The Evanescence of Ethics in the Epidemic

Imagine three individuals who each wish to relieve you of the burden of the contents of your wallet that they might bear this load themselves.

 

The first individual approaches you and says “I hate to ask this, but I’m in a real pickle, I owe Vinnie and Guido $50 and if I don’t pay it by the end of the day they are going to break my legs, would you be a pal and help me out.”

 

The second individual comes up to you wearing a bandana, pulls a gun, and says “stick em up” and then grabs your wallet and runs.

 

The third individual says to you “I want you to give me all your money.  It is your choice if you do or not, but if you don’t I’ll see to it that you can never work, travel, or participate in any community events again.”

 

Which of these individuals was guilty of robbery?

 

The first individual may be guilty of having made very poor choices but is not guilty of robbery. 

 

The second individual is clearly a robber and a stereotypical robber at that, going so far as to wear the traditional uniform of the robber, a mask covering the lower face.

 

The correct answer to our question, however, is that both the second and the third individuals were guilty of robbery.   Robbery is theft – the unlawful taking of another person’s possessions – through the means of coercive force, either actual or threatened.    Both the second and the third individuals used threats to force you to hand over your money.    The nature of what they threatened to do was quite different but the difference does not make what the third individual said any less of a coercive threat.

 

Is it ever right, or at least morally permissible, to use coercive force?

 

This ethical question is more complex than it might at first seem, due to a number of complicating factors.   One such factor is the nature of the coercive force.    Consider our illustration above.   The threats used by the second and third individuals differed in two ways.   One of these was in their level of credibility.   The stereotypical robber’s threat was made believable by the presence of the gun.   The credibility of the other robber’s threat depends upon who the robber is.   If he is in a position of sufficient power to actually carry it out then his threat is credible, otherwise he is obviously a nut and his threat can be disregarded as empty and crazy.   The other way, which is the one that is relevant to this discussion, is in the nature of what was threatened.   The stereotypical robber threatened the use of lethal force.   The other robber merely threatened to make your life miserable, not to take it from you.    Historically, this distinction has been very important in discussions of the ethical question at hand.   While there has been no answer to the question which could be said to have the support of a universal consensus, there has been wide agreement that lethal force is the least justifiable or permissible form of coercion.

 

Another complicating factor is that of the distinction between the state and private individual persons.    It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to conceive of the enforcement of law and the administration of criminal justice that does not in some way or another involve the use of coercive force.    Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has also been wide agreement – although not nearly as wide as with lethal force being the least justifiable or permissible – that it is more justifiable or morally permissible for the state, the institution whose raison d’etre is to enforce the law and administer criminal justice, to use such force than for private persons.    Again, support for this idea while broad, has not been as wide as for the one with which we ended the previous paragraph.   The liberal tradition, that is to say, the tradition that over the course of the Modern Age became dominant in what used to be Christendom but is now Western Civilization, has produced many different views on the matter.   One such view, which is evident today among those liberals or progressives who would argue that you should never fight back and defend yourself, your loved ones, or your property when these are under criminal attack, but  allow yourself to be victimized and let the professionals, the police, take care of it, is that the state ought to have an exclusive monopoly on all use of coercive force.    Conversely, some although not all of the liberals of the kind who began calling themselves libertarian in the last century to indicate their retention and emphasis on the individualism and suspicion of government that were predominant in the liberalism of the nineteenth century, hold that force is only justifiable when used by private persons to defend themselves, their families, and property and that the state is illegitimate.    Although these views, each the polar opposite of the other, are both supported by their proponents from ideas that belong to the mainstream of the liberal philosophical-political tradition, neither could be said to itself represent the mainstream liberal view on the matter of how much coercive force is permitted to the state and the private person.     That the use of force on others, whether on the part of the private person or the state, is ethically permissible only under certain circumstances, which are broader for the state than for the private person, with lethal force being permitted to the latter only in circumstances of self-defense, is much closer to what historically would have been the liberal mainstream.   In this, the mainstream of the liberal tradition was itself much closer to the mainstream of the tradition that preceded it, or, if you prefer, the mainstream of the Western tradition as a whole, including both liberal and pre-liberal strands, than in many other areas.

 

There is one way in which liberalism did depart from the pre-liberal Western tradition that warrants consideration in the context of this discussion, especially in that it had a direct bearing on the way the factor examined in the last paragraph was framed.   Distinguishing between the private person and the state is fairly universal in the ethical debate over the boundaries limiting when force is permissible.  Restricting the distinction to these two, on the other hand, is rather unique to the liberal tradition.   Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet stressed throughout his career, beginning with his seminal The Quest for Community (1953), the importance of a plurality of institutions.    He described such other institutions as the family and the local community as “intermediate” between the state and the private person.   That liberalism had come to largely disregard these is evident in the radically opposite views both emerging from the liberal tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph.    What the ideas that the state should have a monopoly on force and that the state is illegitimate and only the individual person is justified in using force in self-defense have in common is that they both see the state and the individual as the only players worthy of consideration.   The other institutions that Nisbet called “intermediate” traditionally possessed a significant amount of authority.   Authority, which is the respected right to lead, is different from power, which is the ability to command obedience.      For society or any institution within it to be functional authority must take strong precedence over power but, human nature being what it is, authority cannot long exist without power backing it up.   This necessarily means that those who exercise the authority in Nisbet’s intermediate institutions must be morally able to use some kind of force, to some kind of degree.   Another way in which liberalism’s reduction of everything to the state and individual is evident has been in the way in which the liberal tradition, which in the interwar period of the last century largely abandoned its anti-statist libertarianism from the century prior and then sharply veered into statism after World War II, has been attacking the authority of all of these institutions, especially the family, by having the state strip them of their power. (1)

 

The ability to back up an order with force is the essence of power, which to some degree or another is necessary to support authority.    The force needed to support authority differs from institution to institution in both kind and degree.  That lethal force is limited to the state, except in situations where the individual needs it for defensive purposes is something to which virtually everyone in Christendom would have agreed around the time that liberalism began to convert Christendom into Western Civilization.    This consensus did not exist in the classical civilization that preceded Christendom.    In ancient Rome, the pater familias, which meant the patriarch of a household consisting of a large extended family, rather than merely the father in a domestic unit, held authority, the pater potestas, over his family that was not equal to that exercised by the Senate over the Roman city-state, but certainly comparable to it.    Classical literature abounds with stories featuring the abuse of such authority – Oedipus, the king of Thebes who features in several of the extent tragedies, bears a name (“swollen foot”) that testifies to his having been a victim of a botched attempt to end his life while an infant, carried out at the orders of his father when the latter heard the prophecy that the child would kill his father and marry his mother.     While Oedipus’s father Laius was a king, the order to have the child exposed was an expression of what would have been regarded as his patriarchal rather than his civil authority at the time.      

 

The spread of Christianity and the conversion of classical civilization into Christendom led to the elimination of the practice of infanticide by exposure and stricter limits being placed on the pater potestas leading to the Christian consensus that the legitimate use of lethal force is limited to the state except in instance of self-defense on the part of private persons.    While this meant that the power and authority of the family patriarch was no longer comparable to that of the state and that in temporal terms the civil power was now unquestionably the highest authority, the mainstream point of view in Christendom did not regard all other institutional authority as falling in the intermediate position between the state and the individual of which Nisbet spoke.   The mainstream point of view in Christendom was that there were two realms in Christian civilization, the temporal and the spiritual, the membership of which overlapped, but in which different institutions were vested with the highest authority.   In the temporal realm, the state was the highest authority.   In the spiritual realm, the church was the highest authority.  The bishops, as citizens of the temporal realm, were under the authority of the king as his subjects.   The king, as a member of the church, was subject to the authority of his bishop in the spiritual realm.   The king and the bishop, each possessing the highest earthly authority in his respective realm, required power to back that authority up, and this power was conceived of as two “swords”.   These swords were metaphorical, of course, although much less so in the case of the king, whose sword included the use of lethal force to punish crime. (2)   The bishop’s “sword” was the “keys”, given to the Apostles by Christ after St. Peter’s confession of faith, which included the power to exclude people from the Sacraments and the fellowship of the church.

 

Disagreements about the “keys” were involved in fracturing the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom in both the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, which contributed to liberalism’s takeover of Christendom and transformation of it into modern Western Civilization.    While the specifics of these disagreements is not relevant to our discussion here, it is important to note that in the Christian orthodox mainstream of Christendom neither the king nor the bishop was thought to have the right the wield his sword whenever he saw fit to serve his own selfish purposes.   Liberalism maintained otherwise, of course, because it wished to weaken the king or replace him with a republic and to reduce the church from the institution of highest earthly authority in the spiritual realm to one of many intermediate institutions in the temporal realm, but the concept of the divine gifting of the “swords” in Christian orthodoxy clearly implies that both kings and bishops were held strictly accountable to God for the right use of the swords, and a great deal of space in the writings of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted to spelling out the limits on when these swords could be rightly used.   The importance of this lies in the fact that despite the significant differences between the orthodoxy of Christendom and the liberalism of modern Western Civilization both agreed that there were limits on when force could be used, whether by the state or by private persons, and that these limits were written in the language of ethics, of what is right and what is wrong.

 

The idea that there are limits on the right use of force even for the state is an ancient one, going back to the earliest of civilizations.   Even before the Socratic philosophers wrote the dialogues and treatises that laid the foundation of the long tradition of Western political science, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, continues with his being avenged by his son Orestes, and concludes with Orestes escaping the vengeance of the pursuing Furies by placing his fate in the hands of the patron goddess of Athens who establishes the first jury to adjudicate the case, resulting in an acquittal.   The trilogy illustrates how the civilized justice system with its laws and courts is superior to pre-civilized blood “justice” because it limits the violence rather than letting it continue to spiral and escalate.    The myths behind the plays are much older (Homer had drawn from the same source material in his Illiad and Odyssey three centuries prior to this).   Indeed, even the Lex Talionis that is featured prominently in the ancient Code of Hammurabi (Babylon of the eighteenth century BC) and the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, can be understood as a limit on the permissible use of force (under it if someone puts out your eye, the maximum that you can demand as just repayment is his own eye).    That the ancients saw the force of law, exercised by the state, as being subject to the limits of morality is also attested to by manner in which they categorized their philosophy.   While modern totalitarians, who reject limits on the power of the state, have sometimes claimed Plato as an ancestor, to do so they must rely entirely upon a dialogue that is fantastical in nature, in which Socrates and his friends engage in an entirely theoretical exercise in city-building that is clearly set in a world other than the one they actually live in.    The purpose of the exercise is not to create a model for the builders of city-states in the real world to use, but to examine further an ethical question about the nature of justice.   The totalitarians’ claim on Plato, therefore, is very tenuous.   By contrast, modern constitutionalists, that is to say those who believe in constitutional restraints on the powers of government which ought to include everybody of every political stripe who is not a totalitarian, can rightly point to Plato’s disciple Aristotle as their ancestor.   Some of these have agreed with the totalitarians in assigning Plato to the latter camp, but where Plato and Aristotle were clearly in harmony was in making politics in the sense of political science, the theory of states and statecraft, a subcategory of ethics, the theory of human habits and behaviour as evaluated by the standards of what is right, good and virtuous versus what is wrong, bad, and vicious.   This is spelled out by Aristotle, who introduced politics as a subdivision in his treatise on Ethics, then wrote a sequel devoted to Politics, but it is also the obvious implication of Plato’s having made his most famous political discussion as part of a larger ethical debate.   The subordination of politics to ethics is consistent with the constitutionalist rather than the totalitarian point of view.

Over the course of the pandemic that was declared early last year and has continued to the present day it has been very disturbing to see this subordination of politics to ethics that has been so important to every phase of our civilization (or to our civilization and its two immediate predecessors depending upon how you look at it) disregarded or, worse, inverted (the use of shame and guilt to coerce people into obeying every public health order – “you are a bad selfish person who cares only about yourself if you object to being forbidden all social interaction for two years straight” – is the use of a twisted form of ethics to serve the interests of politics, not in the Platonic/Aristotelean sense of the word but in a sense of the term that is usually if, perhaps, unfairly, associated with Machiavelli).   At the beginning of the pandemic, the citizens of Western countries basically acquiesced as their governments imposed unprecedented restrictions upon them.   In imposing these restrictions Western governments overstepped the limits their constitutions place on their powers and essentially took away what for centuries Western people have regarded as their most basic civil, if not human, rights.    Telling people they can have only a limited number of people over to their house is a restriction that limits their freedom of association, but telling them they can have no visitors over to their house, as the province of Manitoba did from November of last year until this July, is taking away that freedom altogether.  This is a freedom that is identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was added to the Canadian constitution in 1982, the rights and freedoms in which the Supreme Court of Canada has previously ruled that governments can limit, but only if the limitation is minimal, as this one obviously was not.   Nevertheless, the province was somehow allowed to get away with this. 

 

Having gotten away with these experimental severe restrictions on our freedoms, our governments then began to add mandates on top of these.   The first of these was the mandate that we wear lower face masks in indoor spaces.   The mask mandates were controversial for a number of reasons, many of which I have discussed in other essays in the past.   What is most significant for our purposes here is that while many have seen the masks as being a lesser imposition than the lockdowns, and in one sense they are right, they represent the transition from the government forbidding us to do things that we had previously been free to do to the government requiring us to do things.   Throughout history, the laws of the freest countries have been mostly if not all prohibitions rather than requirements, and the more requirements a government has added the less free the country has become.   The laws that have been the most universal – the basic laws against such things as murder and theft – are prohibitions.

 

We have now arrived at a point where, if polls are to be believed – and this is a big “if” – the vast majority of Canadians support a different – and far worse – mandate, mandatory vaccination.    The rapidly developed vaccines for the bat flu have spawned much more controversy than the masks.   Much of the heated discussion has been over such matters as the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.    I will leave these matters to others because the ethical problem with vaccine mandates would be the same if they were 100% safe and effective.

Some would distinguish between mandatory vaccination and forced vaccination.    The distinction is false, however, and involves no real difference.   By the latter, these people would presumably have in mind a situation where someone ties you to a chair and injects you with a vaccine without your consent, either freely given or coerced.   A mandatory vaccine, however, is as much a forced vaccine as a vaccine in the circumstance just described.   The only difference is in the nature of the force used, which difference is essentially the same as that between the two robbers in our illustration at the beginning of this essay.

 

Let us use a slightly different illustration.

 

There are three young men.    Each has a young lady of whom he is in pursuit.

 

The first young man woes her with flowers, and chocolates, and sappy love poetry.

 

The second young man, clubs her over the head, drags her off to his cave, and forces himself upon her.

 

The third young man is the young lady’s immediate supervisor.   He tells her that if she wishes to advance in her career, it would be in her best interests to sleep with him, and hints that she will be fired and blackballed in her profession if she does not.

 

As with the original illustration, the first young man is innocent.   The second young man, also corresponding to his counterpart in the first illustration, is a stereotypical rapist.   

 

Is the third young man as guilty of rape, assuming his ploy to be successful, as the second?

 

If your answer is “no” you might be wise to keep your opinion to yourself in the presence of the ladies.  As Rudyard Kipling so aptly said “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.

 

The reason for this second illustration is that the crime involved is much closer in nature to forced vaccination than robbery.   In both rape and forced vaccination someone’s body is penetrated, without that person’s voluntary consent, by a foreign tube which injects a substance into the body.    The similarities far outweigh the differences and include all the elements of rape which make the act a heinous crime.

 

The rhetoric we have been hearing from political leaders, like the Prime Minister, who have imposed vaccine mandates on certain sectors, has been “it is your choice not to be vaccinated, but there will be consequences”.   Imagine a man saying to a woman “it is your choice not to sleep with me, but there will be consequences”.   It would be one thing if by “consequences” the Prime Minister meant something like “you won’t be as protected against the virus as somebody who chooses to take the vaccine.”    This is obviously not what he meant.   It was a threat of the imposition of additional negative consequences apart from whatever ones might be inherent in the choice itself on those who reject the vaccine.   This is an unjustifiable abuse of government power.   Indeed, it is ethically unacceptable for any institution to abuse its authority and power in this way.   Rather than issuing vaccine mandates for their own employees, and those of certain private sectors, governments ought to be forbidding everyone else from imposing private vaccine mandates.    The latter would be a proper and ethical use of government power.  

 

That so many people have indicated their support for vaccine mandates, government or private, demonstrates just how badly our ethical thinking, which was not exactly in great shape prior to the pandemic, has deteriorated over the course of the last two years.

 

(1)   This is what the so-called Culture War, or at least the moral aspect of it, has really been all about.

(2)  The imagery comes from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans in the New Testament.

The Existential Crisis of the West - Redux

The prescient have seen it coming for a century now. In 1918 and 1922, the two volumes of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West were first published. In his magnus opus Spengler examined the civilizations or cultures – he used the latter term but the way the two terms were used and distinguished in the German thought of his day was very different from how they are used and distinguished in English today – of human history, and identified a super-organic life cycle that they each passed through, of which, he maintained, the modern West with its “Faustian” spirit of empirical exploration – the spirit exemplified by the Ulysses of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s eponymously titled poem – was entering into its final season.

In 1964, James Burnham’s The Suicide of the West: An Essay On the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism was published for the first time. This book is probably best understood as the third in a trilogy, the first of which was The Managerial Revolution, written immediately after Burnham’s break with his Trotskyite youth and the Socialist Workers Party and published in 1941, arguing that the capitalist world was evolving into something that would not be the socialist worker’s paradise predicted by Marxism, but rather the rule of a new class of technocratic corporate managers and government bureaucrats. The second was The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, published two years later, in which Burnham gave an overview of a Realpolitik theory regarding the inevitability of elites and the nature of political power that he traced from the writings of Florentine Renaissance political scientist Niccolò Machiavelli through the nineteenth to early twentieth century writings of Robert Michels, Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca, the philosophical framework that he had turned to after abandoning Marxism. By the time he wrote The Suicide of the West, Burnham had become one of the original members of William F. Buckley Jr.’s editorial team at National Review and the magazine’s principal analyst of geopolitical events. In The Suicide of The West he discussed liberalism as being the ideology of Western suicide. A familiarity with the first two books is helpful in understanding what he meant by this, for he did not mean that liberalism was formulated to bring about the end of Western Civilization, but rather that it was an ex post facto rationalization on the part of the governing elites for Western Civilization’s self-imposed collapse. Although this was written at the height of the Cold War – the Cuban Missile Crisis had taken place two years prior to the book’s release – the “suicide” Burnham was talking about was not merely what he perceived to be a losing strategy against the Soviet Union in the “Struggle for the World” (1) but also included internal moral, cultural, and social decay, into which category he put the immediate historical antecedents in his own day of the “woke” race revolutionaries of our own.

In 2002, Patrick J. Buchanan, syndicated columnist, speechwriter and advisor to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan, and Reform Party nominee for the 2000 American Presidential Election, released his The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigration Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. The subtitle pretty much sums up the thesis. As Christendom through secularization became Western Civilization, it lost not just its faith in God but its faith in itself. Since this process was more or less complete by the end of World War II, the period since has seen a radical and sustained fall in fertility throughout the Western world. To prevent the economic disaster that this threat to Western population size poses, and for other reasons, the governments of the liberal West have been admitting unprecedented numbers of immigrants from outside the West, and specifically the Third World. This combination, which adds up to a massive and rapid demographic transformation, spells disaster for the survival of Western Civilization in any recognizable form, and in the meantime, a far left ideology that is hostile to Western survival – Cultural Marxism – has captured the major cultural institutions of the West, from the schools to the media, and has been promoting an agenda of pushing the West’s loss of faith in God and its own civilization and its embrace of the suicidal combination of domestic anti-natalism, mass immigration, and radical multiculturalism ever further and further.

As their Cassandra like predictions of doom progressed from decline to suicide to death, Spengler, Burnham, and Buchanan each provided valuable insights into the phenomenon that four years ago I described as “The Existential Crisis of the West.” Today, I rather regret having used up that title so early. At the time we were seeing Europe inundated with migrants, whom the media represented as being asylum seekers from the Syrian Civil War despite abundant evidence that the majority came from outside the region affected by the conflict, and many of whom clearly displayed hostile intent towards the countries they were entering, as the plot of the late Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints materialized before our very eyes. Today, the news and entertainment media, academic institutions, big tech companies and other corporations, and bureaucrats and politicians of every stripe have united in insisting that no dissent be allowed to the Marxist Critical Theorists’ indictment of our civilization as being built upon racism and so thoroughly permeated by it that all white people are collectively guilty of it even if they have never had a conscious racist thought. This has been accompanied by a large scale campaign of intimidation on the part of far left activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. The chaos has evolved from the familiar pattern of previous race riots – inner city arson, vandalism, looting, and violence – to the Maoist assault on figures of the past – to the current wave of vandalism and arson targeting Churches.

A question I have frequently encountered from those who are fed up with this sort of thing is “what do we do about it?”

The answer which people who ask this question are inevitably looking for is a practical answer, that is to say, one that would resemble a “How to” manual. How to stop Cultural Marxism in ten easy steps, or something along those lines.

I do not have such an answer, and, frankly, I have my doubts as to whether one even exists. The left devoted a century to capturing our cultural institutions and turning them into vehicles for disseminating its hatred of our civilization before making this aggressively totalitarian move and that preparation unquestionably is a major factor in their effectiveness today. We do not have that sort of time to prepare a counter-attack which is required immediately.

This much, however, I will say, and that is that unless we recognize this crisis as the threat to the very existence of our civilization that it is are prepared to deal with it as such, we have already lost. This means no more apologies for our history. No more apologies for being white. No more apologies for believing the Christian faith and practicing the Christian religion. No more wasting our time trying to persuade those who are determined to “cancel” anyone and everyone whom they condemn with one of their ever-growing list of –ists and –phobes that they are in violation of the canons of liberal thought because they don’t care.

When we are all in agreement on that, then maybe we can find a practical strategy for finally defeating this Marxism and saving what is left of our civilization.

(1) This is the title of another of Burnham’s books, the first of a trilogy that addressed the Cold War. It came out in 1947.

“Me Too”, ---- You! - Or Perhaps Not.

Unprovoked and awful charges - even so the she-bear fights – Rudyard Kipling

In 411 BC, the war between the Athenian Delian League and the Spartan Peloponnesian League, which had resumed three years previously after the Peace of Nicias finally fell apart, reached its twentieth year. Things were not going well for the Athenians. During the break in the fighting with Sparta, Alcibiades, the leader of the Athenian war party, talked the Assembly into sending a fleet to Sicily, ostensibly to support their allies, but with the goal of conquering the island. The same Nicias who had negotiated the peace with Sparta, in an attempt to dissuade them from doing this told the Assembly that a much larger force would be needed than what they originally intended, but with the only result being that they enlarged the armada and put him in charge, along with Alcibiades and Lamachus. Once there, the generals decided to begin their campaign by establishing a base and launching an attack on the strongest Sicilian city-state, Syracuse. Before the siege began, Alcibiades, who had thought up this strategy, received a summons ordering him to return to Athens to stand trial on charges of the desecration of sacred statues. He opted to flee instead and defected to Sparta. In his absence, the siege of Syracuse did not go well, Lamachus was slain, and Nicias sent away for reinforcements. Athens sent the reinforcements, led by Demosthenes, but this made things worse as the fighting with Sparta, now backed by Syracuse, resumed shortly thereafter and the Sicilian Expedition ended in total disaster for Athens with the loss of most of their ships and the enslavement of their men.

Ultimately, this would cost them the Peloponnesian War, but in 411 the decisive loss to Lysander of Sparta at Aegospotami was still six years away. It was at this point that Aristophanes, the master of Attic Old Comedy, introduced a new play. The play is called the Lysistrata, after its main character, an Athenian woman who with the help of her Spartan counterpart Lampito, persuades the extremely reluctant women of Greece to go on a sex-strike and withhold sex from the men until they agree to stop the war. It is not easy for her to convince the women to either agree to this or to stick to the plan once they have agreed to it. Contrary to a popular misconception, it is women rather than men who are by far the most obsessed with sex, a fact of which Aristophanes was well aware, and which he exploited to its full comic potential.

What makes the Lysistrata so hilarious is that the title character succeeds in her plan to end the war despite her use of a strategy that would almost universally be perceived – it certainly was so seen by her creator – as utterly undoable. There is an old quip, that has been variously attributed to Ann Landers, Henry Kissinger, and a host of others although it appears to be older than all of them, that the battle of the sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy. It is, however, the current year, and perhaps it is time that the idea of a sex strike be seriously considered – not by women, but by men. Indeed, it is starting to seem necessary not for the purpose of attaining any political end but for survival. This is due to the “Me Too” movement that insists that we treat every Potiphar’s wife as if she were Lucretia. Just be clear, the Lucretia in the last sentence is she of ancient Rome, who committed suicide to protect her honour after her rape by Sextus Tarquinus and not her considerably less virtuous fifteenth century namesake, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was as ruthless, conniving and bloodthirsty as her brother Cesare Borgia, of whom Machiavelli’s Prince was a verbal portrait.

Indeed, there is evidence that just such a sex-strike is in its beginning stages. The ever fabulous veteran actress and author Dame Joan Collins, in her latest Diary for The Spectator remarks that “if these accusations towards men continue much longer, I fear a major decline in population growth in the near future.” She demonstrates that this fear is not unwarranted by concluding her column with the following illustration:

A 30-year-old single man informs me that he wouldn’t consider dating because he was too scared of being accused of inappropriate behaviour or of being ‘named and shamed’ by social media or the Twitterati. ‘I go out with the guys, drink beer and watch box sets,’ he said ruefully, ‘and friends are doing the same. We’re scared of the #MeToo movement and of being accused of sexual harassment and worse if we even tell a girl she’s pretty.’ ‘In my day we called it flirting,’ I told him.

Today, the line between “flirting” and “sexual harassment” is extremely blurry, making it potentially hazardous for any man to approach or otherwise show interest in a woman. American Vice President Mike Pence was mocked about a year ago for his policy of refusing to dine alone with women other than his wife. The Atlantic published a piece that claimed that this policy “hurt women” using the same tortured excuse for logic that the courts have been using since the 1970s to admit female reporters to men’s locker rooms – the reverse has now been accomplished on entirely different but even more absurd grounds – and to force private clubs to abandon “men only” policies. Vox posted an article claiming that this was “probably illegal.” The New Yorker ran a piece entitled “Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women From Power.” Each of these, incidentally or not, was written by a woman. Half a year later, l’affaire Weinstein broke, the “Me Too” movement was launched, and all of a sudden it was a lot more difficult to laugh at Mike Pence.

Rape, of course, is a serious crime – and it has been treated as such from time immemorial. Undoubtedly it is immoral and sleazy for an employer, whether he be a Hollywood producer, a corporate executive, or a Cabinet Minister, to offer to advance a woman’s career in exchange for sexual favours. It is just as immoral and sleazy, however, for a woman to accept the offer – and it is by no means the case, far from it, that it is always the man who initiates this sort of exchange. “Sexual harassment” is the preferred charge of the “Me Too” movement precisely because it is so vague and hazy. Virtually any attention that a man shows to a woman qua woman can be interpreted as sexual harassment if the woman so chooses.

Apart from their preference for the comparatively hazy charge of sexual harassment over those of long recognized sexual crimes and misdeeds with more concrete definitions, the “Me Too” wave of feminism insists that accusations be believed on the say so of the accuser, even in a dearth of supporting evidence and if the accusations pertain to events that took place decades previously. Potiphar’s wife would undoubtedly approve. This is a total assault on justice, that is to say true justice, at least as the term has traditionally been understood in the English-speaking world, and not the spurious contemporary substitute that is called “social” despite being utterly corrosive of society, its institutions, and, as we are seeing in feminism, ordinary social interaction between the sexes.

Eventually, the totally irrational and irresponsible “Me Too” movement is sure to self-destruct. Before this happens, however, there is no telling how many lives and careers it will ruin, to say nothing of the damage it will inflict on the fabric of society and relations between the sexes.

In the meantime, in the interests of self-preservation, men need to consider, at the very least following the example of Mike Pence. A reverse Lysistrata strategy would, however, be more effective in securing the downfall of the enemy. It is true that a strategy that eliminates the procreative act has the potential of resulting in a Pyrrhic victory, but women are far more likely to cave against such a move then men. So perhaps the answer to the “Me Too” movement is for men to tell the fairer sex, “futuete vos ipsos”, not as a crude expletive but practical advice, because they are for the time being no longer willing to do it for them.

Weighing Evils

Since the birth of the internet there have been certain memes which recur online once every four years when the Americans have their presidential election. Of these, one of my favourites is the “Cthulhu for President” meme. Cthulhu is an entity from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth century writer of gothic horror and science fiction. An ancient space demon, described as a giant humanoid with a head like an octopus, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu lies sleeping in the city of R’lyeh somewhere at the bottom of the ocean awaiting the cosmic re-alignment in which he will awaken and plunge the world into madness, chaos and destruction. The slogan for his perennial mock presidential candidacy is “why settle for the lesser evil?”

This slogan and, indeed, the entire Cthulhu for president meme, pokes fun at the idea of voting for the lesser of two evils which is sure to be put forward by the supporters of at least one of the two actual candidates. The idea is that you ought to vote for candidate X, not because of the merits of candidate X, but because candidate Y is so much worse. It is indicative of just how bad the quality of politicians has become when you find this argument being invoked in every election by both parties.

This has been the case for at least two decades, if not longer, now. To be fair, it is the Republicans who have usually fallen back on the lesser of two evils theme for such less-than-spectacular candidates as Dole, Romney, and McCain. The Democrats tend to prefer their own variation of the theme which is to compare the Republican candidate to Hitler.

This year’s election has probably set a record for most uses and abuses of both of these themes. What is somewhat odd this time around is that the same person is the target of both. It has been no surprise to see the Democrats, and the left in general, try to portray the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump, as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. What has been more unusual is that the same establishment Republicans who trotted out the lesser of two evils argument for George W. Bush twice, have been using it this year against their party’s own candidate on the behalf of the candidate of the other party. A recent example of this can be found in the article “The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton” which recently appeared on the website of The Atlantic. The author is David Frum, son of legendary CBC interviewer Barbra Frum, brother of Canadian Senator Linda Frum, son-in-law of the late, great, Peter Worthington, founding editor of the Toronto Sun, and speechwriter/biographer of former US President George W. Bush. The title can only be regarded as something of a sick joke. Frum, whose emigration to the United States I have often said is our country’s gain and America’s loss, has been a thorn in the side of conservatives on both sides of the 49th parallel for almost three decades now. In Canada, he was not a traditional Tory, i.e., a defender of our British institutions and heritage against American political, economic and cultural imperialism. Nor was he a genuine right-wing populist of the mold of the original Reform Party and was constantly calling upon that party to abandon the social and moral conservatism that were its most genuinely conservative positions and adopt a blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. In the United States he is neither a Burkean traditionalist of the Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet variety, nor a true libertarian. His idea of a “conservative” would appear to be a corporate, internationalist, free-trader who believes in a global Pax Americana. Thirteen years ago, he had the gall to write a despicable article for National Review – which had the poor taste to actually publish it – accusing American conservatives like Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Charley Reese, and Bob Novak of being “unpatriotic” for having the prescience to see that the Bush administration’s plans for invading Iraq were foolhardy and would prove disastrous. Now, in an article that maintains that to “vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe” Frum says of Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who told an audience of Brazilian bankers that her dream “is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders” - that she “is a patriot” and that she “will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States.” Someone ought to buy this man a dictionary because it is apparent that he does not know the meanings of the words he uses.

How anybody could look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and say that the former is the lesser of two evils is beyond me.

Compare the personality flaws of the two. Donald Trump is boisterous, vulgar, hotheaded, crude, and emotional. Hillary Clinton is cold, calculating, manipulative, and ruthless. Trump’s failings are those of a human being – Clinton’s are those of a robot programmed to act out Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince.

Now consider the past misdeeds of the two. Everyone is familiar with the accusations against Trump because – despite Frum’s feeble attempt to deny the overwhelming pro-Clinton bias of the media – they have been in the headlines and aired around the clock on all the major news networks for a month. One of these – claiming business losses against one’s income taxes – is hardly a misdeed, but something every rational person does, the alternative being to unnecessarily fork over to the government large amounts of your income. When the Clinton campaign and its disinformation arm, also known as the mainstream media, focus on matters like this it is not people’s moral outrage to which they are making an appeal but their envy. As for the far more serious accusation of being a sexual predator, while his behaviour can certainly be described as sleazy the attempts to spin it as worse than that bear all the marks of media fabrication.

Contrast that with Clinton’s long record of large scale wickedness. Hillary Clinton is the godmother of a family that makes the Gambinos, Lucianos and Massinos look like third-rate amateurs in comparison. All of this controversy over her private server e-mails is not just a matter of careless negligence with state secrets. The post-subpoena deletion of thousands of her e-mails, much like the disappearance of all those Rose Law Firm files pertaining to the Whitewater deal after the “suicide” of Vincent Foster twenty three years ago, was felonious tampering with evidence when the Clinton family was under investigation. Skipping over the details of Whitewater, which dates back to when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, as Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is accused of selling public office for personal profit. Under her secretariat the State Department made massive arms deals with governments that were known to be sponsors of the very jihadi terrorists the United States was ostensibly at war with – governments which happened to have made large donations to the Clinton Foundation – and awarded government contracts, in, for example, the rebuilding of post-earthquake Haiti, to friends of the Clintons who were also large private donors to the Clinton Foundation. For decades every time a Clinton has held public office – be it Senator or Secretary of State in the case of Hillary or President or diplomat in the case of Bill – their actions have served the interests of Wall Street financiers and corporate globalists, who have paid them back with six digit fees for speeches the transcripts of which have been kept from the public until – against the Clintons’ wishes – they were brought to light by whistleblowers recently.

Which leads us to the policies and platform of the two candidates. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy involved the destabilization of regimes deemed insufficiently democratic, like those in Libya, Egypt, and Syria, and the support of rebel groups even if they happened to be Islamic jihadists such as the ones who established the Islamic State. The most hawkish member of the Obama administration, her belligerent confrontational attitude towards Russia – and her insane proposal of a no-fly zone over Syria – is likely to bring about the very head-to-head Russian-American confrontation that every American president from Truman through Reagan sought to avoid during the years of the arms race and MAD. Trump, by contrast, says that it would be a good thing if America got along with the Russian and Syrian governments, and concentrated on fighting their mutual foe in ISIS. Trump’s foreign policy is sensible – Clinton’s is sheer madness. Then consider that Clinton wants to bring into the United States record numbers of “refugees” from the parts of the world she bombed as Secretary of State and will continue to bomb as President. Any sane person can see that “invade the world, invite the world” is a recipe for disaster and, from her past record we know that she will attempt to deal with the terrorist violence that this imbecilic combination is sure to bring upon her country by increasing domestic surveillance, thus threatening the civil liberties of all Americans.

Add to this the facts that she believes that the ongoing slaughter of the unborn is a sacred right that must be protected, is certain to continue Obama’s policy of inciting anti-white, anti-cop racial violence of the sort that took place in Charlotte, North Carolina this summer, and will step up the Obama administration’s heavy-handed attempts to force traditional religious believers to conform to the dictates of progressive ideology, and there is only one conclusion to which any person capable of rationally weighing the evidence can come to. Those voting for Hillary Clinton will be choosing the greater evil. They might as well write in Cthulhu on their ballots.