Prejudice not Pride

The other day I encountered someone wearing a button that had the same three words as in my title here, except in reverse order.  The sentiment thereby expressed is widely held and on conspicuous display in this, the month formerly known as June.  It is very much a sentiment of the present day.  It also reveals much this wrong about the present day.

The “prejudice” refered to in the sentiment on the button can be defined as “a negative attitude towards an identifiable group of people.”  It is unlikely that the sort of people who would wear buttons like this or, for that matter, the sort of people who would make buttons like this, know of any other sort of prejudice.  Fifty years ago the definition might have included the idea that the negative attitude is unfair because it is formed with inadequate information about the group in question.  Today, a negative attitude towards groups towards which you are not supposed to have negative attitudes is regarded as a prejudice even if it is informed and those who have built their careers and reputations on combatting prejudice generally support government attempts to suppress the spread of information, even if it is accurate, that could contribute to the forming of such negative attitudes.   This is what the expression “truth is no defence” which sometimes comes up in discussions of “hate speech” is all about.

 

This change in the meaning of the word prejudice that has been observable within my lifetime is small but it is also significant.  There is a much larger difference, however, between prejudice in both of these senses and the sense attached to the word in 1813 when the Jane Austen novel, the title of which is alluded to both by the button and by my own title, was first published.  Even larger is the gap between today’s usage of the word and that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France published twenty years before Austen’s novel.  

 

Burke’s Reflections include an extended defence of prejudice which would be unintelligible if the word were taken in its present day meaning.  Prejudice, as Burke used the word, was not necessarily either directed towards people or negative (that prejudice can be connected to its object by the preposition “for” as well as the preposition “against” has largely been forgotten).  Rather it had reference to tapping into the accumulated wisdom of the human race available in tradition as opposed to relying entirely upon one’s individual reason.  “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason”, Burke wrote, “because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”  Continuing the thought he said:

 

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

 

To speak of prejudice as a good thing was uncommon even in Burke’s day.  His contemporary and friend, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson who was immortalized for his table talk by James Boswell, included two definitions under prejudice in his Dictionary, the second of which was “Mischief; detriment; hurt; injury.”  Obviously this is not what Burke was defending and Dr. Johnson himself said of this definition “This sense is only accidental or consequential; a bad thing being called a prejudice, only because prejudice is commonly a bad thing, and is not derived from the original or etymology of the word: it were therefore better to use it less; perhaps prejudice ought never to be applied to any mischief, which does not imply some partiality or prepossession.”  It is in the sense of Dr. Johnson’s first definition of the word that Burke used it.  That definition is:

 

Prepossession; judgment formed beforehand without examination. It is used for prepossession in favour of any thing or against it. (1)

The word prepossession is less familiar than the word it is being used to define, so much so that it does not have its own entry in the same Dictionary, but the meaning of both words is provided in the remainder of the first sentence and it is exactly what the Latin root of prejudice suggests.  Instead of prepossession we are more likely to speak of “preconceived opinion.”  In a court of law this is, of course, a bad thing.  That justice involves listening to the arguments of a case and deciding based upon the facts in evidence rather than pre-judging based on other factors is part of what the ancient depiction of the personification of Justice as wearing a blind-fold is supposed to indicate.  The negative implications of prejudice in a legal context are the original reason for the more general notion in other contexts that prejudice is a bad thing that Dr. Johnson alluded to in his second definition.  What Burke demonstrated was that preconceived opinion has a positive as well as a negative side.  Note how he spoke of “just prejudice”.  That is “just” as in “righteous”, not “just” as in “mere”. 

 

To understand Burke’s argument, it is important to keep in mind what he was arguing against.  Burke’s Reflections was written in response to the destructive violence of the French Revolution.  The worst of that violence was still yet to come at the time he wrote but what he had seen had left a huge impact on him because those perpetrating that violence were doing so in the name of the ideals that he himself had professed as a Whig (classical liberal) in Parliament.  His defence of the virtues of the Age of chivalry and of established, traditional institutions such as the Crown and the Church in Reflections reads like what one would have expected his friend Dr. Johnson, a Tory, to have written had he lived to see the French Revolution and it is likely that Burke as he wrote was asking himself what Dr. Johnson would have said.  Burke was, to borrow and slightly adjust a famous definition from Irving Kristol, a Whig who had been mugged by reality.

 

Burke was addressing not merely the way the revolutionaries had turned ideals into “armed doctrines” but the way of thinking that had brought this about.  The French Revolution came at the end of a century in which Modern philosophers had declared war against tradition in the name of reason.  This was utterly foolish on their part.  Tradition – knowledge and wisdom accumulated and passed down from the past – is what prevents us from having to re-invent the wheel, literally as well as figuratively, in each generation, and this applies to philosophy as much as to anything else.   The temptation to exalt reason, the individual’s capacity for judgement based on the knowledge available to him, over tradition, the capacity of man in the collective whether as family, nation, civilization or the entire race or species to accumulate and pass on knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of those yet to come, however, was one which the thinkers of the eighteenth century found difficult to resist.  It must be resisted, however, if consequences like those of the French Revolution are to be avoided and this requires a healthy share of the instinct the late Sir Roger Scruton spoke of that the good things in life are difficult to build but easy to destroy.

 

The wisdom that we inherit through tradition in Burke’s argument, while it can be described as prejudice in that its availability precedes the application of reason on the part of the individual to its justification, is not necessarily contrary to reason.  Indeed, the difference between Burke’s “just prejudice” and bigotry in the word’s lexical meaning (as opposed to its common use as pejorative epithet for disagreement with liberalism) is that whereas just prejudice is opinion derived from tradition that has yet to be confirmed by the individual’s use of reason bigotry is opinion that is stubbornly held to even after it has been convincingly rebutted by reason.  That tradition, the source of just prejudices, is self-correcting and flexible by contrast with ideology, which is what you get when you reduce human knowledge to the technical knowledge that you are left with when rationalism’s irrational demand that reason precede all knowledge is complied with, was a key insight of the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1963), an essay which revisited this theme from Burke’s Reflections from the position of hindsight available in the twentieth century after the rationalism that in Burke’s day was in its infancy had run its course for a couple of centuries.

Prejudice, at least in the sense defended by Burke, is much to be preferred over pride.  Although Aristotle, at least in some English translations, spoke of a “pride” that he considered to be the highest of virtues rather than a vice, the word he used was μεγαλοψυχία which is not an exact equivalent of the English pride.  Indeed, pride is not among the definitions that Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott provide for μεγαλοψυχία in their exhaustive and definitive Greek Lexicon.  Arrogance is provided as a secondary meaning for the occasions when the word is used in a negative sense, but the primary definition is “greatness of soul, highmindness, lordliness”, with the implication of “generosity” and in their intermediate Lexicon “magnanimity” is provided alongside the literal first meaning of “greatness of soul.” In other words, μεγαλοψυχία, while it does include a sense of thinking well of self also includes the idea of being generous to others.  While Aristotle contrasts it with a vice that is sometimes rendered “humility” in translation, the word he used is not the word for the humility praised as a virtue in the New Testament (ταπεινοφροσύνη) but the literal opposite of μεγαλοψυχία, i.e., μικροψυχία, defined by Liddell and Scott as “littleness of soul, meanness of spirit.”   Similarly, μεγαλοψυχία is not among the words used by the New Testament for the pride consistently condemned as a sin.  The main words for pride in the New Testament are ὑπερηφανία which Liddell and Scott define as “arrogance” and when used with an object “contempt towards or for” and ἀλαζονεία which they define as “false pretension, imposture” and “boastfulness” (Koine lexicons usually define it as “arrogance” and “boastfulness”) and τυφόω which is a verb which in classical Greek usually meant to delude (when others were the object) or to be crazy or demented (when self was the object) but which in the New Testament means to be conceited.  In the Authorized Bible, the passive participle of the verb is rendered “lifted up with pride” in 1 Timothy 3:6, the verse which links pride to the fall of the devil.

 

These New Testament words are closer in meaning to the English “pride” than Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  So is the word ὕβρις which Aristotle and for that matter the ancient Greeks in general regarded as the worst defect in character.  This word has passed into English as hubris which we ordinarily think of as a synonym for arrogance.  In ancient Greek it was an arrogance that manifested itself in acts of violence, insolence or insult towards others, i.e., the opposite sort of behaviour towards others than that suggested by Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  In Greek tragedy, this was most often the “fatal flaw” (Aristotle’s word for which is the same word the New Testament uses as its basic word for “sin”) which brought down the tragic hero.

 

Pride is the English word which translates the Latin Superbia which in Latin theology is consistently identified as the worst of all sins.  It is, for example, always listed either first or last in lists of the Seven Deadly Sins depending upon whether they are listed in descending or ascending order.  In this matter Latin theology is in close agreement with Greek theology.  Evagrius Pontius identified a list of eight vices which was later reproduced by St. John Cassian in his Institutes.  The list is for the most part identical to the Latin Seven Deadly Sins – the lower sins or vices in each include gluttony, anger, avarice, and lust (fornication in Pontius/Cassian).  In this list, which goes from least to worst, the eighth vice was pride, which Cassian described as the most savage vice and the root of all the others.  The New Testament word ὑπερηφανία is used for pride.  The seventh vice, and therefore second worst, was κενοδοξία which is usually rendered in English by “vainglory” (as, for example, the Authorized Bible does in the one New Testament verse in which it appears Phil. 2:3) or by “boasting” and which is almost identical in meaning to pride, the basic difference being that whereas vainglory/ κενοδοξία requires an audience pride/ ὑπερηφανία is something one can have in solitude.  Another way of looking at it is that pride is the internal sin, vainglory its outer expression.  In the Latin Seven Deadly Sins, produced by Gregory the Great’s revising of the earlier list and condensing these two into the single Superbia, Invidia (Envy) is added as the second worst sin and it too is closely connect with pride.  Traditionally Pride and Envy are the sins which first arose in Lucifer’s heart prompting his rebellion against God and are thus literally the source of all other sins.

 

So, no, the button, like the present day, has it backwards.  Prejudice – in Burke’s sense – is preferable by far over Pride.

    

 (1)   Dr. Johnson also included a line criticizing the use of the preposition “to” as the link between prejudice and its object as improper.  Dr. Johnson’s opinion has won out and this usage is mostly if not entirely obsolete.

 

 

Abstract Flags

 

One of the bad habits of the age in which we live is the habit of turning abstract terms into flags, running them up the pole, and demanding that everybody salute them or be denounced as a traitor. 

 

This habit can be found on both sides of the political spectrum.   This is, for example, what neoconservatives do with the term “liberty” and its synonym “freedom”.   Up until about a century ago it was self-identified liberals who did this these terms but that is the nature of neoconservatism.   Irving Kristol defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality”.  Neoconservatism is yesterday’s liberalism.   Think back two decades to the events of 9/11 and the “War on Terror” that ensued.   The American President at the time, George W. Bush, his Cabinet, and his supporters all maintained that 9/11 had been an attack on American “liberty” by people who hated Americans for their “freedom” and that their “War on Terror” would be fought on behalf of said freedom.   They ran freedom up the flagpole, demanded that everyone salute, and denounced everyone that was not 100% behind everything they were doing as a traitor to liberty.

 

By turning “freedom” and “liberty” into flags, and proclaiming their allegiance to them, however, they avoided accountability for how their actions were affecting the actual freedoms and liberties of American citizens.   In order to fight the “War on Terror” on behalf of the abstract flag of “freedom”, they permanently and exponentially expanded the powers of their government and created a national surveillance state.   It is a strange sort of “freedom” and one that does not much resemble the traditional understanding of the word that can be defended in this way.  

 

This, of course, is the problem with this habit of making flags out of abstract terms.   Allegiance to the term as a flag is required of people, but it is all that is required, not any sort of consistent, intelligent, understanding of the term.

 

Progressives are just as prone to this bad habit as conservatives.   Indeed, they are much worse.    In the previous example it was noted that the abstraction the neoconservatives were saluting as a flag had originally been run up the pole by liberals, who are progressives and this is true of most of the abstractions that today’s conservatives salute.   Progressives are the ones who make the abstract terms into flags, then, when they have decided that the flag they were saluting yesterday is no longer “modern” (1), they abandon it to the conservatives and make a new one.   “Democracy” is an abstract flag that progressives created and neoconservatives adopted even though the progressives have not abandoned it.   Both sides frequently accuse the other of betraying “democracy”.   This is one reason, among many, why I try to avoid saluting this particular flag, and insist that I believe in the concrete institution of parliament under the reign of a royal monarch, that has proven itself through the test of time, rather than abstract ideal of democracy.

 

At the present moment the primary abstract flag that progressives are saluting and demanding that the rest of us show our allegiance to is that of “diversity”.   This, of course, raises the question of what kind of diversity is in question.   The term is used in a myriad of diverse contexts, from speaking of someone whose outfits are radically different from day to day as having a diverse wardrobe to a farmer who plants diverse crops as opposed to only wheat or only barley to my own use of the word at the beginning of this sentence.   The diversity that progressives demand our allegiance to today is a very specific kind of diversity.   It means diversity of the population in terms of categories of group identity.   Race and cultural ethnicity are the most obvious such categories.   Sex ought to be the least controversial such category, in that no human population could last longer than a generation that is entirely of one sex, and all societies except for mythical ones like the Amazons, have been sexually diverse in the traditional sense.   Progressives have turned it into the most controversial category, however, by demanding that everyone show their allegiance to diversity of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.

 

In practice, the progressive insistence that we all salute the flag of diversity translates into a requirement that we accept the propositions a) that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing to a society and b) the more diversity of this kind a society has the better off it will be.   Here again, we find the habit of making flags out of abstract ideas shutting down intelligent thought concerning those ideas.   Both propositions are obviously false.   Consider the first proposition.  The much more nuanced statement that there are positives and negatives to both cultural and racial heterogeneity (diversity) and homogeneity, that each conveys distinct advantages and disadvantages upon a society, and that the advantages and disadvantages of each must be weighed against those of the other can be defended intelligently.   So can the assertion that after such weighing, the advantages of diversity outweigh its disadvantages and the advantages of homogeneity, although the opposite assertion can also be intelligently defended.    The proposition that diversity of this kind is an unmixed blessing cannot be intelligently defended.  Even if it could, however, and further, we were to concede it to be the case, the second proposition, that the more diversity the better, would by no means follow from the first.   Plenty of things that are good in themselves turn bad when taken to excess.   Indeed, in classical Aristotelean ethics, vices (bad habits) are formed by indulging natural appetites that are good in themselves to excess, and in classical Christian theology heresies (serious doctrinal errors concerning tenets of the Gospel kerygma as summarized in the ancient Creeds) are formed by taking one tenet of the faith, true in itself, to excess.

 

More important, for the purposes of this discussion, than what is included in the “diversity” to which progressives demand our allegiance, is what is excluded.   It is quite clear, from the way progressives respond to those who dare to raise points such as those raised in the previous paragraph, that diversity of thought or opinion is not included in the diversity they praise and value so highly.   Indeed, this entire bad habit of turning an abstract idea into a flag is very inconsistent with the idea of diversity of thought or opinion.   Yet, for anyone who values freedom in the political sense as it was traditionally understood, this is surely the most important kind of diversity of all.   For that matter, for parliamentary government or democracy, in any sense of the word that is consistent with a free society, to function, diversity of thought must be the most important kind of diversity.

 

While this does provide a further illustration of how progressives, in raising new abstract flags, abandon those they saluted in days gone by, it has long been observed that even when liberals, the progressives of yesterday, expressed a belief in diversity of thought, their practice often contradicted it.   Remember that famous line of William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover there are other views”?  He made this statement, in one form or another, numerous times, and I don’t know when he first said it, but the oldest version of which I am aware comes from his Up From Liberalism, first published in 1959.   “Duke” Morrison, the legendary actor who under the stage name John Wayne starred in countless films from The Big Trail in 1930 until The Shootist in 1976, in an interview with Tony Macklin in 1975 said:

 

I have found a certain type calls himself a liberal.   Now I always thought I was a liberal.   I came up terribly surprised one time when I found out that I was a right-wing, conservative extremist, when I listened to everybody’s point of view that I ever met, and then decided how I should feel.  But this so-called new liberal group, Jesus, they never listen to your point of view and they make a decision as to what you think and they are articulate enough and in control of enough of the press to force that image out for the average person.

 

If this could be said of liberals back in 1959 and 1975 it is all the more true of today’s progressives.   

 

One way in which this is evident is in their exclusionary rhetoric.   Progressives, especially those who hold some sort of office of civic authority, have become increasingly prone to issuing proclamations about how such-and-such a thing they disapprove of has “no place” in our community and society.  It would be one thing if what they were so excluding were things like murder, robbery, and rape which would meet with broad disapproval in pretty much any society in any time and place.   In most cases, however, they are speaking of some “ism” or “phobia”, usually one that has been that has been newly coined.   What these neologisms have in common is that each of them is defined in a special way.   On the surface, these “isms” and “phobias” appear to refer to varieties of crude bigotry but they are applied by progressives in actual usage so as to include all forms of dissent from the sacred progressive dogma that identity-group diversity is always good and that more identity-group diversity is always better, no matter how respectfully and intelligently that dissent is worded.   A couple of months ago the Orthosphere blogger who writes under the nom de plume Bonald after the reactionary philosopher who wrote against the French Revolution and its aftermath provided us with some disturbing insights into the implications of the growth of this sort of rhetoric.

 

Another way in which the progressive Left’s increasing rejection of the most important form of diversity for those who want to live in a free society with a functioning parliamentary government is in its use of the terms “denial” and “denier” as derogatory epithets for those who disagree with its dogmas.

 

This has become fairly standard practice whenever progressives run into disagreement on a wide assortment of matters.   The implications of this use of these terms are that either a) what progressives are asserting is so self-evidently obvious that one would have to be stubbornly, stupidly and willfully ignorant to disagree, b) we are under a moral obligation to believe what the progressives say and therefore are committing a moral offense in disagreeing, or c) a combination of a) and b).    Since progressives are not the authorities of a religious communion to which we all belong and have no legitimate authority to set dogma, the second of these implications is absurd.  Since progressives use the “denial” and “denier” epithets to avoid answering well-reasoned and evidence backed arguments against their positions the first of these implications is also ridiculous.

 

This becomes quite comical when the progressive assertions pertain to matters that have a large scientific component.  For decades now, anyone who has questioned the progressive narrative that states that due mostly to the emissions of greenhouse gasses by livestock and human industry the average temperature of the earth has risen and cataclysmic climate change is impending unless the population of the world is radically reduced, we all become vegans, and we stop using fossil fuels for energy has been labelled a “denier”.   A rather convenient way of avoiding answering difficult questions such as “why should climate change be assumed to be for the worse rather than the better, especially since historically human beings have thrived better in warm periods than cold ones?” and “why, since the earth’s climate has hardly been constant throughout history to the point that advocates of your theory have stooped to doctoring graphs of the historical data to hide this fact, should we expect it to remain constant now and be alarmed about the observed rise of about a degree in the earth’s average temperature over a century?”   In the last year and a half we have seen progressives accuse anyone who questions whether it is either good or necessary to sabotage the economies of every country in the world, drive small businesses into bankruptcy while enriching the billionaires who control the big online businesses, cancel our constitutional rights and freedoms, brainwash everyone into looking upon other human beings primarily as sources of contagion, exponentially accelerate the problem of people substituting their smartphones and computers for real, in-person social contact, establish anarcho-tyrannical police states in which acts that are bona in se and absolutely essential to healthy social and communal life are turned into mala prohibita crimes and hunted down with greater severity than real crimes that are actually mala in se, and bribing and blackmailing people into accepting an experimental new gene therapy in violation of the Nuremberg Protocol, all in order to combat a pandemic involving a virus that has proven to be less lethal than the vast majority of previous pandemics for which no such extreme measures were ever considered, let alone taken, of being a “COVID denier”.    To be fair, plenty of “conservative” political leaders, including the premiers of my own province (Manitoba), Alberta, and Upper Canada have all done the same, but the progressives have been much more monolithic about it.   The reason this is so comical is because real “science”, as anybody who understands the word knows, does not make dogmatic statements and therefore admits of no “denial”.   The comedy is greatly enhanced when those denouncing “COVID deniers” or “climate change deniers” advise us to “follow the science” or “listen to the science” as if “science” made dogmatic proclamations, or when they say “the science is settled” when, by the prevalent litmus test of the philosophy underlying science, for a theory to be scientific, it must be falsifiable, and therefore, science can never be settled.   Less funny and more sad, is when someone like Anthony Fauci or Theresa Tam admits the real nature of science, that it is always evolving, but uses this to back up a claim to absolute obedience of the nature of “you should unquestioningly obey my orders at any given moment, even if it contradicts what I told you to do the moment before” as if he, or allegedly she in the case of Tam, were Petruchio and the rest of us were Katherina the shrew.

 

It is far less comical when progressives impose a narrative interpretation on their country’s history in order to undermine the legitimacy of their country and its institutions and attack its historical figures, and then accuse those who point out the holes in their narrative of “denial”.   In this case, the progressives are walking in the footsteps of the French Jacobins, the Chinese Maoists, and the Khmer Rouge all of whom wrought tremendous devastation, destruction, and disaster upon their countries by insisting that their history was irredeemably corrupt and needed to be razed to the ground, along with all of the countries’ institutions.   This is what the progressives that infest Canada’s university faculties and newsmedia, both print and electronic, have been attempting to do in Canada for a couple of decades with their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools.   In the real past, the past as it actually happened, these were boarding schools, initially founded by Christian Churches as a missionary outreach to Native Indians to provide their children with the kind of education they would need if they were to thrive in the modern economy.   The Indian chiefs of the nineteenth century wanted just this kind of education for their children and so, at their insistence, the stipulation that it would be provided by the Dominion government was included in all of the treaties.   Accordingly, the government funded and expanded these schools, as well as making provisions for day schools on the reserves.   If Indian parents neglected to send their kids to the day schools, the government would make the kids go to the residential schools, but initially it was mostly the kids of the chiefs and the elders of the bands who were sent to the schools at their own parents’ insistence.   By a century later, however, the government was making these schools serve the double function of schools and foster group homes for Indian children whom child welfare social workers had removed from their homes to protect them from such things as physical abuse.   Through utterly contemptible methodology, including a “victim centred” approach to testimony that could just as easily have been used to produce an equally damning picture of the schools to which wealthy, elite, white kids were sent, or for that matter schools of any sort because for any school you can always find alumni for whom the experience was something horrible to be “survived”, and which is completely in violation of the standards by which truth and guilt are assessed in the courtroom and the historical process, progressives spun a cock and bull narrative in which all the bad experiences in the schools were made out to have been the intent of the schools’ founders, administrators, and the Canadian government, and the  purpose of the schools was interpreted as the elimination of Native Indian cultural identities.   The progressives then used this narrative interpretation to claim that all of this was the moral equivalent of what the Third Reich did in its prison camps in World War II or what was done to the Tutsis in the last days of the Rwandan Civil war, which would have been a reprehensible claim even if the facts admitted of no other interpretation than that of their narrative, which is not even close to being the case.   The progressives insist that everything else in the history of Canada, especially anything traditionally seen as a great and positive achievement of either English or French Canadians, must take a backset to their interpretation of the Indian Residential Schools and that Canadians of all ethnicities, but especially English and French Canadians, must perpetually live in shame and submit to having their country “cancelled”.   In the last month or so the progressives have kicked this up a notch by claiming falsely that the discovery of the location of abandoned cemeteries on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School – and more recently the Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan – was a “shocking” new discovery (that such cemeteries were to be found has been known all along – an entire volume of the TRC Final Report is dedicated to this) and, irresponsibly to the point of criminal defamation of past Canadian governments, the Churches and the school administrators, faculty, and staff, that the graves constitute evidence of mass murder, the least plausible explanation, by far, of the deaths of the children.

 

For several weeks now Chris Champion, author, historian, and editor of the history journal the Dorchester Review, one of the few publications in Canada still worth reading, has been attacked by progressives over tweets made on the journal’s Twitter account challenging this narrative.   Sean Carleton, who is associated with the Indigenous Studies program at the University of Manitoba, accused the Dorchester Review of being a “straight up garbage, genocide denialism, outfit” for agreeing with the Final Report of the TRC that “the cause of death was usually tuberculosis or some other disease”.   Janis Irwin, the Deputy Whip for Alberta’s NDP, also denounced Champion as “reprehensible and disgusting” for expressing this agreement with the TRC’s Final Report, and demanded that Jason Kenney scrap the K-9 social studies curriculum on the preparation of which, Champion had advised the Albertan government.   While this sort of thing is to be expected from those of Carleton’s and Irwin’s ilk, about a week ago the CBC, the Crown broadcaster paid for out of the taxes of all Canadians, ran a story by Janet French of CBC Edmonton,  full of quotes from people such as the Alberta NDP Education Critic, Sarah Hoffman, Nicole Sparrow who is press secretary to Kenney’s Education Minister, Kisha Supernant who is an archeology professor at the University of Manitoba, and Daniel Panneton of the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, all expressing how appalled they were at Champion’s disagreement with the progressive, Canada-bashing, narrative, this time in an article that appeared on Dorchester Review’s website under his byline on June 17^th and which pointed out just how inappropriate the comparisons the narrative makes between the residential schools and what happened in Europe in the 1940s are.    

 

In his article, which is well-worth reading in its entirety, Champion wrote:

 

It is ridiculous to compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD.   And it is equally false and unjust to act as if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was a child-abuser or sexual predator. 

 

All of this is absolutely true and, it is worth noting, the second sentence is quite consistent with the TRC Report in which the testimony of those who experienced sexual abuse is overwhelmingly of the type in which older students were the abusers, sadly the common experience of boarding school students of all types.  Which is why all of Champion’s detractors quoted in the CBC article do not answer his arguments but merely accuse him of bigoted attitudes and “denial”.   “One photo of smiling children does not negate thousands of survivors’ stories”, which Kisha Supernant is quoted as having said, is the closest thing to an attempt at an answer that appears, although anyone who reads Champion’s article from beginning to end – since the CBC article appeared the same day it is questionable as to whether those quoted had done so – will know that nothing in the article negates the testimony of those whose experience at the residential schools was bad, only the spin by placed on that testimony by the progressive narrative, a narrative, incidentally, which itself negates the testimony of no small number of alumni of these schools whose experience was positive.

 

The progressives who have been attacking Champion and the Dorchester Review talk as if they think that someone who tells a story of having suffered victimization, especially of the sort that can be attributed to some prohibited “ism” or “phobia”, has a right to have “their truth” in current progressive lingo accepted without question or cross-examination.  A certain type of feminist makes this claim explicitly with regards to females who claim to have been sexually harassed or assaulted.   This sort of thinking runs contrary to the principles of courtroom justices, such as the right of the accused to confront and cross-examine his accuser, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, principles which exist for very good reasons, to prevent courts of law from being used as instruments of abuse by false accusers.   This kind of talk, however, is a rhetorical device that dishonestly equates criticism of the progressives’ ideas, interpretations, and narratives with criticism of personal testimony incorporate into these narratives.  

 

In all of these examples of progressive dismissal of their critics as “deniers” we can see how progressives have moved increasingly further away from the diversity of thought and opinion that is the most important diversity as far as the freedom of society and the functioning of parliamentary government goes.    In the last example, the diversity of thought they condemn as “denial” is disagreement with their narrative interpretation of the history of the residential schools, a narrative interpretation that they are presently using to attack the foundations and institutions of Canada, an attack which if it succeeds and follows its historical precedents will not bode well for freedom and parliamentary government in this country.   This makes the way progressives have run “diversity” up the flagpole and are constantly demanding that we salute it into a kind of sick joke.

 

Perhaps it is time we all got over this bad habit of turning abstract ideas into flags.

 

 

 

 (1)   In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, (1932) Basil Seal, having fled England to avoid the duties his mother was insisting he take up, is invited to help modernize the country of Azania by its Emperor Seth, an old Oxford friend of his.   He tells Seth “we’ve got a much easier job than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…” to which the Emperor asks “what is all that” and is told “just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern”.

Conservatism and Neo-conservatism

For at least the last forty years if you were to have asked a self-described conservative living in North America what conservatism was all about the answer you would have received would have been that it is about small government, low taxes, freedom, free markets, free trade, tough laws and sentences for violent crimes and a strong military. If the conservative you were talking to happened to remember he might have added the defence of the nuclear family and a traditional Christian morality and way of life.

In my country, Canada, conservatism was originally about much more than this. Canada is a country that was founded within the British Empire in the Victorian era and which developed her national sovereignty within the British family of nations without severing ties to the Crown and Britain, the way our republican neighbour to the south had, and as such inherited from the older country, the older kind of conservatism known as Toryism. Toryism was about monarchy, the institutional church, and government for the common good of a national society envisioned as an organic whole that includes past and future generations, not merely those present among us today. I have been a conservative of this older type, a Tory, my entire life.

There has been much talk in recent years of “neo-conservatism”. What is meant by this term is somewhat different in Canada and the United States, although in both countries it refers to either the espousing as conservative of ideas that were once considered liberal, the profession of conservatism by former liberals, or both.

In the United States, the term refers to a very specific group of people and a set of ideas with which they were associated. The original neoconservatives had been members of the group known as the “New York Intellectuals”, which consisted mainly of second generation, Jewish Americans who had studied either at City College of New York, Columbia University, or both in the period between the World Wars and who in that same period espoused politics that ranged from New Deal liberalism to far-left Trotskyism. After the Second World War many of these became Cold War liberals, i.e., liberals who strongly supported the West in the fight against Soviet Communism, and of these many realigned with the right in the 1960s and 1970s, to become the “neo-conservatives”. The best known among these were Norman Podhoretz, who edited the journal Commentary for decades, his wife Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, also a journalist, and his wife, historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.” As “neoconservatives” these continued to look upon the New Deal welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, the early stages of second wave feminism, and other such causes they had espoused as liberals favourably, but it is their outlook on geopolitics that is their most notable distinctive.

The American neoconservatives believe that American style liberal democracy is the birthright of everyone on the planet and that the United States has a duty to guarantee that birthright, by offering military assistance and protection to countries that have liberal democracy, fighting against and toppling the enemies of liberal democracy, and bringing liberal democracy to countries that do not yet enjoy it. For this reason, the neoconservatives believe, the United States must continue to maintain a military presence throughout the world, as the world’s policeman. This vision of a Pax Americana is rooted in liberalism, having antecedents in the war aims of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its most utopian articulation, that of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man envisions all of human history as having led up to universal capitalism and democracy and is simply the latest manifestation of the Whig theory of history.

The American kind of neo-conservatism has come under much heavy criticism during the last thirteen years for its influential role, during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, in leading the United States into the disastrous War in Iraq. While most of this criticism is well-deserved, those making the criticism seldom understand the nature of the problem with the neoconservative view of geopolitics. Critics on the left, inevitably maintain that all the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy, protecting the rights of women, and such claptrap, is just a thin veil masking the lust to grab power and resources for the United States, or the large corporations that to people of this mindset are the real powers behind the American government, from which it is assumed on the left that the neoconservative enthusiasm for war arises. In reality, however, it is precisely because the neoconservatives are true believers, in Eric Hoffer’s meaning of that expression, in democracy, human rights, liberalism, and basically all the same ideals that their critics on the left hold dear, that they feel that it is imperative that these American liberal values be exported universally.

In Canada, the word neo-conservatism is often used interchangeably with conservatism, in reference to the conservatism described in the first paragraph. The intent of this usage is to contrast what has been called conservatism for the last forty years or so, with the older Toryism. Red Tories in particular like to use the word in this way. Red Tories are people who, like myself, are High Tories of the older royalist, institutional church, and common good-of-the-organic-whole variety, but who, unlike myself, have avowed sympathies with socialism, feminism, pacifism, and other left-of-centre causes for which I have nothing but disdain and contempt. The Red Tories are quite right in saying that much of what is called conservatism today is what was called liberalism a hundred years ago, but I cannot help but observe the irony of the fact that this offered as criticism by those whose Toryism is modified by an adjective that alludes to their espousal of ideals that have also sprung from the modern well of liberalism and much more recently than the capitalism of the neoconservatives. Liberalism is not like a fine wine that has improved with age – it is more like milk that has long passed its expiry date, and been left out in the sun.

At times these attempts to distinguish Canadian neo-conservatism from the older tradition can be exaggerated in a way that can be quite misleading and which distorts the nature of the older Toryism. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Red Tories say that the older Toryism was the opposite of what is called conservatism today. Think about what that suggests regarding the first items mentioned in the description of conservatism in the first paragraph – small government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade. (1) There is a grain of truth in this when it comes to free trade – the older Toryism espoused protectionism – but if we were to accept the assertion that the older conservatism was the opposite of today’s conservatism, we would have to conclude that it was opposed to freedom and stood for big government, high taxes, and a centrally planned and bureaucratically administered economy. This, however, is laughable nonsense. Indeed, as I have frequently pointed out, the older “throne and altar” Toryism, ought to be regarded as being more favourable to small government and low taxes than contemporary North American conservatism. Toryism was born out of the defence of royal sovereign authority against those who wished to wrest it away from the Crown and to vest all power in elected legislative assemblies. The opponents of the original Tories declared themselves to be on the side of “liberty” against tyranny, but the history of the last four centuries tells us another story. What that history tells us is that the more the Crown’s authority was limited and the power of the elected assembly augmented, the larger and more intrusive government became, while taxes grew both exponentially and astronomically. (2)

With regards to freedom, the difference between the older Toryism and the classical liberalism that much of modern conservatism resembles was not that the latter supported freedom while the former opposed and feared it. It was rather a disagreement about the nature of freedom. The classical liberals equated liberty with the sovereignty of the individual, argued that the function of government was to protect liberty so defined, and declared that only democratic governments, in which each individual participates at least through his elected representative, can so protect the liberty that is individual sovereignty. By contrast, the Tory view of freedom, grounded in the thought of classical antiquity, was explained by the martyred King Charles I, in his final speech before his execution, when he declared that the liberty and freedom of the people consist in their having from their government “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own” rather than “having share in government”.

Anyone who happens to think that the liberal doctrine is more conducive to personal freedom than that of the Tory it is invited to look around him today. The idea of freedom as individual sovereignty is now being taken to the nth degree, with even such constraints on that sovereignty as those of nature and reality itself no longer recognized as valid. Thus, for example, gender is now being declared to be something that the individual decides for himself – or herself – or itself – or whatever! By consequence, liberalism is now declaring such self-determination of gender to be a right of the individual, which is to say something that belongs to the essence of the individual’s sovereignty. Since in liberal theory, the rights of the individual are what law and government exist to protect, the consequence of this will inevitably be that the legislatures and courts, will impose legal restrictions on what we can think, say or do, in order to protect such a “right”. The more the individual is declared to be sovereign, the more new “rights” are discovered, the more laws restricting our thoughts, speech, and actions are passed, so that what is called “freedom” today, often resembles a soft form of totalitarian tyranny. (3)

Contemporary conservatism, or what is called in Canada neo-conservatism, ought not to be faulted by Tories of the older tradition merely for being in favour of small government, low taxes, and freedom. It merits criticism for defining conservatism by such things, rather than by monarchy, institutional religion, the common good of the organic whole, and by such things as continuity, tradition, and established order for which the older Toryism stood, and which, as Roger Scruton argued in The Meaning of Conservatism, provide the necessary context for any real freedom to exist and flourish in a civilized society. There was nothing wrong with Canadian neo-conservatism's opposition to Canadians being taxed to death, overregulated, and treated as wards of a nanny state and it was for these things that this High Tory voted for and even took out membership in the neoconservative Reform Party in the 1990s. Where Canadian neo-conservatism did deserve censure was over the anti-patriotic contempt for Canada and wish that she was “more like the United States” that could far too often be found in its ranks, as well as the liberal equation of democracy with freedom and legitimate and accountable government evident in its wish to turn the Senate into an elected body which was such a marked contrast with the way the older Canadian Toryism defended our Westminster parliamentary monarchy, including the Senate, correctly perceiving that it and our traditional rights and freedoms, stood and fell together. (4) It was over these things that I walked away from the Canadian Alliance prior to the completion of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003.

(1) It is even less accurate to say that the older Toryism was the opposite of the other items mentioned in the first paragraph, although here too there are important distinctions to be drawn. The family that the older Toryism defended, for example, was not just the nuclear unit, but a larger, multigenerational, kinship group, headed by a patriarch. Also, the older Toryism tended to look to the organized Church for what “a traditional Christian morality and way of life” meant, while contemporary conservatism is more likely to be influenced by personal interpretations of the Scriptures.

(2) It was not uncommon in the last century for such High Tories as Anthony Burgess, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robertson Davies (as Samuel Marchbanks) to avow both a feudal, medieval royalism and an attitude of anarchistic contempt for the gargantuan, overregulating body that is the modern bureaucratic state in the same breathe, a sentiment which I heartily share.

(3) That liberalism was a doctrine that loudly proclaimed its faith in freedom while containing within itself the seeds of totalitarian tyranny was not something that was only evident after it had been brought to its apex in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Puritan progenitors of the first liberals, the Whigs, denounced the “tyranny” of the House of Stuart and proclaimed themselves to be on the side of liberty, but when they had seized power for themselves, made it illegal to participate in sports, games, and other amusements on Sundays after church, closed inns, alehouses and theatres, and banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter. In the century prior to that, the first Puritans, in the name of defending Christian liberty against “popish tyranny”, demanded that all practices that were part of the pre-Reformation tradition but which could not be shown to be explicitly authorized in Scripture should be forbidden, while Richard Hooker, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued on the contrary, that Christians ought to be free to observe, whatever practices of the pre-Reformation tradition could not be shown to be explicitly condemned in Scriptures. Hooker’s thinking, which helped lay a foundation for both a distinctive Anglican theology and Toryism, to any rational person, allowed a greater amount of freedom than that of the Puritans which eventually gave birth to liberalism.

(4) See, for example, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).