Free Unrestricted Speech is the Servant of Truth

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Thoughts on Conservatism and Capitalism in the Wake of L’Affair Chic-fil-A

On Monday came the announcement that Chic-fil-A, a fast-food franchise that specializes in a sandwich with fried chicken as the filler and which can be found mainly in the United States, would no longer be making donations to the Salvation Army, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. For several years now the restaurant chain has been under severe pressure from the Homintern to do just this. The alphabet soup gang’s complaint is that these organizations don’t agree with same-sex marriage. In this, these Christian charities are in agreement with Chic-fil-A’s founder, the late S. Truett Cathy, who was a devout, church-going, Southern Baptist, who taught Sunday School and insisted that his restaurants close on Sundays. Daniel Cathy, the son of the founder and the current chair and CEO, has also been an outspoken critic of the gay agenda.

Needless to say, Chic-fil-A’s announcement has generated a lot of discussion this week among those who would consider themselves to be conservative or right-of-centre. Some have focused on condemning the gay lobby’s strong arm, gestapo, tactics and its apparent goal of brutally silencing all who will not give it the affirmation it demands. Lloyd Billingsley’s The Menace of LGBTQ Bigots at FrontPageMag is a good example of this approach. More often, the criticism has been of Chic-fil-A itself for caving in. At least one commentator, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media, has taken Chic-fil-A’s denial that its decision was a capitulation to the demands of gay activists at face value and argued for giving them the benefit of the doubt. Dalrock, in response, has called this a case of “conservative militant cluelessness” which he defines as a “bizarre conservative impulse to not only deny reality, but to actively work in the service of SJWs to ensure that others do as well.” All I really have to add to that is that about a decade ago, when the gay mafia first made Chic-fil-A a target, they were making fairly large donations to pro-family organizations that were engaged in active opposition to the LGBTQ agenda. That they long ago ceased to do so weakens Mr. Kruiser’s arguments since it appears that this latest corporate decision is simply the most recent in a series of capitulations to demands that have, as the demands of bullies tend to do, increased with each capitulation.

Of all the commentary on this news that I have read so far the most interesting has been that of engineer and novelist Francis W. Porretto at his blog Liberty’s Torch. Porretto approaches the subject from a fresh new angle, that of the question of whether or not businesses should make charitable contributions. He makes an ethical argument that corporate charity is immoral if the company’s stock is publicly traded and that if the company is privately owned, its executives’ private charity should be just that, private, both in the sense that it should come out of their own pockets rather than company funds and in the sense that they should follow the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and not trumpet their giving. This he argues, would make companies immune to the attacks of woke activists.

Porretto makes a strong case, although the protection his proposal would undoubtedly give corporations from attacks like the one on Chic-fil-A would not help some of the other businesses targeted by gay activists. Take an example that Porretto mentioned himself, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, the cake bakery in Oregon that was subjected to an anti-discrimination lawsuit in 2013 for refusing to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding, and fined a crippling amount in 2015. While the refusal of the bakery’s owners, Aaron and Melissa Klein, to bake the lesbian cake undoubtedly falls under the category of “the prioritization of irrelevancies – social, political, or otherwise – in the operation of a business” which Porretto decries in his first paragraph, it is also a fundamental matter of conscience, the refusal to participate in something one deems to be wrong.

There is a different form of “the prioritization of irrelevancies – social, political, or otherwise – in the operation of a business” that warrants consideration. I refer to what has come to be known as “woke capitalism.” Woke capitalism is the mirror image of the Chic-fil-A controversy. In woke capitalism, it is the corporate managers who are the social justice warriors imposing their agenda of feminism, anti-whiteness, anti-Christianity and alphabet soup gang demands upon their companies, employees and customers/clients. It seems to be most prevalent in the large corporations of the entertainment and information industries, the reason why being fairly obvious – progressives would find control of these companies the most useful for disseminating their ideas – but it is by no means limited to them.

The rise of woke capitalism gives those of us who would consider ourselves to be traditionalist, conservative, reactionary, or otherwise right-of-centre, to reconsider the assumption that businessmen qua businessmen are our natural allies or, to put it another way, that our interests and business interests coincide. It also, of course, is reason for our progressive foes to reconsider their assumption that businessmen are their natural enemies.

These assumptions go back to the nineteenth century when the Left, which is to say the ongoing Modern revolution against Christian civilization, its kings, and its Church, began to identify itself with socialism. Socialism was the name given to a number of different theories and movements which arose, more or less simultaneously in the nineteenth century, which claimed to speak on behalf of those who had to rely on the sale of their manual labour to make a living and which placed the blame for their woes, and the woes of human society in general, on the private ownership of property. In socialism, the Right, which is to say the defenders of Christian civilization, its kings, and its Church, and capitalists or businessmen, both of which saw private property as a fundamental good and a basic element of civilization rather than the evil which socialism made it out to be, had a common enemy. Through the reasoning that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, this led to the assumption that capitalists were the natural allies of the Right.

There was always plenty of good reasons to reject this assumption, however. In the centuries prior to the birth of socialism the Modern revolt against Christendom, its kings, and its Church was primarily the work of merchants, traders, and financiers, in short, the capitalists. Indeed, capitalism, or more properly liberalism, which should not be confused with business itself but is rather the re-organization of state and society according to the principle that business interests should come first, itself an anti-Christian principle, began with the rejection, in Calvinistic thought, of Christianity’s traditional strictures against usury and the loosening of legal restrictions on such in states influenced by this theology. Furthermore, even after the Left embraced socialism, there were no lack of capitalists to be found to fund and finance socialism, even in its most extreme Bolshevist form. A number of perceptive traditional Tories such as George Grant and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne noted, in the second half of the twentieth century, that capitalism was a far more effective engine for producing the kind of radical social and cultural changes that conservatives loathe than socialism.

The Left has now moved beyond socialism to identify itself with an ever-growing consortium of fringe activist movements, each wackier than the one before it. Big Business, by jumping on board this bandwagon racing down the road to hell has produced the monstrous menace of woke capitalism. This might mean that the business class has collectively lost its marbles. Or, perhaps, they are finally, openly, wearing their true colours, debunking once and for all the notion that there is any natural affinity between their interests and those of the Right.

In which case, it is time for us on the Right to abandon an unnatural alliance and open up on Big Business full blast over how they through their Avaricious worship of Mammon have decimated small towns and the family farm, turned every community in the Western world into a clone of the next – same stores, same restaurant franchises, etc., completely destroyed the aesthetics of the landscape – which the Green movement, if it were genuine, which it is not, would focus on instead of their loony Apocalyptic nonsense about climate change – and turned everything into a commodity thus reshaping the world into the image of Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Heaven knows they abundantly deserve it.

Liberalism Has Not Improved With Age

Liberalism is the spirit which has animated the civilization that was once Christendom for at least the last two and a half centuries. It was born at the dawn of the Age that is called Modern and its conquest of what it has renamed Western Civilization was more or less complete by the end of the Second World War. It has many facets; from the standpoint of epistemology – the theory of knowledge itself - for example, it could be described as a naïve faith in man’s ability to arrive at truth through his own reason, assisted only by the findings of experimental science. Essentially, however, it is a theory about the nature of man, his society, and his freedom.

According to liberalism, man is first and foremost, an individual being. His individuality belongs to his intrinsic nature and comes before his belonging to any larger social group, be it his nation, or on a smaller scale his local community, or even his family. These latter are external to human nature as constructions formed by individuals for their advantage as individuals. The essence of man’s individuality, liberalism further declares, is his freedom which is defined in liberalism as the individual’s sovereign rule over his own self. The purpose of government, in liberal theory, is to safeguard the freedom of the individual by protecting his rights, i.e., those regions of his self-dominion that are formally recognized and guaranteed against assault from other sovereign individuals.

When liberalism began, its proponents thought that by articulating this theory they were laying the foundation of an edifice that would protect against the ancient evil of tyranny which men have struggled against throughout human history. The ancient Greek word tyrannos originally referred to someone who had obtained power through means other than the prescribed constitutional order, in other words a usurper. By the time classical Athenian civilization had reached its height the term had taken on other connotations, that of a ruler who governs autocratically, not recognizing the constraints of law, constitution, or even basic morality and decency, and in a way that is oppressive towards his people. It is not too hard to see the connection between the original concept and the later one – someone who seized power in an unorthodox way is more likely to rule in a harsh, autocratic, manner than someone who has come to a position of authority legitimately – and so we might define tyranny as power that is usurped, unrestrained, and oppressively harsh. The liberals of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, made frequent accusations of tyranny against the medieval Church, the feudal aristocracy, and especially kings. They believed that these institutions had a tendency towards tyranny which their theories would check, thus providing for government that is more restrained and responsible.

History, however, tells another story. Today, in the age of liberalism triumphant, there is scarcely an area of our everyday lives over which elected legislative assemblies and the armies of bureaucrats and regulators at their beck and call would hesitate to assert some degree of control. They may not always literally march into a man’s house and business and boss him around, as home safety inspectors and Child and Family Services social workers do, but they have nevertheless made their government virtually omnipresent in a way that any feudal king would have rightly regarded as tyrannical. Indeed, in virtually every way the size of government can be measured, from the number of ministries and civil workers to the extent of the government expenditure and how much it takes out of everyone’s pockets in taxes, government is very much larger now, than before liberalism got its hands on it. As High Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne put it about ten years ago “with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again.” (1)

Libertarians maintain that this is because today’s liberalism is not really liberalism at all but a democratic socialism that has stolen liberalism’s identity. From this point of view, the classical liberalism endorsed by the libertarian and contemporary democratic socialist liberalism are the opposite of each other. Historically, however, democratic socialism sprang forth as a budding branch from off of the trunk of the tree of liberalism itself and draws ultimately from the same root in “Enlightenment” philosophy that liberalism does. Tellingly, the nineteenth century liberal, John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is highly regarded by libertarians as a classical liberal defence of the freedom of the individual against state tyranny, himself came to accept some of the elements of socialism.

If the libertarians deplore today’s liberalism while praising that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Red Tories do the exact opposite. Red Tories are, for the most part, a Canadian phenomenon. They profess to subscribe to the same older school of conservatism that Canada inherited from Britain as this writer, namely High Toryism – the conservatism that is monarchist, communitarian, traditionalist, and favours a strong institutional church in a healthy working relationship with the sovereign. Unlike this writer, the Red Tories also have a strong affection for many left-of-centre causes and political views. According to the Red Tories, liberalism matured between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, corrected some of the excesses of its individualism, and by adopting an expansive view of the role of the state in bringing about ameliorative social changes moved closer to the classical and Tory concept of the common good.

The Red Tory and the libertarian have both misassessed the situation, in my opinion. The contemporary progressive, democratic socialist, type of liberal has not moved closer to the Tory vision of the common good. The concept of a hierarchical social order, itself part of the larger hierarchical “chain of being” starting from the throne of God Himself, was essential to the Tory vision of the common good, whereas the contemporary liberal justifies his expansion of the role and jurisdiction of the state by means of egalitarian ends. In the Tory view of the common good, the society whose common good government is supposed to serve, includes past and future generations as well as the present. Liberals may sometimes acknowledge the need to take future generations into consideration but since that acknowledgement is not joined with a similar regard for past generations, as liberals tend to look at those who have gone before them with the smug, condescending attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield dubbed “chronological snobbery” , it amounts to nothing for it is only by showing proper reverence and consideration for our ancestors – the virtue the Romans called pietas – that we can truly include future generations in the common good.

The libertarian is also wrong in that the contemporary liberal has not so much subverted the essence of liberalism and replaced it with something different but rather brought to fruition the tyranny the seeds of which have always been there within liberalism. From the beginning, liberals believed that the threat of tyranny came from kings, aristocrats and the Church and sought to transfer all real power into the hand of institutions and officials that were representative, elected, and democratic. These latter, however, have a far greater propensity for tyranny than the former, albeit a soft tyranny that disguises itself as concern for the well-being of those it tyrannizes, which disguise makes it all the more deadly.

The liberals believed that in their doctrine of human rights they were setting up roadblocks to the abuse of power. Instead, they were clearing the path for the multiplication of such abuses. A right is a claim to something on the part of a person or a group within a society which claim is formally recognized by the society. It is one thing for a society to formally recognize a man’s claim to security of his person and property against the violence of others, be they private citizens or the state. The justice of such a right is evident to all sane people, and it imposes no heavy burden upon either society as a whole or the members of whom it is composed. It is a different story completely when a society, in multiplying the rights that it recognizes, loses sight of the distinction between what someone may desire for himself and what he can reasonably and rightly claim for himself.

Take, for example, the rights that are defined as such in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 and the American bill on which it was modelled, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passing of which acts of legislation are celebrated by liberals across North America as milestones in the path towards social justice and progress. In these bills, the governments of Canada and the United States formally recognized as rights, claims to protection against discrimination on the part of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. In recognizing such claims as rights, the governments of Canada and the United States had to forbid discrimination against women and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Discrimination is something that takes place internally, in the mind or heart. By forbidding discrimination, the liberal governments of Canada and the United States had extended the jurisdiction of law into the realm of the inner thoughts and private conscience. Liberals had objected to the laws establishing the Roman Catholic Church in feudal Europe and the Anglican Church in Tudor England on the grounds that these violated men’s freedom of conscience, but these laws pertained only to public religion, the organized communal expression of faith, and did not presume to tell people what they had to believe or think in their own hearts as liberals themselves are now doing with anti-discrimination legislation. Anti-discrimination legislation, by the way, violates more than one traditional safeguard against the abuse of power. Because such law is classified as civil rather than criminal, there is no presumption of innocence for the accused, and since what he is accused of takes place in the heart, which human judges cannot see, there is no way for the accused to establish his innocence.

Liberals, blind to the damage they have done to our traditional standards of justice and to the fact that they have benefited nobody so much as those operating the thoroughly corrupt minority grievance shakedown rackets, continue to press forward, adding more and more groups to the list of those with the “right” not to be discriminated against. Last year liberals succeeded in having the “right” of same-sex couples to “marry” recognized across North America, this year it is the “right” of males who think they are female and females who think they are male to use public facilities designated for the use of the sex they identify with that liberals feel must overrule the thousands of reasonable objections most people have to such nonsense.

All of this is plainly a huge abuse of government power, even when it is carried out with a smiley face, by nice, cheerful, types who tell us that they are doing it all with our own wellbeing at heart. It is, however, completely consistent with basic liberal principles. If freedom is the self-determination of the individual, and government exists to safeguard freedom by protecting the individual’s rights, then the more rights the government protects, the freer people will become. That is the logic of liberalism, even if the ensuing “freedom” has come more and more each day to resemble the inside of a prison run by a madman.

While John Locke, John Stuart Mill, (2) Adam Smith, and the other fathers of liberalism would probably not recognize themselves in the liberalism of today, what we are seeing was nevertheless present in their doctrines in germinal form. That doctrine has now grown to full maturity, and it has certainly not improved with age. Perhaps it is time, that instead of looking back for guidance to the earliest generation of liberals, as the right-liberals who call themselves conservatives today suggest, we look instead to those like Richard Hooker and Archbishop Laud, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, Lords Falkland and Salisbury, Benjamin Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott, and more recently Michael Oakeshott, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton who, drawing from wisdom more ancient than that of liberalism and its Modern Age, have directed us towards order, tradition, and stability as the true safeguards against tyranny and apart from which there can be no real freedom.


(1) Peregrine Worsthorne, "Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed it enslaved us.", The Guardian, June 21, 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2
(2) Maurice Cowling, the High Tory historian, wrote that John Stuart Mill himself, “may be accused of more than a touch of something resembling moral totalitarianism” and that Mill’s liberalism was ”no less than Marxism, is intolerant of competition” going on to say that “jealousy, and a carefully disguised intolerance, are important features of Mill’s intellectual personality.” Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, 1990), pp. xlviii and xlvix.

The Tory and Freedom

Democracy, which liberal and leftist alike consider to be the best form of government, is widely equated with freedom. As we have seen, however, democracy as conceived by the left is the pathway to totalitarianism, for when the distinction between governed and government is eliminated and the state is regarded as the voice of the people, it ceases to see the need for restrictions on the use of its power. Liberalism contained restraints on this tendency of democracy, in the form of protections of the rights of the individual, but as liberalism has moved away from its original individualism towards a realignment with the collectivist left over the course of the last century it has gradually ceased to be a roadblock to totalitarianism.

The Tory, the classical conservative who sees royal and ecclesiastical authority as being irrevocably called to cooperate for the common good of the whole society, accepts democracy, only as a part of a mixed government, under the monarchy and the upper house and deriving its legitimate authority from the same source as these institutions, tradition and prescription. He sees liberalism’s restraints on democracy as necessary and good, but insufficient, because only by making the power of democracy subordinate to the authority vested by prescription in monarchy and aristocracy – or in Canada, the substitute for aristocracy that is our Senate – in a mixed government, can democracy’s tendency to slide into demagoguery, mob rule, and totalitarianism be checked.

Liberalism, from its very beginning has claimed the freedom of the individual as its lodestar but as its ability to restrain democratic totalitarianism has waned it would seem to have lost its bearings and run adrift. As Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne put it nine years ago “with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again”. (1)

Toryism, by contrast with the neoconservatism of the last four decades which is actually a form of liberalism, does not march under the banner of freedom but seeks stability and continuity in order established in tradition. These, however, are not hostile to freedom, as liberalism so often has assumed they are, but are the very things which make freedom possible. The Tory, therefore, is, albeit in an indirect manner, the more consistent supporter of liberty.

In saying that freedom is made possible by a stable, order, established in tradition, the Tory expresses a different view of the nature of freedom, than that espoused by the liberal. The liberal sees freedom as the natural possession of man, but as belonging to him outside of society rather than inside society. This is because he regards man’s natural condition as being individual and society as an artificial construction of individuals. This concept of the individual as prior to society conflicts with what we know of actual individuals, however, who are born into social existence in their families, neighbourhoods, and nations. The Tory recognizes man’s social existence as his natural state, and the condition of an individual isolated from society, such as a hermit who has withdrawn into the desert, as being manifestly unnatural. Man possesses and enjoys freedom, he insists, in and through society, rather than outside of it.

Freedom, the Tory says, cannot exist outside of the context and boundaries of ordered society. While the liberal, who thinks of freedom in terms of the absence of context and boundary, finds this to be absurd, the folly of his position was well illustrated by G. K. Chesterton in the short story in which a professor who wrote a book about “the Psychology of Liberty” reveals himself to have gone dangerously mad by taking his doctrine to the extreme of “liberating” a goldfish from its bowl. (2)

Liberalism further mistakes the nature of freedom by conceiving of it as leading to the end of human happiness through the means of indulging human appetites. This element of liberal thought has grown stronger over the century in which liberalism has given up most of its ability to restrain the totalitarian impulse in democracy to protect the individual. Aldous Huxley saw this coming and in his Brave New World depicted a society in which everyone lives out a life that has been predetermined for him by the state but in which he is free to indulge his appetites for drugs and sex and encouraged by the state to do so.

This view of liberalism is a fundamental contradiction of the wisdom of the ancients and the teachings of Christianity the sources of the tradition to which the Tory looks for light. Plato and Aristotle taught that to achieve true happiness, man must form good habits of behaviour, virtues, in which he masters his appetites and passions – his internal desires and drives for such things as food, sex, wealth, and power – and keeps them in submission to his reason and will, for if he does not these will enslave him. Orthodox Christian theology teaches that man was given freedom in Creation, but lost it when he enslaved himself to sin in the Fall. God redeemed man – the literal meaning of redemption is the purchase for the purpose of emancipation of a slave – from slavery to sin, through the Incarnation, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his restored freedom, man is no longer chained to the fallen, Adamic, nature that remains with him in this life, but is to walk in his freedom through faith.

There is a harmony between the classical and Christian teachings here. In both, true happiness is to be found in the mastery of internal forces that seek to master us - our natural appetites and passions in classical thought, our sinful flesh in the Christian. In both, an established institution exists to help us in this struggle - the state in the classical teaching of the ancients, the church in Christian theology. Both would see the unfettered indulgence of human desire as slavery rather than freedom. In classical thought virtue is the prerequisite for true freedom, which is part of happiness. In Christian thought freedom is the prerequisite for virtue, both in the sense that the redemption of Christ is necessary to free man from slavery to sin that he might be virtuous and that good behaviour is not virtuous unless it is freely chosen. If Huxley’s novel illustrates the classical point of view, the much misunderstood A Clockwork Orange by polymath, novelist, and High Tory Anthony Burgess, is an illustration of the Christian. (3) These are two ways of saying the same thing, that both freedom and virtue require the other, and that to pursue either separately and at the expense of the other is a road that leads to neither.

Freedom, therefore, is an absolutely essential part of the common good of society that the Tory sees as the end of royal and ecclesiastical authority and neither church nor state can assist man in the pursuit of virtue if they do not also seek to secure his liberty. The church proclaims the redemption of man from sin by Christ through her ministry of Word and Sacrament, so that people may follow righteousness through faith in the liberty Christ has purchased for them. Laws, Christianity teaches us, can help us recognize virtue by defining right and wrong, but are powerless to make us virtuous, (4) and so should be kept as few in number as is consistent with order and the common good. The laws of the state, rightly ordered, however, secure our lives and property. As the Tory’s patron saint, King Charles the Martyr, put it in his final speech before he was killed by the Puritans in 1649, the people’s “liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own.” (5) Thus, do church and state, in the traditional order of society, create the context in which freedom can flourish.

(1) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2

(2) “The Yellow Bird” from G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics.

(3) In the novel, the state uses a form of brainwashing, “the Ludovico Method”, to reform the narrator Alex, a violent young hooligan, but the process does not make him good, it merely takes away his freedom. That it cannot make him good because it takes away his freedom is an objection raised by a priest who serves as chaplain, and in raising this objection, the priest vocalizes the entire point the author, who is falling back upon the Catholicism in which he was raised, is seeking to make.

(4) This is a major theme of St. Paul’s epistles to the Roman and Galatian churches.

(5) He wisely contrasted this with the people’s having a “share in government”, for democracy, by making the government and the people one, leads to the opposite of freedom, total control, for any and every law can be excused when it is a law the people make for themselves.

Bad Medicine

If you were to ask someone who believes strongly in an alternative form of medicine, especially one that markets itself as being natural and holistic, he will tell you that conventional treatments for cancer basically operate in the following way: you take something that is harmful to the body such as radiation or toxic chemicals and bombard the cancer with it in the hopes that it will kill the cancer before either it or the cancer kills the body. It occurs to me that this way of describing conventional anti-cancer treatment - one lethal enemy of the health of the body killing another – could also be used to explain what occurred in Paris on January the seventh.

You probably already know all about the event to which I refer. Media commentators have been talking about very little else for days now. On the morning of Wednesday, January the seventh, a pair of Algerian jihadists, wearing masks and screaming “Allahu Akbar”, invaded the office of the smutty French trash rag Charlie Hebdo and began shooting the place up. About 24 people were hurt, half of whom died. What had twisted the terrorists’ knickers into a knot was the newspaper’s publication of cartoons that depicted Mohammed in an unflattering manner, much like those published by the Danish Jyllands-Posten in 2005, against which riots broke out all over Europe.

Since then entertainers, politicians, newspaper columnists, television talking heads, bloggers, and countless other assorted people have jumped on the “Je Suis Charlie” bandwagon, either expressing their solidarity with the victims of the attack or, to paint their motives in a more cynical light, trying to capitalize on the public’s outrage over the massacre. Whatever their motives, people who would ordinarily agree on nothing have come together for a moment, however brief and fleeting, behind the besieged journal. To such people Charlie Hebdo has become more than just a lewd and irreverent publication. It has become a symbol of the highest values that are held dear by France and, more broadly, all Western societies. Thus, the terrorist attack in turn is seen as an attack on those French and Western values.

Now, should we inquire as to what specific Western values came under attack the answer we would inevitably receive would be freedom of speech. On the surface this makes a certain amount of sense. The newspaper printed something which was considered to be offensive to Muslims and for that they were punished and silenced with lethal force. If we pursue the matter further, however, by thinking a little about what freedom of speech actually entails, some inconsistencies in the Charlie Hebdo = free speech = Western values under attack from Islamic jihad position appear.

What we understand “freedom of speech” to mean, depends a great deal upon whether we relate it primarily to the power of government or to the rights of the individual. If we think of freedom of speech in terms of the power of government we think of it in negative terms, as a limitation upon government power, as the idea that it is an inappropriate abuse of the state’s coercive and legislative power, to tell people what they can and cannot think and say. If we think of freedom of speech in terms of the rights of the individual, we think of it as a positive right that each individual possesses to say whatever he wants.

Both understandings of freedom of speech can be either absolute or limited. If we think of freedom of speech as a limitation on state power, the absolute form of this concept is that the state must under no circumstances forbid or punish any speech whatsoever. A more limited version of this understanding would be that while the state should not outlawing thoughts or their spoken expression it is within the state’s rights to forbid words that incite other people to commit crimes, violence, and sedition. If we think of freedom of speech as a right belonging to the individual, the limited version would be that an individual has the right so say whatever he wants provided he is willing to pay the consequences of his speech, such as, perhaps, a punch in the nose for insulting someone’s mother. The absolute version of this understanding, however, is that the individual has the right to say whatever he wants under any circumstances and that this right should be protected by the state.

I should note, here, that to my mind, freedom of speech only make sense when thought of in the first sense, as a limitation on state power.

To accept, however, that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was an attack on Western values, and that the particular Western value that came under attack was freedom of speech, requires that we think of freedom of speech as an individual’s right to say whatever he thinks because whatever else the terrorists might have been, they were not representatives of the power of the state. It is not necessary to hold the absolute version of this because being murdered is not a reasonable consequence that anyone should expect to have to pay for freedom to speak. Nevertheless, a problem is apparent in that if freedom of speech is a right belonging to the individual, it is a right that Charlie Hebdo sought to deny to those who disagreed with them. Indeed, the far left newspaper attempted to have a popular right-wing political party banned and outlawed for their political views. Ironically, it was the party’s stance on immigration and multiculturalism to which the newspaper, now a victim of the consequences of their own liberal position on these matters, objected.

This brings me back to the illustration with which I started. If Charlie Hebdo must be seen as a symbol of anything, it is best seen as a symbol, not of France, the West, Western values in general, and especially not of the freedom of speech that the newspaper claimed for itself but would deny to its opponents, but rather as a symbol of the disease that has been eating away at Western civilization since the beginning of the Modern Age – liberalism. Like all illustrations this one breaks down if pushed too far. Whatever else might have been going through the minds of the Kouachi brothers as they plotted their murderous attack, they were certainly not trying to save Western civilization from its fatal disease and so only fit their assigned role in the allegory, in that what they represent is as deadly to the West as the liberalism represented by their victims.

Since its origins in Renaissance humanism, “Enlightenment” rationalism, and Scottish empiricism several centuries ago, liberalism has spread throughout the Western world and, in the last century triumphed completely over its competitors. Unlike a fine wine it has not improved with age and, as Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne pointed out in an insightful speech to the Athenaeum Club about ten years ago, its principles and pieties have become degraded to the point where it now threatens the very freedoms it once championed. We do not need to look far for an explanation of this. In the days of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, liberalism was one of many competing doctrines and it operated in what was understood by all, liberals and non-liberals alike, to be a Christian cultural climate. While constrained by the context of this climate liberalism was at its best and was able to accomplish such reforms as are to its credit. At the same time, however, its ideas corroded that same cultural context. Around the time of the Second World War the corrosion reached the point where the Christian cultural climate could no longer provide a constraining context.


Liberalism, in other words, has undermined everything which made its own worthy accomplishments possible. In doing so, it has made Western civilization vulnerable to the kind of attacks liberalism itself fell pray to on January the seventh. The Christendom that understood itself as Christendom and produced such leaders as Charles Martel and Jan III Sobieski was not vulnerable in the way the postmodern, liberal, West is. Charlie Hebdo represents the worst form of liberalism possible – a smug, self-assured nihilism, that attacks the very idea of the sacred in any form that it might take. To identify ourselves and our countries with the representative symbol of this liberalism is to commit the very cultural and civilizational suicide that such enemies of the West as those who committed this atrocity wish for us.

Je ne suis pas Charlie!

The Triumph of Power over Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reflections and Ruminations of a Right-Wing Reactionary

Last year, one of my favourite opinion columnists, Charley Reese passed away. He had not written anything in a few years, having retired his syndicated column in 2008 after previously retiring from the Orlando Sentinel in 2001. While he was actively writing, however, it was his practice once a year, around New Year’s, to write a full disclosure column, outlining his beliefs and affiliations, so that his readers would understand where he was coming from in his thrice-weekly column. This is a practice that I consider admirable and have emulated it at Throne, Altar, Liberty, beginning with my 2011 New Year’s essay “Here I Stand”. It is now that time of year once again.

I am a Christian. When I say that I am a Christian I do not merely mean that I am part of a country, culture, and civilization that is, or at least used to be, Christian, as opposed to Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. I mean, that I, a sinful member of the fallen race of man, believe that Jesus of Nazareth, was and is, the Christ, the divine Son of God, given by God the Father to our lost world, to atone for our sins through His death on the cross so that we may be forgiven, justified, reconciled to God, and share in His eternal resurrection life.

When it comes to defining terms and placing things into categories, it has long been noted that people tend to err in one of two opposite ways; that of the “lumper” and that of the “splitter”. Lumpers tend to fit as many things into a single category as possible, no matter how significant the differences between them, while splitters tend to divide things into multiple categories on the basis of the mootest of distinctions. These same erring tendencies have plagued the Christian faith throughout its history. There have been those, like the leaders of the modern ecumenical movement, who have felt that even the most important of Christian truths must be sacrificed in the name of preserving or re-establishing the unity of the Christian Church. There have also been those, like the Cathari, the Radical Reformers and the English Dissenters who have insisted that they are the only ones who possess Christian truth and must withdraw from the rest of the Christian Church to maintain their purity. I have come to see schism as the Scylla and ecumenical compromise as the Charybdis both of which are perils to be avoided.

After, undergoing a personal, evangelical, conversion experience when I was fifteen, I left the United Church of Canada when it started telling people not to believe the Biblical truths which Christians have always believed, was baptized in a Baptist church, and after many years of attending Baptist, Pentecostal, and “non-denominational” evangelical churches, joined an orthodox parish of the Anglican Church of Canada. I chose the parish because of its orthodoxy, and the Anglican Church because Anglicanism at its best, combines the best elements of both Protestantism and Catholicism. It is Protestant in that it affirms the supremacy of Scripture and the Pauline doctrine of justification in its confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles. It is Catholic in its organic and organizational continuity with the early, undivided, church through an unbroken line of apostolic succession, its episcopal hierarchy, its administration of the sacraments, and its liturgical worship.

Believing that the central event in history was God’s coming down to earth, becoming a Man, dying for our sins and rising again, I have no difficulty with accepting that He gave us, through the pens of the prophets and Apostles, a set of authoritative writings, and so hold to the fundamentalist view that the Bible IS the Word of God rather than the neo-orthodox view that it merely contains the Word of God or becomes the Word of God when we experience God through reading it. I also hold to the Reformers’ view that the truths contained in the Bible are the standard by which the teachings and traditions of the church are to be judged. I refuse to identify this view with the phrase “Sola Scriptura”, however, because I reject the lunatic notion that the interpretation of the Bible is a personal and private matter that each believer is to decide for himself. This view is condemned by the Scriptures themselves (2 Pet. 1:20) which clearly teach that Christ did not come to establish merely personal, one-on-one, relationships between Himself and individual believers, but an organized community of faith, the church, in which believers would be joined to each other and to Him in organic unity as His body, and over which He appointed His Apostles as the first bishops (Gk. episkopoi, overseers) with the authority to teach, lead, and ordain others to join and succeed them in that ministry of leadership. The authority of the Scriptures, and the authority of the church and its leadership, both come from God. Although the difference between the two, is more a difference of kind than a difference of degree, the authority of Scriptures as the revealed Word of the God Who breathed them (Gk. theopneustos, 2 Tim. 3:16) is obviously higher than that of those authorized to teach and interpret. The Reformers were right to insist that the Scriptures are the higher authority, but those who use this truth to cut themselves off from the church’s long and rich tradition of Scriptural interpretation foolishly impoverish themselves.

I am a Canadian. I was born and raised in rural Manitoba and live and work in Winnipeg the capital of Manitoba. I am a patriot, but the Canada I love is the historical and traditional old Canada, the Canada that emerged out of the Confederation of British North America in 1867. Canada was founded as a Dominion within the British Empire, now the British Commonwealth, with the same monarch but our own Parliament. The term “Dominion” was our own choice, and it did not denote colonial status, as the deceitful leaders of the Liberal Party later maintained, but was chosen from the Bible (Psalm 72:8) as a synonym for “kingdom”. Traditionally, Canada has always been pluralist, consisting of English Canadians, French Canadiens with their own language and culture, and Indians with whom the Crown had made treaties. This traditional pluralism was very different from the “multiculturalism” that the Liberal Party shoved down our throats in the late part of the twentieth century. Traditional Canadian pluralism was an element of Canadian reality, whereas multiculturalism is a doctrine in which the non-British ethnic origins of many Canadians is used as a justification for waging war on the national traditions and institutions that Canada inherited, adopted, and adapted from Great Britain. I love those traditions and institutions and am proud of my country’s Loyalist history and roots.

I am a Tory. I need to carefully explain what I mean by this because in Canada, as in the United Kingdom, the term “Tory” usually denotes membership in or support of the Conservative Party, and while I consider the Conservative Party to be superior – by an extremely slim margin – to either the Liberal or NDP Party, I am not referring to party affiliation when I describe myself as a Tory. In Canada the term “small-c conservative” is often used by those who wish to indicate that they are conservative in their political views, whatever their partisan affiliation may happen to be. The views that are usually identified as “conservative” in this way include the classical liberal ideas of limited government and the free market economy and the social and moral views of Puritanism. The North American “conservative movement” has turned these views into an ideological formula for political salvation. This is exactly what is wrong with the North American “conservative movement.”

When I call myself a Tory, I too am referring to my political views rather than party affiliation, but foremost among those views is the firm conviction that there is no such thing as political salvation, much less an ideological formula that can bring it about. I believe firmly in the doctrine of Original Sin in its fullest theological and political sense. I believe that man is a fallen creature, that the source of the suffering and evil that afflict man lies in the depravity of human nature, that this depravity is the result of our own twisting and corrupting something that was itself good, i.e., the Free Will our Creator gave us, that God has graciously made salvation from sin and depravity available to man in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that the fullest experience of this salvation can only be found in the Kingdom of God that transcends the spacial and temporal boundaries of the world in which we live, and the attempt to create that salvation here on earth through political means is a blasphemous attempt to retake Paradise by force, or in Eric Voegelin’s words, to “immanentize the eschaton”, and that such attempts are doomed to failure and invite divine judgement.

I agree with small-c conservatives and libertarians that a market system in which people make their own choices and their own agreements with other people as to what they will buy and sell and at what price is a superior set of arrangements to any alternative in which the government sticks its big, bloody, nose into everybody’s business. There is a difference, however, between saying that the market is a better system to its alternatives, and saying that market capitalism is the path to national salvation and that global free trade will bring universal peace and prosperity, and as a Tory I reject the fantasy of salvation through market capitalism and free trade whether preached by British liberals like David Ricardo and Richard Cobden in the early nineteenth century or by American neo-conservatives like Francis Fukuyama in the present.

If market capitalism and free trade are not the means of salvation, neither is socialism in any of its various forms. Just as in many evangelical circles it is assumed that a person who is not a Calvinist must therefore be an Arminian (and vice versa), (1) so it has been assumed in the large Western world since at least the end of World War II that anyone who is not a capitalist must be a socialist (and vice versa). Both assumptions are examples of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma in which the number of options are artificially reduced to two. If capitalism, as some conservatives whom I highly respect (2) have pointed out, is a dynamic force that dissolves the things Tories or conservatives cherish – tradition, local communities, order – socialism is no better. A person can believe in private property and enterprise without seeing them as being the way of salvation but this is not so of socialism. Socialism is by its very nature a doctrine of political salvation. It falsely places the blame for evil and suffering on the private ownership of property and promises political solutions to evil and suffering, identifying its demands with those of justice itself. If liberal capitalism dissolves the things conservatives cherish, socialism had declared outright war on them. I therefore regard socialism as being utterly and irredeemably repugnant.

I do not wish to give the impression that the political views I call Tory are entirely negative. If, as a Tory, I do not believe in schemes of political salvation or Utopias, what do I believe in?

I believe that men were created by God as social beings and not as isolated individuals. The basic form of social organization is the family. Families form communities in which to live and cooperate together, and larger societies are organized out of many communities. I believe, therefore, that the right metaphor to use in thinking about social organization is that of a living organism and not that of the business partnership. Societies are built out of communities, and communities out of families, and families are not voluntary associations formed by contracts made between autonomous individuals, but organic wholes into which people are born.. The contemporary view of the family as something formed by a contract between two individuals, consisting essentially of those two individuals and their children, and only including other relatives as detachable extensions, is wrong. The family is a multigenerational kin group in which generations past and those yet to be born are joined with the present to form an organic whole. (3) It is the community and the society that are properly regarded as the extensions of the family and they too are organic wholes.

This does not mean that I see the individual person as being unimportant. I believe in individuality rather than the individualism of liberalism. The individual, in classical liberalism, is a generic person, defined by traits that according to liberal individualism, he shares with every other individual – autonomy, a set of natural rights, etc. I do not believe in this kind of individual and consider liberal individualism to be a dangerous and corrosive social poison that dissolves the social bonds of the family, community, society, and country. True individuality, I believe, lies in what differentiates one person from another and sets him apart from the masses. I agree wholeheartedly with Robertson Davies’ literary alterego Samuel Marchbanks when he said “I confess that I find the modern enthusiasm for the Common Man rather hard to follow…In fact, I suspect that the talk about the Common Man is popular cant; in order to get anywhere or be anything a man must still possess some qualities above the ordinary.” (4)

Believing man to be a social creature by nature and the body of a living organism to be the best metaphor by which to understand the organic wholes that are the family, community, and society, I therefore believe in race, culture, tradition, prescription, and prejudice.

By race I do not mean “a group of people who share common physical traits such as skin colour” but rather the idea of biological descent through generational succession which is a fundamental element of all human social groups, from the family, up through the nation, to the species itself.

By culture I refer to the output of the human mind and creative spirit, from the laws and customs by which we regulate our lives to the languages and literature in which we express our thoughts to the art which we create in pursuit of beauty. Culture can be the expression of a particular people living in a particular place and time or it can be an attempt to reach for that which has been universally sought by all people in all places and times such as the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Both of these forms of culture are important and I agree with T. S. Eliot (5) that they ought to exist in mutual interdependence rather than conflict.

When culture is passed on from one generation to another it becomes tradition which is also the name for the process of passing on culture and accumulated human wisdom and knowledge down through the generations. In recent centuries and especially the last century tradition has received a bad name. The idea has formed, undoubtedly due to a misreading of Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees brought upon by the deplorable heresy of the private interpretation of Scripture, that tradition is cold, rigid, inflexible and dead, something that binds us in chains from which we need to be liberated. This idea is blithering nonsense. Tradition is a warm, living, thing, the very lifeblood of the organic family and community, and like all living things is flexible and adaptable. The internal self-correcting mechanisms of the free market economy and the democratic assembly pale in comparison to that of tradition, the ability of which, to separate the wheat and the gold of human ideas and customs from the chaff and the dross through the tests of time, is without parallel. I fully agree with Michael Oakeshott that it is the rationalist ideologies which those who slander tradition as “the dead hand of the past” would substitute for it, that are truly rigid and inflexible. (6) Not coincidentally, these are usually the same thing as the schemes of political salvation, that the Tory rejects wholesale.

It is through race, culture, and tradition that past generations are joined with present and future generations to make the organic wholes of family, community, society and nation.

Prescription, is the authority and legitimacy that customs and institutions derive from long-established usage. It does not mean that a custom or institution that is bad ought to be maintained out of respect for its age. It means that customs or institutions, that have existed, as Edmund Burke (7) put it “from time out of mind”, that have endured and weathered the tests of time, on that basis, do not need rational justification to validate their existence, that the burden of proof and rational justification rests squarely upon those who demand that these customs or institutions, be altered or abolished. Prime Minister Stephen Harper should think long and hard about that if he is considering supporting the NDP’s disgraceful, dishonourable, and despicable scheme to dismember our constitution by abolishing the Senate.

When I say I believe in prejudice I mean prejudice in the way Burke used the term. In Burke’s usage prejudice is man’s capacity to draw upon the accumulated, collective, wisdom belonging to his nation and to mankind as a whole, and to find in this wisdom the resources necessary to make judgements in situations where the time or information necessary to make a fully thought out rational decision is not available. By saying that I believe in prejudice I am also saying that I do not believe in the infallibility of human reason or even that it is always the best possible guide. I certainly do not believe that human reason contains the capacity to overcome all of the ills, evils, weaknesses, and suffering that afflict man. That brings us right back to the first and most basic Tory belief that there is no rational formula that can bring about salvation through political means.

I agree with the ancient philosophers that the three basic possible constitutions of government – the rule of the one, the rule of the few, and the rule of the many – each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and have existed in both positive and negative forms. Aristotle speculated that the best possible constitution would be one that combined the three simple forms in such a way that the strengths of each would negate the weaknesses of the others. While I agree with Aristotle, I add that even the mixed constitution is not a formula for political salvation and should not be treated as such. The ancient Greek historian Polybius believed that this constitution had materialized in the Roman Republic, but I would say that the most obvious embodiment of Aristotle’s mixed constitution is the constitution of parliamentary monarchy that evolved in Great Britain in which the government consists of the reigning king or queen, an aristocratic upper house and a democratic lower house. The fact that this form of government evolved over centuries adds to its strength because it has the weight of prescription behind it. We share this constitution with the United Kingdom, here in Canada, even if it would be rather farcical to describe our upper house as “aristocratic”, and because of the circumstances of our founding, that we developed into a country within the British Empire, it has the weight of the prescription of the older tradition behind it here too. I think that we are very fortunate in this.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool royalist. While I have been an instinctual supporter of the institution of monarchy, the British/Canadian monarchy in particular and the royal family, for as long as I can remember, as I have grown older my royalism has become a reasoned belief as well. If, as argued in the last paragraph, Aristotle’s mixed constitution is the best possible form of government, especially where it has evolved naturally through time rather than put together artificially by design, then that is exactly what we have in the parliamentary monarchy in the United Kingdom and Canada and the monarchy is an essential element of that. Furthermore, history demonstrates the need for a monarchy. When a country abolishes its king or queen it creates a vacuum for a tyrant to exploit. When the Roman nobles drove out their last king, villain though he was, the Roman Republic had to constantly fill the vacuum created with temporary dictators until eventually the Caesars rose to fill it permanently. When the monarchy was temporarily abolished in Britain in the seventeenth century, the evil Puritan despot Oliver Cromwell ruled with an iron fist. When the House of Bourbon was overthrown, late eighteenth century France degenerated into the chaos and tyranny of the Reign of Terror paving the way for the rise of would-be world conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte. When the imperial throne of the Russian Tsar was overthrown by revolutionaries in 1917 the Bolsheviks established one of the most evil regimes of all time, the Soviet Union. When the victorious Allies forced the Austrian and German emperors from their thrones after World War I this created the vacuum that Adolf Hitler was able to exploit, to rise to power and create the Third Reich. As the greatest twentieth century leader of the Tory Party put it “This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones.” (8) In these historical examples, we begin to see what the Austrian emperor meant when, in his reply to Theodore Roosevelt’s question about what the role of a monarch in the present day and age was, he said “to protect my nations from their governments.” (9) One more argument for monarchy is indicated by the words of Stephen Leacock who, commenting on how in our parliamentary system we have the best of both worlds because we have joined “the dignity of Kingship with the power of democracy” (10) A royal monarch, whose position is inherited and whose sovereign authority is derived from ancient prescription, can rise above the pettiness of everyday politics, and add a sorely needed touch of class to government, which otherwise would be constantly dragged down into the gutter by lowlife elected politicians and bureaucrats.

I do not believe in the liberal idea of the separation of church and state. Neither do I accept the contemporary progressive idea that the state should force the church to change its ancient customs, ways, and beliefs to conform to whatever bizarre new fad progressives have dreamed up and added to their canon of human rights. Nor do I hold to the Puritan and theonomist view that the state’s role is to enforce the Old Testament law. Although these ideas are very different from each other, they are all alike in that they are departures from the medieval synthesis, in which the church and the civil authority were distinct rather than separate, each with its own specific role delegated to it by God. The church was the earthly manifestation of the transcendent Kingdom of God, the body of Christ in which the Incarnation was continued, authorized to preach the Gospel, teach the Word, and administer the sacraments. The civil authority was authorized by God to punish evil as St. Paul wrote in Romans 13, but this does not mean all forms of sin but “only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained.” (11) I accept the medieval synthesis of Christendom, over any of the ways in which modern Western civilization, Christian or secular, has found to depart from it.

You may have observed a certain similarity between the quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas in the previous paragraph and the famous “harm principle” of nineteenth century English liberal John Stuart Mill. Neither I, nor any other Tory that I am aware of, believes that everything in classical English liberalism is bad, on the contrary we believe that much of it is good. As Dr. Johnson, the Tory of Tories, said “A wise Tory and a wise Whig, I believe, will agree. Their principles are the same, though their modes of thinking are different.” As I see it, the most admirable concepts that we usually associate with the classical English liberalism of the Victorian era, such as legal and constitutional protections of basic rights and freedoms, all have deep pre-modern roots. This does not mean that they were perfectly established and practiced before the Modern Age any more than they are perfectly established and practiced now, but it does mean that they cannot be legitimately regarded, as liberals and progressives wish to regard them, as the products of rational speculation in the Modern Age. I say this to indicate what I see as the criteria of demarcation between the elements of liberalism that I or any Tory would regard as admirable and the elements that are unacceptable. The elements that are admirable have classical and/or medieval Christian precedents and roots. The element is most objectionable is that which liberalism shares with all other forms of progressive thought, once again the idea that human reason is capable of devising a formula for eliminating the evils that afflict mankind and therefore accomplishing salvation through political means. This idea, corrupts even liberalism’s best ideas, because an idea that may be admirable in itself can become deplorable as an element of a formula for political salvation. This is because formulas for political salvation demand universal application and the universal application of something that is otherwise good can often be harmful of other goods.

The Modern Age is not the only age in which men have been tempted by schemes of political salvation. As the late Thomas Molnar put it utopia is the perennial heresy. It is the Modern Age, however, that has made the idea of manmade political salvation its defining characteristic. As the defining characteristic of the Modern Age, the idea of manmade political salvation is known as progress. The idea of progress is a heresy, a Christian truth that has been so corrupted as to make it the enemy of all Christian truth. In this case, the Christian truth that has been corrupted is the doctrine that God’s intervention into the temporal affairs of man, especially in the salvific events of the Incarnation, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is directed towards the end, of the full manifestation of the Kingdom of God, when history ends, time dissolves into eternity, and Heaven and earth become one. Corrupted by rationalism, this becomes the Modern idea of Progress, that history, guided by human reason, is moving towards a future state in which mankind through reason and science will have eliminated all evil and suffering. There are two basic forms of the idea of Progress, technological progress and social progress, and while many who call themselves conservatives today accept the former, I as a Tory reject both. This makes me, what progressives derogatorily call a reactionary, a term that I, like Hungarian-born American historian John Lukacs, gladly accept as a badge of honour.

Technological progress, is the idea that modern science, by providing man with complete mastery over his own nature and that of the world in which he lives, will enable man to rationally devise tools and techniques to solve whatever problems come his way and so eliminate all that ails him. I would say that this arrogance is the very epitome of what the Greeks called hybris and that it is leading modern man precisely to where hybris always led the Greek tragic hero – a huge fall.

Social progress, is the idea that by making our government institutions more democratic and eliminating social, economic and political inequality, man can create a just society in which the root causes of conflict, crime, suffering and injustice are eliminated. I say that this is a ridiculous idea for a number of reasons.

First of all, making our government institutions more democratic will not make them better. If we have a mixed constitution, the more democratic we make our government institutions, the less balanced our constitution becomes. That to me would seem to make our government worse, not better. Furthermore, the last few centuries have demonstrated that as government has become more democratic, it has taxed its subjects at far higher rates, wasted more of their money, and intruded into their personal lives far more than it ever did before. Democracy, like monarchy, is a necessary component of a mixed constitution, but there are different forms of democracy, and the kind that social progress calls for, is the kind C. S. Lewis astutely and humourously warned us against, by placing its advocacy in the words of his advisor devil Screwtape in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.”

Likewise, equality of any sort cannot be achieved without treating most people unjustly. This is because equality is not the same thing as justice, and in fact, is a form of injustice, and a particularly pernicious one because it so effectively masquerades as justice. Think of it this way. Equality presents itself as the idea that you ought to treat a perfect stranger as if he were your brother. Presented that way, it sounds appealing, does it not, almost as if it captured the very teaching of the Parable of the Good Samaritan? The reality of equality, however, which hides behind that mask, is the demand that you treat your brother as if he were a perfect stranger. Sane civilizations have seen behind the mask of equality, and warned about it ever since the myth of Procrustes in ancient Greece.

The ultimate problem with the idea of social progress is that is a denial of the basic human reality which is Original Sin. Man’s afflictions are not born out of social, political, or economic inequality or out of other-than-democratic elements of government. They come from a flaw in human nature that no amount of democratization or egalitarianism can ever eliminate, although it can and will exacerbate it.

An argument often made for the idea of social progress is that it must be true because of the good accomplished by the social reform movements it has spawned, examples including the abolition of slavery movement, the feminist movement, the anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements, the American Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and the Gay Liberation Movement. Frankly, I find this argument to be ridiculous. It is self-contradictory – the good of the abolition of slavery was undone by the anti-colonial/anti-imperial movements for as soon as the colonial powers that had abolished slavery withdrew it was restarted. Most of these movements were not near as good as they are made out to be. Among the proud accomplishments of the feminist movement are no-fault divorce, a massive rise in the number of children being raised without their father, and the legally protected “right” of women to decide whether their children live or die. Feminism clearly deserves to be classified as an evil rather than a good movement. The anti-colonial movement basically transferred power from competent imperial governments to incompetent kleptocrats who ran their countries into the ground and are now blaming European imperialism and colonialism for the evils that were actually caused by ending colonialism. The American Civil Rights Movement opposed the injustice of de jure racial segregation only to replace it with the injustices of de jure racial integration and anti-discrimination legislation, both of which undermine the freedom of association. The anti-apartheid movement also opposed an injustice but its triumph has led to the breakdown of law and order in South Africa, the collapse of its economy, and the savage murders of Afrikaner farmers that can only be described as genocide in the making. In abolishing the foolish laws under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted and ruined in the nineteenth century, the Gay Liberation Movement accomplished good, but that good has been far overshadowed by the evil accomplished as the movement went beyond demanding the legal freedom for homosexuals to live as they choose to demanding that everybody else be forced not merely to tolerate but to accept them.

The pride progressives take in these highly dubious accomplishments is yet another example of hybris displayed by believers in technological progress and will lead only to the same end. The near ubiquitous acceptance of the idea of progress in one or the other of these forms throughout Western Civilization suggests that we are due for a major fall and brings to mind Oswald Spengler’s declaration of almost a century ago that Euro-American civilization had entered into its twilight. I do not wish for this to be the case but I also remember Hegel’s remark that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”, i.e., that when wisdom can see the imminent collapse of civilization, it is already too late to prevent it. The only hope that remains to us is the intervention of divine grace. But then divine grace is the only true hope that we have ever had. That is precisely the problem with the idea of progress and all schemes of political salvation – they are attempts to circumvent the grace of God and achieve salvation through human effort.

Thankfully, and I will end on this note, I believe that divine grace is always available to us, if we are willing to find it, in Christ.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen!



(1) Calvinism and Arminianism, far from exhausting the options available to Christians, do not even exhaust the options available to Protestants. Lutherans, for example, are neither Calvinist nor Arminian.

(2) Examples include Canadian philosopher George Grant and British journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.

(3) This is the reason why the contemporary view of marriage as a contract entered into by two individuals for their mutual benefit and which can be dissolved by either partner at any time without cost is so horrendously wrong. Marriage is the joining, not just of two individuals, but of two families, it confers blessings upon the couple joined in marriage but it also imposes duties and demands sacrifices, and it is properly an indissoluble covenant rather than a contract.

(4) Robertson Davies, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1985), p. 131, from the part of the book originally published in 1945 as the Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, this particular entry being a commentary on the British General Election of that year “which is interpreted in some circles as a mighty triumph for the Common Man. I suppose it is, for it has turned out of office Winston Churchill, who certainly ranked high among the Uncommon Men of our times.”

(5) In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

(6) In “Rationalism and Politics”.

(7) Edmund Burke was an eighteenth century British statesman. As a Whig, he supported the American colonists in Parliament in the period of the American Revolution, but later, finding the violence and chaos of the French Revolution to be repugnant, wrote a famous treatise in which he defended Britain’s prescriptive constitution of church and state against abstract speculators and rationalists and their “armed doctrines” such as the social contract theory and the natural rights of man. If, as Irving Kristol famously said, a neo-conservative is “a liberal mugged by reality”, the Burke of the Reflections on the Revolution in France was a “neo-Tory”.

(8) Sir Winston Churchill, April 8, 1945.

(9) Quoted by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Publishers, 1952), p. 138.

(10) Stephen Leacock, “Education and Empire Unity”, an address to the Empire Club of Canada on March 19th, 1907, later published as “Greater Canada: An Appeal” in University Magazine and The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock.

(11) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 96, A. 2. co.