The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign
Showing posts with label Roman Empire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman Empire. Show all posts

Saturday, October 27, 2012

War and Peace: Part Two

As we have seen, since the dawn of time men have been fighting wars, talking, writing, and singing about their wars, and talking and dreaming about peace. On the one hand we glorify war, build monuments to battles, and honour our warriors. On the other hand we long for and pray for peace. Is there a contradiction between the way we long for the tranquility and security of peace and the way we honour our society’s warriors in our culture?


This question has been around for a long time. The ongoing discussion of war and peace has taken place across the boundaries of several different branches of human thought. One of those is ethics. Ethics, a word derived from the Greek word for habit or custom, is the branch of human thought that pertains to the division of human behaviour into the categories of right and wrong and human character traits into the corresponding categories of virtues and vices. The question of whether or not our desire for peace contradicts the glory we attach to war points to the basic question of the ethics of war and peace – is war right or wrong?

There are three possible ethical positions with regards to war. The first is that war is always right. The second is that war is always wrong. The third is that war is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. All views ever expressed about the ethics of war have been variations of one or the other of these positions.

The position that war is always right would appear to contradict the idea that peace is good and desirable. At the very least the two ideas would be extremely difficult to reconcile with one another. This position is a hypothetically possible answer to the question. It has not played a significant role in the actual ethical discussion of war and peace, and so we will not concern ourselves with it.

That is not the case with the position that war is always wrong. That position is held by a large number of people, such as those who believe in non-resistance for religious or philosophical reasons and progressives who believe they can establish a permanent and universal peace on earth through politics and diplomacy. Those who hold to this position, ordinarily frown upon the way the traditional culture celebrates past victories in war, and honours warriors who have fought and/or laid down their lives for us. If they are progressives who believe that war can be eliminated they may see these elements of our culture as roadblocks standing between them and their goals.

It is the third position, in which war can be either right or wrong depending upon the circumstances, that has been the mainstream traditional position in the Western world. It should therefore come as no surprise that this position is the one which is most easy to reconcile with both our traditional longing and praying for peace and our tradition of lauding and honouring acts of bravery and heroism in war.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Stoic philosopher, orator, and Roman statesman from the last days of the Republic in the first Century BC, is often quoted as having said “the most unjust peace is preferable to the most just war”. In fact he expressed this sentiment more than once. (1) While this is a favourite quotation of those who are opposed to any and all wars, the Roman senator was in fact one of the most important pre-Christian thinkers in the just war tradition. In 44 BC, the last year of his life, Cicero wrote one of his most important works, De Officiis or On Duties. In the first book of this treatise addressed to his son, in the context of explaining that men have just obligations even to those who have wronged him, he addressed the subject of just war. Disagreements, he argued, can be settled in one of two ways – discussion or force, and since human beings, not being mere brutes, are capable of discourse, we are to resort to war, only when discussion has failed us. The only acceptable reason for going to war, he states, is “sine inuria in pace vivatur”, i.e., that we might live in peace, without harm. (2)

This idea, that peace is the only acceptable reason for war, can be interpreted and applied in a number of ways. Cicero lived in a time when his city, Rome, had succeeded in conquering the Mediterranean world and, having become an imperial power, was in the process of converting its republican political structure into an imperial political structure. Livy’s account of the history of Rome depicts Rome’s gradual conquest of her neighbours as an ongoing series of battles against troublemakers bent on disturbing the peace of Rome. Cicero wrote De Officiis in the year of Julius Caesar’s assassination. A little under two decades later, Caesar’s nephew Octavian because the emperor of Rome marking the dawn of two centuries of relatively tranquil Roman order. The wars of the Roman republic could be interpreted as the necessary historical means to the end of the Pax Romana. Throughout history numerous world powers have looked to Rome as an example and sought peace through war by means of conquest.

It is unlikely that this is what Cicero had in mind, even though he does immediately go on to discuss Rome’s treatment of the peoples she conquered. Cicero was an opponent of the transformation of Rome from a republican to an imperial structure, which had placed him in opposition to Caesar and would lead to his being proscribed by the Second Triumvirate and put to death on the orders of Marc Antony. It makes more sense to interpret his statement that peace is the only acceptable reason for war as further commentary on what he had just been saying about how disputes should only be settled by force when discussion is no longer an option. Diplomacy requires the cooperation of both sides in order to work. Sometimes one of the sides cannot or will not be reasoned with. By saying that war is only morally acceptable in these circumstances and that the only acceptable motivation for going to war in these circumstances is that we might live in peace after, Cicero is seeking to place limitations on when and how war is conducted. This is the purpose of the classical concept of just war.

The classical concept of just war is an ancient element of the traditional Western dialogue about war and peace. It is not the only component of that dialogue however, neither is it the oldest component, nor is it the only element to discuss war in terms of justice. To understand the classical concept of just war we need to distinguish it from both the official justification for war and war criticism. These two elements of the dialogue are, of course, opposed to each other and the classical concept of just war differs from both, although it also has similarities with both.

The official justification for war is the oldest element of the dialogue about war and peace. This is true not only of the Western dialogue but of parallel conversations in non-Western traditions as well. Today we have a technical term for this element. That term is propaganda.(3)

When the leaders of one society wish to go to war with the leaders of another society they cite grievances against that other society. This is true today and it has been true for as long as wars have been fought. The purpose of this is to unite their society in support of the war effort. The grievances may be legitimate and serious or they may be fabricated and petty. They might be the actual cause of the war, i.e., the reasons that convinced the leadership of the society to go to war. They might be just an excuse, a pretext given for a war motivated by other, presumably less noble, causes. Late in the second millennium BC, the Mycenaean-led Achaean alliance sailed across the Aegean sea, lay siege to Troy, then captured, looted, and burned the city, putting its men to the sword, taking its women for concubines and its children for slaves. This event, confirmed as having taken place by archaeologists in the 19th Century, became the subject matter of Greek myths, legends, poems, and plays. The legends record the justification Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, gave for this war. Paris, prince of Troy had stolen Helen, the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon. Whether or not this was the actual justification given at the time for the war its inclusion in the legends demonstrates that even in ancient times, governments felt they needed to give reasons for wars. If the abduction of Helen was the actual grievance cited as the casus belli at the time it was almost certainly just an excuse for a war that was actually motivated by a desire to plunder Ilium. (4) Note that the “wrath of Achilles” which is the subject matter of Homer’s Iliad was caused by Achilles’ feeling that he had not received his fair share of the spoils of war and the honour due him, which erupted into a quarrel between him and Agamemnon over their captured concubines.

Both the official justifications of war and the classical concept of just war identify circumstances in which war is considered to be just. Propaganda, however, starts with a specific war that has already been decided upon and offers reasons why it is just, with the purpose of facilitating the act of war, whereas the classical concept of just war proposes general conditions under which war would be acceptable, which specific wars are supposed to meet in order to be considered just, with the purpose of setting limits upon war. The similarities between the two exist on the surface, whereas the differences in terms of fundamental purpose are much deeper.

If the purpose of the official justification for war is to generate support within a society for its war effort and its political leadership in a time of war, the purpose of war criticism is the exact opposite, to call into question the wisdom and rightness of the decisions of a society’s leaders in wartime, including perhaps, the decision to go to war itself. War criticism is not the same thing as pacifism, although a war critic might be a pacifist. Pacifism, rejects all war as a matter of principle. War criticism, like propaganda, begins with and pertains to particular wars.

The greatest poet-playwrights of ancient Athens wrote in the fifth Century BC. The earliest of these, the tragedian Aeschylus, died before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war (5). The rest lived and wrote during that thirty year conflict between Athens and Sparta. The youngest of the tragedians, Euripides, was much more of an innovator than the traditionalists Aeschylus or Sophocles. While they used their plays to convey ancient moral truths, Euripides used his as vehicles for commentary on the events of his own day, especially the war. Some of that commentary is very critical of how the leadership of Athens was conducting the war. The Troades, for example, commiserates with the women of Troy in their plight after the Greek victory. It came out in 415 BC and is believed to have been a negative commentary on the way Athens treated the people of Melos following their conquest of the island earlier that year. (6) Euripides’s criticism of the Athenian leaders, however, was subtle and moderate compared to that of Aristophanes, the comic playwright. He mercilessly lampooned the war and its leaders in several of his plays. Of his surviving works, the oldest is The Acharnians, written in the early years of the war. The hero of this play is a private citizen named Dicaeopolis who wants an end to the war. He goes to the Athenian assembly, but finds that body to be hopelessly incompetent and uninterested in peace. After ridiculing the buffoons who are wasting Athens’ time and money he sends Amphitheus, who claims to be descended from the gods, to make a private peace treaty between himself and Sparta. Amphitheus succeeds, but incurs upon himself and Dicaeopolis the wrath of the veterans of Acharnae, who are represented by the chorus. In a speech to the chorus, who are eventually won over to his side, Dicaeopolis defends his opposition to the war on the grounds that it had been started for bad reasons (7) and continued for the sole purpose of lining people’s pockets. These have been the primary accusations of war critics ever since.

War criticism of this nature is similar to the official justification for war in that both concern themselves with specific wars, rather than the question of the rightness or wrongness of war in general. In this similarity, war criticism and propaganda both differ from just war theory and pacifism, which are themselves similar in that they address the rightness or wrongness of war in general, albeit from opposite standpoints just as war criticism and propaganda look at specific wars from opposing points of view.

The traditional discussion of justice in relationship to war and peace has largely consisted of these four elements, one of which, pacifism, is a version of the second possible position on the justness of war, i.e., that it is always wrong, the other three of which are versions of the third position, that war is sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. (8) The just war element is, is the philosophical, ethical and sometimes theological discussion of two basic questions. The first of these is: Under what circumstances is it right for us to go to war? The second question is: What is the right manner of conducting a war?

That there was a right and a wrong time to go to war, and a right and a wrong way to conduct war, was recognized before philosophers began their enquiry into the justice of war. (9) The war criticism of Euripides and Aristophanes points to such an earlier understanding, and the roots of the philosophical discussion can be traced back to the same era. Socrates was a contemporary of both Euripides and Aristophanes. We only know about him through the writings of others, including the derogatory portrait of him in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, (10) but mostly through the dialogues of Plato in which he appears as the chief character, and often the voice of Plato himself. The Peloponnesian War forms the background setting for many of these dialogues. There is a subtext about the war that runs throughout Plato’s dialogues, in which leading figures of the war appear as characters. According to the Symposium, Socrates himself fought in the Peloponnesian War and was honoured for bravery. In one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, the Laches, one of the dialogues in which Plato is widely thought to have presented the actual Socrates rather than to have merely used him as the voice of his own ideas, Socrates discusses the nature of courage and the necessity of military training. Plato does not discuss the subject of justice in war very often. He does, however, present ideas that would influence later just war theorists such as Cicero.

Plato’s best known work is The Republic in which Socrates, invited to the house of Polemarchus, enters into a debate with several of the people present, including Plato’s older brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus about the nature of justice. Much of the discussion involves the hypothetical construction of an ideal city-state, governed by philosopher-kings whose government is enforced by a guardian class. In the fifth book of  The Republic, Socrates is asked to describe the guardian class in detail. In his response he says a number of things which pertain to war. He says that the children of the guardians should be apprenticed in the art of war by being made observers of wars, that guardians who behave bravely in war should be rewarded, and that those who behave cowardly should be removed from the guardian class. Finally, he draws a distinction between “discord” and “war”. The difference is that the former is a conflict between Greeks, the latter a conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks. Socrates says that there ought to be a set of rules governing discord – Greeks should not enslave other Greeks, the corpses of Greek enemies slain in battle should not be despoiled, Greek territory should not be destroyed nor Greek houses burned. These rules apply only to discord between Greeks, and not to war against non-Greek barbarians.

This is a sort of limited just war theory. It only addresses the jus in bello side of the theory, the question of how to fight justly in war, and the proposed rules apply only to internecine battles among the Greeks.

In Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, the Athenian stranger, who may or may not have been Socrates, discusses the actual laws and constitutions of Crete and Sparta with Cleinias and Megillus. As we have seen (11), at the very beginning of dialogue the Athenian stranger challenged the idea, put forward by Cleinias that the purpose behind the laws requiring certain disciplines, such as the wearing of arms, was to prepare the city-state for war. Demonstrating the peace is preferable to war, the Athenian stranger declared that no one is “a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace.”

This idea, that a state, even in the time of war, should be organized for peace, rather than the other way around, would seem to be reflected in Cicero’s declaration that the only acceptable motivation for war is peace. Cicero was certainly aware of Plato’s statement – his own treatise De Legibus, written about five to six years before his De Officiis, was modelled after Plato’s The Laws. This idea then, should be understood as the first, basic principle of the just war concept, a concept that Cicero developed much further.

After stating that to live in peace unharmed is the only acceptable reason for war, a jus ad bellum principle, he proceeds within the same sentence to give a jus in bello principle. It is similar to what Plato had Socrates’ say in the fifth book of The Republic, except that the distinction Cicero makes, is not between Greeks and non-Greeks, but rather between those who were “crudeles in bello” – “cruel in war” and those who were not. The latter should be spared, upon victory, Cicero wrote, but not the former. He illustrated by pointing to Roman history. Earlier generations of Romans had admitted the Tusculuns, Aequians, etc., to Roman citizenship after defeating them, but, at the end of the third Punic war had razed Carthage to the ground.

Cicero goes on to enumerate several other principles of just war – that protection should be given to those laying down their arms and surrendering, that war is not just unless there has been a formal declaration of war after the other side has been given a warning and the opportunity to settle the grievance peacefully, that a man should not fight in the war unless he is a soldier, legally bound by an oath of loyalty, and that wars fought for supremacy and glory rather for survival, while having to meet all these other standards in order to be just, must also be fought with less bitterness. (12)

This was the fullest pre-Christian expression of the concept of just war to be formulated in the Western tradition.

The largest part of the discussion of just war has been carried out by theologians within the Christian tradition. Not everyone in the Christian tradition has believed in the just war concept – pacifism in various forms has also had a strong voice within Christianity. In War and Peace Part Three, we will address the question of whether the authoritative Scriptures of the Christian tradition, and particularly the teachings of Jesus Christ, support the just war concept or non-resistance/pacifism. We will conclude this essay by looking at the concept of just war as it has appeared in the Christian theology and ethics of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Augustine was born in Numidia in 354 A.D. His mother was a Christian, his father was not. Sent to study at the University of Carthage, he rejected the faith of his mother. He moved to Milan to take up the position of professor of rhetoric, and there converted to Christianity, being baptized by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. He returned to Africa, where he was ordained a priest, and made the bishop of Hippo (13).

It was during St. Augustine’s lifetime that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. This occurred in 410 AD. Two years later, St. Augustine wrote a letter to St. Marcellinus of Carthage in response to some questions the latter had passed on to him. The second question concerned the statements from the Sermon on the Mount about not returning evil for evil, and turning the other cheek. The idea was circulating, based upon these statements, that Christian teaching and practice was not consistent with the duties of a citizen of Rome. Several ideas of this sort were going around at the time, because many were blaming Christianity for the fall of Rome, saying that it was divine punishment on Rome for abandoning the Roman gods for Christianity. Eventually, St. Augustine would respond to those accusations in his treatise De Civitas Dei. In response to this specific question, he pointed out that the men who brought Rome to its position of greatness, were attributed with practicing the very thing Jesus’ commanded. He points to Cicero’s praise of Caesar, for example, as one who was prone to forget nothing except the wrongs done him. This, St. Augustine said, not remembering wrongs done, pardoning rather than seeking revenge, is what Jesus meant by not returning evil for evil. In this context, St. Augustine writes that a commonwealth that practices Christianity, will conduct its wars in such a way, that both sides will be able to enjoy peace and justice after the war has concluded. If the Christian religion condemned all wars, he went on to write, soldiers would be commanded to abandon their profession, when instead they are commanded to be content with their wages. (14)

In another letter, written six years later to Count Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, St. Augustine pointed to King David, the centurion who came to Jesus and Cornelius in the Book of Acts as examples of military men who had God’s favour, and again mentioned that John the Baptist did not tell the soldiers who came to him for baptism to abandon their profession. He told Boniface that he should consider his physical strength a gift from God and that he should make peace his objective, waging war only when necessary, in order that peace may be restored. (15)

In these letters, we see that some of the qualifications that were identified by Cicero as to what makes a war just have been reasserted by St. Augustine, namely that peace must be the ultimate objective of war, that war is to be fought only when necessary. We also see the bishop of Hippo’s concern with demonstrating that Christianity does not make a person a bad citizen, that civil duty is compatible with Christianity and even required by the faith, and that military service is not forbidden by the Christian faith. These are ideas that keep popping up throughout his writings.

One of his most well known passages on just war is found in his De Civitas Dei. In the seventeenth chapter of the nineteenth book, building upon his argument in the previous chapter, he described the entire world as being the third circle of human society, after the home or family, and city or state. In the world, differences of tongue divide men, but imperial powers impose their language upon the peoples they conquer. This creates unity, but at a terrible cost. Wars are full of slaughter and bloodshed. Imperial conquest of the world would not lessen the horrors of war, because the civil wars bound to break out in so large of an empire, would be even more terrible than imperial wars. Here, he described the attitude of the wise man who wages just wars. Such a man laments the necessity of just wars, he wrote, because they are the only wars he fights, and if they were not just out of necessity, he would not fight them and therefore would not fight any at all. He wages just wars, because of the injustice of the other side, which would be a cause for lamentation even if it did not result in a war.

If we took this chapter in isolation from the rest of De Civitas Dei, it could be interpreted as saying that only defensive wars are just wars. This is not what St. Augustine meant. Earlier, in his account of the history of Rome, he, like Cicero, had counted as just wars, the wars by which Rome had conquered her neighbours. Livy’s history depicts these wars as a long string of responses to provocative action on the part of these neighbours but they were not defensive wars in the sense of responses to invasions that threatened their existence and territorial integrity. Later theologians and other just war theorists, have taken the basic principle St. Augustine has expressed here, that to be just a war must be a necessary response to wicked acts on the part of the other side, to argue, as St. Augustine did not, that only defensive wars can be just.

He does, however, give other qualifications as when a war is just. His Contra Faustum was written as a rebuttal of a book written by a leader of the Manicheans, a sect he had been involved with before his conversion to Christianity. In the twenty-second book he states that war contains many evils – lust for bloodshed, vengeful cruelty, ferocious hatred, etc., but that it is in order to punish such things that good men fight just wars. Their justice in doing so, he goes on to explain, depends upon the cause for which they are fighting, and their authority for doing so. Rulers have the authority to wage war according to the natural order, and if they abuse that authority, a soldier fighting under their orders is not personally culpable for fighting in a war lacking a just cause. (16) St. Augustine made these points as supporting arguments for the argument that if human rulers have the lawful authority to conduct wars, then laws conducted under the authority of God must be that much more just, which was a response to Faustus’ claim that the writers of the Old Testament libeled God by depicting Him as commanding the wars of Moses.

The idea that rulers have the authority to wage war, also contains a limitation upon when war can rightly be conducted. If the lawfully constituted rulers of a society have the authority to wage war on its behalf, this implies that other people do not have that authority, and St. Augustine stated this outright in the same book, a few paragraphs earlier. (17) This principle of just war theory could be implied from what Cicero had written in De Officiis, about the need for a formal declaration of war. St. Thomas Aquinas, would make it the first and most important principle, of his just war theory.

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian, Dominican priest in the 13th Century. He was a philosopher, one of the Scholastics, as well as a theologian. His most important work, was his Summa Theologica, a massive work of systematic Christian thought. It consists of a series of topics, in which he first presents a question, then a series of objections to his own position, after which he rebuts the objections and presents arguments for his own position. It is organized into three large parts, the first of which deals with theology, the second of which deals with ethics. The second part is itself divided into two parts, the first of which discusses broad ethical principles, the second of which deals with specific moral questions. The fortieth topic, in the second part of the second part, is the topic of war. The first of four articles that appear under this head answers the question whether or not it is always a sin to fight a war. He answers the question in the negative, stating that war is just if it meets three conditions. The first of these is that to be just, a war must be declared by a legitimate ruler, the second is that a just war must have a just cause, and the third is that the intentions of those fighting the war must be good.

Apart from the Scriptures themselves, St. Augustine is the main source St. Thomas Aquinas relied upon in arguing his case for just war. After his initial listing of objections to his position, he quotes St. Augustine’s argument, from the letter to St. Marcellinus referred to above, about how John the Baptist told the soldiers who came to him for baptism, to be content with their pay rather than to abandon their position. When he presents his three conditions for just war, he quotes from Contra Faustum to support his argument that a just war must be conducted by legitimate authorities and his argument that those conducting a just war must have the right intentions, and he also quotes from other Augustinian works. In his specific replies to each of the four objections, he quotes St. Augustine in all but the fourth. The concept of just war he presents in his Summa is essentially Augustinian.

That, of course, does not make it right. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas saw the just war concept as serving the cause of peace, by placing limits on when war can be rightly conducted. Pacifists see the just war concept as justifying that which is morally unjustifiable, and if the pacifist also has anarchistic leanings, he will probably see it as bolstering what he considers to be the unjust regime of the state. Do the Scriptures support the Augustinian/Thomistic concept of just war, which has been the mainstream in Western Christian thought, or do they support a version of the doctrine of non-resistance/pacifism? That is the question we will consider in the third and final part of War and Peace.

(1) It can be found in at least two places in his letters: Epistularum ad Atticum 7.14.3, and Epistularum ad Familiares 6.6.6. The Latin wording is slightly different in each letter, but both contain the meaning expressed in the English quotation.

(2) Cicero, De Officiis, 1.11.34-35.

(3) The term propaganda is also often used for many examples of what I have here called “war criticism.” Nevertheless, it is more often used for arguments put forth by a government to defend its position, and when we apply it to arguments made by opponents and critics of government it is to say that these arguments are similar in style to those put out by the government.

(4) On the other hand, Menelaus is supposed to have held his throne by virtue of his marriage to Helen who had been the daughter of Tyndareus, the previous king of Sparta. In which case, her having run off with or been abducted by Paris, would have been more than just a case of cuckoldry and a personal insult to Menelaus, but threatened the legitimacy of his rule as well.

(5) He had fought, however, in the Greco-Persian wars, including the Battles of Marathon and Salamis. His play The Persians celebrates the Greek victory by depicting the arrival at Susa of the news of Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis. Needless to say, this is not a work of war criticism.

(6) Thucydides records this incident in the fifth book of his History of the Peloponnesian War. His account includes the famous Melian Dialogue, in which, after the Athenians under the leadership of Cleomedes and Tisias, sailed against the island of Melos, with 38 ships, 3000 hoplites, and 320 archers, their generals were invited to dialogue with the representatives of Melos, a Spartan colony that had remained neutral until this incident. The Athenians demanded the surrender of Melos and the Melians attempted to argue against the Athenian demand on the basis of justice. This points to an understanding of rightness and wrongness in war, before the question was taken up by dramatists and philosophers. The Athenians refused to accept these arguments, or subsequent arguments that it was in their own self-interest not to persist with their demands. They insisted that they would look weak if they abandoned their demands, while the Melians insisted that it would dishonourable on their part to surrender without a fight. Ultimately the Athenians destroyed Melos, but this marked a turning point in the war that led to their own final defeat at the hands of Sparta.

(7) Specifically, he claims that the Megarian Decree of 432 BC, banning Megara from trade with the Delian League, was Pericles’ heavy-handed response to the kidnapping of prostitutes from a brothel run by Pericles’ lover Aspasia, itself a Megaran response to the kidnapping of a Megaran prostitute by some Athenian lowlifes.

(8) Although pacifists are war critics in a general sense, war critics in the sense in which I have been using the term are not pacifists. Aristophanes, for example, did not view the Greek resistance to the Persian invasion in the same way he regarded the Peloponnesian War.

(9) See Note 6 above.

(10) Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates, was that of a deceitful sophist and trickster, who thought up clever ways of making weaker arguments defeat stronger arguments. Although Plato, in Apologia, suggests that Aristophanes’ The Clouds was partly responsible for the unpopularity that led to Socrates’ trial and death, in Symposium he portrays the two as being on good terms at a drinking party.

(11) In Part One.

(12) De Officiis, 1.11.35-3 and 1.12.38.

(13) Now Annaba, Algeria.

(14) St. Augustine, Epp. 138.2.12-15.

(15) St. Augustine, Epp. 189.4-6.

(16) St. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 22.74-75

(17) Ibid., 22.70.





Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Menace of Multiculturalism

The term culture is derived from the same Latin root as the verb cultivate, which refers to the act of plowing a field so as to prepare it for being sown. We use the word culture to refer to that which metaphorically “cultivates” the mind and character. This is especially true when we use the word culture in a limited sense to refer to literature, philosophy, the fine arts, and serious music. These things are “culture” because they are supposed to develop the intellect. We also speak of the traditions and habits which characterize an entire community – its language, its religion, its particular ways of doing things – as its culture. These too “cultivate” the mind and character. A community’s language is the means by which its members communicate with each other. Its customs are its prescribed ways of behaving in certain situations which facilitate social interaction. It is by learning these things that a person becomes capable of living as a full member of his community.

Culture, therefore, is vitally important to both a community or society and to its individual members. For the community it is necessary both as an adhesive which holds its individual members together and gives them a sense of unity and as a lubricant which eases social interaction so as to minimize friction and make it possible for its members to live together in community. Culture also enables the individual to identify with a group larger than himself and provides him with what he needs to get along as a member of the group.

A community is by definition monocultural, i.e., possessing a single culture shared by all its members. A community is not just a neighborhood, a place where people live in propinquity to each other regardless of whether or how they interact. To be a community, people living together in one location, must also interact in such a way as to form a social unity. The very term community points to a group of people sharing something in common, and one way of defining culture is as that which a community shares, which binds them together as a community. Therefore a community is monocultural.

This does not mean that every member of a community is absolutely identical to each of the others, having all the same mannerisms, all the same habits, attending all the same events, etc.

It does mean, at the very least, that a community has one language in common which is used for communication within the community, regardless of what other tongues individual members of the community might also speak.

What is true of a community is not necessarily true of a society or a polity. Societies and polities are usually large units which include more than one community. A polity is a group of people, living in a particular territory, under the sovereign authority of one law administered and enforced by one government. In ancient Greece cities were sovereign polities (the words polity and political come from the Greek word polis meaning city). Today most polities tend to be countries, i.e., large territories governed from a capital city. A society is what we see when we look at the group of people that make up a polity from a different angle, one which encompasses all forms of social organization and not just political sovereignty.

Sometimes polities and societies are, like communities, monocultural. Greek city-states and the European nation-states which evolved during the Late Medieval – Early Modern period are examples of these. In other instances, polities can be culturally pluralistic. There are different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic.

An empire is one form of a culturally pluralistic polity. The Roman Empire, for example, consisted of all the different people groups of the Mediterranean world who had many different languages, religions, and cultures. Their cultural plurality was tolerated by Rome so long as they submitted to the authority of Roman Law, the Senate and the Caesars. In an empire, many cultures co-exist, but one culture is dominant.

Another way in which different cultural communities can co-exist within the same polity or society, is in a decentralized confederation, with a strong degree of local self-rule. The Swiss Republic is an example of this.

Another form of cultural pluralism, is the kind which has existed in my country Canada, since its confederation in 1867. When Canada came together as a country, there were three major ethnic groups within Canada. These were French Canadians, English Canadians, and native Canadians. French Canada had been won from France by Britain during the Seven Years' War. The king had guaranteed the Canadiens their language, religion (Roman Catholic) and culture in return for their loyalty and allegiances. This angered the leaders of several of Britain’s colonies in North America, particularly the ones which had been formed by the virulently anti-Catholic Puritans. They rebelled against their king, declared their secession from the British Empire, and having won their independence formed the American Republic. Not all members of the 13 colonies agreed with the treasonous actions of their leaders. Those who remained loyal to the king and to Britain, fled north after the American Revolution. These United Empire Loyalists, and the inhabitants of British colonies such as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which had not joined in the American rebellion, became the English Canadians. Native Canadians were members of tribes which had made treaties with the British Crown.

The common factor that made it possible to unite these groups into one country, was allegiance to the Crown. It was out of loyalty to the Crown that the English Canadians had not joined with the Americans in their revolution, it was the Crown which had guaranteed the culture of French Canadians in return for their allegiance, and the Crown with which native Canadians had signed their treaties. The Fathers of Confederation established the country, as a confederation of provinces and territories, with a parliamentary government under the Crown.

So there are a number of different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic in contrast with a community which is by definition monocultural.

There is another form of cultural pluralism that we hear a lot about today. That is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is not just a synonym for cultural pluralism. Whereas other forms of cultural pluralism often “just happen” in the sense that they arise as a consequence of history, multiculturalism is a doctrine with true believers, and an official policy enforced by the state. There is one other major difference between multiculturalism and the kinds of pluralism we looked at above.

The cultural pluralism of the Roman Empire, the Swiss Republic, and the Dominion of Canada was not a threat to the cultural homogeneity of communities within these historical polities. The same cannot be said for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of these communities.

Multiculturalism is the political doctrine that declares that while political, legal and economic unity are good, cultural unity is bad, and a country should have no cultural unity other than a commitment to plurality, and that all cultures are equal.. It is also the official policy of encouraging large scale immigration from as many different cultures as possible while also encouraging immigrants to keep their original cultures rather than assimilate into the communities to which they are immigrating.

Multiculturalism is a doctrine which contradicts itself in many ways. While it declares all cultures are equal, it does not treat all cultures equally. It encourages immigrant groups to stick together and form culturally homogeneous enclaves, while breaking up the cultural homogeneity of the communities into which the immigrants are moving. People who live in a community which was formerly homogeneous but into which large numbers of immigrants have moved, find that it is more difficult to order meals in the restaurant down the street or buy groceries in the local grocery store because the servers and cashiers have trouble speaking the language of the community. Then they find that their tax bills have gone through the roof because the government is offering these same immigrants government services and education in their own language. If they complain about all of this, they find themselves denounced as “racists”.

In Canada, Pierre Eliot Trudeau declared the country to be “officially multicultural” in 1971. This was not just a government acknowledgement of the historical cultural pluralism mentioned above which has existed in the country since Confederation. When Trudeau had become prime minister he began an aggressive immigration recruitment campaign with the purpose of changing the demographics of the country. This and the new policy of multiculturalism to discourage assimilation, was an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of communities within English and French Canada.

It was also during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau that the symbol of unity between the different cultural communities within Canada came under attack. They removed “Royal” from the title of as many government institutions as they could get away with and did everything they could to portray our ongoing attachment to the monarchy as something archaic, belonging to the trappings of our “colonial past” which we needed to move beyond in order to fully mature as a country.

This year is the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the first monarch to open a session of Canadian parliament in person. She has visited our country several times, the latest visit being two years ago. Last year, Prince William and his new bride Kate, visited Canada after their wedding. Later that year, Prime Minister Harper, restored the “Royal” to the titles of two branches of our Armed Forces and ordered all of our consulates to hang the Queen’s picture in a laudable effort to emphasize our country’s royal heritage and ongoing ties to the Crown.

In the commentary surrounding these events, leftists whined and cried about how this was an insult to all the new Canadians who came from outside the British Isles. It did not seem to occur to them that if honouring our royal family and our Queen is an insult to new immigrants then their petulant, left-wing attack upon the monarchy is an insult to all Canadians who were born and grew up as subjects to the Queen. Or if it did occur to them it did not matter. Although all cultures are equal under multiculturalism, some, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Of course it makes no sense to say that to honour Canada’s traditional monarchy, our Queen and our royal family, the symbols, as we have seen, of unity between the different cultural communities which formed our country, is an insult to new Canadians. These immigrants, after all, left countries over which the Queen did not reign to move to a country over which she does reign. Surely if anyone is insulting the new Canadians it is the leftists themselves, who arrogantly profess to speak for them, by attacking the tradition they chose to move into.

Multiculturalism, then, while professing to be a belief in the equality of all cultures, attacks the cultures of the countries which adopt it and promotes the cultures of new immigrants instead. There is an interesting consequence of this which Western countries which have adopted multiculturalism have had to face in recent years. Sometimes, the culture of the new immigrants is less compatible with pluralism than the culture which is being undermined by multiculturalism.

One of the fundamental elements of culture is religion, and multiculturalism has been adopted in Western countries whose historical, traditional, religion is Christianity. Indeed, multiculturalism could not have arisen anywhere else. This is because multiculturalism is a progressive and liberal doctrine and progressivism and liberalism are secular, Christian, heresies, i.e., Christian teachings which have been twisted and distorted and then secularized. One Christian doctrine is that of the future Kingdom of God on earth. One version of this doctrine is post-millennialism, which teaches that the mission of the Church is to establish this Kingdom prior to the Second Coming of Christ. Progressivism, the idea that through reason, science, and government policy man can gradually eliminate evil and suffering from the earth, is basically a secularized post-millennialism. Another Christian doctrine is that each person is created in the image of God and has worth in the eyes of God. It is because of this doctrine that the Western and especially the English system of rights and freedoms protecting the person from the abuse of power developed. Liberalism, which provides an alternative explanation for these rights and freedoms by positing a hypothetical individualistic state of nature out of which society arose through voluntary contract, is another form of a secular Christian heresy.

Progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity. This does not mean that Christians should embrace progressivism and liberalism as manifestations of Christ’s teachings, as some misguided clergy teach, or that we should blame Christianity for the ruin of Western civilization wrought by progressivism and liberalism, as some misguided rightists teach. For the other side of the coin is that while progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity, neither could they have evolved within a culture in which the Church had maintained its authority and orthodox Christian faith had not begun to decline. They are not orthodox Christian doctrine but secular Christian heresies.

Just as progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a Christian culture in which Christianity had gone into decline, neither could multiculturalism have come into existence apart from progressivism and liberalism. Multiculturalism is progressive in that its advocates believe that by declaring all cultures to be equal and societies to have no core culture apart from a commitment to pluralism that the evil of oppression of one cultural group by another can be eliminated (1). It is liberal in that it separates culture from its social and communitarian role and makes it a matter of individual preference.

Multiculturalism is also, far more hostile to Christianity than to any other religion. It demonizes Christians who are brave enough to stand up for orthodox Christian doctrine and morality. It does not so demonize Islam, and in recent years left-wing multiculturalists have been outspoken opponents of what they call “Islamophobia” despite overwhelming evidence that Islam is far more incompatible with their ideas of tolerance and diversity than Christianity.

Herein can be seen one of many dangers multiculturalism poses to the societies which adopt it. When the official doctrine is that all cultures are to be considered equal it is difficult if not impossible to screen out cultural incompatibility in the immigration process. Under multiculturalism, it is the person who points out that somebody from Culture X is more likely to declare a holy war and start blowing up buildings than somebody from Culture Y, who is penalized for being a “bigot”.

The biggest threat to a society which multiculturalism poses, however, is that it undermines communities. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists scream, and in some cases this is true. It is not true of all kinds of diversity however.

A community is a stronger community if it contains teachers, doctors, farmers, policemen, grocers, builders, and people of many other professions, than if it consists only of people from one profession or if everybody tries to do everything for himself. This kind of diversity strengthens the community. It is the kind of diversity St. Paul spoke about when he compared the Church to the body of Christ in the 12th chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, and said that just as the body is one but is made up of many organs, so the Church is one but is made up of people with different roles and gifts given by the Holy Spirit. This diversity is a diversity within unity, and it is unity that St. Paul stresses in this chapter.

A community would not be a stronger community if the people in one house spoke German, in the next Lithuanian, in the next spoke Mandarin, and in the next spoke Swahili, and there was no language in common. Nor would it be a stronger community if everybody in the community followed a different calendar than everybody else. Problems would arise if what one person understood to be a friendly gesture, his neighbor understood to be an insult to his mother and a challenge to a duel to the death. This kind of diversity is not a strength and it is fatal to a sense of community. It too is illustrated in the Bible – in what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the tongues of the builders.

It is beneficial for a country to have strong communities. There is less crime and a greater sense of trust between neighbors in a small, largely homogeneous, village than in a large, very heterogeneous, city. In the former, people can leave their homes and cars unlocked, never in the latter. The less a country has to rely upon its laws, the police, courts and prisons, the better.

Multiculturalism, by making culture a matter of individual preference, and embracing diversity at the expense of unity, prevents culture from serving its social function, of uniting and strengthening communities. It is truly a menace.




(1) In reality, multiculturalism is more likely to generate hostility between different cultural groups.