Lighting Candles and Cursing Darkness

The expression “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” is often said to be an ancient Chinese proverb.   Many even attribute it to China’s greatest philosopher, the legendary sixth century BC sage and government advisor/official Kong Fuzi himself.   There is not much in the way of evidence to support these claims.   The earliest known use of the saying goes back only to the early twentieth century AD, during which century it spread like wildfire due to its popularity among liberal Democrat American presidents and their wives.   Although Roosevelt and Kennedy predated the period in which liberal Democrats became enamoured of all things Chinese provided they were no older than the Cultural Revolution it is probably stretching credibility to the breaking point to suggest that they had some special insight into the Confucian origins of an adage that continues to elude the best scholars in the field. 

 

In actuality, it is difficult to imagine such a saying originating in the wisdom literature of any ancient civilization when it so clearly bears the manufacturing stamp of twentieth century, Western, liberalism on it.   As a comparative value judgement it is a truism and an insipid, banal, and trite one at that.   It implies that we are under some sort of moral requirement to make an either/or choice between lighting a candle and cursing the darkness, thus demanding the question why one cannot do both, to which question, of course, there is no answer.  

 

Today is a good day to be contemplating these matters.

 

It is the second day of the second month.   On the liturgical calendar it is a Feast Day, the official designation of which in the Book of Common Prayer is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple Commonly Called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin”.   This is because it is forty days after Christmas.   The Mosaic Law required in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus that after a woman gave birth to a male child she would undergo a forty day purification period after which she would present the child in the tabernacle – later the Temple – to which she would bring a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, or, if this was beyond her means, two turtledoves or pigeons for both offerings.   The fulfilment of these requirements is recorded in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke – it is specified that the second option for the offering was taken – which is the occasion upon which Simeon and Anna prophesy over the Holy Infant.   The informal designation of this Feast is Candlemas.  (1)  This title alludes to the ancient custom of the blessing of the candles which traditionally occurs on this day.   The candles, representing Christ as the Light of the World, are presented in Church in ceremonial reenactment of the presenting of Christ in the Temple, and are blessed.

 

In how many parishes will this be occurring this year?

 

Not very many.

 

The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler is most remembered for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon.   In the novel, his protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is taken away by the secret police of the revolutionary regime he helped create in the middle of the night, and imprisoned.   He is given a number of hearings, not for the purpose of determining guilt or innocence but obtaining his confession.  Ultimately, he gives the confession and is executed.   Although the story and its characters are fictional they represent real events that had just taken place in the Soviet Union.  After Joseph Stalin had become dictator he had secured his control over the Communist Party and his absolute rule over the Soviet Union by ruthlessly eliminating his rivals within the party.   One of the more conspicuous elements of the Purge were the show trials, held in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, in which Trotskyists and other Old Bolsheviks who dissented to Stalin’s rule were made to publicly confess to various crimes before they were put to death.

 

It was Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, Daphne Hardy who later went on to become a sculptor, who gave the book its title.  She was also the one who translated it from his German manuscript and arranged for its publication in London, while Koestler was fleeing the Nazis in a highly adventurous manner.   The title was inspired by the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Job although it has little to do with what Eliphaz the Temanite was haranguing Job about.   It refers to the contrast between the reality (darkness) and the illusion (noon) of Communism as experienced by true believers – such as Rubashov within the novel, and Koestler its author (2) – who are brought to the realization that the ideal paradise they believed they were creating was actually an extremely oppressive tyranny.

 

It seems that no matter how many times the darkness of Communism is revealed for what it is – when a Malcolm Muggeridge tells the world about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, when an Arthur Koestler paints a literary picture of the Show Trials, when an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brings the GULAG to light – there will be those who blindly look to Communism as a source of light.

 

Today, our governments have taken away our most basic rights and liberties.   They have forbidden us from gathering together socially, assembling as religious communities to worship, and in some jurisdictions, even to leave our homes without their explicit permission and a justification they consider valid.   They have forbidden large portions of the population from running their own businesses or earning their own livings for extended periods of time, and basically told us all that we must look to government rather than to our businesses and jobs for our means of support.   They have conditioned us to expect security guards to be the first and last people we see everywhere we go, to be under constant surveillance, and to be stopped by enforcement agents at any time and made to give an account of why we are out and what we are doing.   They have encouraged us to snitch on our friends and neighbours every time we see or suspect them of violating any of an ever growing list of infractions.   Protests against these lockdowns are broken up by police and the protestors fined and/or arrested.   We are told by the media, speaking with a monolithic voice much like the press in the Soviet Union, that all of this is humanitarian and necessary for the greater good.   Everything about this, right down to the “science” invoked as justification for it all, resembles nothing so much as the dark tyranny the Bolsheviks imposed upon Russia a century ago.

 

These lockdowns are the reason that Churches will not be meeting to bless the candles today.   The politicians and health bureaucrats have declared that Church services are “non-essential” and, even though it is clearly Satan’s opinion that the politicians and health bureaucrats are speaking, the Church leaders have decided to obey man rather than God.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.   The nonsense that it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

 

Unless the Churches start cursing the darkness that is Communism – including the Communism that wears the mask of public health orders to slow the spread of bat flu – instead of kissing its butt they will never be able to light candles again.

 

(1)   An old tradition says that fair weather on Candlemas indicates that winter will be long.   In North America, this has led to the day acquiring the secular name of “Groundhog Day” after the creature assigned the task of checking the weather.   The legend accompanying this name is more specific than the tradition from the Old World and the specifics are rather amusing.   The groundhog or woodchuck – a really big squirrel who lives in a hole in the ground rather than in a tree – comes out of hibernation on Candlemas to check the weather.   If he sees his shadow – which will only happen in fair weather – it means there will be six more weeks of winter.   If he does not – it will be an early spring.   The joke of this is that the vernal equinox in this part of the world is always more than six weeks after Candlemas.    It falls between the nineteenth and twenty-first of March – this year on the twentieth.   Thus, a mere six more weeks of winter after the second of February would constitute an early spring.   The outcome, in other words, is the same whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.   Very amusing – almost as much as Harold Ramis’ 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

(2)   Nine years after Darkness at Noon came out, Richard Crossman’s anthology of ex-communists-turned-anti-communists The God That Failed was published.   Koestler was one of the contributors.

That Old Egyptian River

Dougal MacDonald, an assistant lecturer at the University of Alberta, has been the subject of much controversial discussion recently over some posts he made on Facebook last month. In these posts he denied the historical reality of the Holodomor.

Holodomor, for those not familiar with the term, although it sounds like a neologism, a portmanteau coined to create a word similar to Holocaust, is in fact a Ukrainian term that means “killing by hunger.” It describes the same event that, before the fairly recent importation of the Ukrainian term, we English speakers called the Terror Famine. This was the man-made famine by means of which Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. Those interested in the history of this event are advised to read either Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine (1986) or Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017).

Mr. MacDonald described the Holodomor as a “myth” that was created and spread by the Nazis to discredit the Soviet Union. These comments led to protests by the Ukrainian Students Society, calls for him to be fired, and his being denounced on Twitter by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney.

Inevitably, comparisons have been made between Mr. MacDonald’s views and those which earned such notoriety for Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. The contrasts, however, strike me as being more interesting than the comparisons.

First, Mr. MacDonald’s posts unquestionably deny the Holodomor. By contrast, the majority of those who are described as Holocaust deniers by progressives, the media, Jewish activist groups, and antiracist organizations are people who have only questioned elements of the conventional Holocaust narrative such as the total number killed and the means, and regard themselves as revisionists rather than deniers.

Second, while progressives maintain that all “Holocaust deniers” are admirers of the Third Reich who through some weird sort of guilt-by-association share in that regime’s culpability for the crimes they supposedly deny, this is manifestly not the case. Paul Rassinier, one of the first “Holocaust deniers” if not the first, was himself a survivor of Buchenwald having been a part of the anti-Nazi resistance in occupied France who was later captured. In the United States, the first to give Rassinier’s revisionist arguments a hearing and a degree of acceptance, were not the Hitler worshipping followers of George Lincoln Rockwell, but the old kind of American liberals who had rebranded themselves libertarian when American liberalism went statist in the New Deal, a large percentage of whom were Jewish. Such vehement anti-statist, anti-war types as Harry Elmer Barnes and Murray N. Rothbard can hardly be credibly described as “Nazis”. A number of Christian theologians – limiting ourselves to the Protestants, R. J. Rushdooney, Gary North, and Kurt Marquart are just three of the more prominent – found Rassinier’s version of events the more convincing and spoke out against the non-revisionist version as a violation of the Ninth Commandment. These men were not Nazis or Nazi-sympathizers either.

Dougal MacDonald, however, is clearly a Communist. In this year’s Dominion Election he was the candidate for the Marxist-Leninist party in the riding of Edmonton-Strathcona, and has run for that party in previous elections as well.

Third, in response to the controversy, the University of Alberta pointed out that MacDonald was not speaking on behalf of the University and emphasized the commitment of the University to academic freedom and the freedom of its faculty and staff to express different and controversial points of view. While this is exactly the position they ought to be taking, can you imagine them talking this way if one of their instructors had been accused of denying the Holocaust rather than the Holodomor?

Maybe if his name was Mohammed.

Fourth, there is not the slightest degree of credibility to MacDonald’s Communist claim that the Holodomor is propaganda manufactured by the Nazis. The Terror Famine itself began in 1932. In March of the following year, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones went to the Soviet Union, snuck into the Ukraine, and recorded what he personally observed of the famine in his diaries. At the end of that month he issued a press release informing the world of the Terror Famine. At this point in time Adolf Hitler had only been Chancellor of Germany for three months. The newspapers that carried Jones’ report, such as the Manchester Guardian, the flagship newspaper of classical English liberalism, were hardly sympathetic to the Nazi movement, much less controlled by it. Indeed, the same newspaper had published an earlier, anonymous account of the famine, which had appeared two weeks prior to Hitler’s becoming Chancellor! The author of the anonymous account was Malcolm Muggeridge who had travelled to the Soviet Union the previous year at a time when he was still sympathetic to the Communist cause. Furthermore, the work of confirming these early accounts and providing a full, detailed, account of the Terror Famine was carried out by researchers with no ties to the Third Reich or sympathy with that regime, decades after it had fallen and been utterly discredited.

Should, however, someone wish to maintain that the Soviet regime exaggerated the accounts of Nazi atrocities for its own purposes, he would have plenty of grounds upon which to base this claim.

First, the Soviet Union was a very active participant in the Nuremberg Trials. They provided a judge, an alternate judge, and a chief prosecutor to the proceedings, as did the UK, USA and France. American Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft observed at the time that the kind of justice being administered in these trials far more closely resembled the Soviet notion of justice than the Anglo-Saxon justice of the UK and the USA. This suggests that Soviet influence over the trials far exceeded that of its one-vote-in-four. The “confessions” portion of the evidence for the Nazi atrocities is largely taken from these trials.

Second, it was the Soviets and not the free Western Allies, who “liberated” the part of Europe in which the death camps were located and kept that part of Europe under Communist slavery until the fall of the Iron Curtain. (1) This meant that for forty years after the war, access to the places like Auschwitz that were the sites of Nazi atrocities, and hence to a major source of information about what went on there, was under Soviet control.

Third, the Soviets were demonstrably spreading disinformation about Nazi war crimes and through this means quite successfully manipulating Western governments and Holocaust victim groups to act as their unwitting agents against those the Soviet regime had marked for revenge as late as the 1970s and 1980s. It was in these decades, the last of the Cold War just prior to the Soviet Union’s fall, that the KGB began targeting Ukrainian ex-patriots in Canada and the United States by accusing them of having been Nazi war criminals. In most cases the accusation was based upon the Ukrainian in question having been forced to serve the SS in some capacity or other – translator, guard, etc. – when the Nazis overran the Ukraine. In one case, the most famous of them all, John Demjanjuk of Cleveland, Ohio was falsely accused of being a specific war criminal, “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. In each case the “useful idiots” such as the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice and the Canadian Jewish Congress, danced to the tune the KGB played. The CJC began hounding the Canadian government to revoke the citizenship of several elderly Ukrainians. Just this week the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the final appeal of one such man. The OSI stripped Demjanjuk of his American citizenship and extradited him to Israel, where he was charged with the war crimes of “Ivan the Terrible” and convicted. On appeal, however, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the evidence proved conclusively that another man, and not Demjanjuk, had been “Ivan the Terrible” and overturned the conviction. Greatly to their credit, the Israelis refused to have any part of it when the KGB’s stooges then accused Demjanjuk of having committed war crimes as a guard at Sobibor. If the Soviets were spreading false information pertaining to Nazi war crimes in order to manipulate people in the West and accomplish their nefarious purposes at the end of the Cold War, there is no good reason to believe that they had not been doing this since the beginning of the Cold War. (2)

Considering the above, it makes zero sense whatsoever that the taboo on suggesting that the Holocaust account be revised to take into consideration the likelihood of Soviet tampering remains so absolute. It makes even less sense, if there can be anything less than zero sense, a sort of sense deficit, that, with a possible controversial and unprincipled exception for members of the Muslim community, the taboo has increased in strength since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, someone who says that the Nazis killed only 5, 999, 999 and a half Jews, runs the risk of being labelled a "Holocaust denier" and subjected to a campaign of vilification on the part of people mercilessly determined to ruin him, his life and reputation, job and career, family and social standing. It is greatly to our shame that we have tolerated this kind of persecution in our country.


There are many today who rightly object to the form of mob mentality known as cancel culture. Somebody decides to take offence at something that another person has said, calls that other person out, using one of the many weaponized words that progressives have manufactured for precisely this purpose – “racist”, “xenophobic”, “anti-Semitic”, “sexist”, “homophobic” and more recently “transphobic” are the most common of these – and the howling hordes of the easily outraged quickly assemble to carry out the metaphorical – for now – lynching of their victim. Canadian legend, Don Cherry, who for the past four decades had provided the first intermission entertainment for views of Hockey Night in Canada, was recently and disgracefully, made the victim of just this sort of mob attack.


Those who oppose cancel culture today ought, if they were around, to have fought tooth and nail against the persecution of Ernst Zündel and James Keegstra four decades ago. That is where it all began. To paraphrase, and very appropriately if I do say so myself, Pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Holocaust deniers and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Holocaust denier.”


What began with the persecution of the Holocaust revisionists and has grown into the cancel culture of today is an outright assault on one of the most basic principles of the Canadian tradition. In the debates during Confederation, Sir Richard Cartwright said “For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality.” In the 1930s on the eve of the Second World War, Donald Creighton, Canada’s greatest historian, declared that free speech had for generations been considered “the proudest heritage of the British peoples.” (3) In the name of that heritage, Creighton opposed both the Toronto Police’s clapping down on Communists and the provincial government of Ontario’s demands that Frank Underhill be dismissed from his position at the University of Toronto over his socialist, pro-American – at the time these would not have been considered mutually exclusive – and anti-British views. Creighton, who was an old-fashioned, ultra-conservative, pro-British Tory, had no sympathy either for Communism or for his arch-nemesis Frank Underhill, but he understood that free speech was too important a heritage to allow to be jeopardized.

Some, noting the very objectionable double standard that is applied to Holocaust revisionists on the one hand and those with views like Dougal MacDonald on the other, would eliminate the double standard by extending the taboo against “Holocaust denial” to “genocide denial” in general. To sin further against freedom of speech, however, is hardly a solution. The problem with the double standard is not that some people are allowed to “get away” with saying things some consider to be offensive, rather it is that we allow others to be persecuted and destroyed for the views they hold and the words they say. A general taboo against “genocide denial” would sin not only against freedom of speech, but against that keystone of justice as it has long been understood in the English-speaking world, the right of the accused to presumption of innocence, the importance of which right can hardly be said to decrease when the accused is no longer an individual, but an entire nation or even an entire civilization.

Those who insist that “denial” of this-or-that, whether it be the Holocaust, genocides in general, or whatever idée de rigueur such as climate change that progressives happen to be currently fixated on, constitutes a grave moral offence place upon others a moral duty to affirm each of these things. To morally require the affirmation of tenets of faith from its membership is the prerogative of a creed-based faith community. What we are seeing looks very much like the creation of a new, post-Christian, civil religion. Orthodox Christians and classical liberals who oppose any blurring of the distinction between civil society and faith community both have good reasons, albeit rather different ones, to find this disturbing.

I am beginning to develop a strong suspicion that somewhere far away, in the realms of eternal woe, Adolf Hitler is laughing at the way in which some of the countries that at such a huge cost to themselves defeated him almost a century ago are now throwing away their most treasured rights and freedoms out of fear of offending his victims. If some people have their way, Joseph Stalin will be joining him in that laugh very soon.

(1) The distinction between extermination camps or death camps and those which were merely concentration camps was not made by revisionists but is part of mainstream Holocaust history. The former, such as Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were never located on German soil, but rather in German-occupied Poland. Camps on German territory, such as the Dachau camp in Bavaria that was liberated by the Americans, were concentration camps. Poland was overrun by the Soviets and remained under Communist control behind the Iron Curtain until 1989.

(2) Anyone familiar with “Operation Keelhaul”, the most disgusting outcome of the Faustian compact made with Stalin at Yalta in which the Western Allies agreed to hand ex-patriots who had fled the Soviet Union and ended up in Hitler’s camps back over to Soviet tyranny, will recognize sickening echoes of it in the way Canada and the United States allowed themselves to be manipulated into doing the KGB’s dirty work for them in this. For those unfamiliar with Operation Keelhaul, I refer you to Julius – that’s Julius not Jeffrey – Epstein’s book by that title from 1973, and Count Nikolai Tolstoy’s Victims of Yalta, published four years later.

(3) I found the Creighton quote on page 149 of Donald Wright’s, Donald Creighton: A Life in History, published by the University of Toronto in 2015. Wright writes approvingly of Creighton’s stand for free speech, as well he ought. Unfortunately, he failed to live up to the principles of his subject himself, and earlier this year was one of the University of New Brunswick faculty whose signature could be found on a letter condemning their former colleague Ricardo Duchesne for dissenting from the usual academic politically correct tripe on ethno-political matters and, hence, writing far more interesting things than any of them ever dared to put out.

The Triumph of Power over Authority

“Order without liberty”, Theodore Roosevelt once remarked, “and liberty without order are equally destructive”. Libertarians of an anarchist bent tend to respond to statements like this by scoffing and saying that they are nothing more than sugar to disguise the taste of statist oppression and make it palatable to the masses. This is more or less what Karl Marx said about religion and both judgements, that of the libertarian anarchist and that of Marx, have about the same worth, i.e., none whatsoever. I think, however, that it would be more accurate to say with Samuel P. Huntington that “Men may, of course, have order without liberty, but they cannot have liberty without order”. (1)

The two men were talking about different things of course. The American President of a little over a century ago was talking about the necessary middle territory between tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Harvard political scientist was commenting upon modernization in societies that were not ready for it. His next words were:

Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in these modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.

While I generally agree with what Huntington was saying here, I note that the wording of his comments assumes that liberty is the result of the limitation of authority. I would be more inclined to say that liberty is the result of the limitation of power and that furthermore it is authority that most effectively limits power and therefore authority that is the source and protector of liberty. This is the difference between the perspective of the classical conservative and the neoconservative and it is not a mere matter of semantics. Authority and power are different things. Authority commands obedience, power compels obedience. Authority is a matter of right, power is a matter of ability. People obey authority out of respect and power out of fear. Authority must be backed by power to ensure a stable order but the litmus test of the genuineness, strength, and security of authority is the extent to which it must rely upon the exercise of power. The more genuine, firm, secure, and stable authority is, the less it needs to exercise power. (2) The converse is also true and thus the “order without liberty” of which Roosevelt and Huntington speak, which is the reality of tyrannical states, is also “order without authority”, order that is enforced entirely by power.

Classical conservatives recognize that true authority, which limits and humanizes power, is the sine qua non of the kind of order which is the precondition of liberty. Liberalism, of which neoconservatism is a somewhat more realistic variety, is based upon the idea that liberty is the natural condition of man in a pre-order, pre-society, state and it has historically and erroneously regarded authority as the enemy of liberty. Is it perhaps, this mistaking of the true relationship between power, authority, and liberty, that produced the dark irony of the twentieth century in which so many liberal intellectuals, who regarded themselves as the champions of human enlightenment, prosperity, and freedom, were blinded to the reality of the oppression that existed in societies where traditional authority had been eliminated and replaced by regimes of sheer, naked, power, and so were duped into praising and practically worshipping, the least free society the world has ever known, the Soviet Union, precisely at the time when the worst tyrant in its history, Joseph Stalin, was at the height of his career of brutality and violence? (3)

The Modern Age, which give birth to liberalism and saw it grow, culminated in the twentieth century with liberalism triumphant everywhere in the Western world. The triumph of liberalism was at the expense of her old enemies, the established, institutional Church and the ruling houses of Europe. The kings and emperors of Christendom ruled with traditional authority, based upon ancient prescription and divine consecration. By weakening or eliminating them, in either case replacing their government with that of elected assemblies, liberalism replaced the authority it despised with naked power, for democracy is a form of power – the strength of numbers – rather than of authority. In countries where the traditional authorities were eliminated altogether, there were monstrous consequences. In the 1790s, the revolution against the king and Church in France, brought about the Reign of Terror. (4) In the twentieth century, when the Allies at the instance of liberal American President Woodrow Wilson, broke up the Austria-Hungarian and Prussian empires and deposed the houses of Hapsburg and Hohenzollern they removed the roadblock that had stood in the way of nineteenth-century pan-German nationalism, paving the way for a power-mad Austrian demagogue to be elected into office in Germany, unify the German-speaking peoples into a single power, and plunge the world into a second bloody conflict after creating the only twentieth-century regime to rival those of the Communist world in terms of sheer statist terror. (5)

Countries which retained their traditional ruling houses, albeit in a weakened, mostly ceremonial role, were spared having to go through this ordeal. A few Western statesmen, like that wise old Tory Sir Winston Churchill, acknowledged this correlation. (6) Most, however, attributed the survival of liberty in the English-speaking world and its ultimate triumph over the Third Reich – and later over Communism – to modernization, democracy, and liberalism. This continues to be the conventional understanding to this day, an understanding that involves a large degree of wilful blindness to the fact that in modern, liberal, democracies too, power has eclipsed authority. In Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, the United States, et al, it is soft power that is exercised domestically rather than the hard power of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. The vast difference between the two types of power – that of sensitivity and diversity re-education and “political correctness” on the one hand versus that of secret police, concentration and work camps, show trials and execution squads on the other – should not be taken lightly, of course. The boundry between the two, however, has a tendency to get fuzzy over time, a fact of which those who have followed our government’s attempts to squelch “hate speech” in recent decades are well aware. (7) This is inevitable, because, different as soft power and hard power are, and indisputably preferable as the former is over the latter, the gulf between power and authority is even greater and those who truly love liberty, ought always to rank authority over power.

Thomas Jefferson, in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, wrote that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”. In keeping with the foregoing discussion, it could be said that it was well that he used the word “powers” here, for it is power and not authority that governments derive from the governed through democratic election. Jefferson’s use of the adjective “just”, however, indicates that what he had in mind by “just powers” is something closer to what we have here called “authority”, in which case he got things backwards. If a government truly possesses “just powers” or “authority”, i.e., the right to command obedience to its laws in the territory and from the people over which it governs, it is this which produces consent among the governed, and not the other way around. Authority is something which, when it exists in an institution, is recognized by those under that authority, and either obeyed or rebelled against. It is the authority that produces the recognition and not consent which produces the authority.

Although we have been considering the authority and power of governments, government is not the only institution to possess authority, and if we consider the example of the most basic institution in which authority is vested, the family, we find a helpful illustration. There is no rational way in which it could be argued that parents, who are the authority figures in the family, derive their authority from the consent of their children. Their authority over their children arises out of the natural relationships within the family. It is recognized by the children and either obeyed or rebelled against. When rebellion occurs, and it always does, parents must enforce their authority with discipline – an exercise of power. If taken to excess, however, discipline will not reinforce parental authority but have the opposite effect. Children will cease to respect and love their parents, will obey them only out of fear, and ultimately will rebel more. When this happens parents have lost their authority. This is not because authority is something children give to their parents and can revoke if misused, but because authority can only survive in an atmosphere of respect which it generates. If it ceases to generate that respect it shrivels up and dies.

A government derives this respect-generating authority from such things as history, custom, tradition, constitutionality, and ancient establishment. It cannot obtain it from seizing power by force in a coup or revolution and it certainly cannot obtain it from winning a popularity contest. All it can obtain from these things is power. It needs power to reinforce its authority and as a source of power, elections are generally to be preferred over violent coups, which is one reason why a government in which an elected assembly is combined with a hereditary monarchy – the government institution best suited for and most likely to be vested with time-honoured, prescriptive authority – is the best possible government (8). We have that combination today, but liberalism, the prevalent and triumphant ideology of the day, insists that it be democratic in essence and monarchical merely in form, which, as we have seen, is another way of saying that power must trump authority. Liberalism believes that it is safeguarding liberty, but the order that makes liberty possible, is an order in which authority limits power and not the other way around. This means that the longer liberalism prevails, the more liberty itself, like the authority of the sovereign, will be reduced to a mere form. (9)


(1) Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968) p. 7.

(2) This condition, of authority that is backed by power which it has little need to exercise because it is firmly grounded in prescription (ancient usage) and tradition is what Roger Scruton calls “establishment” in The Meaning of Conservatism, (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1980, 2002)

(3) For an account of just how deluded some of these were, see the final chapter “Who Whom?” in Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Green Stick: Chronicles of Wasted Time Vol. 1,(London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, 1972), which chapter covers the years Muggeridge spent in Moscow as correspondent for the liberal/radical newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, in the 1930s. For the full details on what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time see Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). This edition of a book Conquest originally put out in 1968 was revised when material from the Soviet archives became available at the end of the Cold War. The material vindicated Conquest’s original assessment.

(4) Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who visited the United States in the early 1830s and recorded his observations of that society in his Democracy in America, in his later discussion of own country’s revolution (The Old Regime and the French Revolution) noted that the revolutionaries seized the apparatus of state power from the Bourbon monarchy and turned it to their own ends. An argument could be made that this, and not the lofty ideals they proclaim, is the true goal of all revolutionaries. At any rate, revolutions are usually carried out against governments whose authority has grown weak, requiring them to rely more and more upon the exercise of power, which in turn generates the popular discontent that revolutionaries exploit against the government. Revolution is no solution, however, because it can only replace a government whose authority has weakened with a government that has no authority at all but only power, for authority arises out of prescription, i.e., long accepted and established usage. Revolutions may be started in response to real problems but they are never the solution to that problem. Francis Schaeffer, writing in response to the international student revolution of the 1960s and the rise of the New Left, was right when he said that these movements were correct in identifying the predominant culture as “plastic” (artificial and cheap), but he was very wrong when he said, in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter-Varsity Press, 1970) that orthodox Christianity must teach its young people to be revolutionary in a Scriptural, Christ-like manner. (pp. 29-30, 40-41) There is no such thing. Joseph de Maistre had it right when he said “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.” The contemporary use of “revolutionary” as an adjective of praise is a sign of the degradation of our culture, thought and language.

(5) John Lukacs in his The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993), written in response to the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, contrasts the old Austria-Hungarian Empire, a civilization of the highest order in which people of various nationalities (such as “Austrian” and “Hungarian”) were united by a common loyalty to the Hapsburg monarchy with the Third Reich as the outcome of nineteenth century German nationalism. He discusses at length a theme that runs through all his writings - the difference between the older concept of patriotism and the modern phenomenon of nationalism, the superiority of the former, and the perversity of the latter. There is a similarity between Lukacs’ praise of the Hapsburg monarchy in the old empire (he, it should be noted, is an Hungarian Catholic who emigrated to the United States after the land of his birth was overrun first by the Nazis then by the Soviets) as the unifying object of loyalty in a multinational polity to the role of the monarchy in Canada as described by W. L. Morton, a Canadian historian of the old Tory school, in The Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) p. 85. Contradicting the progressive notion that monarchy is an outdated institution, and in words quite pertinent to the theme of this essay, Lukacs writes “A hereditary (as distinct from an electoral) constitutional monarchy is especially suited to modern democracy, when masses of people are not only avid for the symbols of royalty but when, more than ever before, they need the visible presence and consequent authority of a compassionate father (or mother) figure, the presence of a respectable reigning family, with their children. Such authority ensures not fear and perhaps not even power, except that kind of intangible power that is the result of decent, honest, human respect. A constitutional and hereditary monarchy in the twentieth century is more than an instrument for continuity and tradition. Its function is historical, but also political and social”. (p. 70).

(6) Churchill is frequently quoted as having said “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He did indeed say this, although he also said “the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” More to the point he said “This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones” and on another occasion “If the Allies at the peace table at Versailles had allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach and a Habsburg to return to their thrones, there would have been no Hitler. A democratic basis of society might have been preserved by a crowned Weimar in contact with the victorious Allies.”

(7) See my “The Long War Against Free Speech in Canada” for details: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/long-war-against-free-speech-in-canada.html

(8) Aristotle and Polybius foresaw this millennia ago. As Stephen Leacock put it this combination has joined “the dignity of Kingship with the power of Democracy.”

(9) High Tory journalist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, gave an excellent talk to the Athenaeum club about how liberalism failed in its emancipation project and brought enslavement instead in 2006. An abridgement of his remarks can be found, ironically enough at the Guardian’s website, here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2

The Triumph of the Philistine

I have recently been reading The Chronicles of Wasted Time, the memoirs of the curmudgeonly British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. I was first introduced to Muggeridge over twenty years ago by my maternal grandmother, who lent me his Jesus Rediscovered a few months after I announced my intention to study theology. Muggeridge, who had been raised in an agnostic, socialist home – his father was a Labour MP – and who married into the leading family of the Fabian Left – his wife was the niece of Beatrice Webb – grew disillusioned with Marxism, seeing the reality of Stalinist state-terrorism first hand as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow in the early 1930s and later in life converted to Roman Catholicism. I picked up a copy of his memoirs in a used book store over ten years ago and was inspired to finally read them when I came across Anthony Powell’s recollections of Muggeridge in his own four volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling. In The Green Stick, the first volume of The Chronicles of Wasted Time, I found the following interesting observation:

As I see it, in the twentieth century the genius of man has gone into science and the resultant technology, leaving the field of mysticism and imaginative art and literature almost entirely to charlatans and sick or obsessed minds. The result has been that, whereas in the last half century more progress has been made in the exploration of man’s material circumstances, and in the application of the knowledge thereby gained, than in the whole of the rest of recorded time, the corresponding contribution to art and literature has been negligible and derisory. The circumstances of the age are just not conducive to such activities, and those who nonetheless pursue them tend to become unhinged or junkies or alcoholics, if not all three. (pp. 208-209)

Muggeridge does not elaborate further on this at any great length – unless the theme of belonging to a doomed civilization in its dying days that underlies his entire autobiography is regarded as such an elaboration. It seems to me that it is an observation that deserves further consideration.

There are those, of course, who would contest Muggeridge’s assessment of the state of art and literature in the twentieth century. I am not one of those, and would say that if anything, he understated his case and that in the twenty-first century in which we now live, things are abysmally worse. Consider poetry, as just one example. English poetry of all sorts and levels flourished in the nineteenth century. It was the century of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth, of Shelly, Keats and Byron, of Scott and the Brownings, of Swinburne, Macauley, and Tennyson. Kipling and Housman survived into the twentieth century, the early decades of which gave us Auden and Owen, Pound, Eliot, Yeats and Frost. Since World War II, however, English poetry has come to resemble nothing so much as the title of Eliot’s most famous poem, “The Wasteland”. The fact that the late Maya Angelou is today considered to be a great poet is all the evidence we need to show that English poetry has gone from its zenith to its nadir within less than a hundred years.

If man’s twentieth century achievements in the realm of science and technology are linked, as Muggeridge suggests, with the decline and degradation of arts and literature, the question that then arises is one of how the two are related to each other. Are science and art somehow mutually incompatible with one another? Are the mental facilities of man so limited as to allow him to only achieve in one of these two areas at a time?

I think that it is to be explained by the shift in the way the Western world understands civilization. Traditional Western civilization was built upon the idea that human activity is directed towards certain ends. Some of these ends are defined by material needs and desires such as the need for food, clothing and shelter. Others are goods which are transcendent, which exist in a higher realm beyond that perceived through the senses. The ends of human activity are not equal but arranged in a hierarchy of importance in which the transcendent goods – goodness itself, truth, beauty, justice, etc., are higher and more important than the lower, material goods. Therefore, whether a society is civilized or not, and the level of its civilization, is determined by the extent of its pursuit of these higher goods, of which its arts and literature are indispensable indicators.

The foundation of this way of looking at things – the idea that there is something beyond the world as perceived through the senses – has been subjected to a steady process of erosion for almost a thousand years beginning with William of Ockham’s denial of the reality of universals. The less men came to believe in a world beyond the material, the less important the higher goods became to them and the more important the lower goods. Hence man turned his efforts more and more towards science, the means whereby he gains knowledge of and mastery over the physical world and so obtains his every material desire.

In a very real sense, the eclipse of art and literature by science and technology represents the triumph of the spirit of the philistine. I do not mean philistine in the literal sense of the people that ancient Israel fought against but in the metaphorical sense. The metaphorical philistine is the man who looks for nothing in life, beyond material security, other than the comforts and amusements, themselves material, that distract him. He sees no purpose in schooling beyond getting a job, and no purpose in higher education beyond getting a better paying job. He sees no need for a higher life of the mind and spirit for himself, and responds to those who seek such for themselves, with scorn and derision.

In previous centuries, philistinism was associated with certain versions of Protestantism. The Protestant Reformation had begun with Martin Luther re-asserting the Pauline doctrine that salvation is God reaching down to man in Christ and giving us His grace to be received through faith. Some Protestants drew from this the conclusion that all human pursuit of higher goods was “religion” and offensive to God and sought to purge their churches and often their lands of it. English Puritanism, which cancelled liturgy, smashed church organs, and stripped churches of beauty and decoration in the name of “simplicity”, which judged art not by the standards of aesthetics but of a very Pharisaic morality, is an obvious example of this.

The basic essence of philistinism, however, is materialism rather than Protestant theology. That human intellect has been poured into science and technology in the twentieth century at the expense of the arts and literature represents the ultimate triumph of philistinism, its having conquered its ancient enemy, the life of the mind, and forced it to pay tribute. Meanwhile, the world of arts and literature has been taken over by those so aptly described by Muggeridge as “charlatans and sick or obsessed minds” as to make the philistine seem more appealing. While the man who sees no point in the paintings of Michelangelo, El Greco, Titian and Poussin, the plays of Shakespeare and Racine, or the verse of Donne, Dryden, Goethe and Baudelaire, and treats those who do as objects of ridicule, was obviously a fool, there is something to be said for the man who sees no point in trying to read the unreadable verse of Angelou, the woman who cannot sit through a production of an Ensler play, and the person, man or woman, who, unable to make the insane equation of nihilistic subversion with aesthetic value, walks away in disgust from most of which is produced as “art” today. So perhaps even the cloud of the triumph of philistinism has its silver lining.