Conservatism and Neo-conservatism

For at least the last forty years if you were to have asked a self-described conservative living in North America what conservatism was all about the answer you would have received would have been that it is about small government, low taxes, freedom, free markets, free trade, tough laws and sentences for violent crimes and a strong military. If the conservative you were talking to happened to remember he might have added the defence of the nuclear family and a traditional Christian morality and way of life.

In my country, Canada, conservatism was originally about much more than this. Canada is a country that was founded within the British Empire in the Victorian era and which developed her national sovereignty within the British family of nations without severing ties to the Crown and Britain, the way our republican neighbour to the south had, and as such inherited from the older country, the older kind of conservatism known as Toryism. Toryism was about monarchy, the institutional church, and government for the common good of a national society envisioned as an organic whole that includes past and future generations, not merely those present among us today. I have been a conservative of this older type, a Tory, my entire life.

There has been much talk in recent years of “neo-conservatism”. What is meant by this term is somewhat different in Canada and the United States, although in both countries it refers to either the espousing as conservative of ideas that were once considered liberal, the profession of conservatism by former liberals, or both.

In the United States, the term refers to a very specific group of people and a set of ideas with which they were associated. The original neoconservatives had been members of the group known as the “New York Intellectuals”, which consisted mainly of second generation, Jewish Americans who had studied either at City College of New York, Columbia University, or both in the period between the World Wars and who in that same period espoused politics that ranged from New Deal liberalism to far-left Trotskyism. After the Second World War many of these became Cold War liberals, i.e., liberals who strongly supported the West in the fight against Soviet Communism, and of these many realigned with the right in the 1960s and 1970s, to become the “neo-conservatives”. The best known among these were Norman Podhoretz, who edited the journal Commentary for decades, his wife Midge Decter, Irving Kristol, also a journalist, and his wife, historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb. It was Kristol who famously defined a neoconservative as a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.” As “neoconservatives” these continued to look upon the New Deal welfare state, the Civil Rights Movement, the early stages of second wave feminism, and other such causes they had espoused as liberals favourably, but it is their outlook on geopolitics that is their most notable distinctive.

The American neoconservatives believe that American style liberal democracy is the birthright of everyone on the planet and that the United States has a duty to guarantee that birthright, by offering military assistance and protection to countries that have liberal democracy, fighting against and toppling the enemies of liberal democracy, and bringing liberal democracy to countries that do not yet enjoy it. For this reason, the neoconservatives believe, the United States must continue to maintain a military presence throughout the world, as the world’s policeman. This vision of a Pax Americana is rooted in liberalism, having antecedents in the war aims of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Its most utopian articulation, that of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man envisions all of human history as having led up to universal capitalism and democracy and is simply the latest manifestation of the Whig theory of history.

The American kind of neo-conservatism has come under much heavy criticism during the last thirteen years for its influential role, during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, in leading the United States into the disastrous War in Iraq. While most of this criticism is well-deserved, those making the criticism seldom understand the nature of the problem with the neoconservative view of geopolitics. Critics on the left, inevitably maintain that all the neoconservative talk about spreading democracy, protecting the rights of women, and such claptrap, is just a thin veil masking the lust to grab power and resources for the United States, or the large corporations that to people of this mindset are the real powers behind the American government, from which it is assumed on the left that the neoconservative enthusiasm for war arises. In reality, however, it is precisely because the neoconservatives are true believers, in Eric Hoffer’s meaning of that expression, in democracy, human rights, liberalism, and basically all the same ideals that their critics on the left hold dear, that they feel that it is imperative that these American liberal values be exported universally.

In Canada, the word neo-conservatism is often used interchangeably with conservatism, in reference to the conservatism described in the first paragraph. The intent of this usage is to contrast what has been called conservatism for the last forty years or so, with the older Toryism. Red Tories in particular like to use the word in this way. Red Tories are people who, like myself, are High Tories of the older royalist, institutional church, and common good-of-the-organic-whole variety, but who, unlike myself, have avowed sympathies with socialism, feminism, pacifism, and other left-of-centre causes for which I have nothing but disdain and contempt. The Red Tories are quite right in saying that much of what is called conservatism today is what was called liberalism a hundred years ago, but I cannot help but observe the irony of the fact that this offered as criticism by those whose Toryism is modified by an adjective that alludes to their espousal of ideals that have also sprung from the modern well of liberalism and much more recently than the capitalism of the neoconservatives. Liberalism is not like a fine wine that has improved with age – it is more like milk that has long passed its expiry date, and been left out in the sun.

At times these attempts to distinguish Canadian neo-conservatism from the older tradition can be exaggerated in a way that can be quite misleading and which distorts the nature of the older Toryism. It is not uncommon, for example, to hear Red Tories say that the older Toryism was the opposite of what is called conservatism today. Think about what that suggests regarding the first items mentioned in the description of conservatism in the first paragraph – small government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade. (1) There is a grain of truth in this when it comes to free trade – the older Toryism espoused protectionism – but if we were to accept the assertion that the older conservatism was the opposite of today’s conservatism, we would have to conclude that it was opposed to freedom and stood for big government, high taxes, and a centrally planned and bureaucratically administered economy. This, however, is laughable nonsense. Indeed, as I have frequently pointed out, the older “throne and altar” Toryism, ought to be regarded as being more favourable to small government and low taxes than contemporary North American conservatism. Toryism was born out of the defence of royal sovereign authority against those who wished to wrest it away from the Crown and to vest all power in elected legislative assemblies. The opponents of the original Tories declared themselves to be on the side of “liberty” against tyranny, but the history of the last four centuries tells us another story. What that history tells us is that the more the Crown’s authority was limited and the power of the elected assembly augmented, the larger and more intrusive government became, while taxes grew both exponentially and astronomically. (2)

With regards to freedom, the difference between the older Toryism and the classical liberalism that much of modern conservatism resembles was not that the latter supported freedom while the former opposed and feared it. It was rather a disagreement about the nature of freedom. The classical liberals equated liberty with the sovereignty of the individual, argued that the function of government was to protect liberty so defined, and declared that only democratic governments, in which each individual participates at least through his elected representative, can so protect the liberty that is individual sovereignty. By contrast, the Tory view of freedom, grounded in the thought of classical antiquity, was explained by the martyred King Charles I, in his final speech before his execution, when he declared that the liberty and freedom of the people consist in their having from their government “those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own” rather than “having share in government”.

Anyone who happens to think that the liberal doctrine is more conducive to personal freedom than that of the Tory it is invited to look around him today. The idea of freedom as individual sovereignty is now being taken to the nth degree, with even such constraints on that sovereignty as those of nature and reality itself no longer recognized as valid. Thus, for example, gender is now being declared to be something that the individual decides for himself – or herself – or itself – or whatever! By consequence, liberalism is now declaring such self-determination of gender to be a right of the individual, which is to say something that belongs to the essence of the individual’s sovereignty. Since in liberal theory, the rights of the individual are what law and government exist to protect, the consequence of this will inevitably be that the legislatures and courts, will impose legal restrictions on what we can think, say or do, in order to protect such a “right”. The more the individual is declared to be sovereign, the more new “rights” are discovered, the more laws restricting our thoughts, speech, and actions are passed, so that what is called “freedom” today, often resembles a soft form of totalitarian tyranny. (3)

Contemporary conservatism, or what is called in Canada neo-conservatism, ought not to be faulted by Tories of the older tradition merely for being in favour of small government, low taxes, and freedom. It merits criticism for defining conservatism by such things, rather than by monarchy, institutional religion, the common good of the organic whole, and by such things as continuity, tradition, and established order for which the older Toryism stood, and which, as Roger Scruton argued in The Meaning of Conservatism, provide the necessary context for any real freedom to exist and flourish in a civilized society. There was nothing wrong with Canadian neo-conservatism's opposition to Canadians being taxed to death, overregulated, and treated as wards of a nanny state and it was for these things that this High Tory voted for and even took out membership in the neoconservative Reform Party in the 1990s. Where Canadian neo-conservatism did deserve censure was over the anti-patriotic contempt for Canada and wish that she was “more like the United States” that could far too often be found in its ranks, as well as the liberal equation of democracy with freedom and legitimate and accountable government evident in its wish to turn the Senate into an elected body which was such a marked contrast with the way the older Canadian Toryism defended our Westminster parliamentary monarchy, including the Senate, correctly perceiving that it and our traditional rights and freedoms, stood and fell together. (4) It was over these things that I walked away from the Canadian Alliance prior to the completion of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003.

(1) It is even less accurate to say that the older Toryism was the opposite of the other items mentioned in the first paragraph, although here too there are important distinctions to be drawn. The family that the older Toryism defended, for example, was not just the nuclear unit, but a larger, multigenerational, kinship group, headed by a patriarch. Also, the older Toryism tended to look to the organized Church for what “a traditional Christian morality and way of life” meant, while contemporary conservatism is more likely to be influenced by personal interpretations of the Scriptures.

(2) It was not uncommon in the last century for such High Tories as Anthony Burgess, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Robertson Davies (as Samuel Marchbanks) to avow both a feudal, medieval royalism and an attitude of anarchistic contempt for the gargantuan, overregulating body that is the modern bureaucratic state in the same breathe, a sentiment which I heartily share.

(3) That liberalism was a doctrine that loudly proclaimed its faith in freedom while containing within itself the seeds of totalitarian tyranny was not something that was only evident after it had been brought to its apex in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the sixteenth century, the Puritan progenitors of the first liberals, the Whigs, denounced the “tyranny” of the House of Stuart and proclaimed themselves to be on the side of liberty, but when they had seized power for themselves, made it illegal to participate in sports, games, and other amusements on Sundays after church, closed inns, alehouses and theatres, and banned the celebration of Christmas and Easter. In the century prior to that, the first Puritans, in the name of defending Christian liberty against “popish tyranny”, demanded that all practices that were part of the pre-Reformation tradition but which could not be shown to be explicitly authorized in Scripture should be forbidden, while Richard Hooker, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, argued on the contrary, that Christians ought to be free to observe, whatever practices of the pre-Reformation tradition could not be shown to be explicitly condemned in Scriptures. Hooker’s thinking, which helped lay a foundation for both a distinctive Anglican theology and Toryism, to any rational person, allowed a greater amount of freedom than that of the Puritans which eventually gave birth to liberalism.

(4) See, for example, John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).

The Ethics of Economics

Professor Ronald S. Dart of the University of the Frazer Valley in Abbotsford, B. C. is a traditional, Canadian Tory. So, for that matter, am I. His interpretation of the Tory tradition and mine differ in a number of ways. One way our interpretations differ is in the colour we each would assign to the tradition. I, who place much emphasis upon the monarchist element of traditional Toryism, insist that the proper colour of Toryism is royal blue. Professor Dart on the other hand prefers the colour red for his Toryism.


Do not mistake me. The expression “Red Tory” is used in two different ways, with two different meanings, in Canada and they are not interchangeable. One way the term is used is to refer to people who are members of the Conservative Party but whose ideas are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals or the socialist Left. The other way the term is used is to refer to people whose ideas genuinely fall within the British-Canadian conservative tradition and more specifically within the interpretation of that tradition associated with the great Canadian philosopher George P. Grant. When the term is used the first way I mentioned it is as a term of derision, usually applied by those who would refer to themselves as small-c conservatives. When it is used in the second way mentioned it is proudly self-applied. The Red Toryism of Professor Dart is the second and by far the better of the two.

Toryism is a tradition that began in the United Kingdom in the seventeenth century but which draws upon the much older traditions of classical antiquity, medieval Christendom in general, and of England/Great Britain in particular. It is also an expression of an attitude that can be found in every time and place – that of preferring the known to the unknown and the tried, tested, and true to the inventive and innovative. The Tory tradition, which started with the royalists or cavaliers in the English Civil War, stood for the established constitution of Church and State, as grounded in prescription and divine authority, and for an organic view of society rather than a contractual model. When modern philosophy bore fruit in the violence and terror of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, even though he had been a member of the opposing party in Parliament, took Tory principles and reworked them into a philosophical defence of the English constitution and Christianity against modernity. This revitalized Toryism was the first political philosophy to bear the name conservative.

The Dominion of Canada, which never violently broke continuity with the British tradition in which she was founded in the way the United States did, inherited its conservative tradition directly from Great Britain. Furthermore, the Toryism Canada inherited is a specific branch of the Tory tradition that developed in the Victorian era, the era in which Canada came together as a country in Confederation. That branch of the Tory tradition is known as One Nation Conservatism, a title derived from a phrase in the book Sybil, by Victorian Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. What distinguishes One Nation Conservatism from other forms of Toryism is its emphasis on the idea that participation in the organic whole that is the country should be of benefit to all members and levels of society and that the security of the established constitution depends upon this being the case. Thus the One Nation Conservatives supported modest social programs that would alleviate misery and prevent the dissatisfaction from developing that is the fuel of the revolutionary demagogue.

The Red Toryism of George Grant – who disliked the expression “Red Tory” – is a further interpretation of the One Nation Conservative interpretation of the High Tory tradition. While Grant is a man I highly admired and whose writings have been quite influential on my own thinking, I disagree with his contention that socialism is more conservative than capitalism, which is the main reason his version of One Nation Conservatism has been dubbed Red.

Professor Dart, who has made significant contributions of his own to this branch of the Tory tradition, has recently posted a manifesto entitled “Red Tories of Canada Unite” at the Clarion Journal to which he is a frequent contributor. I encourage you to read it as there is much in there that is of value even to those of us Tories who are not particularly “Red”. There is one section in particular that caught my attention. I will quote it in its entirety using boldface to represent what is italicized in the original:

Third, Tories do not separate ethics from economics. When the ledger of profit and loss becomes the dominant criteria we use for evaluating the wealth, health, prosperity and development of a people, we become moral cripples. The tendency to divorce ethics and economics runs contrary to the best of historic Toryism that grounds political life in the classical virtues of courage, wisdom, justice and moderation. The cleavage between the rich and poor is a natural product of elevating trade and commerce and ignoring or subordinating an ethical plumb line by which wealth is earned and distributed. Dante, for example, placed the greedy and idle rich in the lowest level of hell. We need not read too far in Leacock’s Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich or Prime Minister William Bennett’s The Premier Speaks to the People to get a solid fix and feel for how the best of Canadian Tories have viewed the clash between ethics and economics. (http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2013/05/red-tories-of-canada-unite-a-manifesto-ron-dart.html#more)

It is the first sentence in this remarkable paragraph that I wish to comment on, although my comments may and probably will touch on the other sentences as well. “Third, Tories do not separate ethics from economics”. This is a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree. It is worthy of deeper reflection and I can think of no better way of beginning that reflection than by addressing three questions that arise naturally out of the statement. What is ethics? What is economics? Why should ethics and economics be inseparable? Let us think about those questions in that order before moving on to consider the implications of the inseparability of ethics and economics.

What is ethics? The term ethics comes from the Greek word for habits, manners, or patterns of behaviour, just as the term morals comes from the Latin word with a similar range of meaning. Ethics is moral philosophy, i.e., intelligent, contemplative, thought about human behaviour both as it is and as it ought to be.

Everything we human beings do we do with some end in mind. We may desire that end for it’s own sake or because it is a step towards a further end. These ends we consider to be goods and the most basic way by which we judge our actions to be good or bad is on the basis of how effectively they achieve their ends. There is often a difference, however, between the ends we actually strive after and the ends we ought to strive after. We may put all our effort into achieving a lesser good while ignoring completely a greater good. We may fail to recognize a good as a good or we may mistake as a good something that is not a good. How to distinguish a true good from a false good, a greater good from a lesser good, and the supreme good from all other goods is the subject matter of ethics.

Ethics is not just an ethereal, abstract, ivory tower discussion however. It too has an end, a good that it strives after, and that good is the formation of human character. Our actions are not carried out in isolation from each other. When we make a decision, good or bad, we increase the likelihood that we will make that same kind of decision again. We are creatures of habit, in other words, and our habits, our patterns of good and/or bad decision making, shape our character. The proper goal or good of ethics is the development of good character by the formation of habits in which we discern and choose true goods rather than false goods and value greater goods over lesser goods. These habits are called virtues and their opposites are called vices.

The introduction of ethics was the greatest contribution of the Athenian school to the Western philosophical tradition. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began the discussion of ethics to which subsequent schools of thought would later add their own contributions. In the Christian era, ethics was fundamentally transformed. Philosophy, guided by the light of reason, could only go so. It could not bring man to the highest good, for the highest good is God. Since human reason and philosophy cannot reach God, God had to come down to man, which He did in the Incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ. Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection forever changed the relationship between God and man and in the Self-revelation of God, man was given three new virtues to cultivate – faith, hope, and charity or Christian love. This was beautifully illustrated by Dante in the poem Professor Dart referred to. (1) Virgil, representing natural reason, could guide Dante only so far as to the entrance to the Earthly Paradise at the peak of Mt. Purgatory. After that point Beatrice, representing divine wisdom had to take over.

Let us turn now to our second question. What is economics?

Economics is also a word that comes to us from the Greeks. It is derived from the word economy which combines the Greek words for household and law. The Greeks used this combination to refer to the management of household affairs. We still sometimes use the word economy in this way, to describe the virtue of the man who manages his affairs so as to live within his means. The ordinary use of the word economy to refer to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a community, region, or country is an extrapolation from the original meaning. If you think of your community, province, or entire country as an extended household you will see how this meaning was derived. This kind of economy is properly referred to as a political economy, the affairs of the polity or commonwealth, conceived of as a large-scale household.

Economics is a modern twist on the concept of economy. Economics is an intellectual discipline that treats the kind of human activities that we would call economic because they fall under the earlier meanings of economy as the subject matter of a science. It is not a hard science, like natural sciences such as physics, biology and chemistry, but a soft science, i.e., a social or behavioural science. Whether soft or hard, however, the sciences of the modern age rest upon a number of shared assumptions – that everything we need to understand the world is available to us via our physical senses, that through empirical methodology we can convert our observations of the world into laws explaining how things work, and that we can then use the knowledge contained in those laws to obtain mastery over all we survey.

The first of those assumptions is epistemological nonsense and is arguably the root error of all modern thought. The last of those assumptions, however, has the appearance if not the substance of truth, and this is the source of the hold the sciences have had on modern man. “Look at all the wonderful things we have been able to accomplish in such a short time through science, it must surely therefore be the source of all wisdom and truth.” Even if it were the case, however, that we could obtain complete mastery over ourselves and the world through science that would not answer the question of whether or not we should do so. This question is dismissed by many in the scientific community today, as can be seen in the “because I can” justification one often encounters in debates over the moral implications of such things as stem-cell research. It is a question, however, that needs to be asked and which deserves a better answer than that. (2)

Which brings us back to ethics and to our third question, why should ethics and economics be inseparable?

The subject matter of economics is a class or category of human activity. Human beings have material needs and desires. To satisfy those needs and desires we either produce what we need and desire for ourselves, produce things that other people need or desire to exchange with them for what we need or desire, or offer services of various sorts to other people in exchange for the things we need or desire. These are the activities that are studied as economics and, like all human activities, they are subject to evaluation in terms of the questions posed by ethics.

The modern economist does not deny the claims of ethics over economics altogether. He answers those claims, however, by asserting that the science of economics, by uncovering the laws that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of material goods, will provide man with the tools needed to create material abundance for all – or at least the largest number possible - and with that material abundance will bring universal human happiness, or at least something closely akin to it. This is economics’ version of the claim made by all modern sciences. Since this is the claim of the economist regardless of whether he supports capitalism or socialism all ethical criticism of this claim applies equally to capitalism and to socialism.

There are many such criticisms to be made.

The ethics of the modern economist is utilitarian. It is based upon the idea that right action is determined by what produces the maximum amount of happiness for the largest number of people. Utilitarianism removes the qualitative element from ethical judgement and reduces it to quantitative measurement. As an ethical system this is inferior by far to those developed by classical philosophers and the theologians of Christendom.

Furthermore, it is a materialistic ethics that equates material abundance with happiness. This equation, however, is false. Economic liberalism or capitalism, the system devised by the first modern economists in the 18th Century, as it has developed to the present day has produced material abundance that would have been unimaginable in previous centuries. It has also managed to distribute this abundance widely throughout the populations of those countries that have embraced capitalism. This can be seen by everybody except those who blind themselves to it by measuring the distribution of affluence against the yardstick of absolute equality. In a sense, therefore, liberalism has fulfilled the claims of modern economics. In a larger sense, however, it has failed because this material abundance has not brought happiness with it.

Think about it. If material abundance brought happiness, why are alcoholism and drug abuse significant social problems in liberal countries? These same countries, in the period in which they saw the greatest explosion of material abundance in human history, have experienced a massive social breakdown. There has been an erosion of a sense of community, divorce rates have skyrocketed while fertility rates have plummeted. All of these problems are symptomatic of a deep and widespread unhappiness.

Capitalism’s main competitor has been socialism. Socialism was originally thought up as an alternative to capitalism by economists and political radicals in the 19th Century. According to liberal capitalist theory the road to material prosperity lay in the investment of private entrepreneurs in large scale production products carried out in a setting of freedom guided by the forces of the free market. Socialist theory taught that there would be greater material abundance which would be more fairly distributed if the means of production were publicly owned and distribution was administered for the common good by a board of intellectual experts.

Socialism was a disaster when put into practice. It had the same goal as capitalism – maximizing material abundance and distributing it to the largest number of people – but it was nowhere near as capable of accomplishing that goal as capitalism was. Worse, if neither capitalism nor socialism was capable of generating human happiness, socialism proved remarkably adept at producing the exact opposite, human misery. Everywhere it was attempted for any significant length of time it eroded human sympathy and feeling, generated mass suffering and misery, and brought about widespread spiritual and moral death.  Deducing what socialism would be like in practice, Canadian Tory Stephen Leacock declared “socialism, in other words, is slavery.”

The temptation to equate material abundance with happiness – or at least to think that the two go hand in hand – has always been with men. The ethical teachings of the great classical and Christian tradition, however, guarded against this temptation. Material goods, including such necessities as food, clothing, and shelter, are real goods, the ancient philosophers taught, i.e., things to be desired and sought, but they were among the lower goods. True happiness came through the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of the higher goods, including the transcendental ideals of truth, beauty and goodness. Men need material goods to sustain their existence, and are drawn to these and other lower goods by the appetites of their animal nature, but these goods were to be the means and not the end of their existence. Men were called to rule their appetites rather than to be ruled by them and to make the pursuit of the higher goods the end of their existence.

That the accumulation of wealth should not be the end of our existence, the purpose for which we live, is also the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. The Book of Proverbs records the request of Agur ben Jakeh that he be given “neither poverty nor riches” so as to be spared the temptations that come with each. Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, warned His disciples against making mammon their master and told them to lay up eternal treasures in heaven rather than fading treasures on earth. They should not worry about material things, He said, but should seek first the kingdom and righteousness of God. St. Paul, writing to the Philippians from his prison cell, told them that he had learned “in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Modern economics in both its capitalist and socialist forms has inverted the hierarchy of goods contained in classical and Christian teaching.

There is, of course, a lot more in the ethical teachings of the pre-modern tradition that applies to economic matters than just the idea that we are to devote our lives to the pursuit of higher goods and to make the activity by which we obtain the material necessities of life to be merely the means to that end. I have focused on this because the deviation of modern economics on this point appears to me to be its first ethical error and the source of all the others.

The Holy Scriptures repeatedly condemn the person who allows others to perish for lack of the basic necessities of life. They even more vehemently condemn the person who does more than just stand by and watch but who actively takes advantage of the vulnerability of others. The Psalms frequently express astonishment that such people seemingly prosper and are not struck from the earth. The prophetic literature is full of rebuke after rebuke of the kings of Israel and Judah for not doing their job and administering justice for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor in general, upon the heads of their oppressors.

There are many forms of liberal capitalism, such as Social Darwinism and that taught by Ayn Rand, that come out looking very bad in the light of this Scriptural teaching.

That does not let the socialists off the hook, however. Socialist economic theory is built upon the idea that private property is the source of all evil, that man went wrong when he first pointed to what had previously been held in common, and distinguished between “mine” and “thine”, and that things can only be set right by returning everything to common ownership. Two of the famous Ten Commandments handed down to Israel and Mt. Sinai and reiterated at the edge of the Promised Land, however, are protections of people’s property against the designs of others, the commandment against stealing and the commandment against coveting.

There is no contradiction in the ethical teachings of the Scriptures here. In the condemnation of the indifferent onlooker, the oppressor, and the unjust ruler, the basic instruction to us is that we are to help others, to share what we have with those who are need, and basically to treat other people well and just. When the Scriptures forbid us from stealing or even coveting the property of others they are giving us the same basic instruction. To share what is ours with others when they are in need and to refrain from lusting for and taking what they have are two sides to what it means to “love thy neighbour as thyself”.

In interpreting these teachings of the Scriptures for the faithful down through the centuries the Christian Church has identified avarice and envy as being among the seven sins that are particularly deadly and to be avoided. Avarice, or greed, is not just the desire for material goods. Nor even is it just the desire for more material goods than one already has or for more material goods than one needs, for if those desires were a deadly sin then it would be a moral requirement for us to live in caves and possess nothing more than the spears we would need to kill our daily dinner. Avarice is best understood as being the polar opposite of the idea of sharing. It is the desire to possess as much as one possibly can while leaving as little as possible for others. To envy is both to covet what another has for oneself and to resent the other for what he has. Dorothy L. Sayers once remarked that “If Avarice is the sin of the Haves against the Have-Nots, Envy is the sin of the Have-Nots against the Haves.”

I think she was right in saying this and I do not think that I would be straying too far from her original meaning by making the paraphrase that avarice is the sin of capitalism, and envy the sin of socialism. I would add, however, a proviso, that while capitalism may create occasion and temptation for the sin of avarice, socialism requires and is fueled by the sin of envy. Businessmen are frequently accused of the sin of avarice and undoubtedly are frequently guilty of it as well. They are also frequently falsely accused of it and these false accusations arise out of the envy that is at the heart of socialism. A person does not have to be avaricious to be a businessman. There is nothing innately avaricious about running a business and wanting it to turn a profit. Socialism, on the other hand, could not exist apart from the sin of envy. It is its lifeblood.

Neither of the two main systems of economic organization, dreamed up by modern economists, measures up by the standards of traditional, classical, and Christian ethics. As we have seen, capitalism and socialism both have their own specific moral defect, but more importantly they both share in the common ethical failing of all modern economics , the mistaking of material abundance for happiness and the inversion of the hierarchy of goods so as to make the pursuit of material goods the end of human existence.

I do not mean to propose another economic system as a kind of ethical alternative to capitalism and socialism. The problem is not just with capitalism and socialism but with the whole idea that an economic system could be devised that would bring Paradise to man on earth. Tories recognize that economics in the best sense is an art rather than a science, the art practiced in each family by those who manage the affairs of the household, and the art of statesmen in managing the affairs of the country. Tories also recognize that, for those practicing that art, the most useful information does not come from blueprints drawn up in some ivory tower, but from experience, both personal, and the collective experience of the society and of the human race in general, i.e. the experience embodied in tradition. Included within that tradition, and inseparable from it, is the ancient and ongoing discussion of goods and the good (3) that we call ethics, and so for this reason, among many others, Professor Dart is indeed right in saying that “Tories do not separate ethics from economics.”

(1) There is an error in the reference. Dante did not place the greedy and the wasteful in the lowest level of hell. He placed them in the fourth circle of hell, the lowest circle of upper hell which Virgil and Dante passed through before crossing the River Styx and the city Dis into lower hell. The ninth, and lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, was the pit of Cocytus, reserved for the treacherous.

(2) Much of the published writings of George Grant is devoted to this question in one form or another. See especially his Philosophy for a Mass Age, Technology and Empire, and Technology and Justice.

(3) Part of that ongoing discussion, is the serious critique of modern economic systems, including both capitalism and socialism, from a standpoint of traditional ethics. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is an excellent example of this. It called for social justice for the workers in industrial capitalism but condemned socialism as an unacceptable alternative to capitalism. In this it was far superior to the attempt to equate socialism with the Christian gospel that was occurring in North America at the same time. This latter so-called “Social Gospel” was found primarily among free church Protestants who had been influenced by modern philosophy into rejecting the doctrines contained in the Creeds of the ancient Church and the Confessions of their own denominations. Leo XIII’s encyclical, inspired the “distributist” critiques of capitalism and socialism among early 20th Century Catholic writers such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, who in turn inspired the critiques of such men as E. F. Schumacher and Wilhelm Roepke later in the 20th Century. Roepke wrote at a time when the distinction between capitalism and socialism was becoming blurred as both systems were evolving in the same direction – mass society governed by bureaucrats and technocratic managers. He was an advocate of economic liberalism, of the Austrian school type, but only within a Christian social and moral context. Schumacher wrote later on in the 20th Century, when the evolution of capitalism and socialism into a single large scale system was already more or less complete. He believed that large scale economics in mass societies dehumanized those who participated in it, and declaring that “small is beautiful” issued a call for local, small-scale, economics “as if people mattered”. That call would be repeated in the writings of many others, left and right, including Kirkpatrick Sale, Wendell Berry, Rod Dreher, and Bill Kauffman.

This and That No. 4

In re-reading Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences for the review essay (“How We Got Here From There”) which precedes this post I finally located the passage in this book which I searched in vain for when writing the essay which launched this blog (“The Divine Right of Kings Versus the Tyranny of The People”). That passage, from Weaver’s 4th chapter “Egotism in Work and Art” reads:

It would be an unpopular man who should suggest to the present generation that work is a divine ordinance. The idea has been grouped with the widely misinterpreted divine right of kings, and , if we examine the matter closely, we find that the two are indeed related. For whether one is a worker or a ruler, the question becomes at once: What is the real source of his authority to act? That Governor John Winthrop found a solution for this problem is worth knowing. In a statement to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1645 he said: “The questions that have troubled the country have been about the authority of the magistracy, and the liberty of the people. It is you have called us unto this office; but being called, we have our authority from God; it is the ordinance of God, and it hath the image of God stamped upon it; and the contempt of it has been vindicated by God with terrible examples of his vengeance.” In other words, the leader may be chosen by the people, but he is guided by the right; and, in the same way, we may say that the worker may be employed by anyone, but that he is directed by the autonomous ideal in the task. (p. 76)

In the second paragraph of his Introduction Weaver makes reference to how the “widely prevailing Whig theory of history, with its belief that the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development” prevents people from admitting the truth of certain basic facts. That same Whig theory is brilliantly undermined by his book. Although American conservatism is thought by many to be a re-labelled classical liberalism, the book which “launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism” in the United States, was definitely written by a Tory, albeit an American Tory, loyal to the institutions of his own country as a good Tory must be. For more on Toryism I refer you to my essay: "On Being a Tory in the Age of Whigs"

I inadvertently left out the third of the three books I had intended to include in the “Also Recommended” section. Rather than edit it in now I will mention it here, it is T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture which was published by Faber and Faber of London, first in 1948 (the same year Ideas Have Consequences came out), my copy being the 1967 reprint of the 1962 Faber paper covered edition.

I chose this book, like George Grant’s Technology and Justice and C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man because of thematic similarities. Lewis’s book, about what abandonment of the universals that underlie all traditional cultures is doing to modern man is most directly parallel to Weaver in theme. Eliot, who wrote to define culture, distinguishes between a number of different meanings, pointing out that religion is at the heart of culture, and, in defending his concept of a higher culture (led by an aristocracy of course) points out that the ability to think in terms of the universal is the mark of a higher culture, and that this is why Christianity, which is a universal faith in the sense that it believes and preaches that there is one God for everybody and invites everybody to participate in Christ’s redemption and join in Christian worship, is at the heart of the higher culture and civilization of the West. Grant’s book also looks at the decline of Western civilization but my inclusion of it is more because of parallels in secondary themes, such as the significance of the development of technology.

All three of these men were like Weaver conservatives and Christians - indeed, they were all Anglicans (or in Weaver’s case Episcopalian). Grant and Lewis were also strong Christian Platonists like Weaver – Eliot I read as being more Aristotelian. This is an after the fact observation. It was not a conscious consideration in choosing the recommendations.

Some might lift an eyebrow at my recommendation of Grant’s book. George P. Grant is often referred to as a “Red Tory” – indeed, the “Red Tory” because the Red Tories claim to get their inspiration from him. I challenge Grant’s being so designated, however, and not only because Grant rejected that label himself, which is the reason I did not refer to him in my essay on "Red Toryism" ("Red Is Not the Color of Toryism"). A “Red Tory” is a progressive or socialist who is a member of the Conservative Party and sometimes cloaks his real philosophy in conservative lingo. Grant, after a Christian spiritual awakening at the end of World War II, became a genuine philosophical conservative. As such, and as a patriot, indeed a nationalist, of his country Canada, Grant was a true Tory. He was a left Tory on economic issues to be sure, and here he departed from the Tory tradition in Canada, but this was certainly not the case with regards to social issues, which are more important than economic issues (see his essays on euthanasia and abortion in Technology and Justice).

There is a point to be made about conservatism and indeed about politics in general in the above, which is related to what Richard Weaver wrote about knowledge. Just as truth about God, the hierarchy of goods, and other universals is at the center of true knowledge, with facts about the observable material universe at the periphery, held together by that truth which is at the center, so practical economic and social issues should be the peripheral matters in one’s political outlook with more basic principles about the organization of political society at the center. At the heart of conservatism, is the preservation of the values, institutions, culture, civilization and the very life of the political society. Specific stances on economic and social issues must be held together and related to each other by that center. The same holds true for other political viewpoints.

A distinction needs to be made, however, between two different uses of the word “politics”. The most common use of the word “politics” today is in reference to partisan politics – to the struggle over power in political society. The familiar farcical etymology of “politics” – from poly (many) and ticks (blood-sucking insects) – is quite appropriate in reference to this kind of politics. The original meaning of politics, however, the meaning reflected in the title of Aristotle’s Politics , and for that matter Plato’s Republic (the title of which is Politeia in Greek), is reflective thought about matters which concern life in an organized, sovereign, society (which in 5th/4th Century BC Greece, was the city/state – the polis). While this must rank below theology, metaphysics, ethics, and other such branches of philosophy pertaining to transcendent truth, in the hierarchy of the sciences (in the original meaning of science, i.e., all organized human knowledge, not just facts about the physical world), it also ranks above all the natural sciences.

Canada, Past, Present, Future

I sometimes say that I am a patriot of the Canada my father grew up in. This is, of course, a way of expressing disapproval of many significant changes that occurred in Canada in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s, some before I was born, others in my early childhood. It should not be taken as suggesting that the only Canada I have ever loved is one that never saw for myself, one that passed away before I was born. I grew up on a farm in rural Manitoba. Time moves slower in the country than in the city, and the rural Canada I grew up in was still in many ways recognizable as the Canada that existed before Pierre Trudeau started messing around with it.

“Protestant, small town, British, virtuous”. Those are the words Michael Ignatieff, leader of the Liberal Party of Canada uses in True Patriot Love, the history of his mother’s family, to describe the Canada his uncle George Parkin Grant loved, and famously lamented over.

Grant, who was born into a family of illustrious Canadian educators and intellectuals, was a professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University and later professor of religion at McMaster. In 1965, two years after the opposition brought down the Diefenbaker administration over his refusal to allow American nuclear arms on Canadian soil, Grant wrote Lament For A Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Grant believed that the collapse of the Diefenbaker administration spelled the end of Canadian sovereignty and that we would be swallowed up in the continental and world empire of the United States of America.

The booklet, Lament for a Nation earned George Grant, a Christian conservative, a place alongside Oswald Spengler, Evelyn Waugh, and James Burnham, as a twentieth century conservative prophet of doom. Ignatieff, who believes his uncle was wrong, says that his uncle “gave up on his country at exactly the moment when it roused itself to action”. As evidence he goes on to list the very changes I referred to in the first paragraph of this essay.

Ignatieff writes that “the modern Canadian welfare state – medicare and the Canada Pension Plan – was created, distinguishing us ever more sharply from the United States”, a curious assessment on the part of a historian. Surely Ignatieff must realize that the modern welfare state is an American construction? Canada, like many European countries, has gone further down the road of welfare statism than the United States went under Roosevelt in the 30’s, or under LBJ in the ‘60’s, but for all that the welfare-states origins lie clearly within the United States of America.

Ignatieff goes on to list such things as “the repatriation of the Canadian constitution, the next-to-last symbol of our dependency on the British, and the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incarnating a distinctive national rights culture; and we gave ourselves a national anthem and a flag.”

We already had a flag actually, the Canadian Red Ensign, and there was nothing wrong with it. In Lament For A Nation, which was published the year the current flag was adopted, George Grant pointed to Diefenbaker’s stand for the Red Ensign, as leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, as evidence that Diefenbaker’s “basic principles were far removed from any petty sense of self-importance”. The Red Ensign, versions of which remain as the provincial flags of Ontario and Manitoba, speaks of our roots and identity as a country that is at the same time British and North American.

It was, of course, because the Red Ensign identified Canada as being British, that it had to go, even though the Ensign, which includes the fleur-de-lis of Quebec in the shield of arms, also speaks of our country’s French heritage, while the current flag speaks of neither. The Liberal Party elites who insisted upon all of these changes are often thought of as being extremely anti-American and in a certain sense, the worst possible sense, that is correct. Yet, in their attitude towards Canada’s British roots, heritage, and identity they showed themselves to be the most American of all Canadians. They spoke condescending of all the things they were getting rid of – the Red Ensign, “Royal” in the title of several government services, and the name of the country “The Dominion of Canada” as our “colonial trappings”.

What utter nonsense. The Red Ensign, far from being a colonial flag, was the flag our soldiers fought under in World War II, a war which we entered upon our own Declaration of War. The Liberal elites, ignorant of Canada’s history, considered “Dominion” to be a synonym for “colony”.

Sir. John A. MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation wished to name our country “The Kingdom of Canada” and proposed such as the name in the early drafts of the British North America Act. This met with opposition in London based on the fear that such a title would prove provocative to the United States. The term “Dominion”, taken from the 8th verse of the 72nd Psalm was adopted as a substitute for “Kingdom”, being intended to convey the exact same meaning.

John G. Diefenbaker, in an address given to the Empire Club of Toronto on March 9, 1972 and later printed as the 4th chapter “Towards a False Republic” in his book Those Things We Treasure, describes some of the underhanded tactics the Liberal Party elites were using to strip Canada of her royal heritage:

An “Information Canada” booklet entitled How Canadians Govern Themselves states on page 3 that “…we are no longer a Dominion.” This statement is a direct contradiction of the British North America Act which gave the name “Dominion of Canada” to our country, and that was the name included in the Treaty of Versailles, the operative Statute of Westminster and the Canadian declaration of war in 1939.

The repatriation of the British North America Act, which made Canada’s constitution amendable by our own Parliament, was probably a good thing. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was not. Despite the lofty title of this document, the basic right of property is omitted altogether, whereas all of the other most basic freedoms and rights of a civilized, free society, previously protected by ancient prescription under Common Law, find themselves spelled out in sections 2, and 7 through 13, where they are compromised by the weasel clause in section 1, and the notwithstanding clause in section 33. Do we really want the government to pass a law giving itself the power to arrest some and hold them indefinitely without trial despite the rights listed in section 11 of the Charter, which all Canadians had before the Charter was passed? That is exactly what the Charter allows the government to do.

In all of these changes Michael Ignatieff sees the Liberal Party leading Canada into shaping its own identity and future as a country. They look more like acts of sabotage to me.

I hope that George Grant was as wrong about Canada being doomed to become a colony of the United States as he was wrong about socialism being “an essentially conservative force”. In chapter 5 of Lament For a Nation, Grant argues that American corporate capitalism (which he distinguishes from “early capitalism” which was “full of moral restraints”) is a powerful force for progress in the world. Grant was hostile to and suspicious of progress, which he regarded as social upheaval and change which threatened the tranquility of everyday life, rather than as societal improvement. With this attitude I am in full sympathy. I do not however, accept Grant’s conclusion that socialism must therefore be conservative. Grant wrote:

Yet what is socialism, if it is not the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good? In actual practice, socialism has always had to advocate inhibition in this respect. In doing so, was it not appealing to the conservative idea of social order against the liberal idea of freedom?

Socialism, far from restraining greed, encourages it. Socialism encourages among the lower classes the greed which it condemns in the upper classes. As the former in any society will outnumber the latter by far, socialism results in a net increase in greed in society. Socialism cannot appeal to the conservative idea of social order because it has historically been defined as opposition to the institution of private property, an institution as foundational to conservative order as it is to the freedom of the classical liberal.

Grant was correct in seeing corporate capitalism as a progressive force and in seeing progress as being a bad rather than a good thing. Instead of pursuing the silly argument that socialism, the economic doctrine beloved of revolutionaries around the world, was somehow “conservative” he should have pursued his thought on “early capitalism”, inhibited by Protestant morality, beyond the two or three lines he devoted to it as it was a thought far worthier of such a great Christian thinker. He could, for example, have considered the arguments of Wilhelm Röpke, the German economist who combined the Austrian school’s arguments for the free market, with arguments that such a market could only function within the framework and on the foundation of Christian moral and social order.

Grant’s views on socialism led to his being dubbed a “Red Tory”. I however, would associate that term with someone like Dalton Camp, a politician who hid his revolutionary socialist agenda behind a conservative mask. Grant, in contrast, was an actual conservative, a defender of the ways and mores of everyday life in traditional, Christian, small town, Canada, against the forces seeking to overwhelm and swamp that life.

Despite the revolutionary agenda of the Liberal Party in the ‘60’s and 70’s, I believe that the Canada George Grant loved, the Canada I love, is still out there, in the small towns, churches, and homes of rural Canada, and perhaps, hidden deeply, in parts of urban Canada as well. Canada became a country under the reign of Queen Victoria. Historian W. L. Morton, in his history The Kingdom of Canada, described the moment when Queen Elizabeth II opened Parliament in person in 1957, the first Canadian monarch to do so, as the moment Canada truly became the “Kingdom of Canada” Sir. John A. MacDonald had envisioned.(1) On this, the 143rd anniversary of the enactment of the British North America Act and the birth of Canada as a sovereign country, Queen Elizabeth is visiting her North American kingdom once more. May that inspire hope that the traditions of our country may yet be preserved in recognizable form for generations to come.

Happy Dominion Day
God save the Queen

(1) As an interesting aside, the first viceroy Queen Elizabeth II appointed upon ascending to the throne, and the first ever Canadian born Governor General, Vincent Massey, was uncle-by-marriage to George P Grant.

Red Is Not the Color of Toryism

The June 2, 2010 edition of the Winnipeg Free Press contained a tribute to the late Duff Roblin entitled “His love for Manitoba marked the province”. The author of this piece was Frances Russell. Russell, classy as ever, used the opportunity this article afforded her, to politicize our province’s time of mourning over the loss of a beloved statesman.

Russell’s remarks, however, were not just tasteless and inappropriate. They were also false, promoting a favorite myth of the Canadian progressive left. Here are the remarks in question:

Roblin was a Progressive Conservative in the full meaning of that term. He embraced British Red Toryism, not the libertarian conservatism Canada recently imported from the U.S.

Today's Canadian Conservatives represent free market forces, rampant individualism and punitive intolerance towards what they regard as social and moral misbehaviour. Society is a jungle where the fittest survive; government merely sets the rules and gets out of the way. Too bad for those who can't make it. They're on their own.

Red Toryism, Roblin's conservatism, is the polar opposite, anchored in the belief that society is an organic entity. Government is the means for society to achieve the best outcome for all by working to achieve the best outcome for each one. The whole can't prosper if the many are in want and deprivation. All for one and one for all.

All error contains an element of truth. If it were not so, it would never deceive anyone. It is true that traditional Canadian conservatism is a version of British Toryism. It is also true that traditional conservatism is “anchored in the belief that society is an organic entity”.

Belief in an organic society, however, does not lead, either necessarily or logically, to the idea that the government's role in society should be expanded, that it should minutely regulate our everyday lives, or that it should manage the economy and redistribute wealth.

Russell identifies traditional British and Canadian Toryism with “Red Toryism” but they are not the same thing. “Red Toryism” is an abstract construction created by thinkers like Gad Horowitz and Dalton Camp. It is also a contradiction in terms and a clever ideological switch and bait. The basic idea of “Red Toryism” is that because Toryism regards society as an organic whole and historically and traditionally opposed liberalism, which prior to the 20th Century was individualistic and capitalistic, Toryism therefore, would, could, and should support the agenda of radical, progressive, and collectivist movements, because these too are opposed to individualistic and capitalistic liberalism.

Traditional British Toryism, however, was even more opposed to those things than it was to classical liberalism. Indeed, one of its primary objections to classical liberalism was that liberalism would open the door for all sorts of other radical movements.

The Tories defended the interests of Crown, Church, nobility, and landed gentry against the rising class of merchants and factories owners who sought to reshape society into their image, reducing it to what Thomas Carlyle would dismiss as a “cash nexus”. Edmund Burke, the converted Whig of the 18th Century whose ideas would inspire the Tories of the 19th Century, spoke in disgust of how the age of chivalry had been supplanted by that of “sophisters, economists, and calculators”.

Do those sound like the kind of people who would approve of the establishment of an army of government bureaucrats and inspectors who think their university degrees give them the ability and right to micromanage everybody else’s affairs for them, answerable only to elected politicians, supported by levels of taxation that were unheard of prior to the 20th Century, and charged with the task of intruding into the everyday life of society to make sure everybody is treated fairly, and that members of previously disadvantaged groups are treated more fairly than others?

“Red Tories” and their admirers on the progressive Left make much out of the fact that Benjamin Disraeli, who helped reshape the Conservative Party in the mid 19th Century, in his Premiership under Queen Victoria introduced a number of policies aimed at alleviating the conditions of the working class. Disraeli, prior to his career in the Tory Party, had been considered a Radical of sorts and those searching for a pedigree for a Toryism that is red, believe that he brought socialist sympathies into the Tory Party with him which manifested itself as “One Nation Conservatism”.

Disraeli, however, was clearly attempting to thwart radical causes and movements with his policies, not accomplish their goals for them. Whatever his ideas may have been in his youth, Disraeli the statesman was a Tory by sentiment. Radicals were attempting to form an army out of the working classes to wage war against traditional society – they had already attempted revolutions across continental Europe in 1848-9. Disraeli hoped, by his programs, which were quite modest in comparison to those that became part of the 20th Century welfare state, to nip this threat in the bud. The idea behind “One Nation Conservatism” was not to create a society in which the “have nots” have a claim on what belongs to the “haves”, but to ensure that all classes had a stake in maintaining the traditional social order so that none could be talked by demagogues into seeking to tear it down.

While it is difficult to define a Tory economic position precisely there are a great many parallels between traditional Tory economic policy and the view known as “economic nationalism”. Economic nationalism was adopted as official policy by the Conservative Party of Canada in 1878 and remained Tory policy for decades. The last true Tory Prime Minister of Canada, John G. Diefenbaker, was certainly a committed economic nationalist.

What is economic nationalism?

Economic nationalism is the belief that the proper role of the government in the economy is to ensure the country’s economic prosperity by protecting its productive capacity and by maintaining its transportation infrastructure. In economic nationalism, however, the government is not responsible for guaranteeing the economic well-being of any individual in particular let alone all individuals in society. In economic nationalism, as in Adam Smith’s economic liberalism, people are the best administrators of their own economic well-being. The government looks out for the country’s economic interests, families and individuals look out for their own economic interests, and those who are for one reason or another incapable of looking to their own interests are cared for by institutions intermediate between the individual and the state.

What exactly is this “organic society” that is at the heart of traditional Toryism?

It is best understood by contrasting it with the liberal vision of society. Liberalism believed that individuals were prior to society, that society was the creation of individuals, and that society was best organized along the principle of voluntary contract. The relationships of the business world and the marketplace they believed were ideal patterns for all human relationships. Nobody would be bound by anything to which they had not consented beforehand.

Toryism, on the other hand, maintains that most basic social unit, the family, is itself prior to the individual, and that society is not a contractual construction of individuals, but a natural outgrowth of the social life that begins in the family. Families live together in neighborhoods, worship together in churches, and out of their cooperation form communities, which generate the customs, traditions, and prescription that form the cultural and social foundation upon which the political and economic edifice which is the country is built.

Society is organic, because the institutions which comprise it, have their distinct functions which cooperate together to make the whole work, the way a body’s organs and systems work together. In the Tory view of society, the Queen and her ministers have their place and their role, the Church has its place and role, the upper, middle, and lower classes have their places and roles, the neighborhood, the school, the family, have their places and roles, and there is a time and place for business and the market as well.

St. Paul in the twelfth chapter of his First Epistle to the Church in Corinth, likens the spiritual community which is the Church, the Body of Christ, to an organic body in this manner. Each part belongs to the body as much as every other part, and should not envy the others their roles. St. Paul wrote:

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

The same principle applies to the larger society as well.

Society, we are told by progressives and “Red Tories” has a responsibility to the widow and the orphan, to the poor, the sick and the infirm, and to the needy in general. They are correct in principle but err in their application. These societal responsibilities are traditionally met by institutions like the family, the church, and the neighborhood community. Government, which has its own place in society and its own role to play, is not well-suited for meeting these needs. The government exists to enforce the basic laws of society, to administer justice, punish crime, and to provide for the common security of the society. Other institutions would do poorly in these roles, just as government does poorly in the role of nurse, mother, and care provider.

Furthermore, when the government attempts to do these things which other institutions were designed to do, it undermines those institutions, weakening their authority and their role in society. To borrow from St. Paul again, it is as if the ear were saying to the hand “I have no need of thee”.

Toryism’s organic view of society is then, an argument against the welfare state, socialism, and the progressive, collectivist agenda in general and not an argument for these things. “Red Toryism” is a contradiction in terms.

The welfare-state is not an “organic society”. It is an attempt to re-create by government the organic society which liberalism had sought to destroy. Organic society, however, cannot be created by government fiat. It must grow naturally, out of the everyday communal life that is generated by the cooperative efforts of families, churches, and neighborhoods.

Robert Nisbet wrote, towards the end of the final chapter of his landmark The Quest For Community:

I cannot help thinking that what we need above all else in this age is a new philosophy of laissez-faire…We need a laissez faire that will hold fast to the ends of autonomy and freedom of choice, one that will begin not with the imaginary, abstract individual but with the personalities of human beings as they are actually given to us in association…What we need at the present time is the knowledge and administrative skill to create a laissez faire in which the basic unit will be the social group. (pp. 278-279).

Those words, originally written in 1953, come from a sociologist who spent his life as an advocate of both organic society rooted in local community and limited, non-intrusive, government. They express quite well the traditional Tory understanding of what society needs – even if they were written by one of the founders of American conservatism.