Dead Souls

The second of February is the fortieth day after Christmas and therefore the day on which the Church commemorates the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This commemoration is popularly known as Candlemas from the tradition of blessing candles in Church on this day.  There is an ancient folk tradition that says that if it is a clear day on Candlemas it will be a long winter.  A tradition derived from this one says that a hibernating animal – which depends on where you live – will temporarily awaken on Candlemas to predict the remaining length of winter by whether or not he sees his shadow.  In North America, the hibernating animal is the groundhog or woodchuck.

 

This year Candlemas fell on a Sunday.  On most Sunday evenings a friend comes over to watch movies and the obvious choice was “Groundhog Day” the 1993 film by Harold Ramis in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who goes to Punxsutawney, the small community in Pennsylvania where Groundhog Day is a much bigger deal than elsewhere, and becomes trapped in a personal time loop that forces him to relive the day over and over again.  The way in which Phil, Murray’s character who shares a name with the famous groundhog, responds to this dilemma evolves over the course of the movie.  At one point, fairly early in the plot, his response is gross self-indulgence since there are no consequences due to the slate constantly being wiped clean.  In this phase, the character of Rita portrayed by Andie MacDowell, watching him engage in reckless gluttony in the local diner, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him:

 

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he’s sprung

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

In the movie, Phil’s response is to laugh and make a joke about having misheard Walter Scott as Willard Scott.  Watching the movie with my friend, my response was to point out that Rita had misapplied the lines she quoted.  The lines are from Canto VI of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and refer not to a hedonist but to the person lacking patriotism.  The first part of the Canto goes:

 

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

 

After this comes the lines quoted in the movie.

Clearly Sir Walter Scott shared the opinion of Scottish-American, neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue as well he ought for that opinion is correct.  Note, however, that the correctness of the opinion depends on the definition of patriotism.  Nationalism, which is frequently confused with patriotism, is not a virtue.  It is not the opposite of a virtue, a vice, either, but this is only because it does not belong to the same general category, the habits of behaviour that make up character, of which virtue and vice are the good and bad subcategories.  Nationalism is an ideology.  An ideology is a formulaic substitute for a living tradition of thought (see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics And Other Essays).  Shortcuts of this type are always bad. 

 

In a recent column Brian Lilley spoke of “national pride” and criticized those who have only recently started to display national pride as Canadians in response to Donald the Orange.   While Lilley’s argument is related to my main topic in this essay, I bring it up here to make the point that “national pride” is not a good way of describing the patriotism that is a virtue.  To be fair, Lilley did not equate patriotism with “national pride” but this is because the word patriotism does not appear in his column.  Pride appears four times and the adjective proud appears nine times.  While it is easy to see why Lilley would use these terms, since much of the column is appropriately critical of the attacks on Canada and her history, identity, and traditions that have been coming from the current Liberal government for the duration of the near-decade they have been in power, pride is not the right word.  It is the name of a vice, indeed, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than a virtue.

 

Fortunately, we do not have to look far and wide to find the right term.  Patriotism, correctly defined, is neither the ideology of nationalism that values one’s country for its perceived superiority to all others requiring that all others be insulted and subjugated nor the deadly sin of pride as directed towards one’s country, but simply love of one’s country. 

 

Love of one’s country is indeed a virtue.  Whereas pride is the worst of all sins, love is the highest of all virtues. Of course, the love that is the highest of all virtues is a specific kind of love.  The Seven Heavenly Virtues include the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude and the Three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.  The Cardinal Virtues are habits that anyone can cultivate and so make up the best moral character that man can attain in his natural or unregenerate state.  While faith, hope, and love in a more general sense can be similarly cultivated, the Faith, Hope, and Love that make up the essence of Christian character must be imparted by the grace of God although the Christian is also expected to cultivate them.  Love is the greatest of the three as St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and therefore as Henry Drummond called it, “the greatest thing in the world”.  It incorporates the other two since they are built upon each other.  Natural loves are lesser than Christian Love or Charity, but they are still virtuous insomuch as they resemble, albeit imperfectly, the Theological Virtue.  Patriotism, the love of country, is such a love.  Edmund Burke famously described how it develops “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”  The “little platoons” include one’s family and local community and is Burke had wanted to belabour the point he could have said that the first principle is love of one’s family, which develops into love of one’s local community, and then outward.

 

It has been heartwarming to see Canadians display their love of country over the last month or so in response to the repeated threats of Anschluss coming from America’s Fuhrer.  While not all of these displays have been in good taste they do all demonstrate that Captain Airhead’s efforts to kill Canadian patriotism by endlessly apologizing for past events that need no apologies, cancelling Canada’s founders and historical leaders such as Sir John A. Macdonald, and other such nonsense have failed.  This resurgence in Canadian public patriotism ought, therefore, to be welcomed by the “conservatives” who rightly despise Captain Airhead.  Oddly, however, it has not been so welcomed by many of them. 

 

In part this is due to the fact that Captain Airhead, the Liberals, the NDP, and their media supporters who were all on the “cancel Canada” bandwagon until yesterday are now wrapping themselves in the flag and these do deserve to be called out for this.  The right way to do so, however, is to say something to the effect of “you are rather late to the party, but thanks for showing up.”  To Brian Lilley’s credit, that is the gist of what he says in the column alluded to earlier.  Many other “conservatives”, however, have responded quite differently.  In his 2006 book, In Defence of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue, Jeremy Lott pointed out the difference between Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy and Modern condemnation of hypocrisy.  In condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Jesus did not condemn them for the high moral standards they taught, but for falling short of those standards by sinning.  Moderns, however, when they condemn hypocrisy, condemn the moral standards rather than the sin.  The response of many “conservatives” to the newly discovered Canadian patriotism of progressives resembles this in that they seem to be criticizing the progressives more for their expression of patriotism today than for their lack of it yesterday.  One even quoted Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  I refer him to the comments of James Boswell, whose record of the remark is the reason we are familiar with it today, as to what it means.  Dr. Johnson was not impugning love of country, but a kind of pseudo-patriotism which interestingly enough was associated with the founding of America.

 

It can hardly be a coincidence that these same “conservatives” have been rather less than patriotic in their response to the threats from south of the border.  The founder of one “conservative” independent online media company first responded to these threats by saying they should be treated as a joke and a funny one at that. Then, when Donald the Orange said last weekend that it was no joke,  she flip-flopped and criticized Captain Airhead for having initially done exactly that and said the Anschluss threat was a joke.  In between she conducted and published an interview with an immigrant from America who twelve years ago proved herself to be exactly the kind of immigrant we don’t need when she published a book proposing the merger of our country with her country of birth. 

 

The general response to these threats in this organization’s commentary has been to treat the American dictator as a reasonable man, with legitimate grievances, who can be negotiated with and to propose an economic merger between the two countries that falls short of a political merger.  Ironically, their website is promoting a children’s book they just published on the life of Sir John A. Macdonald intended to counter the negative propaganda about the Father of Confederation that progressives have been spewing based on their skewed narrative about the Indian Residential Schools.  The book was a good and patriotic response to this blood libel of our country.  Sir John must be spinning in his grave, however, at the thought that the defence of his memory could be merged with the idea of an economic union with the United States.  Sir John spent his entire career as Prime Minister promoting internal east-west trade within the Dominion and fighting the siren call of north-south trade because he knew that this was the greatest threat to the success of the Confederation Project.

 

Free trade is a good idea from an economic perspective, but each of the “free trade” agreements we have signed with the United States has been a terrible idea from a political perspective.  The kind of economic union these “conservatives” are promoting would be worse than all of the other “free trade” agreements, since the United State is currently led by a lawless megalomaniac, who respects neither the limits placed on his powers by his country’s constitution nor the agreements he has signed and cannot be trusted to keep his own word – the “free trade” agreement he is currently, and deceitfully, claiming is so “unfair” to his country is the one he himself negotiated – and who looks at tariffs and economic measures in general as weapons to accomplish what his predecessors accomplished by bullets and bombs.  By his predecessors I do not mean previous American presidents, but Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  I recognized that this was what we were dealing with the moment he made his first “51^st state” remark and was confirmed in this when he doubled down on this talk after Captain Airhead announced his intention to resign.  No Canadian patriot could fail to recognize it today after he has continued to escalate his lies and rhetoric and threats for the last month.   Yes, the Left’s endless likeness of everyone they don’t like to Hitler has desensitized us to these comparisons, but let us not be like the villagers in Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.  This time the wolf is real. The sort of things the Left objects to in Donald the Orange, his immigration policies, his termination of the racist, anti-white, policy of DEI, do not warrant a comparison with Hitler, but his threatening us with Anschluss, his demand for Lebensraum from Denmark, his intent to take back his “Danzig Corridor” from Panama, his finding his Sudetenland in Gaza, most certainly do, as does the insane personality cult his followers have developed into.

 

Canadian conservatives ought to be leading the renaissance of Canadian patriotism, and yes, Brian Lilley, you are right that it should not have taken something like Trump’s threats to bring that renaissance about.  Liberals have always been the party of Americanization in Canada.  Sadly, today’s conservatives are mostly neoconservatives.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neoconservative is a conservative who has lost his memory.  On the authority of Sir Walter Scott I deduce from the disgusting anti-patriotism I have seen recently that many have lost their souls as well.

Liberalism Has Not Improved With Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Change and Reaction

Conservatives are fortunate to have enemies who are always trying to help them out. The foes of the conservative – liberals, socialists, bleeding hearts, leftists, do-gooders, and everybody else who falls under the general umbrella of “progressives” – are always trying to tell us who we are and what our role is. Or rather, they are always trying to tell us who we are not and what our role is not. The “true conservative”, they tell us, is never a reactionary. There are those within the conservative camp who would echo this sentiment, particularly those on the left wing of conservatism, but I think this is a mistake, not only because by doing so we are allowing our opponents to define us and thus giving them an advantage over us, but because what they are telling us simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

Indeed, the only way the claim that the true conservative is never a reactionary would make sense would be if we accepted the definitions of conservative and reactionary which state that the former is the person trying to preserve the present status quo and the latter is the person trying to restore the status quo ante. If we accept these definitions, then, of course, a conservative and reactionary could never be the same person for their purposes are at odds with each other. These definitions, however, are notoriously woefully inadequate.

It is not that difficult to see what the Left gains by insisting upon this claim. Progressives see themselves as being the advocates of socially beneficial change. They grudgingly acknowledge a legitimate role for the conservative as the voice of caution, to argue the con-side against their changes as they propose them, but who, once they change has been made, is supposed to accept it as being written in stone and never attempt to reverse it. If the conservative accepts this limitation on his role then all the progressive has to do is obtain enough support at any given time to make a particular change and then he need never worry about defending that change from conservative attack ever again but can indeed, rally the conservatives to defend his changes against the reactionaries who would seek to undo them. It also boosts confidence in the progressive vision of history in which every change introduced by a progressive is seen as a positive step, moving history along in a linear fashion, towards a future, better, and more just society.

For the conservative to accept the role assigned to him by the progressives, however, would be to reject some of the most basic principles of conservatism. This is one of the reasons why I prefer the older term Tory. The newer label, conservative, has connotations of caution, risk-avoidance, and resistance to change, all of which are good enough in themselves but none of which, singularly or taken together, make much of an argument against the progressive definition of the role of the conservative. The same can hardly be said of the term Tory which from the seventeenth century has been the party of church and state, standing for apostolic authority in the former and the rights and prerogatives of the monarch in the latter. There is no way that this can be reduced to a mere defence of whatever the status quo happens to be at the present movement.

Indeed, the history of the Tories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very much gives the lie to the claim that a conservative – or a Tory at any rate – can never be a reactionary.

The antecedents of the Tories in the late seventeenth century were the Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War in the 1640s. They lost, the king was arrested, charged with treason in a mock trial conducted in a Parliament from which all of his supporters had been removed by the force of arms by the triumphant New Model Army of the Puritans, then murdered and martyred. After a mercifully short interregnum in which, under the evil dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans cancelled Christmas and Easter, stripped the churches of everything that was visually or audibly aesthetically pleasing, closed the theatres, forbade harmless amusements on the Lord’s Day, and basically went out of their way to make everybody gloomy and miserable, Charles II was restored to his father’s throne and the Church of England with its bishops, King James Bible, and a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer that would become the standard edition was brought back, in what was the most spectacular and successful act of reaction in the history of the world – the English Restoration.

Then, when the Tories lost the battle against the Whigs in 1688, and James II was ousted from the throne by Parliament and replaced by his son-in-law and daughter, those Tories who remained loyal to the House of Stuart, including the non-juror bishops of the Church of England, became the reactionary Jacobites who tried unsuccessfully to restore James and later his son Charles to the throne. While the case can certainly be made that the Jacobites acted unwisely it can also be argued that they were the most true to the principles of the Tory Party. Such later High Tories as Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth, while loyal to the kings of the Hanoverian succession, nevertheless looked back on the Jacobites with sympathy and romanticism.

At any rate, within the space of a single century (the last Jacobite rising was in 1745, less than one hundred years after the death of King Charles I) the Tories had sought to restore two different status quo ante’s, and whatever we may think of the Jacobite cause and movement, the first of these, the Restoration, is certainly an argument in favour of reaction.

The folly of the idea that the Tory or conservative is allowed to oppose progressive changes as they are put forward but must accept and defend them once they are made is quite easily demonstrated. If followed to the letter this would mean that we could never attempt to correct a change that has proven to be a mistake. It is no good saying “you cannot turn the clock back”. Not only is this a bad metaphor – the statement is not even literally true – it is a deadly one. To use another metaphor – a more apt one – when you have swerved off a road and are heading towards a cliff it is suicidal to shrug your shoulders, say “what’s done its done” and keeping heading in the same direction.

Perhaps the most bizarre argument I have ever encountered against the idea that a conservative could take the reactionary position was based upon the fact that conservatives are not traditionally opposed to all change but accept change that is in accordance with the rule of law and which is done “little and little”. This, however, is actually an argument against the declaration that conservative and reactionary are mutually exclusive because that declaration is based entirely upon the idea that the conservative must support the present status quo against all changes.

Yes, the conservative accepts certain kinds of change. His position is not that all change is bad – just that the onus of proof lies upon the person who proposes an innovation. The changes he accepts are lawful, accomplished slowly, and on a small-scale. More importantly, however, for a conservative to accept change it must be change that is consistent with and better yet a means of continuity. Furthermore, a conservative can accept changes of a sort that no progressive ever accepts – changes that acknowledge that a progressive innovation has been a mistake and go back to a way that was time-honoured, tested, and true. It is precisely because a conservative can accept this kind of change that he can be a reactionary.

Indeed, Tory principles demand that the conservative be a reactionary in certain situations. The Tory regards society as an organic whole that includes past and future generations as well. He does not accept simple, unmixed, democracy, whether as a constitutional form, or the idea that the majority at any present moment should rule. The voices of past and future generations must be heard as well and since the future generations cannot yet speak the past generations must be their voice against the present generation whose primary concern is always its own interest in the here and now. Therefore if some demagogue or some persistent group of activists is able at a given moment to obtain enough support in the legislative body or even the general public to make a change that goes against the wisdom of the ages embodied in the voices of the past generations passed down to us in tradition, the Tory has the duty to work to undo this change – to take on the role of the reactionary.

Edmund Burke’s American Prophet and Disciple

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Seventh Revised Edition, Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing Inc., 1953, 1985, 535 pp., US$19.95

In Canada conservatism has been a form of political thought, a movement, and even a political party, from the very beginning. The foremost of the Fathers of Confederation, and the first Prime Minister in the first Canadian parliament of 1867, was Sir John A. Macdonald, leader of the Conservative Party. The traditional Canadian conservative was a monarchist, an Anglophile, a supporter of the British Empire and later the Commonwealth, who had old-fashioned social and moral views, was a Protestant, usually Anglican or Presbyterian, and was a pro-business economic nationalist. Until the 1960s, the province of Quebec was traditionally very conservative, although in a French and Roman Catholic sort of way.

In the United States, there was no conservative movement as such until after World War II. The reason for this should be obvious – the United States had been born out of a revolution led by men espousing liberal and in many cases radical ideas. The American revolutionaries used the word “Tory”, which was the name for the royalist traditionalist party prior to its nineteenth century reorganization under the name “Conservative”, as a term of contempt for the Loyalists who later became the first English Canadians. From its very conception the United States identified itself as a liberal republic. Even the American regions that were the most culturally, socially, and religiously conservative, were often very liberal – in the classical sense – politically. Thus Southern conservatism, which predates any type of national conservatism in the United States by well over a century, historically combines a defense of a Tory social, moral, cultural, and religious order, with that of a Jeffersonian liberal political order.

The United States developed a “Right” before it developed a conservative movement. This was in response to the changes that took place within American liberalism between the two World Wars. American liberalism was originally very individualistic and committed to the ideas of minimal government and maximum personal freedom. During the Wilson administration in the First World War American liberals, impressed with the ability of the state to administer and manage the national economy to meet its wartime goals, began to ask why the state could not do the same in peacetime to meet progressive social goals. The Great Depression of the 1930s gave them the opportunity to experiment along these lines and under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, liberal Democrats became Keynesian interventionists, government expansionists and centralizers, and the architects of the American welfare state. Those who continued to hold to liberalism in its classical form and were alarmed at liberalism’s drift towards statism were surprised to find themselves forced into the role of the reactionary, i.e., the advocate of the old, traditional, order – in this case the American liberal republican order – against progressive innovation. Thus the American Old Right, which included historians Charles A. Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes, social critics H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, journalists Garet Garrett and John T. Flynn, publisher Colonel Robert McCormick and Republican Senator Robert A. Taft, was born. Most of these continued to think of themselves as liberals, some calling themselves “true liberals” or “classical liberals”, although Mencken and Nock in acknowledgement of the position into which they had been forced began to refer to themselves as “Tory anarchists”.

One of the results of World War II, American entry into which the American Old Right had firmly opposed until Pearl Harbour, was a geopolitical realignment in which the United States became the dominant power in the liberal Western world which was now threatened by a Communist Eastern bloc headed by the Soviet Union. Since both superpowers had the atomic weapons their rivalry took the form of a “Cold War.” It was in the context of this Cold War, that William F. Buckley Jr. reorganized the American Right, forged out of an alliance between Old Right liberals, now called libertarians, defectors from Communism such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers, Europeans who had emigrated to the United States and were either Catholic monarchists like Thomas Molnar and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn or philosophical critics of modernity like Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss, and Burkean traditionalists like Robert Nisbet and Richard M. Weaver. This latter group had begun to emerge immediately after World War II, beginning with the 1948 publication of Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, a short book that traced the moral and spiritual decay of Western civilization into the materialistic technolatry that made the development of the atomic bomb possible back to the nominalism of the thirteenth century. Although it is the ideas of the last two groups that most match those that have historically been associated with conservatism Buckley gave the name conservative to the entire movement he was putting together. His inspiration for doing so came from a book which was first published in 1953 under the title The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by a man of letters from Mecosta, Michigan named Russell Kirk.

Kirk had begun writing this book while studying at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland to which he submitted it as his doctoral dissertation. He had originally titled it “The Conservative Route”, but was persuaded by his publisher, Henry Regnery of Chicago, that a less pessimistic sounding title would be more appropriate. He was accused by his critics of having manufactured a long pedigree for a newly created movement but this does not do him justice. What Kirk was actually doing was tracing the influence of the thought of Edmund Burke in England and the United States – Canada alas is omitted – during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

By making Edmund Burke the founder of what he calls conservatism, Kirk was, of course, consciously abridging the tradition of conservative thought, which he acknowledged in his introduction where he gave his reasons for starting with Burke rather than earlier conservative thinkers like Bolingbroke, Hobbes, and Filmer, or even Hooker and Falkland. It is ironic, perhaps, to describe Burke as the father of conservatism, when he was a Whig (liberal) rather than a Tory through most of his Parliamentary career but he earned his conservative credentials with his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke’s friend, the lexicographer, moralist, and staunch Tory Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary defined a Tory as “One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig” and in the Reflections, Burke defends the constitution and monarchy of England , the Christian religion and the established church, against doctrines of the kind that had been turned against the monarchy, aristocracy, and Roman Catholic Church in the French Revolution. Whenever I read Burke’s Reflections I get the strong impression that Burke was writing, not only for himself, but for Dr. Johnson who had died in the decade prior to the French Revolution and could no longer speak for himself, even though Burke retained his admiration for the Whig revolution of 1688 and showed no hint of his friend’s Jacobite sympathies At the time Kirk was writing this book, Irving Kristol was still a liberal and had yet to define a neo-conservative as “a liberal mugged by reality” but the description would seem to fit the Burke of the Reflections to a tee. Thus, the line of thought starting with Burke that Kirk called conservative, might be more precisely called “neo-Tory”.

In the introduction, entitled “The Idea of Conservatism”, Kirk identified six canons of conservative thought. These are general principles, because Kirk insisted that conservatism is not to be thought of as an ideology, by which he meant a rigid formula for an ideal society. The canons, which are the most referenced part of this book, are as follows: 1) “Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience”, 2) “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”, 3) “Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society’”, 4) “Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked”, 5) “Faith in prescription and distrust of ‘sophisters, calculators, and economists’ who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs”, and finally 6) “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform”. (pp. 8-9) Although the fourth canon is something that liberals, or at least classical liberals, also adhere to these are a good, concise, summary of those basic conservative concepts that both a Tory supporter of kings and bishops and a right-leaning American republican could agree upon.

The longest chapter in the book is devoted to Burke, naturally, which focuses upon his defense of prejudice, “the answer with which intuition and ancestral consensus of opinion supply a man when he lacks either time or knowledge to arrive at a decision predicated upon pure reason” (p. 38), prescription, prudence and principle against abstract reason and innovation. What Kirk then presents in the following chapters is not an unbroken chain of thought from Burke to the mid-twentieth century, with each link directly connected to the one that precedes and the one that follows, but rather a collection of snapshots, arranged in a rough chronological order, of individuals and movements on both sides of the Atlantic that have adopted a Burkean stance in one context or another. Although his next chapter discusses the early American Federalists, and particularly John Adams’ defence of constitutional ordered liberty against egalitarian, democratic, populism, Kirk did not limit himself to statesmen and politicians. One chapter discusses conservatism among the Romantic poets, particularly Sir Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his later years, who opposed Benthamite utilitarianism. Another chapter is devoted to Benjamin Disraeli, both as novelist and Tory statesman, and John Henry Newman the leader of the Oxford Movement, the catholic revival in the Church of England in the 1830s who eventually “crossed the Tiber” to become a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Newman was a strong intellectual critic of theological, ecclesiastical, social and political liberalism as both an Anglican and a Roman Catholic. By contrast, a convert to Roman Catholicism who gets prominent treatment, nineteenth century New England Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson, went through virtually every radical cause and idea imaginable, before finally settling down as a Catholic and a conservative.

The final chapters of the book focus on the retreat of conservative ideas in England and America in the late nineteenth century that the book’s original title alluded to, but they are not entirely pessimistic in tone. Various groups on both sides of the Atlantic began to rearticulate conservative ideas in the early twentieth century and Kirk discussed several of these, with a focus on the New Humanist critics Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt. One of Babbitt’s students at Harvard University went on to become a prominent Modernist poet and moved to England, where he became a British citizen and shocked the Bloomsbury Set intellectuals by converting to orthodox Anglicanism. This was T. S. Eliot who, in his capacity as director of Faber and Faber, published the British edition of the book. Eliot objected to the original subtitle on the grounds that George Santayana was not significant enough to warrant being placed on the level of Burke. Amusingly, Kirk’s response was to replace Santayana with his friend’s own name, which is why every edition from the second on has been subtitled “From Burke to Eliot” even though Eliot is only briefly discussed. It is from Eliot that Kirk borrowed one of his favourite phrases “the permanent things” and Kirk later wrote an entire book on the poet who became, not just a conservative, but a High Tory, calling himself a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”

The Conservative Mind has now reached the sixty-first anniversary of its first publication and Kirk is still honoured as a prophet by the American conservative movement, although the honour is mostly lip service. The American conservative moment was long ago taken over by those whose primary interest is a Pax Americana in which the United States uses its vast military might to spread liberal, capitalist, democracy throughout the globe. This is a concept that Kirk would have found appalling. As a young man he had been influenced by American Old Right figures like Albert Jay Nock who were noted for their opposition to military interventionism as an instrument of government expansion. He shared the horror of the Old Right and Richard M. Weaver over the barbaric atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and at the end of the Cold War he joined Patrick Buchanan and the other paleoconservatives who argued that the time had come for America to bring her troops home and opposed the first President Bush’s plans for a New World Order to be policed by an America-led coalition of free countries and his intervention in the Iraq-Kuwait crisis.

Here in Canada, Russell Kirk and his magnus opus have never really been given their due by conservatives. The older type of Canadian conservative, the Loyalist and royalist Tory, often dismissed Kirk as an American liberal republican, and ignored how so many of the ideas he held dear such as Eliot’s “permanent things”, the Burkean concepts of prejudice and prescription, the idea of society as multigenerational and organic rather than contractual in the Lockean sense, were key elements in their own tradition. The newer type of Canadian conservative, who prefers the imported American brand of conservatism to our own domestic variety, shows little awareness of Russell Kirk and would probably wonder what his idea of established order and liberty, stemming from a living tradition with roots stretching back through medieval Christendom to Greco-Roman cultural and civilization has to do with lower taxes and economic deregulation.

It would probably do both Canadian and American conservatives much good to dust off this sixty year old conservative classic and give it a read.

For Queen and Country

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

Within the question asked by these well-known lines which open the sixth canto of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel lies a declaration. That declaration is simply this: that it is natural, good, and virtuous for a man to love his country. The man who does not has a dead soul.

The term for “love of one’s country” in English is patriotism. This word is derived from the Greek work patris and its Latin cognate patria both of which mean “homeland, native country”. Their most literal translation would be “fatherland” as they are themselves derived from pater which means father in both languages. Unfortunately however, that once innocuous word suggesting the “land of one’s fathers” now has sinister, nasty, connotations that are quite foreign to its original meaning.

From its etymology it would appear that patriotism is an affection whose proper object is a place rather than a people. It is this which is the primary difference between patriotism and nationalism, which latter term indicates affection for the people one is connected to by ties of ancestry and cultural heritage. Patriotism, however, does not denote love for one’s homeland as separate from one’s people but as distinct from one’s people. Barren territory cannot command “true patriot love”. The country the patriot loves is the homeland upon which is built the civil society to which he belongs.

Twenty-six years ago Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre, who at the time was the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and who currently is the O’Brien Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was invited to give the Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. The subject of the lecture he gave was “Is Patriotism a Virtue”?

If, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the standard by which we are to judge the answer to that question is liberal morality, the answer must be no. Liberal morality is the reigning system of ethics of the Modern Age. According to liberal ethics questions of right and wrong can only be answered by reason applied impartially and universally. Dr. MacIntyre argued that there are five central positions to liberal morality:

[F]irst, that morality is constituted by rules to which any rational person would under certain ideal conditions give assent; secondly, that those rules impose constraints upon and are neutral between rival and competing interests—morality itself is not the expression of any particular interest; thirdly, that those rules are also neutral between rival and competing sets of beliefs about what the best way for human beings to live is; fourthly, that the units which provide the subject-matter of morality as well as its agents are individual human beings and that in moral evaluations each individual is to count for one and nobody for more than one; and fifthly, that the standpoint of the moral agent constituted by allegiance to these rules is one and the same for all moral agents and as such in independent of all social particularity.


According to Dr. MacIntyre, if we accept such a moral standpoint, we are required to treat patriotism not as a virtue but as a vice. However, Dr. MacIntyre goes on to argue, liberalism is not the only way to understand morality.

Three years prior to giving that lecture, Dr. MacIntyre’s book After Virtue had been published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In this book Dr. MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment Project which had spawned the now ubiquitous system of liberal morality was doomed to failure because of its rejection of basic Aristotelian ethical concepts. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had written that virtue or moral excellence is like excellence in anything else. The purpose of a roof over your house is to protect you from the elements. A “good” roof does this well, as opposed to a roof which leaks and does its task poorly. Fishermen, farmers, police officers, etc. are “good” fishermen, farmers, and police officers to the extent that they fish, farm, and enforce the law, well. Likewise, Aristotle wrote, a man is virtuous when he fulfils the purpose of man, and fulfils it well.

By rejecting that Aristotelian teleology, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment Project had stripped morality of its necessary framework and foundation, and left it at the subjective whims of the individual resulting in moral chaos. He pleaded for a return to Aristotelian virtue.

In his lecture on patriotism he spelled out an alternative to liberal morality, that was particular where liberalism is universal. According to this alternative view “it is an essential characteristic of the morality which each of us acquires that it is learned from, in and through the way of life of some particular community.” Moreover, the goods “by reference to which and for the sake of which any set of rules must be justified are also going to be goods that are socially specific and particular”. Finally, it is only in the context of a community that we can be moral at all. Morality is difficult for human beings, and:

[I]t is important to morality that I can only be a moral agent, because we are moral agents, that I need those around me to reinforce my moral strengths and assist in remedying my moral weaknesses. It is in general only within a community that individuals become capable of morality, are sustained in their morality and are constituted as moral agents by the way in which other people regard them and what is owed to and by them as well as by the way in which they regard themselves.

Thus:

Loyalty to that community, to the hierarchy of particular kinship, particular local community, and particular natural community, is on this view a prerequisite for morality. So patriotism and those loyalties cognate to it are not just virtues but central virtues.

In the remainder of his lecture Dr. MacIntyre defended this alternative morality in which patriotism was indeed a virtue. Acknowledging the liberal argument that patriotism would require an uncritical attitude towards one’s country, he answers it by saying that what is permanently exempted from criticism is “the nation conceived as a project, a project somehow or other brought to birth in the past and carried on so that a morally distinctive community was brought into being which embodied a claim to political autonomy in its various organized and institutionalized expressions”. An uncritical attitude towards one’s country’s current leaders or laws is not required, and indeed, there are certain extreme circumstances where the survival of the country might inspire the patriot to take drastic actions against it’s current leader. Here MacIntyre pointed to Adam von Trott, a Christian conservative, German patriot, who tried to bring down Hitler in order to save Germany (which resulted in his arrest and execution in 1944).

Some Christians, who would not ordinarily be expected to sympathize with the ideas of liberalism, might be alarmed at the particularist system of morality MacIntyre defended in his lecture. Their fears, that particularism might lead to moral relativism, are groundless. Christianity’s requirement that we be just to all men does not exclude particular loyalties. “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men”, St. Paul wrote in the sixth chapter of his epistle to the Galatian Church, which he immediately followed up with “especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” The universal hortatory subjunctive in the first part of the verse does not exclude the amplified particular application in the second. St. Paul’s epistles are in fact full of particular duties being enjoined on certain people towards other specific people – duties of husband to wife, and wife to husband, of children to parents and parents to children, etc.

In the third chapter of his epistle to the Church in Philippi St. Paul speaks of our citizenship in heaven. He does not say, however, that it is our only citizenship, and excuse us from participation in and our duties to the temporal societies to which we belong. To interpret this verse that way would be as wrong as it would be to interpret Christ’s remark “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” as saying that we should not display filial piety.

St. Paul did not disavow his temporal citizenship by declaring his citizenship in heaven. In the Book of Acts St. Luke records how St. Paul, after having been arrested in Jerusalem, and about to be scourged, told the centurion who was guarding him “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” Later, when he appeared before Festus, he invoked his right as a Roman citizen to have his case heard before Caesar.

St. Paul was not the kind of man who would claim the privileges of earthly citizenship while denying the duties that go along with it. In his epistle to the Church in Rome he commands obedience to temporal authorities and goes so far as to identify their role as enforcers of the law as being ordained by God.

Aristotle wrote that it was the nature of a virtue to be a mean between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency. It follows from this, that if the virtue of patriotism consists in loving one’s country, then there are two accompanying vices, loving one’s country too much or in the wrong way, and not loving one’s country enough.

The vice of not loving one’s country enough can manifest itself in indifference to one’s country’s survival or well-being, refusal to take up arms in defense of one’s country should the call of duty arise, or the manifestly perverse form of preferring another country, even the enemy of one’s country, to one’s own.

The vice of loving one’s country too much can also take many forms. It could take the form of jingoism or hostility towards other countries. It could take the form of blind support for all the policies of one’s government even when they are manifestly wrong, stupid, evil and deleterious to the well-being of the country. It could take the form of an ideological nationalism that demands that all other loyalties, to family, God, and local community, take second place to loyalty to country.

Those who are prone to the last mentioned form of excess would do well to remember the words of Edmund Burke:

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

Patriotism is a natural affection. We love our family members, not because we can make a rational argument for it or even because we are commanded to (which if we are Christians we are) but because it is natural to do so. It is part of who we are to form bonds to the people who are closest to us, to the parents who raise us, to the siblings we grow up with. It is through forming these bonds that we learn how to form bonds of friendship to our acquaintances and neighbors in everyday life. We also develop attachment to places. We grow to love the houses we grow up in, the countryside, and the various buildings – school, grocery store, post office, etc. in which live our everyday lives. From these attachments to the people and places we know best, our love for our country, which encompasses them and countless other similar communities, is formed.

It is normal, right, and virtuous to form such attachments.

As for those who don’t, we will return in closing, to the words of Sir Walter Scott::

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.