May They Rest in Peace

The last couple of years have seen the passing of several individuals whose thought has been influential on my own. In May of last year, the Hungarian born historian, John Lukacs passed away from congestive heart failure. I have had cause over the last month to recall Lukacs’ definition of history as “the remembered past” more than once. The past itself, of course, is beyond the reach of the mad iconoclasts, but history, through which we learn from the past, is under siege. It was from Lukacs, especially his first volume of memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), rather than from Mencius Moldbug, that I learned to embrace the label “reactionary.” He was an Anglophile and a Roman Catholic, who had fled to the United States after his native country was taken over first by the Nazis and then by the Communists, preferring America’s liberal republicanism over either of the rival twentieth century totalitarianisms, but whose sympathies in many ways lay with the pre-modern, pre-liberal, order of civilization. He warned against the dangers of populism and nationalism, but was also the author of a pamphlet that argued strongly against the kind of immigration that populists and nationalists generally oppose. He was also wise enough to see that the Modern Age was over, without turning that into a weird pretext for separating language from reality.

The following month came the news that Justin Raimondo had passed away from lung cancer. Raimondo was a very interesting character. He was raised in the state of New York and lived most of his adult life in California, two rather left-leaning states. He was the founder and editor of Antiwar.com, a website opposed to American military interventionism and adventurism. Raised Roman Catholic, he lost his faith, and was openly homosexual. While that may sound like the resume of an ultra-progressive, he supported arch-conservative Pat Buchanan all three times Buchanan ran for the presidency of the United States, to the point of actually working for the campaign. The last time Buchanan ran it was as the Reform candidate in 2000. Raimondo had addressed that party’s national convention urging them to nominate Buchanan, obviously successfully. More recently, and right up until his death, Raimondo had been a strong supporter of Donald J. Trump. His politics were, in fact, right-libertarian, and more specifically the kind of right-libertarian that is called “paleo-libertarian.” Think Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Hans-Herman Hoppe. Indeed, Raimondo was the author of the biography, An Enemy of the State (2000) of the father of paleo-libertarianism, Murry N. Rothbard. He was also the author of a history of the American “Old Right”, i.e., the American Right of the 1930s and 1940s that preceded William F. Buckley Jr., National Review, and the American Conservative movement. This Right began as opposition to the expansion of the American government in the Depression under FDR, and also on non-interventionist grounds opposed American entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbour. Raimondo’s history was entitled Reclaiming the American Right: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Conservative Movement (1993). Buchanan wrote the foreword. I have read both of these books, as well as his The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection (2003), although it was the monthly column he wrote for Chronicles in the last few years of his life that I appreciated the most out of all his writings.

Earlier this year, in a single week we lost both Sir Roger Scruton and Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien, who was the youngest member of the 1930s-40s Oxford literary club, the Inklings, will be remembered not as a primary author, but as the editor who took the supplementary writings to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, had left behind, edited them for publication.

Sir Roger Scruton, on the other hand, has left behind a vast corpus of writing on pretty much every subject imaginable. While primarily a philosopher who specialized in aesthetics – the branch of philosophy that deals with art and beauty – he was a true polymath. I have written reviews of two of his books – The Meaning of Conservatism (1980) and How to Think Seriously About The Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012). The first was written at the beginning of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and the presidency of Ronald Reagan to show that true conservatism was not an ideological argument for freedom and capitalism, per se, but a reflexive defence of the good things which make up a civilized order, which are “easily destroyed, but not easily created.” The second examined the conservative roots of environmentalism to make the case for the responsible preservation of the beauty of our surroundings and our natural resources while avoiding the pitfalls of extremism that the environmentalism movement is noted for falling into. Many other of his books, including but not limited to his memoir Gentle Regrets, his short introduction to Beauty, his books on the aesthetics of music, his history of the Anglican Church, his takedown of the thought of the leading intellectuals of the Postmodern and Critical Theory influenced New Left, and his defence of Western Civilization against those who would attack it from without and within, The West and the Rest, have been of tremendous benefit to me. Countless of his insights, such as into the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence”, as well as his countering the left-wing charge of “xenophobia” with that of “oikophobia”, a term borrowed from the Lake Poet Robert Southey, are particularly relevant to this moment in time. So, for that matter is his personal experience. As related in Gentle Regrets and elsewhere in his writings, it was when he witnessed student radicals in the late 1960s behaving basically the way BLM and Antifa are acting today, with nothing but Marxist gibberish to back up their actions, that he realized his fundamental opposition to this sort of thing and became a conservative. Let us hope that many today will experience something similar, in reaction against the revolting, in both senses of the word, “woke.”

Alan Clark used to refer to Enoch Powell, the Tory statesman who delivered a famous speech warning against immigration and the consequences of the Race Relations Bill to Birmingham in 1968, as “the prophet.” The same appellation could be applied to French author and explorer Jean Raspail, who died earlier this month at the age of 94. He travelled the world in his early life, exploring, and doing what could have been preparatory field work for a career as an anthropologist. His earliest writings were travel memoirs, later he turned to writing novels, incorporating his experiences of the world while globetrotting into his fiction. It was these which won him critical acclaim. His religious and political views – he was a traditionalist Roman Catholic, a royalist who longed for the restoration of a legitimate, Catholic, French monarchy, and someone who deplored most if not all modern ideas, trends, and movements – also found their way into his books. The most well-known of his novels, however, which appeared in French in 1973 and in English translation by Norman Shapiro in 1975, was The Camp of the Saints.

The title alone, borrowed from the twentieth chapter of St. John’s Apocalypse, suggests the prophetic nature of the novel. The story opens on Easter morning on the French Riviera, where a retired academic from his home near the ocean, watches as masses of liberal lunatics gather on the beach to welcome the arrival of a vast mass of the poorest of Calcutta’s poor, arriving on ninety-nine ships. The novel then goes back a few months in time to explain how they got to that point. The Belgian government had closed down a charitable adoption program when it was swamped with too many applications, after which, a prophet of sorts, “the turd eater”, having been turned away from the Belgian consulate, addresses the multitude with a parable that curiously borrows the lines from Revelation from which the title of the novel is derived, although twisting their meaning to the effect that the thousand years allotted to the God of the Christians was at an end, and now He must surrender His kingdom to Allah, Buddah, and an assortment of Hindu deities. At his encouragement they board the hundred ships – one is lost along the way – and set sail for France. This provokes much discussion in France over what is to be done – but due to the extreme liberal cultural climate, everyone - the politicians, news media and celebrities, clerics, very interestingly headed by a Latin American pope – all give the answer that the migrants must be accepted and welcomed. The armada is dubbed the “Last Chance Armada” as in the “last chance for mankind” and this, along with “We are all from the Ganges now” and other such tripe are the only acceptable way of speaking about the situation. A handful of individuals are brave enough to dissent – we are slowly introduced to them throughout the novel – and these all gather at the aforementioned academic’s house to make one last stand for Western Civilization. When the French president, who knows full well what must be done and had been counting on the only remaining right-wing publisher in France to make the point for him, sends the military to the beach, he cannot find the courage to order them to fire, and leaves it up to their consciences, at which point they defect. France is swamped and shortly thereafter coloured immigrant communities rise up in major cities throughout what was once Western civilization, while Western borders fall as the Chinese swarm into Russia, the Palestinians overwhelm Israel, etc. The narrator, indicates that the bastion from which he is writing, Switzerland is about to fall, bringing white, Christian, Western Civilization to an end forever.

It is almost twenty years since I read this novel for the first time. I have read it many times since and, to compound the thought crime indictment against me, have given copies of it out to others. Over the course of the last decade, it has come more and more to resemble a prophetic description of our own times. Its author lived to see this happen. Let us hope and pray that the story does not end the way he wrote it.

A New Apologetics is Needed

Today is June 28th which is a black letter day on the Church Kalendar, dedicated to St. Irenaeus, the second century Bishop of Lyons remembered for his Adversus Haereses, written against the Gnostic heresies of his day. Tomorrow, however, is the red letter Feast of St Peter and St Paul the Apostles, Martyrs. Both of these dates are appropriate for a brief discussion of Christian apologetics. This is a subject that ties in well with what we have been looking at last week, especially in Friday's essay about Critical Theory. The general theme of my last three essays has been the social science departments of the universities and how they have been functioning as indoctrination centres for far left ideology for much longer than many people realize. These were a continuation of an examination begun in May of how the universities have betrayed their foundations. Critical Theory, regarding which we only scratched the surface in my last essay, has from its beginnings in the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, spread throughout the humanities, turning these disciplines into instruments for instilling the kind of left-wing doctrine now manifesting itself as "wokeness." The founders of this transdisciplinary methodology made no attempt to disguise the fact that this was their goal - it is written right in to their account of Critical Theory as being distinguished from older forms of theory by its end of transforming its object, society as a whole, rather than understanding it. While obviously there is much in Critical Theory which somebody, like myself, who regards Sir Roger Scruton's observation that "good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created" as axiomatic, must oppose on political grounds, it also poses a specific challenge to the Church in the field of apologetics. Critical Theory, like its parent ideology Marxism is inherently hostile to the orthodox Christian faith and is a particularly effective tool of the enemies of the faith in that it inoculates those steeped in it against contrary evidence by making traditional forms of presenting evidence out to be part of the system of oppression that it seeks to overthrow, thus turning any traditional evidence-based argument raised against them into confirmation of their own position. The challenge in this for the Christian apologist is how to penetrate such a wall.

The reason that apologetics is a particularly suitable topic for today and tomorrow, is that St. Peter was the one who commanded that it be done, St. Paul is the best example in Scripture of someone who actually did it, and St. Irenaeus was a notable apologist among the Church Fathers.

The first thing that needs to be said about apologetics is that it does not mean the confession of wrongdoing and imploring of forgiveness. This needs to be stated emphatically in the present cultural climate, in which left-wing mobs are forcing people to make such public demonstrations, not for their sins, but for their skin colour, ancestry, and often sex and faith. There is a place - a prominent place - for confession and seeking forgiveness in Christianity, but never for any of those things. It is our sins, that we are commanded to confess in Christianity, and it is primarily God from Whom we seek forgiveness. Secondarily, of course, we are also commanded to seek the forgiveness of those we have harmed by our personal sins. This is enjoined upon us as individual believers as part of our living out of our faith, and collectively as a body is incorporated into our Church liturgy where it occupies a prominent place. Both Morning and Evening Prayer, the daily Offices in the Book of Common Prayer, open with a General Confession followed by a clerical pronunciation of God's absolution because it is only as penitent and forgiven sinners that we can enter into God's presence to worship Him in an acceptable way. For the same reason, a General Confession and absolution precede the liturgy consecrating the elements of the Sacrament in the order of Holy Communion. Obviously, confession of sin and forgiveness are central elements of orthopraxis. They are not, what is meant by apologetics.

The apology in apologetics is the same kind of apology in Plato's dialogue of that name. An apology was the speech on behalf of the defendant in the Greek court system. In Plato's Apology - and Xenophon's for that matter - we have an account of Socrates speaking in his own defence at his trial. He gives witty answers to the actual charges against him, suggesting that Aristophanes' play of a quarter of century earlier had so prejudiced Athens against him as to lead to these proceedings. The real issue, he maintains, is that he has annoyed his fellow citizens with his constant questioning. He gives an account of why he has pursued this path and concludes by saying that if he were to be offered release on promise to cease and desist he could not give it because "the unexamined life is not worth living." Condemned to death, he accepts his fate but warns the consequences will be worse for the city than for him.

Christian apologetics is the offering of such a defence of the Christian faith. It is to be distinguished from evangelism, which is the proclamation of the basic message of the Christian faith, the Gospel, the Good News that God has given mankind a Redeemer in His Son Jesus Christ, Who died for our sins and rose again. Evangelism has as its end that those who hear would believe and be brought into the Church. Apologetics is auxiliary to evangelism, not a substitute for it or an alternative means of seeking the same end. This cannot be stressed enough because the most basic mistake an apologist can make is to try and do the work of an evangelist through apologetics. Few, if any, have ever been argued into believing.

St. Peter commanded apologetics when he wrote "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear: Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ." (1 Pet. 3:15-16)

In the book of Acts we have multiple examples of this in the life of the Apostle Paul. In his speeches to the multitude in Jerusalem in Acts 22, before Felix the governor in Acts 24, and before King Agrippa, Berenice and Festus in Acts 26, St. Paul exemplified apologetics in the meaning that most closely conforms with St. Peter's words. Here, St. Paul had been accused of wrongdoing, and gives an account of his faith, in answer to the false accusations against him. This would be one of the primary tasks of the early apologists of the first few centuries before Christianity was legalized. Frequently, the Church would be accused of all sorts of things such as cannibalism and incest, and the apologists would answer these charges and defend the faith with the end of achieving peace and legal acceptance in the Roman Empire. However, attacks on the faith also took the form of philosophical arguments against its content. Apologists would also answer such arguments, and after the legalization of Christianity this became the primary task of apologetics. Interestingly, St. Paul also provides an example of this sort of apologetics in his address to the Stoics and Epicureans at the Areopagus in Acts 17, although he was not responding to a specific philosophical objection to Christianity so much as providing a philosophical explanation that he had been invited to give by the curious.

In St. Irenaeus we find an example of yet another role of apologetics - defending the orthodox faith against attacks from within by those teaching heresy. In the Scriptures, it is St. John who practices and enjoins this aspect of apologetics in his first two epistles. St. Irenaeus, although he was a bishop in what is now France, was raised in the Church in Smyrna in what is now Turkey. The bishop of that Church was Polycarp, who had been a disciple of St. John and ordained directly by him.

Apologetics has remained an important element of Christian theology ever since. It is divided into branches differently depending upon whether the criteria is the particular element of Christianity being defended or the particular methodological approach being used.

Today, the challenge from Critical Theory is demanding an answer from Christian apologetics. The apologetics of the last two centuries has been largely addressed to arguments arising out of the various strands of Modern philosophy that have descended from the English/Scottish, French and German branches of the so-called Enlightenment. The "Postmodernism" that arose in French art and literary criticism in the same period that Critical Theory was spreading throughout the humanities has also been addressed extensively, although perhaps to a degree unnecessarily because it is its own refutation. Critical Theory has not received adequate attention from apologists and, indeed, can be said to have largely been ignored by them. Dr. Neil Shenvi and Dr. Patrick Sawyer have made Critical Theory the focus of their defence of the Christian faith, but their work seems to be only in the last year or two, and there are few others. This seems extremely odd because when you look at the tensions that have existed between orthodox Christianity and other social groups in the West in the last two to three decades the arguments of the other groups have come in a Critical Theory framework. Considering that Critical Theory had dominated the humanities and social sciences, that the West is now in the grip of a neo-Maoist cultural revolution that spouts Critical Theory-derived slogans in which there have been calls for a Kristallnacht against stained-glass depictions of our Lord and Saviour, and many within the Churches are trying to incorporate this entirely un-Christian way of thinking, we need to do better than that.

Evidential apologetics is obviously worthless for this purpose. Evidential apologetics is the kind of apologetics that argues "Christianity is true because of such-and-such proofs." "Scientific creationism" is entirely a form of this sort of apologetics approach. It is useless against Critical Theory because of the latter's built-in explanation of all evidence, inductive or deductive, brought against it as being part of the system of oppression. Presuppositional apologetics might be better, but only slightly, at least without significant revision.

What is needed is a whole new apologetical approach that counters Critical Theory at the level of its own basic claims. The idea that oppression conveys moral, intellectual, and cultural enlightenment upon the oppressed ,is one example of Critical Theory's claims, Apologetics needs to be able to counter these claims without setting off the intellectual loop that translates any counter-argument into confirmation of the Theory. It is almost tempting to borrow from Nietzsche's master-slave morality distinction, which comes from the rival branch of the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition to that in which the founders of Critical Theory were steeped, but, of course, that is as anti-Christian a line of thinking as Critical Theory itself.

There is much work to be done in laying the foundation of a counter-Critical Theory apologetical approach. It would be well to emphasize again the distinction between apologetics and evangelism. People are seldom if ever argued into believing, and those who are trapped in Critical Theory behind its anti-argument wall, are even less reachable. Reaching them must not be our priority - we must leave that to the Holy Spirit, working through the Gospel, in answer to prayer. It is to prevent others from falling into the Critical Theory mind-trap that must be the goal of our efforts.

It Is Time to Criticize Critical Theory

If you have not already figured it out by now, please allow me to state that the perpetrators of the present wave of anti-white race hatred and Maoist cultural revolution cannot be reasoned out of their narrow and highly destructive point of view. It is not for the sake of rescuing them from their error that we must speak such truths as the fact that when the percentage of blacks among those who die at the hands of the police in the United States is compared with the percentage of blacks among perpetrators of murder, robbery, and other violent crime rather than their percentage of the general population, the first percentage is disproportionately low rather than disproportionately high. It is for the sake of having a sane grasp on reality ourselves. A wall of immunity has effectively been erected around the insular, “woke” point of view protecting it from any intrusion by “things as they are.”

How did we ever arrive at the place where so many people accept the elevation of personal experience as a member of a designated group as being authoritative over verifiable fact?

A large part of the answer to that has to do with the way in which the universities have become leftist re-education camps for brainwashing and indoctrinating young people with wokeness. This is true of universities in general, although the biggest culprits have been the humanities and social sciences departments. While the ascendancy of the STEM disciplines points to another, older, problem in academia, the fragmentation of what ought to be regarded as an integrated whole, human knowledge, they have been more resistant to being turned into factories of wokeness than the humanities. The humanities are venerable in themselves, but they have been corrupted by the social sciences, the source of the problem. My last two essays examined the inherent leftism of sociology, which aspired to be the umbrella discipline of the social sciences, and how the rise of the Boasian school of cultural anthropology amounted to a left-wing takeover of the discipline that produced the immediate ancestor of today’s woke anti-racism.

In this essay I will be looking at Critical Theory, which was the main channel through which the leftism of the social sciences infected the humanities.

Critical Theory is the methodology associated with what is commonly known as the “Frankfurt School.” The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory are often equated with “Cultural Marxism” but the latter is far less precise and a distinction needs to be made here. What is usually meant by Cultural Marxism is the infiltration and takeover of culture generating institutions by leftists who then subvert these institutions into generating a culture that supports progressive causes. Taken broadly, this could describe everything that I have been talking about in my last two essays as well as this one. As a specific strategy, it has more to do with the theories of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader who was imprisoned by the Fascists, than with the Frankfurt School. Gramsci theorized that the capitalist bourgeoisie had prevented the socialist revolution that Marxist theory regarded as inevitable by means of culture through which they maintained their hegemony over the proletariat by causing them to value the bourgeois values as their own. His theory and proposals for a proletariat counter-culture were translated into a strategy recognizable as Cultural Marxism in its ordinary sense by the student revolutionaries of the 1960s, particularly Rudi Dutschke who coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.” While perhaps similar in intention, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School attacked Western Civilization at a much deeper level than this.

The Frankfurt School gets its nickname from the city in Germany in which it was founded. In 1923, Felix José Weil endowed the newly formed Universität Frankfurt am Main, now Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, with funds for the establishment of an affiliate sociological think tank. This thinktank was given the name Institut für Sozialforschung - the Institute for Social Research. It was thoroughly Marxist from the beginning, but in the 1920s under its first two directors its Marxism was the textbook, straight out of Marx and Engels, variety. In 1930 a new director, Max Horkheimer took over, and under his leadership it developed the distinctive form of neo-Marxist thought that has been associated with it ever since. It was Horkheimer who recruited to the think tank most of the notable names of its first generation – the psychoanalyist Erich Fromm, the social critic and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno, the cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin, and the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Only a few years after Horkheimer’s directorate began, the Institute was forced into exile by the rise of Adolf Hitler. The Third Reich revoked the Institute’s charter, and they fled briefly to Switzerland before re-locating to New York City in 1935 where Columbia University offered them a new home.

You may recall from my last essay that Franz Boas had become Professor of Anthropology at this very university in 1899, and in the next two to three decades, his doctoral students at Columbia, indoctrinated in his left-wing version of anthropology, had spread out to take charge of all the major anthropology departments in the United States. Now, a second major centre of left-wing thought was located in the same university. Their ideology was not identical. Boas was well-known for his opposition to psychoanalysis in general and Freud in particular, whereas the Frankfurt School included a number of prominent Freudians and it frequently blended the ideas of Marx and Freud. Interestingly, one of the best known and most influential examples of the latter, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1966) is an argument against the same thing, sexually repressive morality, that the anti-Freudian disciple of Boas, Margaret Mead argued against in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). There were, however, a number of strong parallels between Boasian and Frankfurt School thought, most notably when it came to anti-racism. Boas, remember, pushed very hard for a cultural approach to anthropology which leaned heavily towards nurture as opposed to nature, against previous anthropologists, especially from the physical branch of the discipline, who stressed nature in their study of race, and his disciples, most notably Ashley Montagu, took this to the extreme of denying the existence of race, a denial which in the second half of the twentieth century came to be imposed as dogma upon all of the social sciences and even the real sciences. The year Boas died, Horkheimer became scientific director for the American Jewish Committe which at his recommendation sponsored a series of “Studies in Prejudice” that were published with Horkheimer as the general editor. The most influential of these was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), authored by a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, headed by Horkheimer’s Frankfurt associate Theodor Adorno. The gist of the book was that the average white, Christian, middle class, family in the United States of the 1940s to 1950s, was turning everyone into evil racist Nazis by suppressing their homosexuality and instilling in them respect for their fathers as authority figures.

That this book's idiotic and vile thesis received general acceptance among the liberal Left can be attributed to the fact that it was presented as scientific research and progressives tend to uncritically accept anything that is handed to them in the name of science even if it is obviously nothing of the sort. It is interesting, therefore, to note that while Horkheimer served the AJC in the capacity of science director, Critical Theory as he himself had explained it was a repudiation of science.

In an essay entitled “Traditional and Critical Theory” which appeared in 1937 and served as a basic introduction to the methodology of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer criticized the fact gathering methodology, and the organizational principle of linking propositions into a systematic whole, of the traditional theory which had prevailed in the social sciences in imitation of the natural sciences, and which he condemned as serving the “industrial production techniques” which dominate capitalist society. His own Critical Theory he distinguished by the fact that it does not strictly separate subject and object, but includes a moral element of protest against the existing order, and an activist element of striving to change that order. It is to be applied to society as a whole.

While there are some interesting parallels between the Frankfurt School’s criticism of traditional theory and the orthodox Christian traditionalist criticism of Modern science these are dwarfed by the major differences. If the integration of the social sciences and the humanities in Critical Theory sounds like an appealing step away from the fragmentation of knowledge in the Modern Age, for example, realize that in Critical Theory this is not an argument for recovering a holistic view of things as they are that was lost in the transition to modernity but for weaponizing every discipline in the cause of revolution. The revolutionary cause is, in the end, the chief defining characteristic of Critical Theory and with Critical Theory, as with “orthodox” Marxism, and indeed with every other form of revolutionary ideology, the assumption that the revolutionary who is quick to point out the injustices and oppression of the existing order is capable of replacing it with one without injustice or oppression, or at least with significantly less injustice and oppression, is hardly borne out by the history of revolutions which almost always increase the total amount of injustice and oppression rather than lessen it. If we look around at what is being done today by mobs stirred on by people whose minds have been steeped in Critical Theory, it is evident that these revolutionaries are no exception.

This essay has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be said about Critical Theory, which has evolved and expanded considerably since the days in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). My purpose here was not to provide an exhaustive treatment of the subject – obviously, that cannot be done in an essay – but an introductory glance at the link through which the agenda the Left was pursuing in the social sciences already in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spilled over into the humanities in the mid twentieth century. I hope to explore this further in future essays. In the meantime, for a look back at many intellectuals who were influenced by this sort of thinking in the last sixty years, including Jürgen Habermas the most prominent figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School – which returned to Frankfurt after the war, leaving some of its leading figures behind – see the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2016).

The Irrationality of Anti-Racism

It is amusingly ironic that in the taxonomy of modern thought, racism is considered to be a species belonging to the genus prejudice. The word prejudice refers to certain types of non-rational beliefs or ideas. Note that I said non rational not irrational. Something can be non-rational without being irrational. Something that is irrational is contrary to logic or reason. Something that is non rational is not derived from logic or reason but is not necessarily contrary to logic or reason. Prejudice, a word formed from components that mean “before” and “judgement”, denotes beliefs or ideas that have been formed before the process of making a reason based judgement. It has both a positive and a negative sense, although the former is all but forgotten in our day and age. Prejudice in the positive sense refers to the ideas that have been passed on to us through tradition that enable us to make decisions in the absence of the information necessary to form a fully rational judgment. Edmund Burke praised prejudice in this sense of the word at great length in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the other sense of the term, prejudice is a negative opinion formed against a person or group without sufficient evidence to support it. Both forms of prejudice are non-rational, neither is necessarily irrational, but the latter kind of prejudice is frowned upon because it involves unjustified injury to the reputation of a person or group. Racism is considered to fall under the category of the second kind of prejudice. This brings us back to our initial statement. The irony is due to the fact that anti-racism, in the sense of the set of beliefs that expresses itself in organized activism against racism, is not just non-rational but thoroughly irrational.

As evidence of this claim, I offer the anti-racist response to the words "All lives matter".

This expression is obviously itself a response to "Black lives matter", a phrase which began as a Twitter hashtag seven years ago when George Zuckerman was acquitted for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and which became the name of an organized activist movement. For the sake of distinguishing between the phrase qua phrase and the movement it has been attached to, quotation marks will be used when the phrase is intended and the capitalization of the initial letter of each word will indicate that the movement is intended. Note carefully the nature of the response. “All lives matter” does not contradict what is stated by “Black lives matter.” Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact, it clearly affirms it. Black lives are part of the extension of all lives, therefore if all lives matter, black lives matter. Furthermore, “All lives matter” is more inclusive than “Black lives matter.” In anti-racist theory and rhetoric “inclusivity” is ordinarily considered to be good, desirable and ideal, while its opposite “exclusivity” is treated as being bad and undesirable. Indeed, one of the principle objections to racism is that it excludes people. A stereotypically racist club, for example, is one that excludes people from membership on the basis of their skin colour.

Anti-racists, however, regard “All lives matter” as being a racist slogan, take offense whenever they hear it, and demand that people stop using it.

Let us look at a couple of examples from this past week alone.

Grant Napear, long-time play-by-play television announcer for the Sacramento Kings basketball team, as well as the host of a show on Sacramento’s KHTK Sports 1140 radio station, was fired from the latter and made to resign from the former, because of a tweet including the slogan “All lives matter.”

Here in Manitoba, our provincial premier Brian Pallister, speaking on Tuesday about the anti-racism protest that was scheduled to take place on Friday and in support of that protest said “Black lives matter, All lives matter, of course” and was immediately attacked for doing so. Someone named Elsa Kaka, who apparently hosts a podcast entitled “The Ordinary Black Girl Podcast” gave an interview to the press in which she said “'All lives matter' is a deeply offensive and problematic phrase that has been used to derail and disregard the Black Lives Matter movement.” Pallister, much to my disgust, apologized on Wednesday.

How could "All lives matter" possibly be "deeply offensive and problematic" to anyone except those who hold and cherish the belief that some lives don't matter?

The rational answer is that it cannot. The late Sir Roger Scruton frequently talked about the distinction between "giving offence" and "taking offence" and here we have a textbook example. The phrase "All lives matter" does not give offence in what it affirms, those who object to it are taking offence.

The offence they take from the slogan has nothing to do with the meaning of the words themselves. Indeed, any attempt to find fault with the assertion made by those words would immediately render them susceptible to the charge that they think some lives don't matter. Their justification for taking offence, when they deign to give such a justification rather than simply assuming that their taking offence is itself its own sufficient justification, is to either rely upon the ad hominem argument that the slogan is racist because those who say it are racist, object to the intention of the words, i.e., to counter the "Black lives matter" slogan and criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, or argue that "All lives matter" detracts from their own message which is that the institutions and structure of American, and by extension all Western, societies are embedded with a racism that treats black lives as if they don't matter.

The first of these arguments merits no response.

The problem with the objection to the intent of the words is that it requires the assumption that the Black Lives Matter movement is or ought to be beyond criticism. This assumption is both false and dangerous. No movement, let alone one the "peaceful demonstrations" of which have a tendency to become violent or degenerate into riots, ought to be beyond criticism.

The final argument rests upon a belief that is widely held even though it is demonstrably wrong.

Let us consider the specific type of alleged institutional racism which has been the primary focus of the Black Lives Matter movement. Police in the United States, especially white police, are accused of being racist towards blacks and expressing that racism by making blacks more than anyone else the objects of the violent abuse of their authority.

The facts simply do not bear this out. In 2017 American police killed 457 whites and 223 blacks, in 2018 they killed 399 whites and 209 blacks, in 2019 they killed 370 whites and 235 blacks, and in this year so far they have killed 172 whites and 88 blacks. Now, the fact that the total number of whites killed each year exceeds the total number of blacks is not sufficient to disprove the allegation. It is to be expected because there are more whites than blacks in the United States. In 2017, for example, there were 247.62 million whites in the United States and 43.5 million blacks. Now here is where the argument for police racism comes in. There were 5.69 times the number of whites than blacks in the United States in 2017. By contrast the number of whites killed by police was only twice as high. This, the anti-racists maintain, proves that police are racist. If they weren't, the number of whites killed by the police would be around 5-6 times higher than blacks so killed. However, there is another figure which must be taken into consideration. In the same year out of reported non-fatal violent crimes, 2, 230, 910 involved white perpetrators and 1, 112, 610 involved black perpetrators according to the American Bureau of Justice Statistic’s National Crime Victimization Survey. In other words, the number of whites who committed non-fatal violent crimes was only twice the number of blacks, the exact same ratio as is found among white and black victims of police killings, and equally disproportionate to the relative size of the two racial populations. Since the vast majority of cases where police kill a suspect involve violent crimes - the recent example of George Floyd being an obvious exception as it involved passing a bad bill - it is far more rational, if far less politically correct, to attribute the disproportion in the percentage of blacks among victims of police violence to their identical overrepresentation among violent crime offenders than to racial prejudice on the part of the police. Since this holds true for pretty much any year for which these statistics are available, and studies have repeatedly shown that policemen of every race are far more likely to shoot a member of their own race than of the other, just as criminals of all races are far more likely to choose victims of their own race than of another, this conclusion is quite definite. Arguments which take the form of "but look at what happened to fill-in-the-blank" are not valid as a rebuttal. Ironically, they involve an extrapolation from the specific to the general that is very similar to the sort that anti-racists would immediately recognize as invalid in the case of racial stereotypes.

Clearly, the anti-racist condemnation of "All lives matter" is utterly irrational. This is only to be expected. After all, we are talking about a belief system/movement that fifty-six years after an American Congress that was by a vast majority white passed a bill protecting blacks against the private discrimination of employers, landlords, etc., sixty-three years after a white American president used military force to racially integrate a high school in Arkansas, forcing it to comply with the ruling of an all-white Supreme Court three years earlier that all segregation laws were unconstitutional, and one-hundred fifty-five years after an all-white American Congress abolished black slavery, maintains that institutional white racism is the biggest problem in the United States. Furthermore, it is a belief system the representatives of which frequently claim that all whites are racist and only whites are racist, which very much suggests that it is itself an example of the very thing it ostensibly opposes. The assertion that there is an evil demanding extirpation, of which all whites and only whites are guilty, cannot be anything other than racism against white people - frequently on the part of white people. It is thoroughly and utterly irrational

Liberalism Exposed by Orlando

“It's just obvious”, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman told Peter Brimelow back in the 1990s, “you can't have free immigration and a welfare state.”

These words are not as well-known as his “there is no such thing as a free lunch” but they ought to be. It is perfectly consistent to be opposed to both open immigration and the welfare state. One can make a rational case for either against the other. To try and have both, however, as all Western ex-nations have sought to do for decades, is to invite every would-be free rider in the world to come to your country and leech off of you.

Friedman, who was a libertarian, would have chosen free immigration over a welfare state. I, a somewhat libertarian, High Tory patriot, would lean towards having neither, while regarding a modest welfare state – much more modest than we have today – as the lesser of the two evils. These are positions that can be intelligently defended. The progressive or left-liberal position that we must have both is not, which is perhaps the reason why progressives, rather than try to intelligently defend the indefensible, instead try to silence everyone else with emotional accusations of being cruel, hard-hearted, inhumane, bigoted, unfeeling and the like.

This is not the only example of progressive liberals simultaneously endorsing two things that are mutually exclusive. If someone were to say “it’s just obvious that you cannot have a culture that affirms and celebrates homosexuality while also being open to Islam” he would be just as right as Friedman was. Once again, a person can argue against both of these things simultaneously without self-contradiction. Or he might make a convincing case for the one that excludes the other. It is those who insist on having both who are writing a prescription for disaster. Once again it is progressive liberals who do this and who denounce anyone who opposes either of their pet causes as being bigoted and unenlightened.

If the folly in this had not already been obvious before, it was certainly exposed for all the world to see by the events in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. In what has been described as the worst such shooting in American history, a twenty-nine year old son of immigrants from Afghanistan, called 9-11 to announce his intentions and his allegiance to the Islamic State and then went into a gay club called the Pulse and shot the place up, killing about fifty people and wounding about fifty others.

Liberals, with the exception of those gay rights groups that have now endorsed the Donald Trump campaign, have learned absolutely nothing from this about the mutual exclusivity of the causes they espouse in the name of such banal drivel as “social justice” and “human rights”. If we do not include US President Barack Obama’s emotional meltdown and hate-filled tirade against Trump the liberal response to the shooting has basically been twofold.

First, quite predictably, they are blaming the incident on the accessibility of guns in the United States and what they call the American “gun culture” and calling for more restrictions on gun owners. That way, the next time someone declares his loyalty to ISIS and hatred of the United States, and in the name of Allah sets out on a one-man jihad, his efforts will be frustrated and defeated by the fact that he has to obey a law that prevents him from owning guns. Peter Hitchens has already said all that needs to be said about this kind of stupidity when in his reflections on Orlando he observed that America’s gun laws were a lot laxer fifty years ago before these kind of shooting incidents became common place, noting that such shootings also occur in countries with strict gun control like Britain, Germany and Finland while being much rarer in Switzerland. Hitchens argued that “an inquiry into the correlation between drug abuse and violence” would be “the most rational and effective response to the horrific news from Orlando” which suggestion contains far more good sense than all of those coming from the gun-hating lunatics on the left.

Secondly, and again predictably, they have been blaming conservative Christians for the incident. The same people who consider it to be a horrible and unfair generalization to blame the actions of this man on his own religion have no problem blaming it on another one altogether. This is what enlightenment looks like, folks, and it is indistinguishable from what we used to call being just plain crazy.

According to the looney-tune left, Christians are responsible for creating a “culture of homophobia” which drove this young Muslim into a murderous frenzy. He pledged his loyalty to a regime that kills homosexuals by throwing them from rooftops. Islam is the dominant religion in the ten countries in the world where homosexuality is a capital offence. Yet, liberals expect us to believe that the source of his murderous hatred is not his own religion but Christianity, a faith whose adherents are also routinely targeted by ISIS for death.

Who do they think they are fooling?

Liberals maintain that all religions are equal, an idea that can be held only in a mind that regards all religious beliefs as false and therefore takes seriously the beliefs of neither Christians nor Muslims. As Sir Roger Scruton recently explained it “the new ideology of non-discrimination” means “not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable.” Not believing anything himself, the liberal cannot accept that Christians might genuinely believe that God made mankind male and female and gave the sexes to each other in marriage so that we are not therefore free to change this institution to accommodate homosexuals in the way the liberal considers to be reasonable. No can he accept that Muslims might sincerely believe in anything that would prevent their full integration into Western society or lead to a violent clash with Western culture or a portion thereof. Faced with evidence that somebody does actually believe something, he seeks to silence that person and extirpate the belief for, as Sir Roger further explains “What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them.”

Despite their promises of twenty years ago that their campaign for gay rights would not infringe upon anyone else’s rights and certainly not upon the freedom of religion of devout believers, the ink had hardly dried upon the legislation and court rulings that secured their victory in Canada, the United States, and throughout the Western world, before Christians were being dragged into court, fined thousands of dollars, and forced out of their businesses because they would not alter their Christian convictions to suit liberalism.

This is the behaviour of bullies, and bullies are natural cowards. It is not surprising therefore, that much depends upon whose beliefs have come into conflict with liberalism. Liberals are not about to risk the beheadings, bombings, and other messy possibilities that might result from offending believers whose faith has not been three-quarters diluted with liberalism already and includes concepts like jihad. Therefore, when someone does something in the name of Islam that offends them, they take it out on Christians. Which is why today, their response to Orlando looks less like genuine outrage over a horrible atrocity and more like the cynical use of the suffering of one of the groups for which they feign compassion at the hands of another to further kick a defeated foe while he is down.

That’s just how classy they are.

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 Patriotism

One of the most familiar remarks of Samuel Johnson, as recorded by his biographer James Boswell, is that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Lest anyone think that his remarkable subject was impugning the virtue of patriotism, Boswell explained that it was false rather than true patriotism, of which Dr. Johnson was speaking. This clarification would have been unnecessary for anyone who had read “The Patriot”, a tract addressed to the electorate of Great Britain that had been written and published by the famous lexicographer and wit in 1774, an election year, and the year before he made his famous remark. In that pamphlet, Dr. Johnson explained what true patriotism was and how it could be distinguished from patriotism falsely professed to cover up baser qualities, motivations, and actions. He defined a patriot as “he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest” and declared that “no man can deserve a seat in parliament, who is not a patriot,“ for “no other man will protect our rights: no other man can merit our confidence.” (1)

Dr. Johnson was a Tory – a classical conservative who supported traditional royal and ecclesiastical authority against radical, revolutionary, and modernizing forces – and two years after his pamphlet was published, thirteen of Britain’s colonies in North America declared their independence from the Crown and Parliament, launching the war in which the revolting colonists, fighting against the Tories who remained loyal to their king, would take upon themselves the name of patriots. This revolution grew and developed out of the kind of patriotism Dr. Johnson had dismissed as false and so “The Patriot” can be read as a judgement on the American Revolutionaries as well as the Parliamentary Whigs. It stands to this day as the best worded statement of the Tory view of patriotism in the English language.

Such a statement is more needed now than when it was first written. For while Dr. Johnson wrote against politicians who cloaked themselves in patriotism to hide their unworthy motives and goals, the two and a half centuries since have seen the rise of far greater threats that call for a strong dose of true patriotism as their antidote. Six years after the Treaty of Paris brought the American Revolutionary War to an end another revolution broke out in France, the first of the revolutionary movements that would target royalty, the nobility, and the established Church in the name of “the people” in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and which would ultimately produce the terror states of Nazism and Communism, foreshadowed in the Reign of Terror in the French Republic of the mid-1790s. These movements were inspired by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who in his call for a revolution that would establish a state in which the will of the people would be sovereign and all opposition to that will would be brutally supressed became at once the father of modern democracy and of totalitarianism. He also became the father of what in the nineteenth century would be dubbed nationalism.

Although many confuse the two, nationalism is not patriotism. Nor, for that matter, is it right-wing in the historic and traditional sense of this term although it is widely thought to be so today. The historic right is identical with Toryism and stood for royalty, nobility, the established church, organic community, tradition, and a concept of the common good that encompassed all of these things. Nationalism, from the French Revolution through to the Third Reich, was opposed to all of these things and allied with democracy, revolution, totalitarianism, and in the case of the Third Reich, socialism. It is the inevitable product of Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty when the idea of the people is equated with that of the volk, the nation, or the ethnic group, as it was almost universally so equated until 1945.

The difference between nationalism and patriotism was best explained by two Catholic, monarchists, from central Europe who taught in the United States, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and John Lukacs. (2) Just as the French Revolutionaries had joined mutually exclusive concepts when they included both liberty and equality in their motto, Kuehnelt-Leddihn explained, so have those who speak of “blood and soil”. Blood, nationalism, and equality, go together he argued, for “blood is an equalizing and generalizing factor”, as do soil, patriotism, and freedom because “the soil makes free men (the peasant and the landed nobleman are free)”, but the two sets do not mix well with each other. (3) Furthermore, nationalism is argumentative, he maintains, for the nationalist is always trying to prove his nation to be superior, whereas patriotism is not for:

Just as an intelligent man would never try to argue that his parents were the “best in the world,” so the patriot considers his attachment to his country a matter of loyalty. (4)

Lukacs put it this way:

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a “people,” justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist. (5)

Patriotism is the feeling of attachment and loyalty one has to one’s home as extended to his country. Edmund Burke, a friend of Dr. Johnson’s although, ironically, almost certainly one of those he had in mind when he spoke of the false patriotism that is the “last refuge of a scoundrel”, notably remarked that:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind. (6)

This affection for home that, taken to a larger scale, becomes patriotism, is one that we naturally develop unless something happens to prevent its development and it is inseparably tied to another natural affection, our love for our family. It is the fact that our family, our loved ones, live there, that makes a place our home, for apart from this it would be merely a house, a building. Therefore, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Lukacs are right to say that the focus of patriotism is on soil rather than blood, the true love of country cannot exclude one’s countrymen any more than love of home can exclude one’s family.

It is vital that we recognize this because a much greater threat than nationalism has developed in Western civilization. Since 1945, liberalism and the left have held up Adolf Hitler’s example as having permanently discredited the idea of volk or nation, i.e., a group connected by ties of blood, language, culture, and history, at least for Western countries. At the same time they continue to affirm the basic idea that was the foundation of both Hitler’s nationalism and his socialism – Rousseau’s concept of popular sovereignty, despite the fact that this concept is far more closely tied to the form of despotism Hitler practiced than the idea of nationality and that this concept, divorced from that of the volk or nation, produced despotism on an even larger scale in the Communist countries. (7) The result has been the permeation of Western civilization by a perverse ethnomasochism. If nationalists insist on the superiority of their own race, culture, and nation over all others, this ethnomasochism insists on the superiority of all other peoples and cultures to their own and expresses a death wish for its own people and culture. This is far more morally reprehensible than even the most jingoist of nationalisms, but, like the envy at the heart of socialism, it hides behind the mask of virtue - or at least what modern minds mistake for virtue in the empty concept of tolerance. Roger Scruton has described this ethnomasochism as oikophobia, giving this word the meaning of “the repudiation of inheritance and home”. (8)

From the Scylla of nationalism, which sacrificed millions in war to its idols of race and nation, we would appear to have escaped only to fall into the gaping maw of the Charybdis of ethnomasochistic oikophobia, (9) which would sacrifice all Western peoples and cultures to its own far deadlier Moloch.

Faced with these modern alternatives, the Tory looks to the ancient virtue of patriotism, the natural love for home extended to take in one's country, complete with people, customs, and institutions, as the antidote to both these poisons.


(1) It can be read online here: http://www.samueljohnson.com/thepatriot.html
(2) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was Austrian, John Lukacs is Hungarian. In addition to being Roman Catholic monarchists, with a respect for bourgeois liberalism and a contempt for democratic populism who were refugees from totalitarian regimes in their home countries, both men were professors of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, Lukacs being picked by Kuehnelt-Leddihn as his successor, when he returned to Europe in 1947.
(3) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace of the Herd: Or Procustes at Large, (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1943) p. 196. Kuehnelt-Leddihn originally had this book published under the penname Francis Stuart Campbell. That liberty and equality are mutually exclusive is, of course, the theme of his Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of our Times (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers Ltd., 1952).
(4) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot, (Washington D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990) p. 199.
(5) John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 36.
(6) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Vol. 1, (Paternoster Row, London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1834), pp. 398-399. Reflections was originally published in 1790.
(7) Modern despots like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, practiced tyranny on a larger scale than history has ever known before. These dictators saw themselves as the embodiments of Rousseau’s “general will” and in Hitler’s case, his power was derived from his demagogic ability to mesmerize the masses and rally them behind him.
(8) Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), p. 24.
(9) Several movements that call themselves "nationalisms" today are defensive responses to ethnomasochistic oikophobia. The negative portrayal of nationalism in this essay should not be taken as applying to these except in cases where they unmistakably join the concept of the nation with that of Rousseau's "sovereign people" as in nineteenth to early twentieth century nationalisms.

The Tory and Social Legislation

The Tory is the classical conservative in whose traditional view of society the common good can only be achieved through the alliance of royal and ecclesiastical authority. He accepts capitalism, the economy in which business is privately owned and operated and goods and services are bought and sold in an open market, with the qualifications that the market can only perform its function of converting self-interest into the common good, when set in the context of the social and civil order and of a moral and cultural tradition which supplies the brakes on our tendency to take the basic human appetite for acquisition to excess in the vice of Avarice that the market itself lacks. He rejects socialism, the utopian dream of achieving greater justice and happiness through the collective ownership of productive property, as something unfit for men as they actually are and which in practice could only increase injustice and misery and, worse, as being the sin of Envy trying to hide its ugly face behind the masks of charity and compassion.


The topic of socialism raises the question of social legislation, by which name we designate laws passed and programs operated by the state for the purpose of ameliorating the human condition by alleviating suffering and want. Today such legislation is usually regarded as falling under the province of socialism. Indeed, there are many people, who would think first of this, rather than collective ownership, when they hear the word socialism. Yet historically, it was Tories who introduced several key elements of social legislation. (1) Furthermore, they did so with the explicit motivation of combating socialism.


The most important figure in the history of Tory social legislation was Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, who served under Queen Victoria as Prime Minister briefly in 1868, then again from 1874 to 1880. In the 1870s his government passed multiple reform acts aimed at improving the conditions of the lower and working classes, but more importantly he put forward a theoretical justification for these bills, grounded in Tory principles. Decades before he became Prime Minister he wrote the novel Sybil which illustrated his arguments. From the sixteenth century until his own, he argued, a series of factors including the confiscation of the church lands under Henry VIII, the enclosure of the commons, industrialization, and the growth of the cities, caused the lower classes to lose so much security and so many of their traditional rights as to make the rich and the poor in effect, “two nations”. The Tory must seek to re-integrate these into “one nation” that secures the rights of rich and poor alike, lest the latter become the followers of some demagogue or socialist bent on revolution. He appealed to the traditional Tory principle of noblesse oblige – that those in high social, political, and economic positions have duties to those in lower positions – to make his case.


In Disraeli’s “one nation conservatism” we see the fundamental difference between the Tory and socialist arguments for social legislation. The Tory and socialist both have additional motivations to pass social legislation apart from its internal purpose of alleviating human misery. These motivations are diametrically opposed to each other. The Tory introduced such legislation to unite the country. Socialism, however, wants to level the classes and create social, political, and economic equality. This is not a unifying doctrine, but a divisive doctrine, aimed at organizing the masses of “have nots” against the hated “haves” class. For socialism, social legislation is a weapon of aggression in its war against the “haves”.


Such radically different ends, at cross-purposes with each other, cannot help but produce differences in the nature and scope of the social legislation approved by the Tory and that advocated by the socialist.


The differences in nature are easier to illustrate than to explain. To give one example, the Tory has historically preferred unemployment insurance over outright handouts. Canadian Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, in a radio address defending the unemployment insurance legislation his government was proposing eighty years ago, said “If he [the workman] is able and willing to work, but can get no work, provision must be made for his security in a decent way. By this I do not mean the dole. The dole is a rotten thing. It is alike an insult to the worker and to those who profess to have control of our industrial system.“ (2) Unemployment insurance preserves the dignity of everybody involved in a way that relief handouts – the dole - do not.


The difference in scope is simple to explain. Socialism’s view of social legislation is expansive, with no internal boundaries or limitations on how far it can expand. This must necessarily be the case, because socialism has set an unattainable end, equality, as its goal. The Tory, on the other hand, is inclined to a minimalist view of social legislation. He sees that the realities of modern existence are such that it is necessary that there be some degree of public policy to guarantee that help is available to the aged, infirm, and those for whom no gainful employment can be found, but insists that we must strive to limit that policy to what is absolutely necessary. (3) He recognizes what the socialist does not, that social legislation taken too far, does more harm than it does good.


The socialist would say that theirs is the more charitable and generous approach. This, however, is nonsense. Social legislation is not about charity or generosity, virtues that can only be cultivated by individual persons, but about the security and stability of the social and civil order. “The supreme function of statesmanship”, Enoch Powell said, “is to provide against preventable evils.” (4) Unrest and revolution, due to misery and want, are the preventable evils that social legislation provides against.


In a different speech from that quoted in the previous paragraph, Enoch Powell explained how when given too large of a scope, social legislation can produce the very unrest it is supposed to prevent. He distinguished between two meanings of the phrase “welfare state” (5), which correspond to the Tory and socialist visions of social legislation. The first, he said, was that “the state is the agency by which the community discharges its responsibility to ensure a tolerable livelihood to all its members.” (6) The second is that “the state undertakes on behalf of its members the responsibility for meeting whatever needs of theirs it chooses to recognize.” Observing that there had been a rapid transition since WWII from the first to the second meaning, he remarked that:


The state which undertakes, and is accepted as undertaking, the obligation to meet the general needs of the citizens is particularly vulnerable to violent agitation, for one simple reason – the obligation it has accepted is by its nature unlimited. It follows that the material for dissatisfaction is likewise unlimited.


There are plenty of other evils attendant upon the growth of the welfare state from the basic security net envisioned by Disraeli and Bismarck into the Santa Claus state. Created by democratic assemblies, administered by arrogant bureaucrats, and paid for out of obscenely high taxes, the Provider State works against the end for which the ancients saw the state as being established, by discouraging rather than facilitating the cultivation of habits of virtue. “One of the worst effects of national welfare systems”, Dr. Thomas Fleming wrote, “is that they diminish our capacity and our desire to perform voluntary works of charity.” (7) Worse, they allow us to pride ourselves on our “charity” and “generosity”, not for giving alms to the poor out of our own pocket, but for voting them out of all of our neighbours’ pockets. Which is to say nothing of the deleterious effects that this kind of social legislation has been observed to have had on its recipients. (8)


Ultimately, social legislation, in its expansive, Provider State form, is a repudiation of the good principles upon which Tories like Disraeli stood when introducing their more modest version. These Tories hoped to redress evils that had been brought about by industrial capitalism having uprooted the organic relationships of pre-modern society. It is in our social nature to form such relationships, and to reform them should they be destroyed, but it is the nature of the socialist Provider State to impede the reforming of the organic relationships uprooted by liberal capitalism. Consider again how Powell defined the original meaning of the welfare state “the agency by which the community discharges its responsibility to ensure a tolerable livelihood to all its members.” In the pre-modern order, that agency was the church not the state, (9) and one of the obvious effects of the Provider State has been to reduce the influence of the church in society, not to restore it to its pre-modern place at the heart of the community, a restoration for which the Tory longs.


Unfortunately, it seems to be the nature of social legislation to expand into its socialist form (10), and so the Tory will be fighting an uphill battle as he strives to roll it back and contain it in the form where it does the most good and the least evil.


(1) “English socialists claim credit for the ‘heroic struggle’ against the evils of industrial production. They prefer to forget that the Factory Acts, the legalization of trade unions, even the welfare state, were either Conservative inventions, or made possible by conservative forces that had long been striving to bring such things into being.” Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, Rev. 3rd Edition, (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1980, 2002), p. 109.
(2) R. B. Bennett, January 4, 1935, the second address in The Premier Speaks to the People, (Ottawa: Dominion Conservative Headquarters, 1945)
(3) Anthony Burgess, the eccentric, High Tory, novelist, playwright, and composer who, commenting on his first visit to East Berlin in his memoirs remarked “If ever I wavered in my acceptance of Western capitalism, I had only to return to that grimness unenlivened by the gaudy posters of commercialism to wish to scuttle back to nudes and Mammon” described this as “minimal socialization” in an interview with John Cullinan that appeared in the Spring 1973 issue of The Paris Review.
(4) Enoch Powell, speaking in Birmingham, April 20th, 1968.
(5) Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn preferred the term “Provider State”, pointing out that “It should not be called the Welfare State for, after all, every state exists for the welfare of its citizens.” Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Washington D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990), p. 28.
(6) Enoch Powell, speaking in Portadown, Amragh County, Northern Ireland, February 7, 1970.
(7) Thomas Fleming, The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative to the Liberal Tradition, (Columbia and London: The University of Missouri Press, 2004), p. 77.
(8) Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994).
(9) “What we might now call welfare –food, clothing, shelter, medicine—was distributed by the Church to members of the local parish. The monasteries, on the other hand, gave emergency relief to strangers and beggars.” Thomas Fleming, op. cit., p. 78.
(10)“The trouble with state welfare is that it grows and grows, until the economy - which supports both forms of parasite, its beneficiaries and its bureaucrats – collapses.” Auberon Waugh, The Spectator, May 13, 1995.

Principles and Prejudices

The old year has passed away, a new year is upon us, and that means that once again it is time for my traditional “where I stand” essay. This tradition did not begin with me but with one of my favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who retired from the Orlando Sentinel in 2001 and from his syndicated column in 2008. Reese believed writers owed it to their readers to make a full disclosure of their views, affiliations, and everything that gave them their particular slant once a year and encouraged other writers to do this by setting an example himself, devoting one column around New Years, sometimes the last of the old year, sometimes the first of the new, to doing this. I liked the idea and have kept this tradition myself every year since I started “Throne, Altar, Liberty”, beginning with the essay “Here I Stand” in 2011.

I am a Canadian. I am furthermore a Canadian nationalist, although I dislike this term and would prefer the older term patriot. In Canada, however, it is the custom for patriots to refer to themselves as nationalists, just as in the republic that is our neighbour to the south it is the custom for nationalists to refer to themselves as patriots. Patriotism consists of loyalty, attachment to, and love for, one’s country, its traditions, and its way of life. It is a feeling, a sentiment, and even, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued convincingly, a virtue. It develops naturally as an outgrowth of the smaller attachment one feels to one’s family, home, and what Edmund Burke memorably called “little platoons”. Nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology. In nationalism one’s nation or country is not a beloved home to be defended when attacked but a cause around which to rally the masses. It does not develop naturally but requires indoctrination. When I say that I am a Canadian nationalist, in keeping with my country’s custom, what I really mean is that I am a Canadian patriot as I have just explained the term. I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, have lived in Canada all my life up until now, and intend to live in Canada for the remainder of my life. I feel about Canada the same way I feel about my family and friends, about the people and places I have always known and loved.

There is another kind of Canadian nationalism, one which actually is a form of nationalism rather than patriotism. Peter Brimelow aptly described this kind of Canadian nationalism as “one of the toadstools of history”. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that was historically associated with the Liberal governments of Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, with the new school of Canadian historians that was partial to these governments – think Peter C. Newman and Pierre Berton – and which seems to be the only kind of Canadian nationalism our public broadcaster, the CBC, is interested in. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that John Farthing described as the “pure-Canada cult” in his excellent book Freedom Wears a Crown, which is among other things the classic rebuttal of this cult. This kind of Canadian nationalism sees the Canadian identity as something Canada needed to forge anew after WWII and from which everything our country inherited from Great Britain needed to be either excluded and eliminated or underplayed and ignored. I loathe and detest this kind of Canadian nationalism. The Canada of which I am a patriot, is the country confederated under its own Parliament based on the British model in 1867, which obtained full sovereignty over her own affairs through evolution rather than revolution, by growing up within the British family of nations under our shared monarch, rather than by severing family ties. I see our country’s heritage of Loyalism, not just as manifested in the American Revolution but when Canada stood by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War, as the top of the list of things for which Canadians can rightly take pride in our country.

I am a Christian, and while I look back upon my evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, when I knelt down to pray and told the Lord Jesus Christ I accepted Him as my Saviour, as the beginning of my Christian experience, I no longer use the word Christian in its evangelicalese sense of someone who has had such a conversion, but in the more traditional sense of someone who holds to the faith affirmed in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. I was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church when I was a teenager and more recently confirmed by a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. I am reformed in my understanding of justification – that salvation is a work in which God is the only actor, accomplished for us in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, freely given to the world by grace and received simply through faith, and catholic in my understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, established by Christ through His Apostles to continue His incarnational presence in the world after His Ascension back to the right hand of the Father in Heaven by the collective indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and commissioned by Him to bring His grace to the world through the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Politically I am a Tory. By referring to myself as a Tory I do not mean to indicate my support for any political party but rather my holding to a set of political convictions. In Canada, like other countries with a Conservative Party, this distinction is often made by use of the expression “small c conservative”, but I prefer the term Tory, despite the potential for confusion, because my political convictions are closer to those of the Tory Party of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than of the Conservative Party into which it was reorganized early.in the nineteenth century. I believe that human beings are by nature social beings who are born not as individuals but as members of pre-existing social groups, from their families up through their local communities to their nations, and that while it is good and natural for people to develop a sense of individuality within these groups as they mature it is bad for them to become alienated and isolated, and that these social groups from the family up to the nation, are best regarded as organic wholes in which past and future generations are included with those living in the present. I believe, therefore, that governments should rule with the good of their societies viewed as such organic wholes in mind. Therefore, our most important civil institution is the office of the monarch. The monarch can represent the organic whole of a society, including past and future generations, in a way no elected politician ever could, because the royal office is filled not by popular election but by a line of succession and so embodies the principle of continuity. For the same reason the office of monarch is vested with something far more valuable and important than the power politicians obtain through winning elections – sovereign authority. Power is the strength to compel obedience, authority is the right to command obedience. The man who wins an election, whether as representative of his constituency by obtaining the largest number of its votes or as leader of the government by obtaining the support of the largest number of representatives in the legislative assembly, obtains thereby a form of power – the strength of numbers. While power in this form can come from below, true authority can only come from above, from a source that transcends politics in the sense of the struggle for power. Whether that source is conceived of as constitutional order, prescription (long established custom), divine right, or a combination of these, the office of monarch is uniquely suited to be the representative of both the transcendental source of authority and the organic whole of society. The office of monarch is also the safeguard of our social and civil order against the threat of tyranny, a threat which when it arises, almost always comes from a demagogue who claims to be the voice of the “will of the people”. It is well that in our constitution the institutions of senate and elected assembly make up the state together with and under the monarch, joining, in Stephen Leacock’s words “the dignity of kingship with the power of democracy” so long as we remember that for a government to be truly civilized, authority must take precedence over power and power must support authority. These convictions are what I mean when I describe myself as being a Tory.

While it is obvious that holding to a royalism rooted in an organic view of society in which the community precedes the individual is incompatible with an acceptance of the individualism and contractual view of society that is the underlying philosophy of libertarianism, I nevertheless, with a few important qualifications and exceptions, usually agree with the libertarians on questions of whether the government should legislate or not. I fully agree with satirical novelist and High Tory Evelyn Waugh’s libertarian statement that while men cannot live together without rules these “should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”

I do not share the libertarian’s faith in the ability of market forces, unimpeded by legislation, to bring about a perfectly just distribution of goods and wealth but I do share his contempt for socialism’s confidence in the ability of government planners to do a better job of it. I think that under ordinary circumstances people as individuals, families, and other groups and organizations, know and are better able to manage their own business than anyone else and that governments should let them do so without intrusion and interference. This does not mean pure laissez-faire because, while governments cannot possibly manage any person or group’s business better than that person or group, much less the business of every person and group in the country, government’s can and ought to be able to manage the business of the country as a whole. A farmer, for example, does not need the government to come in, boss him around, and tell him how to run his own farm. A country, however, which needs a healthy agricultural industry to ensure an uninterrupted food supply, may need government to protect the industry if it is threatened.

Social legislation that ensures that a basic standard of living is within the reach of every member of society so that nobody goes without food, clothing, shelter or health care due to old age, infirmity, economic recession or depression, or other factors beyond their control, but only through their own bad choices is a necessity in any civilized country today but this too ought to be kept at the bare minimum. Those who support a more expansive social safety net frequently accuse those of us who try to keep it minimal of a lack of generosity, compassion, and Christian charity but when governments can only pay for these programs with money they have obtained by taxing their people, generosity, compassion, and charity have nothing to do with it. It is not generous, compassionate, or charitable to give to one person what one must first take from another. There is no virtue in being liberal, let alone magnanimous, with other people’s money. Furthermore, the expansion of basic social legislation into a welfare state can hardly be described as compassionate and charitable when it clearly contributes to illegitimacy, the break-up of families, children growing up without fathers, high rates of violent crime, and intergenerational poverty and dependence among the poorest sectors of society. The proper end of social legislation is not to try and achieve the unattainable and false ideal of equality but to alleviate misery and so prevent the kind of dissatisfaction and unrest that could threaten the civil and social order.

Often libertarians will say that government should not pass laws pertaining to morality but this is nonsense which displays an appalling ignorance of the nature of both laws and morality. Morality is a system in which human behaviour is classified into the categories of right or wrong. Laws are always statements about morality. Every law says either a) a certain behaviour is wrong in itself and hence prohibited or b) that a certain behaviour is prohibited and therefore wrong. That having being said, governments ought not to pass laws against everything that is morally wrong but only against acts which cause injury to other people, the institutions of society, and the civil order. It is enough that the police maintain the Queen’s peace, they do not need to be Mrs. Grundy’s enforcer as well.

Many today go further than this and say that questions of morality, right and wrong, are private and personal, to be decided by the individual rather than the community or society. This too is nonsense. Yes, every man must make his own moral decisions, but this means choosing his own actions not creating his own personal system of morality. The morality of his community, society, and civilization, contained in its mores and folkways, customs and habits, stories and songs, religion and culture, is the indispensable instrument by which he learns to make moral decisions and to cultivate virtues and it is the role of his parents and priests, family and church, community and its elders, to provide him with this means. This is not the role of the State and the State ought not to usurp this role nor should it undermine the efforts of the institutions and authorities whose role it is.

There are many today who look upon the last several decades since the end of the Second World War as an unprecedented Golden Age of human enlightenment in which we have made great strides towards achieving freedom, prosperity, and racial, sexual, and social equality. I am not one of those. When I look at the same decades I see the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural disintegration of my country and the wider Western Civilization to which it belongs, often in the very things those progressives consider to be “advances” over which to pat themselves on the back. If the equality of the sexes, for example, is a laudable ideal then it follows that artificial contraception and abortion must be legal, affordable, and universally accessible, for as long as women are getting pregnant, bearing, giving birth to, and nursing children with their bodies, their choices as much as those of men will ensure that the roles of the sexes will be different and not fully interchangeable, hence not equal. Abortion is the deliberate termination of innocent human life by the will of the person upon whom that life is dependent and whose instinct and duty is to protect it. It is difficult to conceive of any greater evil. George Grant was quite right when he described the arguments made in favour of it as the fascist concept of the triumph of the will masquerading behind the language of liberalism.

These revolutionary moral, social, and cultural changes are always spoken of in the language of liberation by those who look positively upon them just as they depict us who take the negative view as being puritanical zealots who wish to impose a narrow morality upon society by force of law. I find it difficult to understand how the replacement of social and cultural taboos against sexual immorality which were deeply rooted in tradition and the wisdom of the ages with newly coined taboos against thoughts and words that are deemed to be “politically incorrect”, i.e., objectionable to the brutally inflexible ideology of egalitarianism, can possibly be regarded as being liberating. Surely telling a man what he can and cannot think and say is far more intrusive than telling him that if he gets a woman pregnant he should do right by her and the child. Furthermore, these changes did not just happen on their own due to forces outside our control. They happened because those who wished to bring them about obtained enough influence in the State so as to be able to use its power to tamper and experiment with the social and moral order.

An example of this is how the law has been used to change the fundamental nature of marriage. I do not mean the recent change to include same-sex couples – that is merely a superficial consequence of the real change, albeit one that is already proving to have its own deleterious consequences on what Roger Scruton calls “the autonomous institutions” of civil society, as pressure is being placed upon religious-based educational institutions like Trinity Western University and will eventually, as everyone who is not a complete moron can see, be placed upon clergy and churches as well, to change their teachings and practices so as to be in accord with the change made in the civil law. The real change to marriage was the introduction of no-fault, easy divorce. This transformed marriage from a permanent union, formed by solemn vows, to which both partners are expected to make sacrifices of self into a temporary arrangement of convenience between couples, easier to get out of than a business partnership, that comes with legal perks. By creating no-fault divorce, government divorced marriage from all the reasons for which the institution exists in the first place and undermined other social authorities. The church is robbed of its authority if, after the priest proclaims the words of Christ, “what God has joined together let no man put asunder”, a judge is able to sign the union out of existence the next day without any fuss or muss.

I would like, of course, as one who willingly accepts the label of reactionary, to see all these changes reversed, just as I would like to see the general decay in Western thought of which they merely the most recent manifestation reversed. We have gone from thinking of the Good, the True the Beautiful as transcendent realities, that are what they are, and which it is our duty to pursue and approach to the best of our imperfect ability to thinking that they are whatever we decide them to be for ourselves. It took all the centuries of the Modern Age to bring this about but now, in what is awkwardly and absurdly called the Postmodern era, we have in a few short decades done to such visible realities as sex, what we had previously done to the invisible, transcendental, realities. Where this process of decay and disintegration may lead us next if it continues much longer, I shudder to think.

On that cheery note it is time to bring this essay to a close.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen