Justin Trudeau is no Friend of Canada

I, as long time readers will be well aware, am a Canadian and a patriot of my country. Many Canadians seem to think that being a patriotic Canadian means being anti-American but I like to quote one of my two favourite Prime Ministers, (1) John G. Diefenbaker, who said "I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian." Of course, for a Tory like myself, being a Canadian patriot does involve a firm belief in my country's own institutions and traditions rather than those of the United States. I believe in parliamentary government, reigned over by a king or queen, rather than republican government presided over by an elected president, and have argued this point at length. I have a very low view of sedition, rebellion, and revolution, which history demonstrates almost always produce a worse and more oppressive government, and so cannot share the common American belief, born out of their founding mythos, that these are the well-spring of liberty. I say rather, with the long-neglected Canadian conservative John Farthing, that "freedom wears a crown" and believe the tradition of loyalty upon which our country was founded and which led us to stand by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War to be a virtuous tradition worthy of honour. I trust that you can see the difference between this attitude and the juvenile, left-wing, anti-Americanism that the Liberals, NDP and Greens seem to think is part and parcel of Canadian patriotism.

I see, therefore, no patriotic reason to come the the defence of Her Majesty's First Minister in Ottawa simply because he has been on the receiving end of a barrage of insults from the American President and members of his administration. Frankly, he deserved them. While I have no problem with a Canadian Prime Minister standing up for our country - it is his job, after all - Justin Trudeau, in his choice of time and place to say that Canada "will not be pushed around" displayed a stupidity far in excess of that for which his reputation is already well-established. When the G7 summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, commenced, a trade war was already impending between our two countries. Somehow, the leaders had managed to come to an agreement of sorts and an official communication of this had been sent out before Donald Trump took off to Singapore to negotiate what will hopefully be the end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula with Kim Jong-un. It was then that Trudeau called a press conference and uttered his now infamous words, which, given at that particular moment, could only be understood as gloating at having won one over on Trump. This earned him, as was undoubtedly his intention, the admiration of anti-American leftists around the world, but, as with so much other of his grandstanding, it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price in the upcoming trade war which our country simply cannot win. Trudeau has shown his contempt for the teachings of the Holy Scriptures on many occasions but it would have served him well to have read over Luke 14:28-32 before he shot his mouth off and applied its literal meaning even if he continued to ignore the intended spiritual application.

Not only was it the wrong time and place for Trudeau to boast about standing up for Canadians, he was the wrong person to do so. He might have thought that he was simply imitating Trump's Mr. Tough Guy nationalist rhetoric but there is a huge difference. Trump, for as long as he has been in politics has taken his stand on a hard core, America First, Buchananite, populist-nationalist platform. Trudeau, on the other hand, has worked hard to establish the reputation of being the same kind of left-liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist citizen-of-the-world that his father was. The idea that he would ever put the interests of Canadians ahead of whatever inane brain rot is the latest fashion among liberal intellectuals (2) is laughable.

Consider his track record. His biggest concern in picking the Ministers to fill his Cabinet was not their competency but that the levels of estrogen and testosterone be equal. Feminist ideology and the adoration of the multitudes of young people who have been brainwashed by universities into swallowing that mindless tripe, took precedence for him over the interest of ordinary Canadians in the Ministries of Her Majesty's government being competently administered. One of the very first things he did in office was to take Canadian taxpayers' dollars, use it to bring large numbers of the economic migrants invading Europe under the pretence of being refugees from the Syrian Civil War over here, and then take more of the Canadian taxpayers' dollars to bribe Canadian employers into giving the "refugees" jobs instead of Canadians. He then bullied anyone who objected to this by accusing them of racism. (3)

Trudeau's attitude towards the Canadian energy industry can only be described as one of arrogant hostility and while this might earn him brownie points with the green gang it does not benefit the average Canadian and works against the interests of all the Canadians employed by the energy industry directly but also those who depend upon the jobs available in an economy that itself is heavily dependent upon affordable energy to survive. He has shut down most of the pipeline projects that would have benefited Canadians across the Dominion, constantly sided with anti-pipeline agitators that are funded by foreign energy interests, and, rather than use force to protect the rights of the petroleum company that had jumped through all sorts of ridiculous loops to obtain legal permission to expand an existing pipeline, opted to buy out the pipeline at the taxpayers' expence. He has imposed a carbon tax upon the country, driving the cost of gas through the roof, for absolutely no good reason, (4) hurting the most those who were already just barely getting by on the wages from jobs that require vehicular transportation to get to. He has imposed massive debt on future generations of Canadian taxpayers with his runaway defecits, which include large amounts of spending on global projects that do not benefit Canadians, and has increased the cost of living, while reducing the ability of most Canadians to pay through tax increases.

If Canadians have only recently begun to feel the impact of Trudeau's green agenda on their pocketbooks, we have so far been shielded from the full impact of his anti-business agenda on Canadian employment by the relatively free trade that has existed between our country and the United States, thus allowing us to benefit from economic boom the United States has seen since the election of Donald Trump. That will no longer be the case if Trudeau has gotten us into an unwinnable trade war. Note that I say this as an economic patriot not as a doctrinaire free trader. The basic idea of economic patriotism is that of doing what is best for the economic interests of your country. (5) It is not in your country's best interests to piss off your largest trading partner, especially if that partner has much more economic clout than you do. Neither, however, is it in your country's economic best interests to sign free trade agreements that make your country that vulnerable in the first place. Trudeau's foolish words today would not have the potential to harm us today if Brian Mulroney had not betrayed his party's historical platform (6) thirty years ago and signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement that later evolved into NAFTA and which plunged us into three decades of addictive dependency on free trade.

What will eventually come out of all of this only time can tell. What we do know is that we have no reason whatsoever to be proud of our lousy Prime Minister who serious needs to learn to keep his hubristic tongue in his mouth.


(1) The other, of course, being Sir John A. MacDonald.

(2) When I use the word "intellectuals" I have in mind the way Paul Johnson uses the word in his book of that title (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) and the following quotation from the late, great, Tom Wolfe: "We must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very, very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others. Starting in the early twentieth century, for the first time an ordinary storyteller, a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, a playwright, in certain cases a composer, an artist, or even an opera singer could achieve a tremendous eminence by becoming morally indignant about some public issue. It required no intellectual effort whatsoever. Suddenly he was elevated to a plane from which he could look down upon ordinary people. Conversely — this fascinates me — conversely, if you are merely a brilliant scholar, merely someone who has added immeasurably to the sum of human knowledge and the powers of human insight, that does not qualify you for the eminence of being an intellectual."

(3) Berkeley professor and former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich maintains that blaming economic stress on immigrants is the sign of an ascending tyrant. This is nonsense. A much more reliable observer, Aristotle, noted almost two and a half millennia ago that a tyrant, unlike a true king, prefers and trusts foreigners over his own people. Politika, Book V.

(4) A carbon tax is an idiotic notion dreamed up in hell by the devil himself. A) CO2 is not a pollutant - it is naturally exhaled by all human and animal life and the more of it in the atmosphere, the better for plant life. B) Over 90% of the Greenhouse Effect is produced by water vapour and CO2 is only a fraction of the remainder. C) The Greenhouse Effect is a good thing not a bad thing - without it the earth would be a lifeless ball of ice. D) Climate has been constantly changing throughout all of history and until all of the causes of this are understood and taken into account - and climate science is not even remotely close to starting to have done this - there can be no way of telling how much recent climate change has been caused by human factors. E) The modern warming trend that is blamed on the burning of fossil fuels actually began with the end of the Little Ice Age decades before the industrial boom and included a forty-year period of cooling after World War II which coincided in time with a large rise in CO2 emissions due to accelerating industrialism. F) The "proof" for the theories of climate-change alarmists is not evidence from real world observations but the simulations of computer models. G) The global warming/climate change scare has been a deliberate fraud since day one. The day on which it was presented to a US Senate Subcommittee in 1988 was consciously chosen to be the statistically hottest day in summer, the summaries of the UN's IPCC's reports on climate change were written by environmental bureaucrats and released prior to the science reports which were then redacted to fit the summaries. H) "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period" - Michael Crichton. I) Scientists funded by governments and international agencies like the UN are just as likely to provide the results they are paid to provide as scientists funded by petroleum companies.

(5) Adam Smith and David Ricardo's theories of absolute and comparative advantage ought to be considered, when determining what is best for your country, but they ought not to be treated as outweighing all other considerations.

(6) The Conservative government of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, introduced its "National Policy" to the public in 1876 (they had been discussing it internally since the 1860s), campaigned on it in 1878, and put it in practice in 1879. The policy was similar to that adopted by the new Republican Party in the United States a decade earlier and that which would be adopted by the government of the newly unified Germany - protecting domestic manufacturers with tariffs and the use of government revenue on internal infrastructure improvements, which in Canada's case meant the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The policy worked quite well in developing the manufacturing base of all three countries, by contrast with the free trade practice introduced in England, the birthplace of industrialism, at the behest of the Manchester manufacturers. While it was agricultural tariffs (the Corn Laws) the latter sought to repeal, their practice of free trade in this same period that America and Germany were practicing economic nationalism led to their falling behind the USA in industrial development. The Canadian Conservative "National Policy" was something of a last-option-available measure initially, but it worked for Canada for almost a century, and it became a fixed plank in the Conservative platform until Mulroney removed it. The old Conservatives believed it to be necessary, not only for the protection of Canada's own industries and resources, but for her political and cultural protection as well (at least the cultural protection of English Canada, the Victorian-era British culture of which did not have the built-in protection against Americanization of a language barrier like French Canada). The Liberals were the party that wanted free trade and Americanization. Today's Grits are not likely to admit to being the party of the latter, although they obviously base their policies on what the craziest trend in Hollywood is at any given moment, spewing left-wing anti-Americanism of the sort that Jean-François Revel so ably exposed as irrational in his 2004 monograph of that title. Nevertheless, it was openly admitted by Liberal thinkers of the past such as Goldwyn Smith and John Wesley Dafoe. Their economic arguments and historical interpretations in favour of the Liberal project of undoing Confederation and moving Canada into the American orbit were fully rebutted by Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Eugene Forsey.

Apartheid in Perspective

There are many evils that can be charged to the account of the late twentieth- century phenomenon that is commonly called political correctness. One of these is the growing inability to perceive certain historical figures, events, and institutions with anything worthy of being called perspective. In the last century alone, movements and organizations committed to the political philosophy of Marxist-Leninism murdered the bodies of over one hundred million people and the spirits of millions more whom they forced into the dreary, hopeless, slave like existence that passed for life in the police states that flew the red flag. Yet to this day it is far safer for someone in academic or media circles to praise a Communist government, to dismiss the fear of Communism as irrational paranoia, and to say that the Americans were the aggressors in the Cold War, than it is for someone in those same circles to say anything that could be construed as a defense of General Franco of Spain or General Pinochet of Chile even though there was far more freedom and prosperity for the average citizen under either of their regimes than in any Communist country and the number of people tortured and killed by their regimes was far lower than that of any Communist country. Any attempt to put both Communism and the anti-Communist regimes of Franco and Pinochet in perspective is likely to be met with widespread denunciation and accusations that one is engaging in apologetics for “human rights” abuses.

Virtually anything having to do with Africa is similarly protected from perspective by political correctness.

Take the slave trade for example. We know all about it, don’t we? The bad guys, the white Europeans, in the age of exploration came to Africa, where they began to capture and enslave black people, who they shipped overseas to Europe and the European settlements in the Americas, where they were oppressed as drudge labourers.

Suppose, however, we were to broaden our perspective on African slavery by including within our picture of it the fact that slavery existed on the African continent long before European ships arrived on her west coast, that African slavery had begun with African tribes going to war with one another and enslaving each other, that the Arabs had conducted a trade in African slaves centuries prior to Europe’s getting involved, and that one of the consequences of modern European expansionism, colonialism, and imperialism was that the imperial powers ended and outlawed the slave trade in the nineteenth century, and abolished slavery in the territory under their control? Suppose we were to broaden our perspective even further by pointing out that since the end of World War II, which had accomplished a geopolitical realignment around the two new superpowers of the USA and USSR, who forced the old imperial powers to withdraw, slavery has begun anew in parts of Africa where it had been abolished by Britain, France, and the Dutch.? Suppose we were to point out, as Professor Bruce Charlton recently did (1), that due to liberal immigration and multiculturalism slavery has been reintroduced into the birthplace of abolitionism and is largely being ignored by the leftists who promote multiculturalism in contradiction to their professed opposition to slavery in all forms?

From that broader perspective it no longer appears to be a simple Manichean morality tale of evil whites and pure, innocent, oppressed blacks does it?

There is probably no element of African history that is more lacking in perspective than that of apartheid. Apartheid is the word in the Afrikaans language that refers, as its sound would suggest to English speakers, the state of being apart or separate. In 1948, when the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa, it adopted this term to designate its policy of racial segregation.

The government of South Africa picked a particularly poor time to institute this policy. World War II was over, the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany had given racialism a bad name, the anti-colonial, anti-imperial era was beginning under the supervision of the new progressive superpowers, the Communists were at work trying to fan the flames of anti-racist sentiment into the fire of revolution, and in the United States, now the leading power of the liberal, democratic, West, the Civil Rights movement would soon be underway, which would lead to the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, the model for subsequent anti-discrimination legislation such as the 1968 Race Relations Bill in the UK and the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act. The way the tides of opinion were moving, it was inevitable that apartheid would receive widespread condemnation. Interestingly, the one country that understood perfectly well where the Afrikaners were coming from, itself achieved its independence as a country that same year. After the Six Days War in 1967, Israel and South Africa forged a close alliance, signing the Israel-South Africa Agreement in 1975. Today, enemies of the Jewish state liken the measures she has taken to preserve her existence in the face of the constant threat of Arab and Muslim terrorism to apartheid. Her defenders reject the comparison as a calumny, perhaps because they, unlike the country they are defending, lack perspective on apartheid.

It is fitting, therefore, that of those essays with which I am familiar, the one which in my opinion best put apartheid into perspective, appeared in an extremely pro-Israeli publication. The author of the essay was British writer and historian Paul Johnson. In an article that appeared in the September 1985 issue of the American neoconservative monthly journal Commentary, (2) Johnson took the United States to task for the economic boycott of South Africa then underway. It was a “cruel absurdity”, he declared, for the richest country in the world to “deliberately set about destroying the economy of what is in some respects still a developing nation.” (3) The United States had nothing to gain from doing so and much to lose. The only explanation for this absurdity, Johnson argued, was that “assumption that the South African regime is a unique moral evil, whose wickedness is so great that the necessity for its destruction transcends all the rules governing relations between states and, indeed, the dictates of elementary common sense.”

He then proceeded to demolish that assumption by pointing out that South Africa, far from being unique, is “in many fundamental respects…a typical African country.” He gave six examples, the first four of which are 1) that like other African states it was undergoing a population explosion, 2) like other large African states its racial problems were particularly complex and not just a matter of black and white, 3) “population pressure on the land is driving people into the towns, and especially into the big cities”, and 4) like in other African states this creates problems for the government to which the response is typical:

So governments respond with what has become the curse of Africa—social engineering. People are treated not as individual human beings but as atomized units and shoveled around like concrete or gravel. Movement control is imposed. Every African has to have a grubby little pass-book or some other begrimed document which tells him where he is allowed to work or live. South Africa has had pass-laws of a kind since the 18th century. They have now spread all over the African continent, and where the pass-book comes the bulldozer is never far behind. Virtually all African governments use them to demolish unauthorized settlements. Hundreds of thousands of wretched people are made homeless without warning by governments terrified of being overwhelmed by lawless multitudes. In the black African countries bordering on the Sahara, the authorities fight desperately to repel nomadic desert dwellers driven south by drought. When the police fail, punitive columns of troops are sent in. (4)

The fifth example Johnson gave was that South Africa, like all African states, conducts its social engineering on a racial basis. He wrote:

All African states are racist. Almost without exception, and with varying degrees of animosity, they discriminate against someone: Jews, or whites, or Asians, or non-Muslim religious groups, or disfavored tribes. There is no such thing as a genuinely multiracial society in the whole of Africa…African countries vary in the extent to which their practice of discrimination is formalized or entrenched in law codes and official philosophies. Most have political theories of a sort, cooked up in the political-science or sociology departments of local universities. Tanzania has a sinister totalitarian doctrine called Ujaama. Ghana has Consciencism. There is Zambian Humanism, Négritude in Senegal, and, in Zaire, a social creed called Mobutuism, after the reigning dictator. All these government theories reflect the appetites of the ruling racial groups… Apartheid is not a concept which divides the Republic from the rest of Africa: on the contrary, it is the local expression of the African ideological personality. (5)

This, it should be noted, has changed since the change in power from the Afrikaner National Party to the African National Congress in 1994. Not only does the ANC, despite the false image of the “rainbow nation” generated by a deceitful media, practice discrimination against the white South Africans who are currently being eliminated in a Zimbabwesque manner, the ANC is not even representative of all South Africa blacks, being historically a primarily Xhosa organization, (6) although its current leader, Jacob Zuma, comes from the rival Zulu people.

The sixth way, in which Johnson said that South Africa was typical of Africa was in the way it had suffered “at the hands of its politically minded intellectuals”.

Having demonstrated that in all of these negative things Nationalist South Africa was a typical, rather than unique, African state, Johnson then identified four ways in which it stood out by differing from other African states. The first two of these were its wealth, “South Africa has by far the richest and most varied range of natural resources of any African country”, and the fact that it had used that wealth to build a modern economy, the only one of its kind in Africa. The third was that blacks were better off in white-governed South Africa than any other country in Africa. Here another extended quote from Johnson is in order:

Except for the Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Malawi, all the black African states have experienced falls in real incomes per capita since independence. But only in South Africa have the real incomes of blacks risen very substantially in the last quarter-century. In mining, black wages have tripled in real terms in the last decade and are still rising…This helps to account for the fact that there are more black-owned cars in South Africa than there are private cars in the whole of the Soviet Union. The Republic is the first and so far the only African country to produce a large black middle class. In South Africa the education available to blacks is poor compared to what the whites get, and that is one of the biggest grievances the black communities harbor; but it is good compared to what is available elsewhere on the continent…Thanks to mining, again, this modest but rising prosperity is not confined to blacks born in South Africa. About half of South Africa’s black miners come from abroad, chiefly from Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Botswana…The security fences South Africa is now rather anxiously erecting are designed to keep intended immigrants out, not—like the Berlin Wall—to keep people in. (7)

The fourth way in which Nationalist South Africa differed from other African countries is that was “in many respects a free country.” Johnson explained that:

Every other African country has become, or is in the process of becoming, a one-party state. None of them subscribes in practice, or in most cases even in theory, to the separation of powers. Both the rule of law and democracy are subject in South Africa to important qualifications. But it is the only African country where they exist at all. The emergency and security powers enjoyed by the South African government are so wide and draconian that they almost make us forget that the judiciary is independent—very much so—and that even non-whites can get justice against the state, something they are most unlikely to secure anywhere else on the continent. The courts are cluttered with black litigants suing the police, the prison authorities, or other government agencies, or appealing against sentences. (8)

To summarize, the things which the anti-apartheid movement most objected to in Nationalist South Africa – its official racial discrimination, its heavy handed government policing, etc., were all features that the South African government shared with all other African governments, that were not uniquely South African, per se, but rather were typically African. It made no sense, therefore, to single South Africa out for condemnation. The only difference was that in South Africa the governing group was white whereas in all other African countries – now that Ian Smith’s government had fallen and Rhodesia was being turned into Zimbabwe – it was black. Since the conditions for blacks were improving in Nationalist South Africa, to the point that they had an immigration problem from the rest of the continent, whereas they were rapidly declining in the rest of Africa, it made even less sense to condemn South Africa.

Since the ANCs rise to power in 1994, conditions in South Africa have deteriorated for blacks and whites alike. What was a first world country when governed by the Afrikaners is becoming a third world country, in which the white South Africans face genocide and the black South Africans face the deterioration of the rule and protection of law, a failing economy, and a decline into the conditions present everywhere else in Africa. Those South Africans who can, black and white alike, are now fleeing the country, while under Afrikaner rule they were struggling to get in.

What is apparent out of all of this is that South Africa was a better place to live, for blacks and whites alike, from 1948 to 1994, than either any other country in Africa was at the time or than South Africa itself has been ever since.

This does not mean, of course, either that the policy of apartheid made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now, or that apartheid is somehow justified by all of this. What made the difference between South Africa then and South Africa now is that South Africa then, the prosperous, Western, country, was largely an expression of the Afrikaner people who built the country, established its institutions, and wrote its laws. As such an expression, the country of South Africa was a country that Afrikaners, other African whites, and African blacks all wished to participate in. Apartheid, of course, prevented the other people living in South Africa, other than non-Afrikaner whites, from full participation, and that is wherein its injustice lies. The difficulty is that apart from apartheid, that South Africa would probably have been impossible to create.

All of which must be taken into consideration if we are to even approach perspective, when it comes to apartheid and the whole South African situation.

(1) http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca/2013/10/why-do-modern-leftists-pretend-to-be.html


(2) Commentary has been published since 1945 when it was founded by the American Jewish Committee as a replacement for the Contemporary Jewish Record. Its first editor was Eliot Cohen, who was succeeded by Norman Podhoretz in 1960. It was during Podhoretz’s editorship that the journal ostensibly moved to the right, when Podhoretz, initially a Cold War liberal Democrat, grew disgusted with the pro-Soviet, pro-Palestinian, New Left in the 1970s and realigned himself and his publication with the American conservative movement. Hence the label “neoconservative”, which in an American context generally refers to a member of the “New York Intellectuals” who moved from the left to the right in the 1970s and who is usually belligerently militaristic. Commentary gradually became independent of the American Jewish Committee. Its current editor is John Podhoretz, son of Norman Podhoretz, and it remains extremely, to the point of being obnoxiously so, pro-Israel.

(3) Paul Johnson, “The Race for South Africa”, Commentary, September, 1985. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-race-for-south-africa/ (if you wish to view this, you will have to part with some shekels, I am afraid, either a subscription price or the purchase price of the article)

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid.

(6) See Ilana Mercer’s Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011) for more information about this.

(7) Johnson, op cit.

(8) Ibid.

The History of Human Creativity

Art: A New History by Paul Johnson, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003, 777 pages,

No single volume could ever properly do justice to the history of art. Art has been produced by every human society, from the most simple to the most complex, throughout mankind’s long history. Even if we narrowed the subject matter to the history of one kind of art, lets say sculpture, in one civilization, that of Italy for example, the story would be far more than could be condensed into one book even if it were a thousand pages long.

Paul Johnson’s Art: A New History is not a thousand pages long although it falls short by only a couple of hundred pages. Nor does Johnson limit himself to a single civilization. For while he focuses upon the art produced by the various Western civilizations and their antecedents in the near East, he also brings far Eastern, African, and native American art into the picture as well. Everything from cave art to the anticipated art of the 21st century is covered.

Which is not to say that Johnson covered everything that could conceivably be included in a history of art. The art that he writes about consists of the visual arts – architecture, pottery, sculpture, painting, and basically any sort of activity in which the appearance of the items made is an important consideration in their creation. You will not find a history of literature, music, or the theatre here, although specific writers and musicians do appear when needed to illustrate movements and trends that cross over into their territory.

The necessary limitations on a book of this nature are such that any one-volume history of art must be considered an introduction to the subject. This is something Paul Johnson himself would undoubtedly agree with. He has the humility to know and acknowledge that his work is not the final word that could be or has been written on the subject of the history of art. As an introduction, his history is excellent. This is what we would expect from the historian who provided us with the superb introduction to the history of the 20th century that was his Modern Times.

Painting must have a pre-eminent place in any history of the visual arts and it has that place here. Johnson, the son of a painter and a painter in his own right, marvelously shares with us his knowledge accumulated over a lifetime of interest in his subject. Architecture, however, plays as important a role in his history. The chapters on the construction of temples, mosques and churches are among the most interesting in this book.

The repugnant phenomenon which has come to be known as “political correctness” is avoided like the plague which is a pleasant relief. In chapter 16, “The Golden Century of Spanish Art”, for example – the century which included Spain’s colonization of the New World, Johnson does not shy away from describing the ugly side of the indigenous cultures encountered by the Spanish colonists nor does he treat the actions of the European settlers as unpardonable sins. This does not mean that he does not appreciate the creations of the indigenous peoples, particularly their architecture. Interestingly, in discussing their architecture he explodes a popular myth:

Both Aztecs and Incas seem to have understood vaulting. In some areas they were superb masons. At Cuzco in Peru and elsewhere, there are Inca walls of irregular polygonal blocks, some of great size, which are carved and fitted together to the point of perfection. It is not true, as is often said, that a knife blade cannot be passed between the stones—I have tried and it can.

That came as a surprise to me as I had always heard that that was true.

A good book of art history must in some ways be like other history books. It requires basic facts – people, places, dates – that are brought together in a story told in a lively and interesting way. In other ways it differs from history books in general. Illustrations, which are optional in most history books, are indispensable in art history books. The more the better.

Then there is opinion. It is widely considered to be bad form to include a great deal of personal judgment in the writing of history. This is not a universally accepted standard, is perhaps impossible on the level of practicality, and is ignored by some of the best history books. In art history, at any rate, opinion can not be exorcised. An inevitable element of any art history book will be art criticism.

Johnson’s history is excellent when it comes to the facts. He knows his subject well and has clearly “done his homework” as the expression goes. He talks about architecture that he has personally visited, at one point even giving his readers advice about the best way to experience a particular building, and paintings and sculptures that he has seen in person. His book is fairly well illustrated although there is room for improvement here. An editorial decision to throw in a few hundred more reproductions of paintings, even if it brought the page total up to a thousand, would not have been amiss.

It is in opinionating, however, that the author truly shines. Johnson is a born opinionist and his judgments on artists and their art are both interesting and entertaining. His judgments sometimes appear rather singular. “Who commissioned the Mona Lisa? Whoever he was he must have been disappointed” he writes, and then two pages later he invokes Samuel Johnson’s assessment of Milton’s Paradise Lost to say of the Sistene Chapel “No one ever wished the ceiling larger.” There is nothing wrong with that, however, and as his history draws to an end he lets his readers know where he ranks the opinions of art historians, presumably including himself – only slightly above art critics on a scale of knowledge that has the critics at the bottom and the restorers of art at the top.

One of Johnson’s opinions which stands out in this history, is his conviction that the system of classification into various periods and schools utilized by most art historians is of little worth. He does not structure his book around it and dismisses it on several occasions. To give one example, he dislikes the term Impressionism, which he says has “confused art history ever since it came into vogue.” The term was derived from the title of one of Claude Monet’s paintings and applied by hostile critics to a number of artists associated with Monet in rebellion against the art establishment at the French Salon. Edgar Degas in particular, he makes a point of emphasizing, had little in common stylistically with the others and with the common idea of what “Impressionism” was.

Johnson is not the only writer to take this position. Indeed, in researching the matter further I found more writers who tried to distance Degas from the Impressionists than who supported the supposedly routine inclusion of him in the school. Impressionism is not the only classification that Johnson writes off however. He takes a very individualistic approach to art, stressing at several times throughout his history, that artists are individuals and that it is in this light that their work must be viewed.

Johnson uses Degas’ own terms for himself – “realist” and “naturalist”. These are terms of high praise in Johnson’s vocabulary, and rightly so. In his chapter on the northern European art of the late medieval to early Renaissance he argues that the influence of Christianity at this time produced individualism among artists who made the depiction of reality their ideal. He writes:

Realism meant stressing individuality. The artists perception of how people differ, in body, mind and soul, the essential foundation of any great art based on human beings, inevitably made him more self-conscious. The fifteenth century, especially in northern Europe, is the first occasion in history (so far as we know) in which the self-portrait becomes frequent.

This chapter, in which the early Flemish masters are discussed, culminates in the career of the German Albrecht Dürer who, a century and a half before Rembrandt, routinely painted self-portraits of himself. Johnson thinks very highly of Dürer who is his bridge to the Italian Renaissance in the next chapter.

It is in his assessment of the Renaissance and those who subsequently followed its tradition that I would most question Johnson’s judgment. He points to humanist writers like the art biographer Vasari and the scholar Lorenzo Valla who dismissed the cultural and artistic output of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Italian Renaissance as being worthless because it was “gothic”.(1) While I agree with Johnson that this was a huge flaw in humanist thought I think that he allows it to overly colour his assessment of the value of the Graeco-Roman revival in art.

This is especially noticeable after he moves beyond the Renaissance itself. When he comes to the seventeenth century he writes that Caravaggio “achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting” and that the era of realism that began with his work was “both the climax and the golden age of European art”. While Caravaggio was certainly deserving of this praise, we we find later in the chapter that the Bolognese Carracci family are cast in a very negative light.

Johnson writes: “It is arguable, however, that Italian painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have flourished more healthily if the Carracci methods had never been taught”. He goes on to write “All three main Carracci drew well but their sense of colour was defective, their composition painstaking but ultimately dull, and none of them seems to have been capable of creating an arresting image”. This is not how I would describe what I have seen in reproductions of Annibale Carracci’s paintings for the gallery ceiling of the Farnese Palace in Rome. Perhaps they look worse when viewed in person.

Johnson’s treatment of Nicolas Poussin in the chapter on “The First Great Landscape Paintings” is less harsh than his treatment of the Carraccis but is along the same vein. Here the contrast is with Peter Paul Rubens, who is described as the “eventual successor” to Titian and “not only one of the greatest, he was also one of the happiest of artists”. As with the contrast between Caravaggio and the Carraccis, it is difficult to disagree with Johnson’s assessment about those he lauds, but he gives the impression of being less than fair to the others. He describes Poussin as being too bound by rules and too engrossed with his books to notice the real world around him and allow it to influence his art. In this we hear an echo of Johnson’s earlier work The Intellectuals but it is by no means clear that his assessment is valid in this instance.

The difference between realism – the depiction of things as they appear, and classical idealism – the depiction of things in perfect form, is less important in the later history of art, when the very idea that art should be representational at all was challenged, a development that Johnson is not at ease with, nor am I. When he gets to the twentieth century, he discusses “one of the key developments in the history of art: the rise of fashion art as opposed to fine art”. The distinction, he notes “is not absolute”. “All that can be said is that fine art becomes fashion art when the ratio of novelty and skill is changed radically in favour of novelty”. He identified Cubism as “the first major instance of fashion art” and writes that fashion art “inevitably produces more fashion art since, when the novelty wears off and the low degree of skill becomes apparent, there is a demand for fresh novelties, and a new phase of art is produced to satisfy it”. I can see some people being quite furious with these remarks although I tend to think they sum up the 20th Century rather nicely myself.

Many of the early chapters of this book were devoted to architecture and it is to architecture that Johnson returns in his last chapter. He looks at the accomplishments of architecture and structural engineering in the production of skyscrapers and suspension bridges as the true marvels of artistic expression in the 20th Century. In architecture there is the good, the bad, and the frivolous and here Johnson distinguishes between what he calls “High Frivolity” and “Low Frivolity” in architecture. He offers Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as an example of the former, and the buildings in Los Angeles and Las Vegas as examples of the latter. “Low Frivolity” is ephemeral – “built to entertain but not to last”.

Despite this, Johnson ends on a positive note, expecting greater things from architects, engineers, and artists in general in the century to come.

(1) “Gothic” was originally used as a pejorative because it is derived from the name of several of the tribes who sacked Rome in the last days of the Roman Empire. It literally means “German”. The Gothic revival of the 19th Century, which Johnson discusses in his chapter on Romanticism, was an architectural movement that looked to northern Europe in the medieval period for its inspiration, just as the classical movements looked to Graeco-Roman civilization for theirs.

This and That No. 15

My last essay, Christian Orthodoxy Versus the Gnostic Heresy of The Suicide Cult, was the final essay in my 2011 theological series. It is also the sequel I promised back in February to The Suicide Cult. This series has taken longer than I expected or wished to complete. I had planned on posting the final essay on Trinity Sunday. This is the Fifth Sunday after Trinity.

My next series of essays, on the topic of Arts and Culture, will begin with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture. Before writing the review I intend to re-read it, although my most recent reading of it was less than half a year ago. I will start my next reading of Eliot's book once I am finished one of the books I am currently reading, Charles Williams' Descent into Hell. I am down to the last few pages of this book so I expect to be finished it, and starting on Eliot's book again tonight. I am also currently reading Simone Weil's Waiting for God and Paul Johnson's Art: A New History. I might review the latter in my Arts and Culture series.

Charles Williams is an author I have intended to read for quite some time but have until recently had difficulty finding copies of his works. I read his War in Heaven last week - which I recommend to anyone who likes C. S. Lewis' space trilogy. Williams was a friend of Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and was with them and a number of others part an informal club of sorts that met at a pub called the Bird and Baby to read and discuss their writings. Like Lewis and Tolkien he was a traditionalist Christian (he was orthodox Anglican) whose views are reflected in his books. He wrote seven novels in total. I hope to read the other five soon.

The news this weekend has been full of the tragic massacre and bombing in Norway. The newsmedia has been placing a great deal of emphasis upon the madman's blond hair and blue eyes. Ordinarily they try to under-emphasize the ethnicity of criminals and terrorists. I wonder why that is?

In case you failed to pick up on it that last question was written with a heavy dose of sarcasm. In this sick-minded murderer the "Great White Defendant" sought after by the Bronx D.A. in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities has finally materialized. He is a bit out of the Bronx D. A.'s jurisdiction however.

The media is reporting that the killer is a "Christian" even a "Christian fundamentalist". That is a curious way of describing someone who said "I’m not going to pretend I’m a very religious person as that would be a lie", described himself as "pro-gay" and was apparently a Freemason. "Christian fundamentalist" appears to be a more inclusive label than we had previously realized.

Whatever the killer's religious views actually were this was, of course, a terrible tragedy and a horrible atrocity. Norway needs our prayers in this time of suffering.

Mark and Connie Fournier of Free Dominion also continue to need our prayers as their legal battles against their persecutors continue. This past week their motion to dismiss the libel suit against them by left-wing blogger "Dr. Dawg" was heard. Dr. Dawg sued the Fourniers because one of their posters, the venerable Peter O'Donnell, called him a Taliban supporter or something to that effect over his position on the Omar Khadr case. If such name-calling now counts as libel, then surely countless people such as Free Dominion's Maikeru, who have been falsely labelled "Nazis" by Dr. Dawg in the past have a case for a libel suit against him. So, for that matter, do I. Dr. Dawg called me an "apartheid supporter". I have declared on many occasions, my sympathy for the Afrikaner people, my disgust with the dishonorable and cowardly Western governments that betrayed the Afrikaners and forced them into their present plight, and my absolute contempt for the ANC, their Communist ideology, and the white-washed former leader of their militant wing the Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela. I never supported their policy of apartheid, however, which I considered unjust but also none of my business, none of the business of the self-righteous, progressive, do-gooder, busy-bodies who were determined to end it, and a lesser injustice to that which was brought about by the rise of the ANC. I suppose Dr. Dawg would call that a "distinction without a difference". Whatever. I have no intention of suing him and if he has any decency he will drop this silly lawsuit against the Fourniers.

The Reality at the End of the Rainbow

Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa by Ilana Mercer, Seattle, Stairway Press, 2011, 319 pages, $24.95

In Jean Raspail’s prophetic novel The Camp of the Saints an armada of decrepit ships containing a million invaders armed only with their own wretchedness slowly makes its way on a long trek from Calcutta around Africa to the coast of France. The eyes of the world are upon France, to see how she will respond. Will she muster up the spirit to defend herself against an invasion of the weak or will she succumb to liberal guilt and offer no resistance? As the armada approaches the Cape of Good Hope the thought arises that perhaps the ships would land in South Africa instead. South Africa is depicted as it was in 1973 when Raspail’s novel was first published – a pariah state, condemned by the world for its racism and apartheid. Her president calls a press conference in which he announces that “not a single refugee from the Ganges will set foot alive on South African soil”. Then a few days later, as the fleet rounds the Cape it is intercepted by the South African navy, which loads the ships up with food, water and medical supplies. All of these are promptly thrown overboard into the ocean and the leftist media is left to debate the Afrikaners motives and to praise the refugees for not compromising their principles and accepting help from the evil racists.

In the course of this episode, Raspail places a very interesting sentence in the mouth of the President of South Africa. In his address to the hostile reporters he says “Just let me make one thing clear: the Republic of South Africa is a white nation with eighty percent blacks, and not—as the world would like to think of us, in the name of some mythical equality—a black nation with twenty percent whites”. The President took it for granted that those hearing his words would never understand them. It is unlikely that many people would. Most people today have never viewed South Africa other than through the tinted lenses of left-wing propaganda which demonized the Republic prior to 1994 and has flattered and praised it ever since.

1994 was the year in which Nelson Mandela was elected President of South Africa in the first democratic election open to all South Africans of all races. The election was held on the 27th of April, less than a month after my eighteenth birthday and I remember well the huge fuss everybody made over it. I also remember the indignant, self-righteous tones in which South Africa was spoken of by teachers, clergymen, and journalists in the years leading up to that election. This was particularly the case with those who describe themselves as liberals. The term “liberal” is supposed to mean generous and broad-minded but is curiously applied to those who least display these characteristics. William F. Buckley Jr. once said that “liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” This is certainly the case with regards to South Africa and apartheid.

Although liberals may not like it, there is another side to the story of South Africa and apartheid. Occasionally, in the years before the triumph of Nelson Mandela, a courageous conservative writer would present that side in his columns. Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel and Patrick Buchanan and Sam Francis of the Washington Times were examples in the United States. The much-maligned Doug Collins of the North Shore News was a Canadian example. The best treatment of the subject from that era that I have encountered was the article “The Race for South Africa” by British historian Paul Johnson which was published in the September 1985 issue of Commentary. Johnson, argued against the economic pressure being placed on South Africa by the United States on the grounds that South Africa was being singled out for condemnation over things which were in fact (and still are) typical of all African nations when she should be praised for those things which at the time set her apart – its wealth, modern economy, rising real incomes for blacks, and its relative freedom compared to other countries on the African continent.

It has been much harder to find voices questioning the left-wing orthodoxy on South Africa since 1994. A myth has developed about how justice, freedom, and equality have triumphed in the “Rainbow Nation” under the wise leadership of Nelson Mandela. This myth was recently translated into film by director Clint Eastwood in Invictus. It is very seldom challenged.

This is most unfortunate because it is now, more than ever, that the progressive orthodoxy on South Africa needs to be challenged. In the 1994 general election, South Africa transitioned from being a classical republic, with working institutions and the rule of law, to a mass democracy, perpetually governed by a corrupt socialist party, that has brought about cultural decline, economic disaster, and the collapse of the rule of law. Worse, South Africa has changed from being a country in which people were excluded from social equality and full participation in the political process on the basis of their race to being a country where people are targeted for extermination on the basis of their skin color.

One of the very few writers to faithfully report on this transformation for the worse has been Ilana Mercer. Mrs. Mercer’s concern over the state of affairs in South Africa is understandable. It is the country of her birth and the country to which she returned after being raised in Israel. She and her family left South Africa in 1995, moving first to British Columbia here in Canada and then to the United States. It was during her years in Canada that I first encountered her writings in the pages of the Report Newsmagazine. She is now a columnist with WorldNewsDaily and has over the years told the story the rest of the media is not telling in her Friday column there.

Now, after a long struggle to find a publisher, her book Into the Cannibal’s Pot has finally been released. She describes her book, in the final sentence of the introduction, as “a labor of love to my homelands, old and new”, and throughout this fascinating volume she takes her reader back and forth from South Africa to the United States, drawing parallels and contrasts, and uttering warnings which, for the Americans sake, one hopes will not fall like Cassandra’s on deaf ears. The warnings are timely for non-American Westerners as well, for most of the trends she describes can be found – and indeed, have often progressed further – in other Western countries as well.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot is largely the story of a people, the Afrikaners. After describing the epidemic of violent crime that has swept South Africa since 1994 in her first chapter, in her second chapter Mrs. Mercer tells us about the genocide that is being perpetrated against the Afrikaners. It is in this context that she gives us the background and history of this fascinating, widely reviled, and universally misunderstood people.

The Afrikaners are a people, of European stock (primarily Dutch, with some French and German mixed in) who evolved an ethnic identity of their own over centuries in Africa. A hard-working farming people, with a strict Calvinist Protestant faith, they speak a language of their own, Afrikaans.

It is vital that we understand this, because the biggest mistake the rest of the world made concerning South Africa in the 20th Century, was to try and force the South African situation into a pre-made framework of white vs. black. It was never that simple.

The Afrikaners were conquered by the British Empire in the Boer Wars of the 19th Century. Under British Imperial rule, a program of Anglicization was attempted, to try and make the Afrikaners give up their language and culture. This program failed, and it sparked a nationalist fervor among the Afrikaners that gave birth to the National Party which was elected into office in 1948, withdrew South Africa from the British Commonwealth and declared her a Republic in 1961, and which governed until 1994. Although some of the elements of the system had been put into place under British rule it was the National Party that introduced full-blown apartheid to South Africa.

The rest of the world saw apartheid in terms of racial oppression and injustice. All we could see was a country in which a white minority had all the power from which the black majority was excluded. We saw this as being unfair and demanded that the country change to suit our (very recently formed) notions of racial justice. When they refused we put economic pressure upon them and forced them to change.

What we did not see was that for the Afrikaners, who had survived an attempt to erase their ethnicity, and were in the process of securing their independence, the one-person, one-vote, majoritarian democracy the rest of the world demanded that South Africa adapt, would mean their subjugation and eventual eradication.

Unfortunately for the Afrikaners the moment in which they chose to assert their national independence occurred at the same time the anti-colonialist cause was triumphing. Great Britain, France, and the other great colonial powers of Europe, were withdrawing abandoning their colonies, giving up their empires, withdrawing their nationals, and handing power over to governments elected in democratic votes in the newly formed countries that were their former colonies. This did not work out well for these new “countries”. In her fourth chapter Ilana Mercer discusses how the rest of Africa has fared in the post-colonial era and in her fifth chapter, masterfully explodes what she calls “the colonialism canard”, i.e., the myth promoted by celebrity do-gooders and other progressive twits, that all of the suffering and poverty and tribal warfare in present day Africa is the fault of European colonialism.

The world, however, was convinced of the righteousness of anti-colonialism and the South African situation smacked of colonialism to the progressives, even though the Afrikaners were not colonial nationals of any European power, and had no home country in Europe to return to. South Africa was their home country. They had, in fact, been there longer than many of the black tribes. This meant nothing to anti-colonialist, progressives, who smugly and self-righteously condemned the Afrikaners and demanded that South Africa kowtow to world opinion and reorganize itself according to the majority-rule ideal.

William F. Buckley Jr. once said “Some day, when you have nothing else to do, come up with a solution for South Africa, won’t you? But remember the rules of the game. All the marbles have to end up each in a cavity—you can’t just throw a few of them away, to make the game simpler.”

No such solution appeared to be possible. Majority rule in South Africa would have been an injustice to the Afrikaners. Apartheid was an injustice to South African blacks. It was not intended to be such. The word “apartheid” refers to the condition of being separate. The National Party used this term in the sense of “separate development”. The Republic, would be a representative government elected by the Afrikaner nation and other white South Africans. The blacks would be assigned to tribal homelands where they could develop their own forms of self-government. That way the Afrikaners would not be subjected to the injustice of being permanently dominated by the black majority, and the blacks would be able to develop on their own in their own homelands.

While that might sound reasonable on paper there was no way of justly putting it into practice. It required a strict and petty system of racial classification backed up by racial hygiene laws, and, since the white South Africans did not wish to ban blacks from working on their farms and in their factories, curfews and pass-laws that were strictly, and sometimes brutally, enforced by the police.

This is what the world saw in apartheid.

This is what countless people, including Ilana Mercer’s father Rabbi Ben Isaacson protested against.

That is was unjust is undeniable. This reviewer does not deny that and Mrs. Mercer states it frequently throughout her book.

It is a question of which is the greater injustice – apartheid, or the injustice that has resulted from the rise of the ANC to power as a result of the introduction of majoritarian democracy to South Africa. Most people avoid this question. Mrs. Mercer tackles it head on and does not hesitate to give the honest answer.

Which is the greater injustice, being barred from voting in an election or being denied the rule of law and subjected to an onslaught of violent crime?

The ANC has proven unable – or unwilling – to maintain law and order in South Africa and a massive outbreak of violent crime has been the result. In her first chapter, Mrs. Mercer provides illustrations of the brutality of this crime, then provides us with an analysis of crime statistics from South Africa that show how it has become one of the most violent countries in the world and how the South African government and the South Africa Police Service try to disguise this fact. She shows how, even using the ANCs doctored statistics, the rate of victimization for blacks and whites alike is at least three times higher under democracy than under the old regime. She talks about how the ANC has passed and is passing laws that make it harder for people to legally defend themselves against home invasions and other violent crimes that are on the rise. She also takes a look at the racial statistics of crime in both South Africa and the United States which show that the perpetration of violent crime is not close to being equally divided between the races and that while there certainly is a lot of racially motivated crime, it is not, for the most part, committed by whites against blacks, a fact one would never know from the news media.

In her second chapter Mrs. Mercer shows how violence against the Afrikaners, especially the Boer farmers, since 1994 can only be described as a genocide. Over 3000 white farmers have been killed in South Africa since the ANC came to power. The number of Afrikaners murdered each year in South Africa exceeds the total number of blacks killed by the police in the entire history of apartheid. Mrs. Mercer quotes from genocide experts like Dr. Gregory Stanton of “Genocide Watch” who say that the rates and manner in which the farmers are being killed points to systematic extermination. She also shows the genocidal intentions of the ANC from their chants and slogans, and from the words of their leaders.

After the revelations of the second chapter, the third chapter might seem rather moderate. It is about the BEE program. BEE stands for “Black Economic Empowerment” and is an affirmative action program taken to the nth degree. Mrs. Mercer describes it as a “phased process” that “requires that all enterprises, public and private, make their workforce demographically representative of the country’s racial profile” (p. 94) If this sounds reasonable to you, Mrs. Mercer shows how this corrupt policy, under which whites have been forced to sell large parts of their companies to blacks (and lend the blacks the money to buy them) fits in to the ANC’s overall policy towards private property. Private property and the rule of law are two essential components of the kind of productive, civilized economy the Republic of South Africa had prior to 1994. The country can now no longer feed itself, the average standard of living for black South Africans as well as whites, has declined under ANC rule, and a large class of unemployed, poor, whites has developed.

If all of this sounds like South Africa is heading rapidly in the direction in which the former Rhodesia went after Western governments (including, ironically, that of apartheid South Africa) forced Ian Smith’s government to hand over power to a democratically elected government that was soon thereafter be taken over by Robert Mugabe, then turn to chapter four. As bad as Mugabe is, Mr. Mercer argues, the problems his country faces are deeper than just himself and so will survive him. They are problems that can be found all across Africa – including the South Africa of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki who remain saints in the eyes of the Western media long after “Comrade Bob” fell into disgrace.

The person of Nelson Mandela is not a major focus of the book overall but it does come up briefly in this chapter. Here we see the real Nelson Mandela – the head of the MK, the incompetent terrorist wing of the African National Congress, the anthem of which calls for genocide against whites. No prisoner of conscience, he was arrested for attempted sabotage and sentenced to prison for conspiracy against the government. He later turned down that government’s offer to let him out if he would give up violence. Unsuccessful in their attempts to unseat the Nationalist government – it took economic pressure from the rest of the world to do that – his organization was much more successful in terrorizing other blacks who they brutalized with methods like the notorious “necklacing”, involving gas-soaked tires being thrown around people and then set on fire.

Why on earth did Western countries insist that a man like this be released from prison and applaud when he was elected into power?

In her seventh chapter, Mrs. Mercer discusses the betrayal of South Africa by the major English-speaking countries. Although she describes herself as a “classical liberal”, her arguments in this chapter are the arguments of a classical conservative. Liberty requires order, democracy is not the same thing as freedom, can be tyrannical if the proper cultural institutions are not in place to make it compatible with liberty, and is best practiced on a small-scale in say, a city. She draws parallels between the crusade to force majoritarianism on South Africa with the more recent American military campaign to bring democracy to Iraq. Both democratization campaigns worked out badly for the countries involved.

At the same time that the United States has embarked upon a crusade to bring democracy to the world she has opened her doors to mass immigration from the Third World. Mrs. Mercer explains the follies of the American immigration system which is unnecessarily leading to the kind of ethnic strife in America that is killing the land of her birth. What she says of America’s immigration system is also true of Canada’s, and virtually every other Western countries. There are lessons we all can learn from this book.

My only criticism of this book is that in the chapter where she discussed Israel, Israel’s friendship with the Old South Africa and betrayal by the New South Africa, and related subjects, she seemed to send a contradictory message, by pointing to the obvious parallels between the two countries on the one hand, and displaying indignation over the Left’s pro-Palestinian references to “Israeli apartheid” on the other. Unless she wishes to argue absurdly that everything Israel does is intrinsically just, a far better response to the leftists on this point, is to turn their own argument against them. At their insistence, Western countries boycotted South Africa and forced her to change her policies. Those policies were not the most just policies in the world, but the changes we forced upon South Africa have led to chaos, violence, and the death of a civilized country. That is exactly the same thing that will happen in Israel if we force her to give in to the Left’s demands. The parallels between Israel and pre-1994 South Africa make for a strong pro-Israeli, rather than anti-Israeli, argument if used properly.

In addition to recommending this book for personal reading, I would recommend that you talk to your local bookstores and encourage them to stock it on their shelves. Its message needs to be spread more widely than is possible when it is only available for special order.

How We Got Here From There

Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1948, 1984, 190 pages.

The collapse of Western civilization is evident wherever we turn our eye. When living amidst ruins our thoughts often turn to the civilization that existed before the collapse and to the question of what happened to it. How did we get to where we are today from where we were back then?

Sixty-six years ago, the Second World War came to an end. Today, this conflict is widely remembered as “the Good War” and the Allied victory is regarded as the ultimate triumph of good over evil by many. Distance from the events has helped this rather uncritical perspective to spread. For while the end of the war had brought about an end to the tyranny of the Third Reich and to the aggression of Imperial Japan, it also brought about an end to the British Empire. The liberation of occupied Europe and of the concentration camps had brought to light the astonishing degree of evil that was possible in the country that had given us Mozart, Beethoven, and Goethe. An even more evil regime than Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, came out of the war triumphant. Stalin held in captivity the Eastern European countries the Red Army had “liberated” from the Nazis and now posed a major threat to Western Europe. Finally, the war had been brought to an end, by the unconscionable act of dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities.

In the years immediately following the War, the question of “how we got here” was on many minds. In 1948, the University of Chicago Press published an answer, in a brief but deep, book by Richard M. Weaver entitled Ideas Have Consequences. Weaver was an English professor at the University of Chicago and a conservative. His book, in the words of Dr. Robert Nisbet, “launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in” the United States and “is one of the few authentic classics in the American political tradition”.

In the first sentence of his introduction, Weaver declared his topic to be the “dissolution of the West”. On the same page he tells us “there is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot”. If that could be written in 1948, think about what that says about man today!

In his introduction, Weaver presents a series of steps, that have taken Western man from the nominalism of William of Occam in the late 14th century and brought him to Nagasaki in the 20th century. This is a lot further back than most conservatives today would trace the decay. There is a tendency among the current generation of conservatives to see the decline of the West as a 20th century problem or, if they are more informed, to trace it back to the “Enlightenment”. When nominalism was born, the Renaissance was just in its infancy stage and the Reformation was a century away. Weaver has done a very good job of showing how the stages he writes about, proceed from the previous ones in a chain, as well as of demonstrating why that chain is a chain of descent rather than the chain of ascent that progressives would identify it as.

Ideas Have Consequences, however, should not be read as an exercise in finger pointing – “it is all Occam’s fault!”. It is a diagnosis of a culture and a civilization and to understand a diagnosis we need to have an idea of what a “healthy” culture and civilization looks like. A healthy civilization is one which is integrated around a center that is illuminated by universals.

What are universals? They are ideas which transcend particulars. The material world consists of particulars. There are particular people, particular objects, particular places, particular things of all sorts, which we experience in everyday life. A universal is something which we cannot see and experience but which is essential to our understanding particulars. If we say “Bob is a man” what are we saying about Bob? To know what that predicate is saying about Bob, we need to have an idea of what “man” is. This means having an idea of something called “man” which is different from a particular man like Bob, but which applies to Bob, Joe, Bill and every other particular of whom “is a man” is a valid predicate.

Plato and Aristotle disagreed as to the nature of universals and their relationship to human knowledge. Plato, asserted that universals were Forms, that existed in the realm of pure thought, and that we obtain knowledge when particulars, which are imperfect representations of universals, awaken within us innate concepts of the universals they represent. Contemplation of those universals is the road to truth. Aristotle argued that knowledge of the universals is not innate, something to be awakened through a process of remembering, but something we arrive at by generalizing from particulars.

Weaver was a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian, and this manifests itself in his book, but a Platonic rather than Aristotelian understanding of universals is not absolutely essential to his main concept. However they may have disagreed on the nature of universals, both Plato and Aristotle insisted that true knowledge is a knowledge of universals (truth) rather than an accumulation of knowledge about particulars (facts). This is the classical perspective which was incorporated into the Christian religion and Christian theology.

It is this perspective that William of Occam, the 14th century Franciscan friar who is best remembered today for his law stating that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, and the school of nominalism attacked. As Weaver puts it:

The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence…It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. (p. 3)

The steps, according to Weaver, that brought Western man from nominalism to the Twentieth Century are as follows: From the denial the real existence of universals, came the necessary belief that nature (the physical world) is fully intelligible within itself, from which came the liberal rejection of Original Sin and faith in the fundamental goodness of man. From this came rationalism and modern science which uses knowledge of the physical world as a means to domination. Next came Darwinism which sought to explain man by his environment, and from that social theories which explained human action by economic factors.

To those who object, that these steps represent progress, because modern science and the technology it has created have led to an increase in material blessings, Weaver points out that:

One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today. (p. 14)

This disparity has only gotten more pronounced in the decades since those words were first written.

What nominalism robbed Western man of , Weaver explains, is the center of his knowledge and civilization, and without a center civilization must inevitably disintegrate. Man cannot rely upon reason alone because the outcome of reason is determined by man’s disposition:

If the disposition is wrong, reason increases maleficence; if it is right, reason orders and furthers the good. (p. 19)

Reason, in other words, is instrumental, it is a means to an end. But what end?

Our everyday thoughts, Weaver tells us, rest upon our beliefs, which in turn are derived from our “metaphysical dream”. Now, upon a first reading of Weaver, one might be tempted to write off Weaver’s rather singular terminology as the kind of rhetorical flourish to be expected from a university English professor, and to read “worldview” wherever Weaver writes “metaphysical dream” or “mass media” wherever he refers to “the Great Stereopticon”. This would be a mistake, however, for Weaver chooses his terminology for its precision rather than for its rhetorical effect. Worldview is a much more general term, referring to any broad outlook upon the world in general. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines questions about the world which cannot be answered through the natural sciences, such as why it exists, and what the purpose of life is. A “metaphysical dream” then, is the level of conscious thought where one’s basic understanding of the answers to such questions lies.

It should be apparent how this level of reflection depends upon universals. For if the sentence “Bob is a man” is unintelligible apart from the universal concept of “man”, in which case the universal is clearly, if imperfectly, reflected in a physical world before our eyes, then ultimate questions of the reason and purpose for existence will require universals to be understood, let alone answered, and these universals will be ones whose manifestation in the world observable through the senses is less immediately apparent than that of “man” – universals like, truth, love, justice, good, etc.

The metaphysical dream is the center which integrates and unites a “metaphysical community” which Weaver describes as being “suffused with a common feeling about the world which enables all vocations to meet without embarrassment and to enjoy the strength that comes of common tendency”. (p. 33) When the center is lost, the culture it holds together begins to fall apart. When men reject the universals, they make the mistake of defining the physical world as the “real world” and they must search for a purpose and meaning for their lives that is contained entirely within this physical world. How often have we heard someone refer to the struggle to obtain the material necessities of life as “the real world”, making the end of that struggle the purpose of existence, and dismissing the civilizing forms, structures, and conventions of culture?

When man turns away God, the Good, and the universals, he loses his sense of higher purpose. When he loses this, he loses his vocation, i.e. the sense of higher calling which makes his activity meaningful and fulfilling. He also loses his sense of having a shared purpose with all other members of his community from the highest to the lowest. In the second through fourth chapters of his book, Weaver explores how this loss manifests itself politically, socially, and economically in ways which are harmful to the community and to society.

When a shared sense of a higher purpose is lost to a community or a society it loses its fraternity which has been replaced, in Western societies, with the notion of equality. Weaver writes:

The ancient feeling of brotherhood carries obligations of which equality knows nothing. It calls for respect and protection, for brotherhood is status in family, and family is by nature hierarchical. It demands patience with little brother, and it may sterns exact duty of big brother. (pp. 41-42).

Fraternity binds a community together, equality, other than equality before the law, tears it apart. Equality is the rejection of distinctions and hierarchy, both of which are essential to the structure of society. Modern democracy, Weaver informs us, is a lie and a contradiction. It is a lie because:

If it promises equality before the law, it does no more than empires and monarchies have done…If it promises equality of condition, it promises injustice, because one law for the ox and for the lion is tyranny. (p. 44)

It is a contradiction because it purports to be the most effective means of placing the people best suited to leadership in governing positions. This contradicts egalitarian democracy’s own rhetoric, for if one man is as good as another, there can be no people who are better suited for leadership than others, let alone any that are best suited. If egalitarian democrats truly believed what they preach they would demand that governors be chosen at random rather than through elections.

If we want our society to be led by the people best suited to be leaders, we must believe in a distinction between best, better, good, bad, worse, and worst. This distinction forms a hierarchy and the leadership of the best, is by definition, aristocracy. “Democracy” Weaver writes, “cannot exist without aristocracy.” (p. 49)

In this context that Weaver, talking about modern democracy’s celebration of the common, the mediocre, and the average and denigration of the excellent, made the following interesting remark:

The democrats well sense that, if they allow people to divide according to abilities and preferences, soon structure will impose itself upon the mass. Hence the adulation of the regular fellow, the political seduction of the common man, and the deep distrust of intellectuals, whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight. (p. 46)

Many would probably balk at Weaver’s description of intellectuals as people “whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight”. Contemporary “intellectuals” tend to be supporters of every progressive fad, revolutionary cause, and left-wing notion no matter how utterly stupid it is. Why on earth, then, would Weaver describe such people in such adulatory terms?

The answer is that he is not talking about that kind of intellectual. In his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, historian Paul Johnson describes people who believe that because of their intellectual accomplishments, they form a class that better deserves than the clergy to fill the clergy’s old role as the spiritual and moral leaders of society and the world. Professing their love for mankind, they are brutal to people in particular, and Johnson describes their personal tyrannies towards the people closest to them in their own lives, in great detail, to make the point that these are the people who are least suited to spiritual and moral leadership.

Author Tom Wolfe made an interesting point about such people in his commencement address to Boston University in 2000. He said:

Now, we must be careful to make a distinction between the intellectual and the person of intellectual achievement. The two are very very different animals. There are people of intellectual achievement, who increase the sum of human knowledge, the powers of human insight, and analysis. And then there are the intellectuals. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.

As an example of this, Wolfe pointed to Noam Chomsky, the brilliant linguist. After describing Chomsky’s contributions to our understanding of grammar and our psychological ability to learn, Wolfe said:

Did anyone call him an intellectual merely because he was one of the most brilliant people in the United States? No. When did he become an intellectual? When he finally spoke out concerning something he knew absolutely nothing about: the war in Vietnam.

Chomsky was, in other words, a specialist who was speaking outside his field.

Weaver, in the third chapter of his book, explains the phenomenon of this kind of intellectual to us. His explanation is similar to Wolfe’s but also very different. For Weaver, the problem is not that a specialist is speaking outside his field of expertise, the problem is rather specialization itself.

In the Middle Ages, Weaver tells us, “the possessor of highest learning was the philosophic doctor”. (p. 52). This was not someone who had earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in a university, but someone who “had mastered principles”, i.e. the universals of metaphysics and theology. Such a person ranked far above “those who had acquired only facts and skills”.

In the initial stage of modernism the philosophic doctor was replaced by a secular equivalent – the gentleman, Castiglione’s courtier, the “renaissance man”. The gentleman was in some ways similar to what we would call a polymath today but there is also a key difference. A polymath is someone with expertise in several areas, Weaver’s gentleman is characterized by “a general view of the relationship of things”. The original meaning of “liberal education” was education designed to impart such a general (“broad” or “liberal”) view to a person.

The philosophic doctor, the renaissance gentleman, and their North American descendant the antebellum Southern gentleman raised in the “Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom” (p. 55) are the intellectuals Weaver spoke of “whose grasp of principle gives them superior insight”. What happened to them? When nominalism rejected universals, it started a process whereby truth, which is at the center of knowledge and was the subject of the learning of the philosophic doctor and gentleman, was replaced with facts, the subject matter of the specialist. The modern scientist is a specialist. He spends his life amassing a huge amount of information about the aspect of the physical world that he has chosen as his subject of expertise. This may lead to amazing breakthroughs within the context of his own field. In the broader view of human knowledge, however, he has focused on the peripherals (facts) and ignored the center (truth).

When the importance of truth and fact are inverted, in this way, Weaver tells us, the result is the fragmentation of human knowledge, and the specialist “ceases to be a doctor of philosophy since he is no longer capable of philosophy” (p. 57) He focuses on the kind of knowledge that increases man’s power, man’s domination of the world, but neglects the knowledge that essential to man’s relationship with other men and with God. This focus on physical facts and neglect of the more important areas of human knowledge is an obsession and “Civilization must be saved from some who profess to be its chief lights and glories” (p. 62).

The example that Weaver points to, of what this process of elevating the study of the physical world for the purpose of dominating nature over knowledge of God and truth, was the development of the atomic bomb in World War II. From a scientific point of view it was an amazing development. From a moral perspective it was a disaster.

In the decades since Ideas Have Consequences was first written the triumph of science over morality has continued unabated. Today, scientists are able to help infertile couples conceive artificially. In and of itself that would be considered a blessing, but to do so they must create human lives that the know beforehand will never be able to grow into human adults. That should be a major ethical roadblock in the way of such processes. Modern man has abandoned true ethics for utilitarianism, pragmatism, and consequentialism, however, and the solution the scientist offers is to put the “unused” embryos created by this process to the service of mankind by doing research on the development of stem cells in such embryos. “Modern man” as Richard Weaver wrote “has become a moral idiot”.

Weaver’s book was written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These same years saw the beginning of the Cold War and this also is reflected in many of the themes Weaver chose for this book. The Cold War would come to be seen by many as a conflict between two sides that embodied opposite ideas, those of capitalism and socialism. Weaver’s perspective is quite different. He writes that socialism is “itself the materialist offspring of bourgeois capitalism” (p. 37). This is an insight that Weaver derives from the Vanderbilt Agrarians, some of whom were his mentors, and within whose tradition he writes. Weaver is very critical of capitalism, attributing the growth of commercialism to the loss of heroism and saying that “the man of commerce is by nature of things a relativist”.

This might seem odd to someone who thinks of conservatism primarily as “neoconservatism”, which in the last decades of the Cold War preached capitalism and democracy as the source of all blessings in the Western world and which in the decades since the Cold War has elevated capitalism and democracy into universals themselves, insisting that for the good of the world the United States should militarily bring these things to all countries. Weaver’s is the more authentic conservative tradition and there are many parallels between his critique of capitalism and technology and that made by his fellow Platonist and conservative, George P. Grant. Weaver, however, understood the nature of socialism better than Grant and points out how it makes all the same mistakes of capitalism because it is itself an outgrowth of capitalism.

Ultimately, the error that both capitalists and socialists have bought into, is one of materialism, the substitution of material ends for a higher calling as the goal and motivation of human activity. Men have lost their sense of vocation – the sense that the work they do they are called to do, and that there is meaning and purpose to it, other than as an unpleasant necessity in order to obtain a paycheck. They have also lost their spirit of heroism whereby they are willing to endure hardships to achieve ends that are not motivated by mercantile factors. They have developed the mentality of a spoiled child, who rejects all authority on the part of his superiors and sees no higher goal than the fulfillment of his every material whim.

If Richard Weaver could write such a diagnosis in 1948 – imagine what he would say if he were living today.

ALSO RECOMMENDED

George P. Grant, Technology and Justice, Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991. (originally published in 1986)

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 (originally published in 1943).