Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth

 

Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.   Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths.  Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine.  This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.

 

What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?

 

Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God.   Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.

 

Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace.   This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.

 

Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin.   Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed.   Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths.   Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.

 

Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?

 

If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree.  Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have.   Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice.   This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it.   God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will.   Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.

 

Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created.   When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin.   The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect.   They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation.   When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness.   Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery.   The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh.   This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.

 

God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness.   Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity.   He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form.   The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good.    If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection.   This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962)    The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person.  In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique.  (1)

 

I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed.   I wish to expand upon that idea here.   Think again of Burgess’s novel.   The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it.  Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true.   This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.

 

If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding.   By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit.   In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.  

 

These come in two forms.   The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”.   The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”.   This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex.   Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth.   Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.

 

The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”.   The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful.   Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred.   This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate.   The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print.   The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit.   The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing.   The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree.   Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990).   More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott.   Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female.   Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant's biological maleness.   Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.

 

That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth.   Further analysis confirms this.  If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth.   If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth.   The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth.   Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say. 

 

Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth.   As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.

 

The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856).   It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them.  “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”   In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words,  Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more.   He wrote:

 

the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

 

In what he stated here, Mill was quite right.   Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T.   Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought.   Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today.    It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts.  By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”.   In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals.   Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence.   In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature.   Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.     Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought.   If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would.    It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed.    Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”.   He wrote:   

 

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

 

On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power.    In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power.   Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control.   The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform.   The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet.   Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were.   The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added,  in a more burdensome manner than ever before.

 

Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones.   Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak.  Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it.   When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it.   Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do.   Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.

 

 (1)   The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.

(2)   The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction.    The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this.  Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him.  In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie.  Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours.   William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth.    None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind.

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

The Tory and the Individual

I prefer the word “Tory” to the word “conservative” as a description of my political worldview, despite the potential for confusion caused by the fact that this term is widely used as a nickname for members and supporters of the Conservative Party. The Tory worldview is built upon the timeless principle that royal authority and ecclesiastical authority share a divine vocation to co-operate for the common good, which principle can be seen as the basis of both Dr. Johnson’s definition of a Tory in the eighteenth century (1) and T. S. Eliot’s description of himself as “an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics”.

Conservative, on the other hand, is generally defined in opposition to liberalism. Liberalism is a progressive ideology, that is to say, it is built upon a linear view of history that sees humanity as constantly moving towards a better world. Thus, its content is perpetually changing, if not its basic secular, rationalistic, presuppositions. This means that the meaning of conservatism is perpetually changing as well, usually to incorporate a defence of last year’s discarded liberalism against that of the present day.

It has become customary to identify the set of terms liberal and conservative with that of left and right. When the latter set of terms entered the discussion of politics each had a clear, well-defined, meaning and it made sense to regard the right as being essentially synonymous with the Tories. The political usage of left and right began in 1789 with the French Revolution. Supporters of the House of Bourbon, the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy, the nobility, and the Ancien Régime gathered on the right side of the chairman of the National Assembly whereas the supporters of the Revolution amassed on the left side. By the twentieth century, the terms left and right had come to be seen as the two poles defining the entire spectrum of political thought, but it was no longer clear what constituted each of the poles. There were several attempts to define left and right. One of these, which attained a certain degree of influence, especially in North America, saw the spectrum in terms of individualism versus collectivism, defining the right as the individualist position and the left as the collectivist position.

Any attempt to reduce the political spectrum to something that simplistic is bound to generate confusion. In this case, the right-individualist versus left-collectivist spectrum was thought up by men who were liberals in the nineteenth century sense of the word and therefore individualists, after liberalism, at least in North America, had moved away from individualism and towards a form of collectivism. The new collectivist liberalism was equated with the left, by the older kind of liberals who equated their own position with the right and conservatism.

So where does the Tory fit on the individualist-collectivist spectrum?

It is not easy to answer this question because the Tory is both an individualist and a collectivist. He is not, however, an individualist in the same sense that a nineteenth century liberal was, nor is he a collectivist in the way a twentieth century left-liberal is. In a future essay I intend to explain the difference between Tory collectivism and left-liberal collectivism. For the remainder of this essay we will look at the difference between Tory individualism and classical liberal individualism.

In the classical liberalism of John Locke and J. S. Mill, the individual is prior to society. To be an individual, in this view, is the natural state of man, whereas society is an artificial construction, created by the mutual voluntary assent of individuals, in order to better secure their rights and liberties.

Now a moment’s reflection is all it takes to realize that this is utter poppycock. What classical liberalism asserts of the individual, cannot be said to be true of any actual individual. I live in the Dominion of Canada, a country that just celebrated its 148th birthday. I am not over 148 years old, nor do I know of any other Canadian who is that old. Canada is older than any individual who lives in it. Her existence is clearly prior to that of any individual who lives within her borders. Even if this were a much younger country, however, it would still not be true that our individual existence predates our social existence, because each of us is born into a family, which is a unit of social organization, albeit on a much smaller scale than that of a country. We do not choose the family we are born into, nor do we choose the country we are born into, although people, as they grow older, affiliate themselves with other families through marriage and may choose another country in which to live.

Since what classical liberalism asserts about the individual is observably not true about any actual person, the individual of whom liberalism predicates priority before society, must be a generic figure who exists only in the abstract. Indeed, everything that liberalism asserts about the individual, such as his possession of certain inalienable natural rights and his sovereign ownership of his self, is asserted of the individual in such a way as, if true, to be true, not just of specific individuals, but of every individual equally. What this tells us is that in classical liberalism, individuality is defined by what makes us all alike. (2)

This, however, is a serious flaw in liberal thought. For in normal conversation, when we speak of actual individuals, of Bob, Walter, June and Sally, their individuality, that which makes them individuals, is not that which makes them alike but that which makes them stand out from others. In liberal theory individuals are equal, but it is uniqueness rather than equality that is the mark of true individuality.

That which makes a person unique, which sets him apart from others, may be good or it may be bad. That which sets Louis Pasteur apart from others, makes him stand out and be memorable, are the ways in which he benefitted mankind through his discoveries. Pol Pot was also a very distinct individual, but it is his evil for which he will be remembered.

The Tory is an individualist, but his individualism concerns actual individuals, and not the abstract, generic, concept of the individual. These are real men and women, embodied souls, created in the image of God but marred by sin, thus possessing much potential for both good and evil. Their individuality is not a shared trait, but is different for each person, because it is the nature of individuality to make a person stand out as distinct and unique, whether for better or for worse. The Tory does not see individuals as being prior to their families, communities, and societies, but rather sees their families, communities, and societies as providing the necessary pre-existing context within which their individuality develops. The Tory believes in both the common good and freedom for individuals, but neither at the expense of the other. Whereas the classical liberal believes the individual to have possessed absolute freedom in a fictitious, pre-society, “state of nature”, the Tory recognizes that society is the state of nature for human individuals and that it is only in the context of a stable, societal, order that they can have and experience any real freedom.

(1) “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.” (Whig was defined as “The name of a faction”).

(2) By making “individual” into a generic, defined by that which can be said about each “individual” equally, liberalism has created a false universal. Universals are general concepts of which we encounter particular examples. For example, the idea “tree” is a universal, of which the elms, oaks, maples, and poplars we see in our neighborhood are particulars. “Man” is a universal, as is “woman”, but “individual” is a designation of particular men and women. Liberalism’s individual, ascribes to a term of particularity, the characteristics of a universal. That liberalism would blur the distinction between particular and universal is unsurprising in light of the fact that liberalism is the philosophical great- great-great-grandchild of nominalism, the fourteenth century movement that rejected the classical concept of universals, whether as Plato’s Forms existing in another realm of which this world is a copy, or Aristotle’s Ideas found embodied in their particulars in this realm, and asserted that universals are merely projections of our own mind and will upon the reality around us, that help us to make sense of it.

Private Property: A Social Institution

Between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first liberalism has traveled a great distance on the subject of private property. It was in the late seventeenth century that the works of the Father of Liberalism, John Locke, were first published. In his treatises in which he argued for the contract theory of society, for natural rights, and individual liberty, Locke made private property the foundation of rights and civilization. Today, it is not uncommon to hear “liberals” repeat mindless slogans like “people before property” or “human rights before property rights”. These slogans, as Russell Kirk pointed out decades ago, express nothing more than the desire to have the government expropriate that which belongs to somebody else.

Socialism, from which contemporary liberalism has absorbed many ideas and values, is built upon a foundation of enmity towards property. In the 19th Century, when various different socialisms sprung up, often as or more hostile towards each other than to capitalism, the one thing which they had in common was their hatred of property. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the founder of 19th Century French socialist anarchism declared “La propriété, c'est le vol” (“Property is theft!”). Karl Marx, who attacked Proudhon in the third chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party declared in the second chapter: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”

When a movement exists with the express purpose of destroying an institution like property it is important that those who believe that institution to be beneficial and would prefer that it be retained oppose the movement seeking it’s destruction. From what stand point should the defenders of property launch their attack upon socialism?

To many the answer to that question is “liberalism”, that is liberalism in its original form, the liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. Those who would defend property from the standpoint of liberalism refer to themselves as “classical liberals”, “libertarians”, or sometimes, although very inaccurately, “conservatives”.

In the course of this essay I will first make the case that such people have chosen the wrong standpoint, that they are building their edifice upon a foundation that will not support it. The seeds of contemporary, more socialist, liberalism can be found in classical liberalism. After having made this case, I will make the case for an alternative foundation for the institution of private property in traditional society – the society, the authority of which, classical liberalism was founded to attack.

The quotation from Karl Marx given above is a truncated quotation. The first three words “In this sense” were omitted. What sense is Marx referring to?

In the four preceding paragraphs Marx had argued that communism is not unique in its goal of the abolition of existing property relationships. “All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions” he wrote, and gave as an example the French Revolution, which “abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.” What was distinct about communism, Marx argued, was that it sought the abolition of bourgeois property and:

modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

This is the “sense” Marx is referring to. Marx saw history as an ongoing struggle in which classes of exploited “have nots” (people without property) would constantly overthrow their exploiters, the class of “haves” (people with property) becoming the new class of “haves”. The bourgeoisie, however, would be the last class of “haves” and their property would be the last form of “private property”. The proletarian, Marx argued, in overthrowing the bourgeoisie, would establish communism in which the distinction between “haves” and “have nots” would vanish, nobody would be exploited, all property would be owned in common and society would function according to the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.

While most of what Marx wrote was complete rubbish there is insight we can glean from him in the parallel he drew between the French Revolution and the Communist revolution he was advocating. If the bourgeoisie were to feudal society what communism was to bourgeois society then the ideology which the bourgeoisie devised to justify overthrowing feudal society can hardly be said to be a pro-property ideology. What was that ideology?

The French Revolution to which Marx refers was launched in the name of the “rights of man and of the citizen”, gathering its inspiration primarily from the writings of the romantic philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau. In the English-speaking world, however, the transition from feudal to bourgeois society was accomplished, in a much less violent manner. The ideology which inspired or explained the transition in the English-speaking world was the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith.

If English liberalism achieved the same end as the French Revolution through less overtly violent methods what does that say about liberalism as an appropriate ideological foundation for the institution of property?

Before returning to Lockean liberalism it is important that we define property. What is property? What concepts are essential to its nature? What is “private property” as opposed to other types of property?

The noun “property” simply means “that which is owned”. Specialized uses of the term in law, politics, and economics come back to this basic meaning. In law property can be either personal property (your clothes, books, and other such items), real property (land, buildings, etc.) or intellectual property (the legality of which is currently in debate, a debate which is beyond the scope of this essay). In economics “property” refers to “the means of production”, i.e. everything such as land, raw materials, a production plant and tools that is used in the production of useful goods.

In political arguments about “private property” the term “property” tends to encompass both the economic meaning of property and the legal concept of “real property”. The adjective “private” means “not open to the public but exclusive for the use of X”. When we modify property with the adjective “private” we express the idea of that property which is owned, not collectively by society, but privately by society’s members.

One last word needs to be defined and that is the verb “own”. To own something means more than just to possess the use of it. Human beings can use resources without owning them. We all breathe the air but non of us owns it. We all use the light of the sun but it is not our property. The basic difference between owning something and merely using it is that when you own a resource you have the right to determine how the resource is used, whether for your own benefit or the benefit of others. Inherent within this right is the right to exclude others from the use of the resource.

Now having the “right” to determine how something is used and to exclude others from its use is different from having the “ability” to do so. Lets say you go out and build a wall around a section of land, fortify the wall, and arm yourself to the teeth. You may very well possess the ability to determine the use of the land and prevent others from using it. That does not mean that you have the right to do so and if you do so in the middle of a public park that thousands of people frequent on a daily basis you are probably going to run into some difficulties as a result of your actions.

What makes the difference between the person whose control over resources he claims for himself rests solely on his ability to defend his claim by force and the person who actually owns resources?

The difference is that the latter’s claim to the property in question is recognized by society and protected by society’s laws.

What does this tell us about private property?

It tells us first, that society has a interest in recognizing and protecting the institution of private property. The private ownership of property, therefore, benefits not only those who own property themselves, but society as a collective whole.

Secondly it identifies for us the idea in supposedly pro-property Lockean liberalism that is the seed of the anti-property contemporary liberalism.

In the first of John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Locke had argued against Robert Filmer’s defense of patriarchal authority.(1) His second treatise was devoted to suggesting an alternative theory of the origins of society, authority, and government. In his theory, men in their natural state, are “free, equal and independent”, and societies arise when men voluntarily contract with each other to form a society and government for their greater security. Men’s basic rights, according to Locke, go back to the pre-societal natural state. The fifth chapter of his second Treatise is devoted to the question of how property arose in this natural state. God had given the world, including the land and all lesser creatures, to man in common, Locke argued, but “every man has a ‘property’ in his own ‘person.’” He then goes on to argue:

This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this "labour" being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.

Locke’s theory that property, like rights and the individual himself, predates society, requires him to come up with an explanation like this. There are a couple of problems with it however.

The first problem is that the entire theory of which Locke’s “labour theory of property” is a subcategory is manifestly false. It is the human state of nature to live together in societies, not to be “free, equal, and independent”. Society precedes the individual person – as can be seen every time a baby is born, for he is born into a pre-existing society, his family.

The second problem is that this theory is also the foundation of Marxism.

Think about it. How does Marx’s theory of history work again? First, all things are owned in common. Then some people appropriate to themselves that which was previously held in common and form the class of the “haves”. This leaves the rest without anything. They become the class of the “have nots”. Because the “haves” have all the property they are able to exploit the “have nots” who have only their labour. The exploitation takes this form: the “have nots” exchange their labour for wages from the “haves”, but because the “haves” have all the property the bargaining is one-sided and the “have nots” never receive the full value of their labour. This continues until the “have nots” overthrow the “haves” and become the new “haves” until the process ends with communism being established.

Marx’s theory is false, but apart from Locke’s theory of the origins of property it would be completely incoherent. It is nonsense to think that the workers in a factory are exploited just because the factory owner makes a large profit from selling the factory’s product. Nobody would ever have thought so, however, if Locke had not argued that property arises out of labour.

Locke is wrong. There is no state of nature for human beings that is prior to society. The man outside society is the most unnatural of men. Property is a product of society.

Traditionally, societies are bound together by a common set of beliefs, customs, and habits. These form the core of a society’s culture and they include basic concepts of what is right and what is wrong with regards to human behavior. The terms we use for a particular system of right and wrong (morality) or for the branch of philosophy devoted to the question of what is right and wrong are derived from the Latin and Greek terms for “custom” or “habit”, reflecting the fact that standards of right and wrong are primarily collective rather than personal. A society with a higher civilization than others will believe in moral standards that transcend itself, that are universal, written in a natural law flowing from a higher authority (God’s). In such a society, however, the higher, universal rules, must be expressed in particular customs and habits.

It is out of such customs and habits that the institution of private property arises. Societies recognize that their members have a right to that which they have legitimately acquired (through inheritance, purchase, gift, etc.), forbid others from trespassing on that (through theft, robbery, vandalism, trespass, etc.) and protect people’s rights to their own through their laws.

Does the institution of private property then serve the interests of society as a collective whole? If so what are those interests?

I can see three ways in which the institution of private property serves the collective interests of a society. These are a) it helps preserve the peace, b) it helps conserve the condition of material things in society, c) it contributes to the general prosperity of society.

Society consists of human beings, who live and work together for their common good as a society, the collective goods of the families, churches, and communities to which they belong, as well as their own personal goods. Such living and working together generates friction and at times disagreements arise. Sometimes one person’s good may conflict with another person’s, or the good of one or both of them might conflict with the good of society as a whole. One of the purposes of law to prevent these disagreements from tearing society apart in violent conflict.

Private property is a means to this end because when property is privately owned the difference between what belongs to one person and what belongs to another is also clearly defined and distinguished. This makes it easier for disputes to be settled peacefully.

The various socialisms, of course, dispute this. They argue that the very existence of a distinction between “mine” and “thine” is the cause of conflict. All one needs to do to prove them wrong is to point to a society which has tried to put socialism into practice. The elimination, at least nominally, of private ownership of factories and land and other productive property, makes people more jealous of their most minute personal effects. It eliminates trust, tears people apart, and generates more conflict over the pettiest of things.

This is because socialism has misdiagnosed the cause of evil in human society. It is not the existence of private property, the existence of “mine” and “thine” rather than a universal “ours”. It is the human heart, which is fallen, rebellious, and depraved. There is no political, social, or economic cure to the human condition. It is from that condition that human evil comes, and the laws of human societies are better able to deal with it when private property exists and property rights and protected under law.

The private ownership of property helps to conserve the condition of material things in society. What that simply means is that people are less likely to waste and abuse resources that they own than ones which are owned in common by society. This should be obvious to everybody. Where are you more likely to find garbage carelessly thrown about? In the backyards and front laws of privately owned houses or in ditches, back alleys, streets, and public parks? Who is more likely to keep their home in well repair? The person who owns the house he lives in or the person renting an apartment? What are the biggest pollution problems in the world today? The pollution of the atmosphere, the oceans, and other resources where private ownership is largely impractical.

Ecologists have long recognized this but they unfortunately are largely infected with the affinity for socialism that pervades much of the contemporary scientific and academic world. Instead of promoting responsible private property ownership they tend to support more government intervention and conservation laws.

Practically speaking, there are basically three options with regards to conserving resources. Either a) the resources are commonly owned, and available to all, with no limitations, b) they are commonly owned, and available to all with regulations and limitations that are strictly enforced, or c) you have resources that are privately owned and available to those their owners make them available to.

The first is the worst option from an ecological standpoint. This produces the famous “tragedy of the commons” of which Garrett Hardin wrote. (2) The second option is appropriate only in very specific situations where there is a practical reason for having the resource publicly owned. Applied on a large-scale throughout a society it eliminates human freedom and produces misery. The third option, is the best option, the option that has stood the test of time.

Finally, private property contributes to the general prosperity of society. This is true on a number of different levels. There is the basic fact, that in a society with private property, like Canada, the UK, or the United States, there is greater material abundance at every level in society than in a country like the old Soviet Union where misery was the only thing in abundance except in the higher echelons of the Communist Party.

We should not make the mistake of identifying material abundance with human happiness however. The two are not the same. Private property contributes to society’s prosperity in the sense of real happiness in that people are healthier psychologically and happier when they can say of something “this is mine” and have society recognize their claim. This is part of what is meant by the term “status”. “Status” is not a concept that is well-liked by levelers, egalitarians, revolutionaries, progressives, liberals and the like but it is vitally important to a person’s well-being and their integration into society. Private property helps convey status, and with it a sense of responsibility and achievement and helps ward off alienation.

It is therefore an institution that is vital to the interests of a civilized society.

(1) In my opinion, Locke’s thesis and arguments are inferior to Filmer’s.

(2) http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html