiritual, psychological, physical, and even mortal.


The lesson in all of this for Captain Airhead is that if he truly feels this pandemic requires a dictatorial response, he would be better off looking to the example of the ancient Roman dictators rather than modern Communist ones. If he really wants to be useful, he could, if he can figure out the difference between the flat and the pointy end, try hammering a nail into a wall.



(1) Although this was a title that was passed on to all of his heirs, it is also used as the personal name by which historians identify him after his elevation to the rank of emperor.

Government Hubris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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