The Evanescence of Ethics in the Epidemic

Imagine three individuals who each wish to relieve you of the burden of the contents of your wallet that they might bear this load themselves.

 

The first individual approaches you and says “I hate to ask this, but I’m in a real pickle, I owe Vinnie and Guido $50 and if I don’t pay it by the end of the day they are going to break my legs, would you be a pal and help me out.”

 

The second individual comes up to you wearing a bandana, pulls a gun, and says “stick em up” and then grabs your wallet and runs.

 

The third individual says to you “I want you to give me all your money.  It is your choice if you do or not, but if you don’t I’ll see to it that you can never work, travel, or participate in any community events again.”

 

Which of these individuals was guilty of robbery?

 

The first individual may be guilty of having made very poor choices but is not guilty of robbery. 

 

The second individual is clearly a robber and a stereotypical robber at that, going so far as to wear the traditional uniform of the robber, a mask covering the lower face.

 

The correct answer to our question, however, is that both the second and the third individuals were guilty of robbery.   Robbery is theft – the unlawful taking of another person’s possessions – through the means of coercive force, either actual or threatened.    Both the second and the third individuals used threats to force you to hand over your money.    The nature of what they threatened to do was quite different but the difference does not make what the third individual said any less of a coercive threat.

 

Is it ever right, or at least morally permissible, to use coercive force?

 

This ethical question is more complex than it might at first seem, due to a number of complicating factors.   One such factor is the nature of the coercive force.    Consider our illustration above.   The threats used by the second and third individuals differed in two ways.   One of these was in their level of credibility.   The stereotypical robber’s threat was made believable by the presence of the gun.   The credibility of the other robber’s threat depends upon who the robber is.   If he is in a position of sufficient power to actually carry it out then his threat is credible, otherwise he is obviously a nut and his threat can be disregarded as empty and crazy.   The other way, which is the one that is relevant to this discussion, is in the nature of what was threatened.   The stereotypical robber threatened the use of lethal force.   The other robber merely threatened to make your life miserable, not to take it from you.    Historically, this distinction has been very important in discussions of the ethical question at hand.   While there has been no answer to the question which could be said to have the support of a universal consensus, there has been wide agreement that lethal force is the least justifiable or permissible form of coercion.

 

Another complicating factor is that of the distinction between the state and private individual persons.    It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to conceive of the enforcement of law and the administration of criminal justice that does not in some way or another involve the use of coercive force.    Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has also been wide agreement – although not nearly as wide as with lethal force being the least justifiable or permissible – that it is more justifiable or morally permissible for the state, the institution whose raison d’etre is to enforce the law and administer criminal justice, to use such force than for private persons.    Again, support for this idea while broad, has not been as wide as for the one with which we ended the previous paragraph.   The liberal tradition, that is to say, the tradition that over the course of the Modern Age became dominant in what used to be Christendom but is now Western Civilization, has produced many different views on the matter.   One such view, which is evident today among those liberals or progressives who would argue that you should never fight back and defend yourself, your loved ones, or your property when these are under criminal attack, but  allow yourself to be victimized and let the professionals, the police, take care of it, is that the state ought to have an exclusive monopoly on all use of coercive force.    Conversely, some although not all of the liberals of the kind who began calling themselves libertarian in the last century to indicate their retention and emphasis on the individualism and suspicion of government that were predominant in the liberalism of the nineteenth century, hold that force is only justifiable when used by private persons to defend themselves, their families, and property and that the state is illegitimate.    Although these views, each the polar opposite of the other, are both supported by their proponents from ideas that belong to the mainstream of the liberal philosophical-political tradition, neither could be said to itself represent the mainstream liberal view on the matter of how much coercive force is permitted to the state and the private person.     That the use of force on others, whether on the part of the private person or the state, is ethically permissible only under certain circumstances, which are broader for the state than for the private person, with lethal force being permitted to the latter only in circumstances of self-defense, is much closer to what historically would have been the liberal mainstream.   In this, the mainstream of the liberal tradition was itself much closer to the mainstream of the tradition that preceded it, or, if you prefer, the mainstream of the Western tradition as a whole, including both liberal and pre-liberal strands, than in many other areas.

 

There is one way in which liberalism did depart from the pre-liberal Western tradition that warrants consideration in the context of this discussion, especially in that it had a direct bearing on the way the factor examined in the last paragraph was framed.   Distinguishing between the private person and the state is fairly universal in the ethical debate over the boundaries limiting when force is permissible.  Restricting the distinction to these two, on the other hand, is rather unique to the liberal tradition.   Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet stressed throughout his career, beginning with his seminal The Quest for Community (1953), the importance of a plurality of institutions.    He described such other institutions as the family and the local community as “intermediate” between the state and the private person.   That liberalism had come to largely disregard these is evident in the radically opposite views both emerging from the liberal tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph.    What the ideas that the state should have a monopoly on force and that the state is illegitimate and only the individual person is justified in using force in self-defense have in common is that they both see the state and the individual as the only players worthy of consideration.   The other institutions that Nisbet called “intermediate” traditionally possessed a significant amount of authority.   Authority, which is the respected right to lead, is different from power, which is the ability to command obedience.      For society or any institution within it to be functional authority must take strong precedence over power but, human nature being what it is, authority cannot long exist without power backing it up.   This necessarily means that those who exercise the authority in Nisbet’s intermediate institutions must be morally able to use some kind of force, to some kind of degree.   Another way in which liberalism’s reduction of everything to the state and individual is evident has been in the way in which the liberal tradition, which in the interwar period of the last century largely abandoned its anti-statist libertarianism from the century prior and then sharply veered into statism after World War II, has been attacking the authority of all of these institutions, especially the family, by having the state strip them of their power. (1)

 

The ability to back up an order with force is the essence of power, which to some degree or another is necessary to support authority.    The force needed to support authority differs from institution to institution in both kind and degree.  That lethal force is limited to the state, except in situations where the individual needs it for defensive purposes is something to which virtually everyone in Christendom would have agreed around the time that liberalism began to convert Christendom into Western Civilization.    This consensus did not exist in the classical civilization that preceded Christendom.    In ancient Rome, the pater familias, which meant the patriarch of a household consisting of a large extended family, rather than merely the father in a domestic unit, held authority, the pater potestas, over his family that was not equal to that exercised by the Senate over the Roman city-state, but certainly comparable to it.    Classical literature abounds with stories featuring the abuse of such authority – Oedipus, the king of Thebes who features in several of the extent tragedies, bears a name (“swollen foot”) that testifies to his having been a victim of a botched attempt to end his life while an infant, carried out at the orders of his father when the latter heard the prophecy that the child would kill his father and marry his mother.     While Oedipus’s father Laius was a king, the order to have the child exposed was an expression of what would have been regarded as his patriarchal rather than his civil authority at the time.      

 

The spread of Christianity and the conversion of classical civilization into Christendom led to the elimination of the practice of infanticide by exposure and stricter limits being placed on the pater potestas leading to the Christian consensus that the legitimate use of lethal force is limited to the state except in instance of self-defense on the part of private persons.    While this meant that the power and authority of the family patriarch was no longer comparable to that of the state and that in temporal terms the civil power was now unquestionably the highest authority, the mainstream point of view in Christendom did not regard all other institutional authority as falling in the intermediate position between the state and the individual of which Nisbet spoke.   The mainstream point of view in Christendom was that there were two realms in Christian civilization, the temporal and the spiritual, the membership of which overlapped, but in which different institutions were vested with the highest authority.   In the temporal realm, the state was the highest authority.   In the spiritual realm, the church was the highest authority.  The bishops, as citizens of the temporal realm, were under the authority of the king as his subjects.   The king, as a member of the church, was subject to the authority of his bishop in the spiritual realm.   The king and the bishop, each possessing the highest earthly authority in his respective realm, required power to back that authority up, and this power was conceived of as two “swords”.   These swords were metaphorical, of course, although much less so in the case of the king, whose sword included the use of lethal force to punish crime. (2)   The bishop’s “sword” was the “keys”, given to the Apostles by Christ after St. Peter’s confession of faith, which included the power to exclude people from the Sacraments and the fellowship of the church.

 

Disagreements about the “keys” were involved in fracturing the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom in both the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, which contributed to liberalism’s takeover of Christendom and transformation of it into modern Western Civilization.    While the specifics of these disagreements is not relevant to our discussion here, it is important to note that in the Christian orthodox mainstream of Christendom neither the king nor the bishop was thought to have the right the wield his sword whenever he saw fit to serve his own selfish purposes.   Liberalism maintained otherwise, of course, because it wished to weaken the king or replace him with a republic and to reduce the church from the institution of highest earthly authority in the spiritual realm to one of many intermediate institutions in the temporal realm, but the concept of the divine gifting of the “swords” in Christian orthodoxy clearly implies that both kings and bishops were held strictly accountable to God for the right use of the swords, and a great deal of space in the writings of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted to spelling out the limits on when these swords could be rightly used.   The importance of this lies in the fact that despite the significant differences between the orthodoxy of Christendom and the liberalism of modern Western Civilization both agreed that there were limits on when force could be used, whether by the state or by private persons, and that these limits were written in the language of ethics, of what is right and what is wrong.

 

The idea that there are limits on the right use of force even for the state is an ancient one, going back to the earliest of civilizations.   Even before the Socratic philosophers wrote the dialogues and treatises that laid the foundation of the long tradition of Western political science, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, continues with his being avenged by his son Orestes, and concludes with Orestes escaping the vengeance of the pursuing Furies by placing his fate in the hands of the patron goddess of Athens who establishes the first jury to adjudicate the case, resulting in an acquittal.   The trilogy illustrates how the civilized justice system with its laws and courts is superior to pre-civilized blood “justice” because it limits the violence rather than letting it continue to spiral and escalate.    The myths behind the plays are much older (Homer had drawn from the same source material in his Illiad and Odyssey three centuries prior to this).   Indeed, even the Lex Talionis that is featured prominently in the ancient Code of Hammurabi (Babylon of the eighteenth century BC) and the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, can be understood as a limit on the permissible use of force (under it if someone puts out your eye, the maximum that you can demand as just repayment is his own eye).    That the ancients saw the force of law, exercised by the state, as being subject to the limits of morality is also attested to by manner in which they categorized their philosophy.   While modern totalitarians, who reject limits on the power of the state, have sometimes claimed Plato as an ancestor, to do so they must rely entirely upon a dialogue that is fantastical in nature, in which Socrates and his friends engage in an entirely theoretical exercise in city-building that is clearly set in a world other than the one they actually live in.    The purpose of the exercise is not to create a model for the builders of city-states in the real world to use, but to examine further an ethical question about the nature of justice.   The totalitarians’ claim on Plato, therefore, is very tenuous.   By contrast, modern constitutionalists, that is to say those who believe in constitutional restraints on the powers of government which ought to include everybody of every political stripe who is not a totalitarian, can rightly point to Plato’s disciple Aristotle as their ancestor.   Some of these have agreed with the totalitarians in assigning Plato to the latter camp, but where Plato and Aristotle were clearly in harmony was in making politics in the sense of political science, the theory of states and statecraft, a subcategory of ethics, the theory of human habits and behaviour as evaluated by the standards of what is right, good and virtuous versus what is wrong, bad, and vicious.   This is spelled out by Aristotle, who introduced politics as a subdivision in his treatise on Ethics, then wrote a sequel devoted to Politics, but it is also the obvious implication of Plato’s having made his most famous political discussion as part of a larger ethical debate.   The subordination of politics to ethics is consistent with the constitutionalist rather than the totalitarian point of view.

Over the course of the pandemic that was declared early last year and has continued to the present day it has been very disturbing to see this subordination of politics to ethics that has been so important to every phase of our civilization (or to our civilization and its two immediate predecessors depending upon how you look at it) disregarded or, worse, inverted (the use of shame and guilt to coerce people into obeying every public health order – “you are a bad selfish person who cares only about yourself if you object to being forbidden all social interaction for two years straight” – is the use of a twisted form of ethics to serve the interests of politics, not in the Platonic/Aristotelean sense of the word but in a sense of the term that is usually if, perhaps, unfairly, associated with Machiavelli).   At the beginning of the pandemic, the citizens of Western countries basically acquiesced as their governments imposed unprecedented restrictions upon them.   In imposing these restrictions Western governments overstepped the limits their constitutions place on their powers and essentially took away what for centuries Western people have regarded as their most basic civil, if not human, rights.    Telling people they can have only a limited number of people over to their house is a restriction that limits their freedom of association, but telling them they can have no visitors over to their house, as the province of Manitoba did from November of last year until this July, is taking away that freedom altogether.  This is a freedom that is identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was added to the Canadian constitution in 1982, the rights and freedoms in which the Supreme Court of Canada has previously ruled that governments can limit, but only if the limitation is minimal, as this one obviously was not.   Nevertheless, the province was somehow allowed to get away with this. 

 

Having gotten away with these experimental severe restrictions on our freedoms, our governments then began to add mandates on top of these.   The first of these was the mandate that we wear lower face masks in indoor spaces.   The mask mandates were controversial for a number of reasons, many of which I have discussed in other essays in the past.   What is most significant for our purposes here is that while many have seen the masks as being a lesser imposition than the lockdowns, and in one sense they are right, they represent the transition from the government forbidding us to do things that we had previously been free to do to the government requiring us to do things.   Throughout history, the laws of the freest countries have been mostly if not all prohibitions rather than requirements, and the more requirements a government has added the less free the country has become.   The laws that have been the most universal – the basic laws against such things as murder and theft – are prohibitions.

 

We have now arrived at a point where, if polls are to be believed – and this is a big “if” – the vast majority of Canadians support a different – and far worse – mandate, mandatory vaccination.    The rapidly developed vaccines for the bat flu have spawned much more controversy than the masks.   Much of the heated discussion has been over such matters as the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.    I will leave these matters to others because the ethical problem with vaccine mandates would be the same if they were 100% safe and effective.

Some would distinguish between mandatory vaccination and forced vaccination.    The distinction is false, however, and involves no real difference.   By the latter, these people would presumably have in mind a situation where someone ties you to a chair and injects you with a vaccine without your consent, either freely given or coerced.   A mandatory vaccine, however, is as much a forced vaccine as a vaccine in the circumstance just described.   The only difference is in the nature of the force used, which difference is essentially the same as that between the two robbers in our illustration at the beginning of this essay.

 

Let us use a slightly different illustration.

 

There are three young men.    Each has a young lady of whom he is in pursuit.

 

The first young man woes her with flowers, and chocolates, and sappy love poetry.

 

The second young man, clubs her over the head, drags her off to his cave, and forces himself upon her.

 

The third young man is the young lady’s immediate supervisor.   He tells her that if she wishes to advance in her career, it would be in her best interests to sleep with him, and hints that she will be fired and blackballed in her profession if she does not.

 

As with the original illustration, the first young man is innocent.   The second young man, also corresponding to his counterpart in the first illustration, is a stereotypical rapist.   

 

Is the third young man as guilty of rape, assuming his ploy to be successful, as the second?

 

If your answer is “no” you might be wise to keep your opinion to yourself in the presence of the ladies.  As Rudyard Kipling so aptly said “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.

 

The reason for this second illustration is that the crime involved is much closer in nature to forced vaccination than robbery.   In both rape and forced vaccination someone’s body is penetrated, without that person’s voluntary consent, by a foreign tube which injects a substance into the body.    The similarities far outweigh the differences and include all the elements of rape which make the act a heinous crime.

 

The rhetoric we have been hearing from political leaders, like the Prime Minister, who have imposed vaccine mandates on certain sectors, has been “it is your choice not to be vaccinated, but there will be consequences”.   Imagine a man saying to a woman “it is your choice not to sleep with me, but there will be consequences”.   It would be one thing if by “consequences” the Prime Minister meant something like “you won’t be as protected against the virus as somebody who chooses to take the vaccine.”    This is obviously not what he meant.   It was a threat of the imposition of additional negative consequences apart from whatever ones might be inherent in the choice itself on those who reject the vaccine.   This is an unjustifiable abuse of government power.   Indeed, it is ethically unacceptable for any institution to abuse its authority and power in this way.   Rather than issuing vaccine mandates for their own employees, and those of certain private sectors, governments ought to be forbidding everyone else from imposing private vaccine mandates.    The latter would be a proper and ethical use of government power.  

 

That so many people have indicated their support for vaccine mandates, government or private, demonstrates just how badly our ethical thinking, which was not exactly in great shape prior to the pandemic, has deteriorated over the course of the last two years.

 

(1)   This is what the so-called Culture War, or at least the moral aspect of it, has really been all about.

(2)  The imagery comes from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans in the New Testament.

The Poet versus the Pandemic

John Tory, the current mayor of the city of York in Upper Canada, or, as people who prefer to be up to date like to call it, Toronto, Ontario, must be a poetry hater. That is the conclusion to which I was led by reading about one of his recent decisions.

On Wednesday April 22nd, he issued the order that when the cherry blossoms begin to bloom in High Park, the park was to be sealed to the public, to re-open only after the bloom period ended. Accordingly, on April 30th the park was sealed. By sealed, I mean that he had erected a temporary steel fence around the park, ordered the police to barricade the entrances, and sent in the by-law officers with their ticket books to fine everybody they could find. All of this to prevent people from looking at flowers. Anybody who wanted to see the cherry in bloom would have to watch it livestream. On the evening of Sunday, May 10th, the park re-opened. Not because the Hogtown mayor had come to his senses but because the cherry bloom period was over.

This decision was, like virtually all government decisions in response to the pandemic, stupid, heavy-handed, and over-the-top. If it were the expression of a thought, rather than the absence of thought, that thought would be the opposite of that found in the second poem in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad.

A Shropshire Lad, which appeared in 1896, was the first of two volumes of poetry that classical scholar Alfred Edward Housman published in his lifetime. The second, entitled Last Poems, appeared almost three decades later in 1922. It is in the latter that one can find “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man.” This is another poem which the government response to this pandemic brings readily to mind. In this case it is not any one particular decision that evokes the poem, any of their repressive, totalitarian, rules will do. The poem expresses the perspective of someone caged in by rules made without his consent but from which he cannot escape. It begins with the lines:

The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;

and includes the memorable:

And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

Anyone who remembers Steve Gerber's 1970's comic, Howard the Duck, published by Marvel, will probably recognize the source of its tag-line here.

If these sound like the sentiments of some sort of radical, anarchist, subversive or rebel, think again. Housman had been, like his six siblings, raised in the political convictions of their father Edward whose post-dinner toast was “Up with the Tories and down with the Radicals!” Unlike his sister Clemence and his brother Lawrence who abandoned this political creed for its opposite, Clemence becoming a prominent feminist and Lawrence becoming a socialist and pacifist activist, Housman did not. While his partisan enthusiasm eventually died down, he continued to cheer for Conservative victories, if mostly because, they, in his words “will vex the kind of people I don’t like.” He ridiculed and mocked the causes his brother and sister supported and to the end of his life rebuffed their efforts to enlist him. He described himself to a Dr. Barnes, whose petition to reform the English language he had returned unsigned, as “a real conservative, who thinks change an evil in itself.”

Like Dr. Johnson, and probably most “real conservatives”, he was prone to melancholy, or what they would call depression today. There were other factors that presumably contributed to this. After his mother passed away, he lost his early Christian faith when he was thirteen. His spiritual trajectory followed the opposite path to that of his protégé Enoch Powell. Powell, who studied under Housman at Trinity College in Cambridge University where the poet was Professor of Latin, before becoming an acclaimed classicist and later the Conservative statesman legendary for sounding the alarm against creeping socialism, the European Common Market, and especially mass immigration, had received no religious upbringing, fell under the spell of Nietzsche in the 1930s, but was eventually drawn, through the beauty of Cranmer's liturgy, to a sort of high Anglicanism. Housman had been raised in this faith and lost it. Unlike Nietzsche, who was the son of a Lutheran pastor, and several more recent examples, he did not become a zealous evangelist of unbelief, labouring to destroy the faith he once held, but rather mourned the loss of the consolation it offered. The hymn sung at his funeral was of his own composition. The other major factor was the devastation of unrequited love which has been the dark muse of more than one poet. In Housman's case it was all the more devastating due to the complicating factors of his having been by nature a highly introverted individual and the love having ben of the type of which, only a few years later, the Irish poet-playwright Oscar Wilde, speaking in his own defence at the trial that his ill-advised and self-destructive defamation suit against the notoriously pugnacious and pugilistic Marquess of Queensberry had brought down upon him, would say that it "dare not speak its name" which was true at the time, although more recently, Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist who, incidentally, borrowed several lines from Housman as chapter titles in one of his novels, has with equal truth said that it has become the "love that won't shut up."

Housman's melancholy is very evident in the tone that characterizes his verse. It frequently takes the form of lament for youth cut short or nostalgia for something that has been lost through time and change. In “1887”, which is the very first poem in A Shropshire Lad, it is wed to a celebratory tone. This poem, as is indicated by its title, was written for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and begins by describing the celebrations across the realm, as dales and hills light up with beacons “Because ‘tis fifty years to-night/That God has saved the Queen.” This leads into:

Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we’ll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn’s dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.


As he brings it to a conclusion, the voices of the lamented dead and the living join in the celebratory cry “God save the Queen” and the poet ends with this admonishment:


Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you’ve been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen. (1)


Later in the fortieth poem in the volume, to which he gave no other title than XL, we find the nostalgic aspect of his melancholy on full, undiluted, display:


Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.


In the above verses there is not the slightest trace of hope, or any other mitigating positive sentiment, mingled with the lament. The “blue remembered hills” and the "happy highways" in the “land of lost content” are lost forever. The air that brings their memory to heart is an air that "kills"

This is not so in the second poem in this anthology, the one alluded to at the beginning of this essay and the one with which we shall bring it to a close. This is quite probably Housman’s best-known poem. While it is difficult to judge this because, like those of his contemporary Rudyard Kipling or, for that matter, pretty much any Victorian era poet, his poems have the quality of sticking in your mind, of practically memorizing themselves, I am going by the fact that it is the one that appears most often in anthologies. The poem just cited and "When I Was One and Twenty" would be the closest contenders for the title. In this poem reflection on the brevity of human life is the source of sadness. In an ironic twist, this reflection is placed on the lips of one who is only twenty, which is not ordinarily an age in which one morbidly contemplates his own mortality.


Here, however, he is not helpless. There is a positive step he can take, however, to ameliorate the situation, by making the days which are quantitatively few, qualitatively better:


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.


To translate this into prose: death is inevitable, life is short, don't waste it, fill it with beauty such as that of the blossom of the cherry tree.

The opposite notion, in other words, to that of erecting a barrier to prevent people from seeing the cherry blossoms in the foolish hope of thereby keeping the Reaper away.

What would Housman have thought of someone like John Tory?

(1) There was a famous encounter between Housman and Frank Harris that concerns the interpretation of this poem and which illustrates the difference between Housman and his pacifist brother Lawrence. Harris, taking the poem to be a, anti-war polemic and a “bitter satire” written against patriotism and the like, offered his congratulations, based on this interpretation, to its author who repudiated him to his face:


I never intended to poke fun, as you call it, at patriotism, and I can find nothing in the sentiment to make mockery of: I meant it sincerely; if Englishmen breed as good men as their fathers, then God will save the Queen. I can only reject and resent your truculent praise.

If We Must Take Away Guns From People Start With the Police

This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.

Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.

A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.

I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.

According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.

All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.

Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.

The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.

Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.

You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.

Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.

There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.

The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.

The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.


(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.

Sacrificing Billions to Save Thousands?

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." – Rudyard Kipling

The way the World Health Organization, our power-hungry politicians, the technocratic boobs with tunnel vision who are our health apparatchiks, and the cheap harlots of the mainstream media talk about it, one would think that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a real life equivalent of the artificially engineered, antibody resistant, superflu which wipes out most of the world’s population in Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand and the various adaptations thereof. It is not. Although it is possible that like the weaponized flu strain in the novel, it escaped from a laboratory, that of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not remotely comparable in terms of lethality. It is basically a normal strain of bat influenza that has jumped species to humans, that has been spreading rapidly due to it being new to the species and thus our having no built up immunity to it yet, but most people are not at risk of anything worse than the ordinary flu from it. Those who are most susceptible to developing the severe and potentially lethal form of pneumonia that it can produce are the same people susceptible to catching pneumonia and dying from H1N1 and the other, ordinary, seasonal strains of the flu.

From the beginning of this pandemic it has been apparent that the WHO’s claims with regards to the lethality of this virus have been greatly exaggerated. Although the press in its daily reports has used “staggering” and similar scare words to describe the rising death tolls, the numbers themselves have not supported the use of such adjectives. Not when taken in context at any rate. COVID-19 has not become the leading cause of death, it is nowhere close to it. The overall number of deaths from all causes for the period of this pandemic has not risen astronomically in comparison with the number for the same period in other years. Indeed, in some areas that have been particularly hard hit by COVID-19 this number has been down from recent years.

In most countries, the epidemiologists’ original projections of expected deaths from this disease have been radically revised downward. At some point the mortality rate will have to undergo a similar radical adjustment. Contrary to the lies of the health authorities and the media, the official death count for COVID-19 is not too low but too high. Even though the vast majority of people who have caught this virus and died have had multiple other conditions that also contributed to their demise these have all been classified as deaths from COVID-19. If deaths from regular influenza were counted the same way the mortality rate for the flu would be much higher than it is. Similarly, the other number that goes into the mortality rate calculation is much too low. Since a large number – as many as fifty percent some estimates put it – of those who contract the virus are completely asymptomatic, the total number known to have been infected is obviously much, much, lower than the true number of infected. Indeed, when we consider that international travel in and out of Hubei province was allowed long after the initial outbreak began there – and long after Red China shut down travel from that province to the rest of their own country – during a period in which Western countries, sick with a liberalism far more lethal than this virus, resisted imposing travel restrictions on China, it is almost certain that the virus had made it into all of our countries long before we noticed that it had arrived.

Since the potential lethality of this virus has been hugely exaggerated, the extent to which the repugnant, totalitarian, Communistic measures being taken almost everywhere are “saving lives” is also exaggerated. In pointing this out I do not wish merely to throw water on those currently engaged in a nauseating orgy of self-congratulatory, backslapping, tripe over their efforts to save lives by sacrificing our freedoms, but to contrast the low number of lives saved with the potentially much higher number of lives endangered by the same measures.

While I am no fan of Karl Marx – Groucho is much more my style – and am of the firm opinion that he was wrong about almost everything, there are a few rare exceptions to this. One such exception was the sentence with which he opened his letter to Louis Kugelmann on July 11, 1868. He wrote “Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.” With this sentence he introduces an argument that is neither interesting nor relevant to the subject at hand, but the sentence itself states an obvious truth, one very similar to that which is found in the verses by Rudyard Kipling quoted at the beginning of this essay.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus continues to be remembered to this day for his theory about population size and the food supply. Human beings, Malthus argued, can increase our food supply through improved means of production, but if we do so the natural human response will be an increase in reproduction. The increase in reproduction will be faster and larger than the increase in food production so that the growth in population size will exceed the increase to the food supply and as a result there will be famine, poverty, starvation, disease and death. His essay on the Principle of Population was first published in 1798. He expanded and revised it in 1803, and published several further editions with minor revisions before his death in 1834. From that day to this, it has inspired several prophecies of doom, the most famous of recent times being the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb by Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die in the 1970s from starvation due to overpopulation. That, of course, did not happen.

There is obviously a flaw somewhere in Malthus’ theory. The question is where. According to the popular Demographic Transition Model, first developed by Warren Thomson in 1929, the problem is with his understanding of human nature. According to this theory, as societies progress towards industrialization they pass through stages and, after they have achieved a certain level of industrial development, fertility rates drop drastically and population size stabilizes. While the demographic history of Western countries and other developed countries such as Japan in the twentieth century would seem to bear this interpretation out, explaining its having passed into conventional wisdom, it has not gone without challenge. Dr. Virginia Deane Abernethy of Vanderbilt University, for example, in her book Population Politics (Transaction Books, 2000) gave several examples of empirical evidence that goes against the theory, making the case that popular late twentieth century progressive efforts to combat Third World overpopulation and poverty with policies based upon the assumption of the DTM, such as foreign relief and liberal immigration to the West as a population safety valve, have not worked as the model would have predicted but have, if anything, made the problem worse. The sharp decline in fertility that developed countries have experienced since the end of the post-World War II Baby Boom is better explained by other aspects of the transition to modernity, such as a severe weakening of the traditional idea that producing posterity is a duty we owe to our ancestors, than by industrial prosperity itself.


The other leading explanation of the flaw in Malthus’ theory is that he vastly underestimated our capacity to improve and increase the food supply. This explanation is also borne out by the history of the twentieth century and much more consistently than that of the DTM.

Now, if this explanation of what went wrong with the predictions based upon Malthus’ theory is the correct one, and I believe it is, then what could potentially happen when we have a global population of 7.8 billion people and we shut down the economy all over the world, jeopardizing out ability to produce food at this improved and increased capacity?

Why, lo and behold, we have just discovered where the potential for a death rate as a high as the one in Stephen King’s book is to be found.

Yes, shutting down the economies of practically every country in the world, is indeed a move that will put the food supply in jeopardy. When those who produce and sell food are almost the only ones allowed to be open they are essentially being asked or told to work for nothing, for nobody else is producing anything with which to pay them. Yes, governments are printing and handing out fiat money by the gazillions, but money has no intrinsic value. Its role in the marketplace is to be a convenient stand-in for real goods. The X number of dollars that you pay someone for Y amount of magic beans, represents the cow that you would have traded in a barter exchange. Perhaps that is a bad example, because both beans and cattle are sources of food, but I think it still gets the point across. If only category of producers are allowed to actually produce anything for sale in the market, the currency that is exchanged in that market will rapidly become worthless, and those producers will become overburdened and start to fail. It is estimated that nine million people in the world die from hunger every year. It is responsible for half of the deaths of children under the age of five. This is over three times the number of people known to have been infected with COVID-19. It is about fifty times more than the number who have died after contracting the virus. As of this writing, the number who have died from hunger in 2020 so far is almost three million. That’s about fifteen times the number who have died after contracting COVID-19, whether the virus was the primary killer or not. The measures being taken to combat COVID-19 will drive the number who die from hunger up and by considerably more than they can bring the number who die from COVID-19 down.

There are those who would say that this is the intentional and deliberate true purpose of the global lockdown. I would not go that far. The problem with the interpretation of events as being the intended outcome of a very powerful and malevolent cabal is that it requires assuming that politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, and the like possess an almost superhuman level of competence. In reality, these are people who think they are Sherlock Holmes, when they are actually Jacques Clouseau – the Jacques Clouseau portrayed by Peter Sellers in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films, not the version of the character more recently portrayed by Steve Martin. Unlike the latter, who is able to scrape together enough deductive reasoning to actually solve the case by the end of his movies, Sellers’ classic interpretation of this character was of a bumbling, clumsy, nincompoop whose incompetence is matched only by his vanity and arrogance, and who succeeds only through an extraordinary degree of sheer accidental luck.

That having been said, large scale global depopulation has been one of the chief goals of the environmentalist wing of the United Nations and its ultrawealthy backers like Bill Gates, George Soros, and the late Maurice Strong since at least the 1992 “Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro that produced the famous – or, depending upon your perspective, infamous – action plan “Agenda 21.” These people represent the most extreme version of one of the two distortions of Malthus that have been around since his own day. While his detractors, like Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, unjustly accused him of heartlessly wishing upon people the famine, poverty, and death his theory predicted, his supporters, especially those of more recent times, have advocated measures to combat overpopulation that he himself would have found morally repugnant, such as abortion, infanticide, and totalitarian state control of reproduction. Those who want the world’s population reduced by as much as eighty to ninety-five percent are the worst example of this sort. The overlap between the institutions such as the United Nations and individuals such as Bill Gates who advocate this radical agenda and those behind the global lockdown is certainly worth taking note of.

Whether intentional or merely the result of the kind of stupidity that is the unique property of technocratic experts – “I had no idea my solution to Problem X would create the much worse Problem Y because that is not my field of expertise” – the potential lethality of the measures being taken to combat COVID-19, far exceeds that of the disease itself.

“Me Too”, ---- You! - Or Perhaps Not.

Unprovoked and awful charges - even so the she-bear fights – Rudyard Kipling

In 411 BC, the war between the Athenian Delian League and the Spartan Peloponnesian League, which had resumed three years previously after the Peace of Nicias finally fell apart, reached its twentieth year. Things were not going well for the Athenians. During the break in the fighting with Sparta, Alcibiades, the leader of the Athenian war party, talked the Assembly into sending a fleet to Sicily, ostensibly to support their allies, but with the goal of conquering the island. The same Nicias who had negotiated the peace with Sparta, in an attempt to dissuade them from doing this told the Assembly that a much larger force would be needed than what they originally intended, but with the only result being that they enlarged the armada and put him in charge, along with Alcibiades and Lamachus. Once there, the generals decided to begin their campaign by establishing a base and launching an attack on the strongest Sicilian city-state, Syracuse. Before the siege began, Alcibiades, who had thought up this strategy, received a summons ordering him to return to Athens to stand trial on charges of the desecration of sacred statues. He opted to flee instead and defected to Sparta. In his absence, the siege of Syracuse did not go well, Lamachus was slain, and Nicias sent away for reinforcements. Athens sent the reinforcements, led by Demosthenes, but this made things worse as the fighting with Sparta, now backed by Syracuse, resumed shortly thereafter and the Sicilian Expedition ended in total disaster for Athens with the loss of most of their ships and the enslavement of their men.

Ultimately, this would cost them the Peloponnesian War, but in 411 the decisive loss to Lysander of Sparta at Aegospotami was still six years away. It was at this point that Aristophanes, the master of Attic Old Comedy, introduced a new play. The play is called the Lysistrata, after its main character, an Athenian woman who with the help of her Spartan counterpart Lampito, persuades the extremely reluctant women of Greece to go on a sex-strike and withhold sex from the men until they agree to stop the war. It is not easy for her to convince the women to either agree to this or to stick to the plan once they have agreed to it. Contrary to a popular misconception, it is women rather than men who are by far the most obsessed with sex, a fact of which Aristophanes was well aware, and which he exploited to its full comic potential.

What makes the Lysistrata so hilarious is that the title character succeeds in her plan to end the war despite her use of a strategy that would almost universally be perceived – it certainly was so seen by her creator – as utterly undoable. There is an old quip, that has been variously attributed to Ann Landers, Henry Kissinger, and a host of others although it appears to be older than all of them, that the battle of the sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy. It is, however, the current year, and perhaps it is time that the idea of a sex strike be seriously considered – not by women, but by men. Indeed, it is starting to seem necessary not for the purpose of attaining any political end but for survival. This is due to the “Me Too” movement that insists that we treat every Potiphar’s wife as if she were Lucretia. Just be clear, the Lucretia in the last sentence is she of ancient Rome, who committed suicide to protect her honour after her rape by Sextus Tarquinus and not her considerably less virtuous fifteenth century namesake, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was as ruthless, conniving and bloodthirsty as her brother Cesare Borgia, of whom Machiavelli’s Prince was a verbal portrait.

Indeed, there is evidence that just such a sex-strike is in its beginning stages. The ever fabulous veteran actress and author Dame Joan Collins, in her latest Diary for The Spectator remarks that “if these accusations towards men continue much longer, I fear a major decline in population growth in the near future.” She demonstrates that this fear is not unwarranted by concluding her column with the following illustration:

A 30-year-old single man informs me that he wouldn’t consider dating because he was too scared of being accused of inappropriate behaviour or of being ‘named and shamed’ by social media or the Twitterati. ‘I go out with the guys, drink beer and watch box sets,’ he said ruefully, ‘and friends are doing the same. We’re scared of the #MeToo movement and of being accused of sexual harassment and worse if we even tell a girl she’s pretty.’ ‘In my day we called it flirting,’ I told him.

Today, the line between “flirting” and “sexual harassment” is extremely blurry, making it potentially hazardous for any man to approach or otherwise show interest in a woman. American Vice President Mike Pence was mocked about a year ago for his policy of refusing to dine alone with women other than his wife. The Atlantic published a piece that claimed that this policy “hurt women” using the same tortured excuse for logic that the courts have been using since the 1970s to admit female reporters to men’s locker rooms – the reverse has now been accomplished on entirely different but even more absurd grounds – and to force private clubs to abandon “men only” policies. Vox posted an article claiming that this was “probably illegal.” The New Yorker ran a piece entitled “Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women From Power.” Each of these, incidentally or not, was written by a woman. Half a year later, l’affaire Weinstein broke, the “Me Too” movement was launched, and all of a sudden it was a lot more difficult to laugh at Mike Pence.

Rape, of course, is a serious crime – and it has been treated as such from time immemorial. Undoubtedly it is immoral and sleazy for an employer, whether he be a Hollywood producer, a corporate executive, or a Cabinet Minister, to offer to advance a woman’s career in exchange for sexual favours. It is just as immoral and sleazy, however, for a woman to accept the offer – and it is by no means the case, far from it, that it is always the man who initiates this sort of exchange. “Sexual harassment” is the preferred charge of the “Me Too” movement precisely because it is so vague and hazy. Virtually any attention that a man shows to a woman qua woman can be interpreted as sexual harassment if the woman so chooses.

Apart from their preference for the comparatively hazy charge of sexual harassment over those of long recognized sexual crimes and misdeeds with more concrete definitions, the “Me Too” wave of feminism insists that accusations be believed on the say so of the accuser, even in a dearth of supporting evidence and if the accusations pertain to events that took place decades previously. Potiphar’s wife would undoubtedly approve. This is a total assault on justice, that is to say true justice, at least as the term has traditionally been understood in the English-speaking world, and not the spurious contemporary substitute that is called “social” despite being utterly corrosive of society, its institutions, and, as we are seeing in feminism, ordinary social interaction between the sexes.

Eventually, the totally irrational and irresponsible “Me Too” movement is sure to self-destruct. Before this happens, however, there is no telling how many lives and careers it will ruin, to say nothing of the damage it will inflict on the fabric of society and relations between the sexes.

In the meantime, in the interests of self-preservation, men need to consider, at the very least following the example of Mike Pence. A reverse Lysistrata strategy would, however, be more effective in securing the downfall of the enemy. It is true that a strategy that eliminates the procreative act has the potential of resulting in a Pyrrhic victory, but women are far more likely to cave against such a move then men. So perhaps the answer to the “Me Too” movement is for men to tell the fairer sex, “futuete vos ipsos”, not as a crude expletive but practical advice, because they are for the time being no longer willing to do it for them.

The Female of the Species is More Randy than the Male!

To point out the hard truth about women qua women as I am about to do in this essay goes against many of my deeply cherished convictions. As a Canadian Tory, which is something different from a right-liberal which is what most American conservatives are, I do not believe that everything worth defending in Western Civilization came about in the Modern Age as the result of the Enlightenment but insist rather, that there is much that is worth fighting and dying for to be found in the tradition that antedates modernity. That includes the concept of chivalry, which arose out of the code of honour of the knightly orders of the Middle Ages. One aspect of the attitude and behaviour towards women prescribed by chivalry, that of pretending that they are as pure as the driven snow, could be described as the maintenance of what Plato called a “noble lie.” It was based on the recognition of a greater truth, which was that men and women are different and not equal and that the natural inequality is such as warrants protective behaviour on the part of men towards women, even to the point of publicly holding such an illusion about them.

Unfortunately chivalry is dead having been murdered by the monstrous beast that is feminism. By insisting, contrary to reality that men and women are equals, and contrary to the superior morality of pre-liberal tradition that they must be regarded and treated as equals, feminism has so altered the relationship between the sexes as to remove any justification for the noble lie. That might not, in itself, be a good reason to say something unchivalrous, but female hypocrisy has never been more on display than it has for the last week and so the time has come to speak the ignoble truth.

In ancient Greek mythology there was a prophet by the name of Tiresias. He was an unusually long-lived man who lived in the city of Thebes. If you are familiar with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex you will recall that he is the man who reluctantly, and only after the provocation of an unjust accusation of conspiracy, revealed to Oedipus that he was the man who had killed King Laius and in doing so, unwittingly murdered his own father. Another well-known story about Tiresias is how he received the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery. One day he came across two snakes mating and whacked them with his staff, offending Hera, the notoriously psychopathic wife of Zeus, who turned him into a woman. Having undergone this apogynosis, she changed her name to Caitlyn, got her picture on the cover of all of Thebes’ popular entertainment magazines, was offered her own show at the amphitheatre, and became a star until, seven years later, she came across another pair of snakes going at it, and was changed back.

Don’t worry, I am going somewhere with all of this.

Tiresias was, as is quite unusual in a seer, blind. The stories vary as to how this came about, but one version says that he was called upon to judge, on the basis of his ahead-of-the-times transgendered experience, in a dispute between Zeus and Hera over which sex enjoyed copulation more. Zeus claimed that women got more out of it, Hera insisted that the pleasure mostly belonged to men. Tiresias, unwisely, answered truthfully and said that men get only one tenth of the pleasure that women do, thus pissing off the vengeful Hera yet again, and was struck blind as punishment.

Ancient stories of this sort are usually ways of telling truths and this is no exception. The truth contained in this story is that the female of the species is not only, as Rudyard Kipling famously noted, more deadly than the male, but she is also hornier and more randy as well.

As difficult as this is for most people to accept, having had it drilled into our heads most of our lives that the male is dominated by his libido, a violent and powerful force from which the female must be protected, it is also quite evidently true. Is there anybody who seriously thinks that a scientific comparison of the conversation men have among themselves, with that women have among themselves, would reveal that the former spend more of their time talking about women than the latter do about men? If so, such a person needs to get a grasp on reality.

Several years ago in a Bible study class at church the subject of pornography was addressed. It was put forward that this is a sinful addiction to which men are more prone than women. I made the objection that if we do not limit our concept of pornography to merely visual depictions of sex but include verbal descriptions as well, this is clearly not the case. Indeed, by that broader definition, a case can be made that the vast majority of fiction written for primarily female consumption constitutes smut, plain and simple.

Consider popular music for a further example. The most highly sexualized lyrics and performances on the pop music scene today are to be found among female recording artists like Madonna, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga. Let us grant that these are women with a very strong business sense who are providing a supply to meet a market demand. Is that demand coming from heterosexual males? You would find little evidence of that by looking at the fan bases of these stars. Their audiences are composed mainly of females.

Women do not like to acknowledge this truth and understandably so. It greatly weakens their bargaining power when it comes to negotiating their relationships with men. So they would prefer that society continue to maintain the fiction that the larger portion of lust has been allotted to men. The hypocrisy in this has been magnified to the nth degree by the feminist movement which purports to speak for women. Feminism demands that the expression of female sexuality be free from the constraints of traditional morality. It complains that traditional morality held a double standard which condemned promiscuity more severely in women than in men and interprets this as an attempt to maintain a male monopoly on power by controlling female sexuality. This ignores the far more realistic explanation that women get pregnant and men do not, a fact which means that the natural consequences of sexual activity are visible in women and place a heavy burden upon them, so that the rules of traditional morality actually serve women’s own self-interest far more than they do that of men.

While feminism has rejected the constraints of traditional morality on female sexuality the natural consequences that explain the existence of what feminism wrongly perceived as a double standard still exist. Feminism’s solution to these is a monstrous one, to assert for women a right to terminate the lives of their unborn children while developing in the womb. Meanwhile, it has replaced the old morality with a new one of its own mold and manufacture replete with a double standard of its own. It is masculine sexuality the new morality seeks to constrain, not with simple and straightforward rules like “thou shalt not commit adultery” as in the old morality, but with loosely defined jargon that is malleable and expansive enough to allow feminists to read virtually any expression of masculine sexuality that they don’t like as a form of sexual aggression. If that was not bad enough, the feminists insist that women who accuse men of sexually aggressive offenses have a “right to be believed” which, as I pointed out in my last essay, is completely incompatible with the right of the accused – male or female – to be considered innocent until proven guilty which is fundamental to our civilization’s concept of justice.

All of this feminist hypocrisy has been on prominent display for a week now as women of both sexes have been waging a blitzkrieg on Donald Trump in their determination to see a woman who makes Queen Jezebel look like the Blessed Virgin in comparison become the next President of the United States simply because she is a woman. In the face of such hypocrisy, the time has come for all of us, distasteful as it may be, to leave chivalry aside and call a spade a spade where women are concerned. The fact of the matter is that women, the raunchier of the two sexes, say things publicly all the time that are far worse than what they have been condemning Donald Trump for saying privately. Their hypocrisy is so great they could offer lessons in it to the scribes and Pharisees.

Barbaric Cultural Practices

Earlier this year, and especially during the long federal election campaign, the Liberal and New Democrat parties, the liberal media, progressive bloggers, and other assorted lefties, were able to get a lot of mileage out of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices”. The previous government, led by Stephen Harper, had banned the wearing of the niqab during citizenship oath ceremonies in 2011, a ban which was struck down by a Federal Court.* Harper’s government vowed to take the matter to the Supreme Court and then, in the last month of the election campaign, promised to establish an RCMP tipline for reporting cases of “barbaric cultural practices”.

The progressives condemned this as racist and xenophobic. Harper, they maintained, was appealing to fear, negativity, and hatred, and this was “unCanadian” because Canada is the land of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. Actually, Canada was nothing of the sort prior to the premiership of Trudeau the Elder, which began in 1968. It was the Trudeau Liberals who created the new Canada of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism – that is to say tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that were imposed on the country from the top down, administered by arrogant bureaucrats, and protected by the suppression of dissent. The older, traditional, British Canada was a much superior country.

The merits of the older British Canada, and the rather odious nature of the kind of “tolerance” and “diversity” introduced by the Trudeau Liberals which make a mockery of the ordinary meaning of these terms are, of course, beyond the understanding of today’s progressives. Nor do they seem to be capable of grasping that it is one of their own chief ideals that Stephen Harper was fighting for in his campaign against “barbaric cultural practices”.

This is not intended to be laudatory of Stephen Harper. The ideal in question is that of the equality of the sexes, or, as the progressives now insist upon mislabelling it, “gender equality”, an ideal I do not share with Harper or the progressives and, indeed, regard as worthy only of ridicule. Auberon Waugh put it best, I think, years ago when he wrote:

I have never understood how equality can be said to apply, except in the most superficial sense. to any human relationship. By this I do not mean that we are all graded in some divinely-imposed pecking order, but that our essential differences make talk of equality meaningless. Study of the sexes is bound to identify the differing characteristics of each, and I cannot see how anything useful is achieved by asserting that chalk is equal to cheese, or should be equal to cheese and must be made equal.

I don’t believe in “gender equality” but the progressives all seem to believe in it and none of them more so than that vapid young twit who is our new Prime Minister and who has made a grand gesture of support for this ideal in the way he chose the Ministers for his new Cabinet.

These same progressives accused Stephen Harper of waging a “war on women”. Which, however, actually accomplishes more for the fairer sex – choosing your Cabinet Ministers on the basis of their sex so you can have an equal number of men and of women, or actively trying to keep such practices as honour killings and female circumcision from becoming prevalent in Canada? It is practices like these, which target the female sex, that the Harper government condemned as barbaric.

In 2011, the year the Harper Conservatives won a majority government, the federal government updated the “Discover Canada” brochure that is given to those who wish to immigrate to and become citizens of Canada. Among the changes was the addition of forced marriage to the following list: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence” and goes on to say that those who commit these things will all be severely punished under our criminal law. Now that last part may have been more a statement of wishful thinking than an accurate description of how our criminal justice system actually functions but that is beside the point. “Spousal abuse”, runs both ways, and in fact there is recent evidence that women are more likely to be abusive in relationships than men, which, of course, would have come as no surprise to Rudyard Kipling, but this too is beside the point as the government clearly had male-on-female abuse in mind when it put that into the pamphlet. For that is what all of these “barbaric cultural practices” have in common, they all target females. The title of the subsection of the brochure that this is found in, by the way, is “The Equality of Women and Men”.

At the time, Justin Trudeau, then Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Shadow Minister for Immigration condemned the Harper government for the use of the word “barbaric”, even though it was not itself a new addition to the publication. He received so much negative feedback over this he was forced to make a retraction the next day.

Every time the Harper government spoke of “barbaric cultural practices” it was with regards to practices in which women are treated cruelly or unfairly. The niqab controversy was no exception to this although the face veil is obviously not on the same scale as murdering one’s daughter or sister because she shamed the family by having a boyfriend, dressing inappropriately, or being raped, or removing a young girl’s clitoris to prevent her from growing up to become promiscuous. While I may not think much of the “gender equality” Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau both believe in, unlike Mr. Trudeau four years ago, I have no problem agreeing that these practices are utterly barbaric. Indeed, one of the things most objectionable about the false ideal of equality, is that those who believe in it tend to make a big deal out of peccadilloes while letting major injustices like these slide.

Consider the example of feminism. “The women’s movement” is a modern phenomenon, whose raison d'être is to promote the rights of women. Yet it has never concentrated its efforts on fighting honour killings or cliterodectomy or anything of the like. Instead, it has focused on such things as the “glass ceiling” and the “77 cents on the dollar” and to combat these largely imaginary bogeys, has created a barbaric cultural practice of its own, i.e., abortion on demand. It could be argued that this is because feminism is a movement which began in, grew up in, and still mostly belongs to, the Western world where the former practices were mostly unknown until quite recently. That is the whole point, however. That a revolutionary movement seeking radical societal transformation in the name of women developed in the West, where it really only became a force after women had been given the vote and barriers to their education, owning property, and having professional careers had for the most part disappeared, and not in parts of the world where girls have their genitals mutilated and may be murdered by their relatives if they “shame” their family is because the modern Western mind has been thoroughly permeated and polluted by the false ideal of equality.

Ironically, feminism is part of the larger progressivism which is itself responsible for practices like female genital mutilation and honour killings, once unknown in countries like Canada, becoming more and more common in large Western cities. For progressivism is not just about the equality of the sexes, it is about the equality of races and cultures as well and for decades now, what this has meant, is that it has insisted that all cultures ought to be equally welcome in Canada and other Western countries. This is what the first Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy of “official multiculturalism” was all about and it is clearly the reason that the younger Trudeau, heir to this dogma in which he was undoubtedly indoctrinated from an early age, initially took a foolish offence to the description of forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and honour killings as barbaric a few years ago. To call these things barbaric is to say that all cultures are not equal after all, which, of course, they are not.

Trudeau and other progressives are no more capable of admitting this than they are of admitting that there is a fundamental contradiction in their ideology – that equality of the sexes and equality of cultures are mutually incompatible ideals. They can be rejected together with consistency – which is my own position – but they cannot be consistently affirmed together. Stephen Harper got this partially right, the Trudeaus have always gotten it completely wrong, and Canada has paid a heavy price for their error.

*It has been drawn to my attention that I was mistaken in thinking that the ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal was based on the Charter. The ban, which was an instruction from the Ministry to the judges administering the citizenship oath rather than a law, was overturned because it conflicted with an older rule that requires such judges to give maximum religious freedom in the swearing-in ceremony. Thank you to the person who noticed and notified me of this factual error.

Light 'em up, Boys!

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Twenty-seven years ago the World Health Organization declared May 31st to be “World No Tobacco Day”. What better way to celebrate the occasion, and to give the WHO and its parent organization the United Nations that ancient phallic symbol of disrespect, the digitus impudicus, that they so richly deserve than by writing a pro-smoking essay?

Just to be clear, it is not all smoking that I will be defending, merely that of the leaves of that excellent, indigenous-to-the-Americas, plant Nicotiana. This plant, long grown by decent, salt-of-the-earth farmers of the kind depicted in the novels of Wendell Berry and which has long provided comfort and temporary respite from the stress and pressure of the day to professional and working classes alike, has been the target of a decades long vilification campaign on the part of numerous organizations of bossy busy-bodies. Just under a century ago another plant, this one indigenous to Asia but which has been put to various uses in Western countries for millennia, was banned outright or at least heavily regulated in most countries of the world. The scientific name of this plant is Cannabis, its more common name is hemp, and its flowers and leaves too are often smoked as the drug marijuana. I will not be defending the smoking of this substance, just that of tobacco and I will explain my reasons for supporting the one and not the other as this essay unfolds.

It is not primarily a question of legality. Tobacco is technically legal, at least for those of the age of majority, although it is taxed to the hilt, its advertisement is forbidden, the companies that sell it are required to put grotesque warnings on their labels, shops that sell it are required to keep it hidden, and its use is prohibited in an increasing number of places and situations. The use of cannabis as a drug is illegal, except when prescribed by a doctor for medicinal purposes. There is currently a campaign to legalize its recreational use, a campaign that has received the prominent support of Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau. Although Trudeau’s support is a very good reason indeed to question the soundness of legalizing marijuana, it seems evident to me that the prohibitionist approach to marijuana and other mind-altering substances has been the wrong tactic, one that has accomplished more harm than good. It needs to be said, however, that despite the fact that the prohibition of marijuana has driven the profit margins of its production and sale through the roof, enriching drug lords, and creating needless amounts of violence as criminal organizations compete for the monopoly of the dangerous but profitable black market, the outright prohibition of the drug is far more honest than the laws regarding tobacco, which are designed to demonize tobacco producers and harass and persecute tobacco smokers while still allowing the government to make money off of the trade.

When it comes to matters such as this culture is far more important than law. Decades ago, when the anti-tobacco zealots were just getting organized , when the most prominent tobacco prohibitionist was a vegetarian dictator with a postage stamp moustache who governed Germany with an iron fist while the Tory statesman who led the free world in its fight against this dictator did so with a huge cigar firmly clamped between his teeth, cultural attitudes towards tobacco smoking ranged from tolerant to supportive and tobacco was depicted positively in much literature and art. “A woman is only a woman”, Rudyard Kipling quipped in a poem, “but a good cigar is a smoke”. G. K. Chesterton wrote “Nobody who has an abstract standard of right and wrong can possibly think it wrong to smoke a cigar.” In the context in which he wrote this he told about offering cigars to two American journalists, one of whom responded as if he “were the Old Man of the Mountain offering him hashish that would turn him into an assassin”. Hashish is an alternative form of the drug produced from the hemp plant, thus Chesterton’s remarks demonstrate more than one way in which cultural attitudes have changed. C. S. Lewis, himself a chain smoker, mocked anti-smoking fanatics in his novels while J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbits famously grew and smoked “pipe-weed” described by Tolkien as “a variety probably of Nicotiana.” Since that time, the technological media of film and television have replaced the written word as the primary vehicle of popular culture and in these media today, tobacco smoking is routinely demonized, while pot smoking is routinely glorified. That the cultural attitudes represented by Lewis and Tolkien are slipping away from us while those of the protest movements of the sixties and seventies of the last century have now become mainstream is in itself a reason to be dismayed over the turn our culture has taken.

Long before the anti-tobacco movement became the power that it is today, certain preachers would condemn smoking from the pulpit. These were virtually all Protestants of a kind that placed great emphasis upon basing its theology and ethics directly upon the Bible without putting much stock in how Christians, in the Great Tradition from the Church Fathers down to the Medieval Scholastics, interpreted the Scriptures. This, amusingly, led to dogmatic ethical positions that are not only not taught by the Bible but sometimes contradict its teachings. It was this kind of Protestant, for example, that preached against the consumption of and even started a movement to ban the sale of a form of beverage that was made by Jesus Christ Himself in His first miracle (John 2) and later commanded by Christ to be consumed in the sacrament He ordained and instituted at the Last Supper before His Crucifixion. There is, of course, no verse in the Bible, Old or New Testament, with or without the Deutero-Canonical writings, that mentions, let alone condemns, the smoking of tobacco. Preachers who condemned it from the pulpit, inevitably had to fall back on St. Paul’s comments in the third and sixth chapters of his epistle to the Corinthian Church against defiling the Temple of God. Of course the context of these remarks make it clear that the defilement St. Paul was talking about is fornication, and if one wishes to argue that the concept can be extended to include defilement by other means, it is equally valid to extrapolate what Jesus says in Matthew 15:11 “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man: but that which commeth out of the mouth, this defileth a man” to show that smoking is not included. Which is undoubtedly why the greatest Calvinist Baptist preacher of all time, C. H. Spurgeon, wrote to the Daily Telegraph saying: “I demur altogether and most positively to the statement that to smoke tobacco is in itself a sin…There is growing up in society a Pharisaic system which adds to the commands of God the precepts of men; to that system I will not yield for an hour”

Of course the contemporary anti-smoker does not base his ideas upon the Bible, a collection of writings that he usually wants to ban as much as he wants to ban tobacco, but rather upon the adverse effects of tobacco smoke upon people’s health. Now it is true that tobacco smoking has been shown to increase your risk of lung cancer and other respiratory diseases as well as your risk of strokes and heart attacks. There are all sorts of other facts, however, that one needs to take into consideration to have the proper perspective on this. Virtually everything has a risk factor of some sort or another. Exposure to sunlight increases your risk of cancer, but as is also needed for your body to form Vitamin D3, it would be foolish to live like Count Dracula in an attempt to avoid the risk of getting cancer from the sun. The extent of the risk created by smoking depends upon both the amount you smoke and the manner in which you smoke. The more you smoke, the greater the risk, and cigarettes pose a far greater risk than cigars and pipes. Cigarettes are made from processed tobacco with plenty of additives whereas hand rolled cigars and pipe tobacco are generally pure tobacco leaf, furthermore cigarettes are intended to be inhaled and the latter products are not. The supposed threat of “second-hand smoke” is somewhere between a gross exaggeration and an outright lie. (1) Furthermore, tobacco smoking, like exposure to sunlight, has its health benefits as well. It has been shown to decrease the risk of Parkinson’s and Altzheimer’s diseases (2) and it seems to be an effectual form of self-medication for schizophrenics (3). I emphasize these benefits because of the contrast with cannabis smoke which is notoriously bad for your mental health, increasing your likelihood of developing schizophrenia or paranoia, but there are other health benefits to tobacco. It is, for example, an anti-inflammatory which decreases your risk of certain types of osteoarthritis (4) as well as ulcerative colitis and other digestive disorders (5).

These health benefits are not, of course, the reason people smoke tobacco. People smoke tobacco because it calms them down when they are stressed out and anxious and because it makes them alert when they need to concentrate. Other recreational drugs are used for a feeling of psychological pleasure or euphoria which, however enjoyable it may be to the user, usually impairs his reason, judgement, and general ability to function mentally. The alternative smokes produced from the hemp plant are a good example of this. Tobacco, by contrast, does not impair your mental functions but rather, if anything, enhances them, while balancing out your mental and emotional state. It is, of course, addictive, but this, like its other negative effects, varies according to how you take it. Cigarettes are more addictive than cigars and pipes.

Perhaps you feel that such benefits do not outweigh the risks of smoking tobacco, even moderately and in the far less dangerous forms or pipes or cigars. That is a valid decision, but one that you should make for yourself and not one that the control freaks at the WHO should be making for you.

Therefore, I say feel free to thumb your nose at the World Health Organization and all the other health nazis by saying yes to tobacco this “World No Tobacco Day”.

(1) http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100251229/passive-smoking-another-of-the-nanny-states-big-lies/

(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10942038

(3) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763405000874

(4) http://rheumatology.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/5/366.abstract; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15908236

(5) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1365-2036.2000.00847.x/abstract