Raptum Omnium Ab Omnibus

 

The late Lawrence Auster, who passed away in March of 2013, was a huge inspiration to the generation – in a rather loose sense of the word – of writers who started blogging in the years when he was active at  View From the Right and who, like himself, were theologically conservative Christians and political “conservatives” in the “traditionalist” sense of the word who espoused views on race, immigration, sex, and gender that would have been well within the mainstream sixty years ago but are now considered to be beyond the pale on the right wing of the political spectrum.    This would include, among many others, Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife, the contributors to The Orthosphere, and this writer.

 

On April 21^st, 2009 he re-posted a comment from a post at Dennis Mangan’s blog and the thread that followed as “The Next Frontier of Non-Discrimination: Obligatory Interracial Dating”.    I’m not sure, upon re-reading the post after all this time, how much of the discussion was carried over from Mangan’s blog, which is no longer around to check, and how much was original to Mr. Auster’s, but it is not important.    The original comment linked to a Youtube video in which University of Delaware students were quizzed as to their willingness to date blacks and Muslims for the purpose of determining how “racist” they were.    The point was that liberal anti-racism was moving from condemning opposition to interracial dating as “racist” to condemning a lack of interest in participating in it oneself as “racist” and thus making interracial dating socially obligatory, hence Mr. Auster’s title.   About half way through the discussion someone who went by the handle “LL” asked Mr. Auster about whether it follows from this revised liberalism that to “eschew same-sex dating” is homophobic.    He answered in the affirmative, saying that this was precisely the direction in which liberalism was leading.    Pointing to how liberals were using previous bans on interracial marriage as part of their argument for same-sex marriage, he said “So if there’s no moral difference between a black and a white marrying each other and a man and a man – or a woman and a woman – marrying each other, there would not seem to be any moral difference between requiring a white student to date a nonwhite student (as some schools are apparently now doing) and requiring a male student to date a male student.”   The last comment in the post was by Lydia McGrew of What’s Wrong With the World and was about how pressure on heterosexuals to date members of the same-sex already existed in some women’s studies classes.

 

This whole idea that liberals’ own internal logic placed them on a trajectory that led from demanding tolerance of non-traditional relationships, to demanding acceptance of the same, to demanding participation in them, was one that Mr. Auster revisited several times.  I thought, and still think, that he was right about this and picked up the theme myself after he passed away.    A few years later, I wrote an essay that started with the hypothetical scenario of someone who politely rejected the advances of a member of the same sex being slapped with a discrimination suit, which he lost and found himself facing cripplingly punitive fines, and from this scenario reasoned towards the ethical conclusion that discrimination qua discrimination was not inherently wrong and that anti-discrimination laws, that is to say, laws that prohibit private persons from discriminating are fundamentally unjust.    Shortly after this, a judge ruled against the Christian dating site Christian Mingle in a discrimination lawsuit, and ordered them to expand their options from “men seeking women” and “women seeking men”.   While the court order did not compel individual men and women to date members of their own sex it was a large step in that direction in that it set the precedent that the realm of dating and relationships was now subject to anti-discrimination law.    In commenting on this at the time, I said that we were rapidly heading towards mandatory obligatory omnisexuality, which I described as a raptum omnium ab omnibus (“rape of all by all”) which expression, obviously, I borrowed, mutatis mutandis, from Thomas Hobbes’ famous description of human existence outside of civilized society and its laws as a bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”).

 

 

Who would have thought at the time that five years later a radically different situation would develop which could also be aptly described with this same expression?

 

I am referring, of course, to the forced vaccination that is the latest episode in the ongoing bat flu saga.

 

Let us consider the component parts of the expression, beginning with raptum, which would usually be translated abduction but which I am using here in the sense of its English derivative, rape.

 

To call forced vaccination rape is to use this word in a sense that is only slightly less than literal.  In the most literal sense of the word to rape is to force someone to have sexual intercourse with you against that person’s will.   Apart from instances of statutory rape involving an adult woman and a minor in which the minor is unable to legally consent due to age, this almost always means a male forcibly penetrating somebody else.   This is due to basic biology – even if you have a female who is sufficiently larger and stronger than a male to try and force herself upon him in this manner, to succeed would require that his body co-operate in a wayr in which it is noted to fail even when its cooperation is wanted by the male and under the set of circumstances when it is least likely to do so.    Therefore, for all intents and purposes, rape can be said to be forced penetration.    Forced vaccination is forced penetration, albeit with a needle rather than a penis.   To the wiseacres who think that talking about the bees and mosquitos who “raped” them is a witty comeback to this, note that mens rea, which can only be present in those with human moral agency, is a necessary component of any crime.   Insects do not and cannot possess mens rea, humans who compel other people to be injected with substances that they do not want to be injected with, have it in spades.

 

Should, however, anyone still object on the ground that rape is essentially sexual in nature, I shall answer neither by suggesting, however plausibly, that those who are so insistent that everyone who does not want the bat flu vaccine be compelled to take it derive some erotic thrill from this, nor by making reference to the common feminist trope that rape is about power not sex, but by offering an alternative comparison.   Imagine the government telling everybody that they need to have two injections of heroin, and possibly a booster injection of heroin at a later date, issuing heroin passports to confirm that people have had their required doses, banning people from bars, restaurants, movie theatres, concerts and sporting events unless they can prove they have had their heroin shots, and requiring all public employees and all people employed, whether publicly or privately, in certain sectors, to take their heroin shots as a condition of their continuing employment.    This would be considered by pretty much everybody to be a heinous crime against humanity.   The analogy here is exact, with the only difference being the contents of the needle.    The heinousness of forced heroin injection, however, does not lie solely in the heroin itself, but rather permeates the entire act.

 

The omnium, meaning “of all”, requires little in the way of commentary.    The fact that these vaccine passport and mandate measures have generally been introduced after a sizeable portion of the population has already been voluntarily vaccinated shows that nothing short of 100% vaccination will satisfy those insisting upon such extreme measures, which in turn demonstrates just how irrational these people are. 

 

The ab omnibus, which means “by all” is appropriate here because of the broad support these vaccine passports and mandates seem to have.   If the numbers on the matter are at all credible, vaccine passports and mandates have far more supporters than lockdowns and mandatory masks did.   The explanation for this is that the number of those who supported lockdowns and masks but feel that forced vaccination is a step too far is much lower than the number of those who opposed lockdowns and masks and who see the vaccines as a means of escaping these things.    This was inevitable, I suppose.   Once someone has accepted suspending everybody’s basic and constitutional rights and freedoms, imposing quarantine on the entire healthy population, ordering people to close their businesses based on an arbitrary classification of “essential” and “non-essential”, and the like as acceptable means of slowing the spread of a novel respiratory disease that those who are young and healthy have over a 99% chance of surviving he does not have much further to go to accepting forced injections.   Such a person is not likely to understand that holding the rights and freedoms that the government stole from us hostage is not morally different from holding a gun to our heads as a means of persuading us to get vaccinated.   Meanwhile, two years of lockdowns and masks have tired many out, wearing away at their moral resolve so that those willing to resist the vaccine mandates are fewer in number than those who opposed the earlier measures.

 

This is most unfortunate since forced vaccination is, in reality, an escalation of the tyranny of the last two years, not an escape from it.   Do we want to live in a society where we can be compelled to be injected with substances without our informed and voluntary consent?   Do we want to live in a society where we can be required to show our “papers” wherever we go?   Do we want future generations to have to live in such a society?

 

If our answer to any or all of these questions is no, then regardless of what we may think about the vaccines qua vaccines, or whether we ourselves have been vaccinated, partially or fully, or not, we must fervently oppose and reject this raptum omnium ab omnibus now.

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

Peace, Order and Good Government

The ninety-first section of the British North America Act (1) begins with the words:

It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada, in relation to all Matters not coming within the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces;

The phrase “Peace, Order, and good Government”, identified here as the end to which the law-making authority of the Queen-in-Parliament is established, has been similarly used in the constitutional documents of other Commonwealth countries and, in Canada, has often been considered to be our equivalent of the United States’ “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Both expressions identify a triad of goods and make that triad out to be the purpose for which government is constituted. The differences, however, not only in content but also in context and use, may outweigh these similarities. Contextually, the American expression does not appear in the document that legally established their republic, the Constitution of the United States of America, but rather in the document by which the Thirteen Colonies rationalized and justified their decision to secede from the British Empire. For the obvious reason that Canada’s Fathers did not secede from the Empire but deliberately choose to maintain the connection to Britain and the Commonwealth and to build the Dominion on a foundation of loyalty and continuity, Canada has no parallel document. With regards to usage, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” served a revolutionary purpose, “Peace, Order, and good Government” a constructive one.

When we turn to the content of the triads the contrast that is most striking is that the goods in the American triad pertain primarily to the individual, whereas the goods in the Canadian/Commonwealth triad belong to the country as a whole. The different sources from which the two are drawn can be seen in this. In the case of the American triad, its origin in classical liberalism, and specifically the social contract theory of John Locke, is quite obvious. The triad is borrowed, with a slight adjustment by Thomas Jefferson, directly from Locke. In the second of his Two Treatises on Government, (2) Locke argues that life, liberty, and property are the basic natural rights that belong to the individual in a pre-societal state of nature, and that the state was created by individuals voluntarily forming a compact to live under laws that would make these rights more secure. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is a restatement of this theory.

The liberals who formulated this theory sincerely believed that they were devising a rational and effective safeguard against tyranny – the ancient term for usurped and oppressive power. Their Puritan forerunners believed that by removing Charles I from his throne, beheading him, and making Oliver Cromwell into the Lord Protector they were striking a blow for liberty. Cromwell, however, went down in history as the dictator who established a grim and gloomy, Calvinist, theocracy in which Christmas, the theatre, and harmless amusements were all banned and today it has become quite evident how the idea that government exists to protect the rights of individual can be the basis of tyranny as much as a protection against it. (3) Until very recently, the suggestion that the government might pass laws requiring us to use a plethora of newly-coined pronouns to refer to individuals who have chosen a gender identity for themselves other than male and female would have been confined to the literary genres of totalitarian dystopic fiction and conspiracy theory. Yet today many liberals are promoting such legislation, trying to suppress the views of anyone who would be opposed to such legislation, and doing all of this in the sincere belief that it is necessary to protect individual rights.

Liberals were not the first to assert that the law must protect people’s lives and property. Indeed, this assertion is contained within the ancient definition of justice as each person getting what he deserves. Nor were liberals the first to connect this protection with liberty. It was King Charles I who declared that the “liberty and freedom” of his people “consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own.” In the older tradition, however, the security of life and property, and the freedom that comes from that security, were the products of a stable and orderly civil society and such a society could only exist under a government that legislates and administers justice for the good of the society as a whole. Life outside of such a society was not regarded as man’s natural state. Such an existence, in pre-modern thought, more closely resembled Thomas Hobbes’ idea of a state of nature than that of John Locke, and in this absence of civilization, no rights could exist.

When liberalism rejected the pre-modern tradition in which each person derives his rights and freedom from belonging to a society that is an integrated whole, liberals believed that they were emancipating mankind but, as we see in our present day, triumphant liberalism forges its own chains and fetters with which to bind man. Liberalism is the offspring of rationalism, the epistemological error of reducing the knowable to the technical, i.e., utilitarian knowledge capable of formulation (4) and was born out of the fragmentation of the older tradition. (5) By obsessively fixating on the individual, at the expense of the whole society, liberalism pushed Western civilization so far away from the pre-modern ideal of balance and harmony between the individual and the whole of society in one direction, that in time it produced a pendulum swing in the opposite direction and so in the twentieth century, totalitarianism, which saw only the collective and crushed the individual, came into existence. Liberalism clashed with totalitarianism and triumphed over it, but only by taking on some of its own characteristics. (6)

“Peace, Order, and good Government” was not a conscious attempt to produce a summary of the goods which the pre-liberal tradition regarded as the purpose of the state but it nevertheless serves fairly well as such a summary. “Good Government”, which means the competent and just administration of public affairs, is a fairly adequate equivalent of πολιτεία, as the term was used by Plato and Aristotle to describe their ideal of government. (7) It is certainly more accurate than “republic” which, through its Roman, Italian, and American usage, has ceased to convey the sense of the Latin res publica, “public affairs”, and has taken on the meaning of “kingless government.” The ancients believed that any government, whether it be one ruler, a small elite group, or a majority of enfranchised, corporate, citizens, could be good or bad. A good government was one that exercised its authority in the interests of the whole of the society, a bad government was one that used its power only to serve its own private interests. (8) Actual real-world governments, of course, exist on a spectrum between the absolutely good and the absolutely bad. A common idea among the ancient Athenians, which as adopted by Aristotle, spread through the ancient world by Polybius, and later incorporated into medieval Christendom’s ideal of the Christian commonwealth, (9) was that the best way to ensure a stable government, that would be more good than bad, was to combine monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (10) into a single government.

America’s Founding Fathers were at their best, not when they were writing rabble-rousing, revolutionary, agitprop like the Declaration of Independence, but when they were putting together the Constitution of their new republic. Despite the fact that a president is a poor substitute for a king or queen, the American Constitution is widely esteemed for its system of checks and balances, a concept America’s Fathers borrowed, indirectly through Montesquieu, from the ancient-medieval ideal of mixed government. That Montesquieu himself had pointed to the British system of King/Queen-in-Parliament as the very embodiment of that ideal, America’s founders for obvious reasons opted to ignore. Canada’s Fathers of Confederation, the heirs of the Loyalist tradition rather than that of the Revolution, had no need either to ignore this fact, or to re-invent the wheel, and directly adapted the British system for the new Dominion. This system began its evolution centuries before the dawn of the Modern Age and it is very fitting and appropriate, therefore, that the Canadian Fathers chose to identify it with the public goods of “Peace, Order, and good Government.”

Today, after a century of assault upon our Loyalist heritage and traditions, our monarchical and parliamentary institutions, and our Common Law rights and freedoms by the Liberal Party of Canada, aided and abetted by her allies in the mainstream Canadian media, it is more important than ever that we remember the principles upon which our country was founded. For it is only by so remembering that we can hope to recover what we have lost and find our way back from the abyss into which the Liberals have been leading us.


(1) This Act, which was passed by the British Parliament in 1867 and which came into effect on July 1st of that year, established the confederation of several of the North American provinces of the British Empire into a new country, which it designated a “Dominion” and gave the name “Canada” which had previously belonged to two of those provinces. Many Canadians, especially supporters of the Liberal Party, are under the impression that the BNAA was replaced as our constitution by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. This is a gross distortion of the truth. What happened that year is that the legislative authority to amend the BNAA, which remains our constitution, was transferred from the British Parliament to the Canadian Parliament, the BNAA was renamed “The Constitution Act, 1867”, and the Charter was added to it as an amendment (or set of amendments). The Charter did not replace our constitution, although, as I have argued many times in the past, it subverted to a great degree, both our constitution of Queen-in-Parliament and the Common Law. Indeed, most of the substantial changes made by the Liberal Party between 1926 and 1982 have had this effect, which is one reason why I, in protest, continue to use the old name of the Act.

(2) The first of the treatises argued against Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia. It has been liberal orthodoxy since the nineteenth century that Locke successfully rebutted Filmer, although in the eighteenth century a few honest liberals could be found willing to admit that of the two, Filmer had the better arguments. The second treatise is an attempt at an alternate explanation of the origin and legitimacy of the state.

(3) This has been explored at length by James Kalb in The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2008. See also Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2018.

(4) Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, London, Metheun & Co. Ltd., 1962, pp. 1-36.

(5) See Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948, pp. 52-69.

(6) “In this sense national socialism survived Hitler. Every state in the world has become a welfare state. Whether they call themselves socialist or not does not matter much. Of course the proportions of the compound of nationalism and socialism vary from country to country; but the compound is there…We are all national socialists now.” – John Lukacs, “American History: The Terminological Problem,” The American Scholar, Vol 61., No. 1, (Winter 1992), p. 23. “Some European authors observed that communism died in the East because it had already been implemented in the West.” Tomislav Sunic, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, Book Surge Publishing, 2007, p. 34.

(7) In ordinary Greek usage, πολιτεία could refer either to the rights of citizenship in a city-state or the constitution of the city-state. In other words it had the same range of meaning as the Latin civitas. Plato and Aristotle used it in its ordinary sense, but also made it the designation of the best possible government. It is the title of the Platonic dialogue that addresses this concept. Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero, entitled his own work written which was inspired by Plato’s, De Re Publica, and it is from this that the misleading custom of rendering this word as “Republic” in English arises. The common alternative “Commonwealth” is much more accurate.

(8) Note how liberalism, by replacing the good of the commonwealth with the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government, reverses this judgement.

(9) See the Respondeo in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, Q. 105.

(10) Today, the terms democracy and ochlocracy (the rule of the mob) are used for the good and bad versions of “the rule of the many” respectively. Plato and Aristotle, however, used democracy for the bad version.

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought

This essay is dedicated to the late Douglas H. Christie Jr., who passed away Monday, March 11, 2013.   Mr. Christie championed the cause of freedom of speech, both as the lawyer who defended James Keegstra, Ernst Zundel, Malcolm Ross, and virtually everyone else who has been charged with a “hate crime” over the things they said in the last three decades, and as the founder of the Canadian Free Speech League.

Liberalism, which became the dominant political ideology in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was wrong about a great many things.   It was also right about a number of things.   It tended to be wrong – extremely wrong – about first principles and what we might call “the big picture”.   Its view of human nature, the nature of and relationship between the individual person and society,  the relationship between religion, state, and society, the source of suffering, injustice, and other evils in the world, and of history, were completely and totally wrong.  It was in the realm of applied politics that liberalism produced its best ideas.

There is a reason for this.  The ideology of liberalism had two parents.  One of these was the English political tradition that had developed over more than a thousand years.  The other was the Enlightenment project.  The English political tradition and the Enlightenment project were not sympathetic to each other.  Indeed, they were mortal enemies.  The English tradition had evolved as part of the larger tradition of medieval Christendom.   Indeed, as Christopher Dawson explained in The Formation of Christendom, the founders of the English tradition had been very important in the development of the larger tradition. (1)   The Enlightenment project, however, was the sworn enemy of all things medieval and Christian.  It’s roots go back to Renaissance humanism (2), which sought to revive classical civilization after what it considered to be the dearth of culture and civilization in the Middle Ages (3).   The architects of the Enlightenment regarded religion in general and Christianity in particular, especially Christianity as an organized, public, institution, as the enemy of human reason, knowledge, creativity, and happiness, and sought to establish a secular society, in which religion would be entirely private and personal.  In such a society and only in such a society, the Enlightenment philosophers believed, could man, guided by reason and science, escape the suffering and evil which had plagued him from time immemorial and build a better and brighter future for himself.

So how did these two radically different sources come together to produce liberalism?

The best explanation of it that I know of is found in the essay “Rationalism in Politics” by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was Professor of Government at the London School of Economics.(4) Ever since the Renaissance, Oakeshott explained, Western thought has gradually come to be permeated by modern rationalism. This modern kind of rationalism reduced human knowledge to technical knowledge, i.e., knowledge that can be expressed as a formula and written down. This, however, was a kind of intellectual impoverishment because technical knowledge represents only a fraction of human knowledge. A tradition of thought contains much knowledge that is valuable but which cannot be formulated as technical knowledge. Rationalism strips a tradition of this knowledge, abbreviating it and reducing it to its technical elements, thereby producing an ideology. As an example of this, he pointed to the political ideology contained in the writings of John Locke, as what you get when the English political tradition is reduced by rationalism to an ideology.

This was the genesis of liberalism, of which John Locke was the father.   The English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   Or, to be more precise, one side of the English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   For in the seventeenth century, in a conflict stemming from the English Reformation of the century before that, the English tradition had split into two warring sides.  One side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Tories after the Restoration, sought to preserve the ancient constitution of church and state, the traditional prerogatives of the monarch, and the organic connection via apostolic episcopal succession of the Church of England with the early Catholic Church.   The other side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Whigs after the Restoration, consisted of radicals who wished to subvert the constitution, seize the powers of government for the House of Commons, and eliminate the remaining links between the Anglican Church and medieval Catholicism.  The Tories, in other words, emphasized the elements of the English tradition that connected it to the larger tradition of medieval Christendom, whereas the Whigs sought to purge the English tradition of those elements.   The Revolution of 1689 was the ultimate triumph of the Whigs.   John Locke was a Whig, and liberalism was his rationalist abridgement of a tradition that had already been whittled down by his party’s century long attempts to severe its roots in medieval Christendom.

Neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described the Enlightenment project as an “attempt to discover an independent rational justification for morality.” (5)  In the case of English classical liberalism it was more an attempt to discover an independent rational justification for the common law and constitution of Great Britain, at least in the form they would take when the modifications the Whigs were undertaking at the time Locke was writing were complete.   Thus liberalism’s inheritance from the Enlightenment project was a set of theories that provided arguments justifying English laws and government that did not depend upon the Christian tradition in which those laws and government evolved.   Liberalism’s grossest errors arise out of these theories. (6)

If liberalism’s theories were tainted by Enlightenment rationalism, they were at least developed to justify good laws and a good constitution. The Whigs had modified the English tradition and constitution, but they had not obliterated them, and so classical liberalism often argued for rights, freedoms, and laws, that had their source in the pre-Modern, Christian English tradition.

In developing their rationalist case for a constitution, laws, rights and liberties that had evolved within the Medieval Christian tradition, the liberals occasionally hit upon a brilliant and worthwhile principle or ideal. The most important of these were the closely related ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Freedom of speech is the idea that a person should be free to express the thoughts that are on his mind in whatever words he so chooses and that he should not be silenced or penalized over the content of what he says. Freedom of thought or opinion is the idea that a person should be free to use his own faculties of reason and observation to come to his own views and conclusions. These two freedoms are inseparably intertwined.

The classical liberal argument for freedom of speech and thought was penned by liberal and utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill, as part of his famous treatise on the civil liberty of the individual.     On Liberty was first published in 1859 and it was a liberal essay from start to finish.   The wrongheaded ideas of liberalism are on prominent display within it from the first page, indeed from the first sentence in which Mill declared his subject to be “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Mill thought of liberty and authority as being in perpetual conflict, of non-democratic governments as the antagonists of their subjects, and of civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks as things which patriots had to wring from the hands of the authorities by force.   All of these ideas arise out of the all too human spirit of suspicion of and rebellion against authority, which Whiggery made into a virtue, but which St. John declared to be the very essence of sin, (7) justifying Dr. Johnson’s remark that “the first Whig was the devil.”

Nevertheless, Mill had some good insights. He went on to talk about how liberals had grown dissatisfied with civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks and balances and how they had demanded that government power be placed in the hands of elected and temporary governors, but that many of them had come to think that with this new form of “popular government” that was supposed to embody the voice of the people, they could abandon civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks on the sovereign power because these things would now be a hindrance rather than a help. Reflecting upon what this line of thinking had produced in France at the end of the previous century, but also unconsciously anticipating the direction liberalism would take in the English-speaking world a century after his own time, Mill rejected this line of thinking and argued for the necessity of civil rights and freedoms and limitations on government power under any form of government, warning against the “tyranny of the majority.”

In his second chapter, entitled “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”, Mill articulated the basic concepts of freedom of thought and speech. He wrote of freedom of these freedoms as things long and well established in his own day, as indeed, they were. As he put it:

[S]peaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.

What, however, if there was a government that truly was completely in tune with its people, that spoke with their voice, and only exercised power in accordance with their will?


Even then, Mill declared, it would be wrong for that government to try and control the expression of thought. The people did not have the right to do so, nor did any government good or bad, because “the power itself is illegitimate”. In one of his most memorable statements, Mill declared freedom of thought and speech to be absolutely, not to be limited by government, society or the people under any circumstances:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

This is a powerful assertion.  Mill argued, in favour of his position, that to silence an opinion is to rob mankind, and especially those who disagree with the opinion, because if it is right and they are wrong, they lose the opportunity to be corrected, whereas if it is wrong and they are right, they lose the confidence and certainty in the truth that comes from it having coming into conflict with and triumphed over opposing errors.   Over the course of the chapter he expanded this argument into four basic supporting points – that a silenced opinion might be true, it being an assertion of one’s own infallibility to claim otherwise, that the conventional view is seldom if ever the whole truth, that even if the conventional opinion is the whole truth people will accept it as a mere prejudice without understanding the reasons it is true apart from conflict with opposing views, and that people will give mere lip service to the truth apart from any real conviction in the absence of a free debate.

While many of the things Mill wrote in the course of making this case for free speech are questionable, the main idea that comes across, that the truth is better off for being allowed to compete with error in free discussion and is weakened by the suppression of dissent, rings true.

It is a great irony that Mill, in laying down the intellectual foundation for absolute freedom of thought and speech, was championing the cause of liberalism against its sworn foe – religion and religious orthodoxy.   The irony lies in the fact that freedom of speech and thought may ultimately prove to be the means of the preservation of religious orthodoxy, while liberalism evolved in the twentieth century into the archenemy of freedom of speech and thought.

Liberalism thought of religion, especially organized public religion, as the enemy of freedom.   This was in part due to real abuses of religious authority within Christendom in the late centuries of the Middle Ages, but also because of liberalism’s individualistic orientation.  Liberalism conceived of freedom in strictly individualistic terms.  Religion, on the other hand, was and is a community institution that serves a social purpose.

Religion is not, as some evangelical Protestants have grown accustomed to saying, “man’s attempt to reach God”.   The term  religion comes from the Latin word religio, which means reverence for the sacred.   Religio was itself believed to be derived from the verb religare, which means “to bind fast”. (8)   This etymology points to the social function of religion as the institution which connects the members of a community to one another and to the sacred..  Religion does this by means of shared beliefs and rituals which, because they are passed down from one generation to another, are able to connect past, future, and present generations of a community into an organic whole. (9)   This is also the role of culture, which is why, as a myriad of commentators including Christopher Dawson and T. S. Eliot have pointed out, religion is the heart and soul of culture.

Liberals like Locke and Mill, obsessed with the individual, have never fully appreciated the importance of the community, or of the essential social function of religion within the community and the larger society.  Thus they fail to appreciate the importance of orthodoxy, apart from which religion could not perform its function.   Orthodoxy, which means “right belief”, is a religion’s definition, as a community of faith, of what its essential shared beliefs are.   If a religion did not identify a set of core beliefs as its orthodoxy, it could not create a sense of organic oneness between those who share its beliefs.

While there is tension between orthodoxy, the right of religion as a community to define what its common beliefs are, and freedom of thought and speech, the right of the individual to dissent from the community and think his own thoughts, the two do not necessarily contradict each other. Indeed, if the religious community in defining a set of beliefs as orthodox and the individual in drawing his own conclusions are both guided by the ideal of what is true, there is reason to hope that the relationship between the two might be one of harmony rather than opposition. In fact, by Mill’s own arguments, free discussion should strengthen orthodoxy, by clarifying the reasons behind orthodox beliefs and deepening the believer’s convictions.


Of the rationalist, Michael Oakeshott wrote “And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics.” (10) The importance of this insight cannot be underestimated. Tradition, which includes everything that a community, society, or civilization passes down through the generations, including its religious orthodoxy, is a living thing, which like all living things, is a combination of change and constancy. From birth to death, a living organism remains the same being, but it also undergoes changes. Some of these changes, such as natural growth and the replenishing of dying cells, are necessary to sustain the life of the organism, whereas others, such as severe disease or injury can cripple or even kill the organism. The same is true of a tradition, and while liberals believed that the ideas that would arise in a free discussion would kill tradition by emancipating the individual, they may also be the fresh ideas that will keep the tradition alive.

Whichever is the case, liberalism itself has become noted for the inflexibility that Oakeshott rightly said was the attribute of ideology.   In the twentieth century it became itself the enemy of freedom of thought and religion as, in pursuit of the next stage of what it considered to be social progress, it demanded that certain ideas and forms of speech be driven from polite society.   In the phenomenon that has come to be known as “political correctness”, liberals have insisted that language they consider to be offensive to racial minorities – regardless of whether or not the racial minorities themselves consider it to be offensive – be banned, that the structure of the English language be altered to be “gender inclusive”, and that ethnic humour, unless directed at one’s own ethnic group (or against whites) be forbidden.   More disturbingly, liberals have demanded that major academic disciplines including the sciences, adhere to the egalitarian doctrines they are currently obsessed with.   Worst of all, they have in some places, including Canada at both the federal and provincial levels, introduced laws that define the expression of certain thoughts as criminal acts or as acts of discrimination that make the speaker liable to expensive civil lawsuits.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief the rascally adventurer Basil Seal, having fled England and his mother’s attempt to impose respectability and responsibility upon him, and arrived in Azania, where his Oxford friend Seth has just been crowned emperor, agrees to help Seth modernize his empire with disastrous consequences.  “You know”, he remarks to the emperor “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…”  In response the emperor asks “What is all that?” to which Seal replies “Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.” (11)

  So, it would seem, freedom of thought and speech, have ceased to be liberal. The kind of thinking that Mill identified as being common in continental liberalism in his own day and which was represented in England by Jeremy Bentham in the generation prior to his own, in which constitutional rights, freedoms, and protections are regarded as hindrances to progress when the government is democratic has eclipsed Locke’s and Mill’s emphasis on personal liberty to become the mainstream of liberal thought.

In defense of their new position, some liberals make a distinction between what they call “hate speech” and “free speech”. Hate speech, they maintain, is not covered by Mill’s arguments for freedom of speech, because it has no value and would not be “robbing the human race” of anything. It is not the expression of a thought, right or wrong, they say, but a verbal assault upon “vulnerable” groups like racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and homosexuals.

The first clue that something is wrong with this reasoning is that the hate speech liberals believe should be suppressed may be true.   Liberals have argued that those accused of hate speech should not be allowed to present evidence that what they have said is in fact true in their defence.   What matters, they claim, is that the speech has the effect of casting negative aspersions on a group that hate speech laws are designed to protect.   It makes no difference if the speech is true.  Hence the wording of the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which declares speech to be defamatory if it is “likely to expose” members of protected groups “to hatred or contempt” and the ruling by the Supreme Court in the John Ross Taylor case that “truth is no defense”. 

The second clue that that distinction between hate speech and free speech is spurious can be found when we look at what is considered to be hate speech.  What is hate speech, anyway?  Actually saying “I hate you” to someone does not seem to be prohibited by any existing hate speech law.  Attempting to prove that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War II was less than six million, by contrast, is prohibited by hate speech laws.   Surely there must be something terribly wrong with a theory that justifies the suppression of speech that contains hate, but allows expressions of actual emotional hate, while silencing those who claim that Hitler only murdered five million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine Jews.

The final clue that something is wrong with hate speech laws is the expanding nature of the definition of hate speech. At first, when hate speech laws were introduced, they were used against people who had extremely marginal views and few defenders. Today it is not uncommon to hear expressions of Christian opposition to the deliberate taking of the life of the unborn or of the Christian doctrine that sexual intercourse outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful denounced as hateful, no matter how much the Christian may say that we are to hate only the sin but love the sinner.

What we can see in all of this is that laws against hate speech are not really exceptions to the arguments Mill made for freedom of speech but examples of the very thing he was arguing against, the social engineering of public opinion by democratic governments.

Whatever else the classical liberalism of men like Mill may have gotten wrong, at least their concept of absolute freedom of thought and speech was superior to this.

(1)   Christopher Dawson, The Formation of Christendom, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), especially chapter eleven (pp. 165-177) and chapter thirteen (pp. 190-213).  In chapter eleven, Dawson describes how the Celtic monasticism of St. Columba and St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and the Benedictine monasticism of St. Augustine of Canterbury had planted a Christian culture in Northumbria and Kent respectively, and how out of this culture arose men like St. Bede “the real father of medieval history” and St. Boniface the evangelist of northern Europe.   In chapter thirteen he describes how Alfred the Great of Wessex, while the Vikings were wiping out these monasteries in the north, preserved the Christian culture they had founded in the south,  and “found time to think out afresh the problems of Christian education and to lay with his own hands the foundations of a Christian vernacular culture.”       

(2)   Richard M. Weaver traced its roots further back, to the nominalism of William of Ockham in the thirteenth century, in his Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).   Weaver saw the nominalist break with Christian Platonism by rejecting the reality of the forms as the start of the unraveling of the Christian worldview of an order of being descending from God.   Interestingly, Christopher Dawson, through a different line of reasoning, also traced the origin of the breakdown of the unity of medieval Christendom to Ockham, in  The Dividing of Christendom (London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1965), pp. 24-25, 27.

(3)   Robert Nisbet in Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 261, wote “The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century is unique among ages of claimed cultural efflorescence, or so-called golden ages, in that it is almost entirely the product of egocentric illusion.  The century was barely under way when the Italian humanists began to celebrate what they called, with consummate impudence, the eta moderna, the modern age, the age of renewal of civilization, after the long dark night of the church-dominated millennium, the medium aevum, that separated them from classical civilization.   They were destined, the humanists believed, to terminate the murk of scholasticism by calculated revival of Greek and Roman ideas, style, dress and ceremonies.  On the basis of this revival, they would bury medieval culture and at the same time build imperishably to the future.   They and they only were the true heirs of Plato and Aristotle and also the architects of the future of Europe.”   This attitude towards itself and toward medieval Christian civilization, which Nisbet went on to mercilessly tear to shreds, is the attitude, taken to the nth degree by Voltaire and Diderot, became the foundational view of the world and history of the Enlightenment project.

(4)   This essay was first published in the first volume of the Cambridge Journal in 1947.  It was later republished as the first and titular essay in a collection of his writings entitled Rationalism in Politics: And Other Essays (London: Metheun Publishing, 1962), Oakeshott’s second and best known book.

(5)   Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2^nd edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 1984) p. 39.

(6)   Locke, for example, in his Two Treatises Of Government borrowed the theory of the social contract from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.   In this theory, man in his “natural state” is an individual rather than a member of a society, and society is an artificial construction of man, external to his nature, formed by compacts made between individuals.   This in itself is obviously wrong.  It is the opposite of what is observable all around us. Human beings are born into their families, communities, and larger societies and that their individuality is something that gradually develops. Man is a social animal by nature, hence the same basic social institutions recur, albeit in different forms, wherever there are people, in every place and time. While some social relationships – friendship, business partnership, and recently marriage, are entered into voluntarily – many of the most fundamental social relationships, such as those between father and son, mother and daughter, and brother and sister, are not voluntary at all but are permanent relationships defined by blood.  As wrong-headed as social contract theory is – except for Edmund Burke’s version of an “eternal contract” written by God Himself – Locke made it even more unrealistic when he modified Hobbes’ version to fit his liberalism (if Locke’s writings put forth an “independent rational justification” for the Whig interpretation of the English political tradition, reducing it to an ideology, Hobbes’ writings could be said to have done the same for the Royalist/Tory interpretation of the English political tradition) .   Hobbes recognized what human beings in the absence of law, government, or society, would actually be like – a war of all against all.  Locke rejected this “bellum omnium contra omnes” view of man outside society – as he rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of Original Sin – in favour of an optimistic view of human nature as being basically cooperative and good.

(7)   “he hamartia estin he anomia”, 1 John 3:4

(8)  Lactantius, for example, asserted this derivation in his Divine Institutes.

(9)  Religion, of course, cannot be reduced to just its social function.  This is particularly true, I would add, of Christianity, which is built on the foundation of God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, as St. Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 12, Christianity, does perform the social function of a religion, by binding its members into an organic community, the Church.

(10) Oakeshott, op. cit.

(11) Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1932], 1962), p. 128.