Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- A country over which neither a king nor a queen reigns is not a real country.

- Democracy is not the safeguard of liberty, it is royal monarchy that protects the freedom of the people from the tyranny of elected politicians who think they can do whatever they want to the people because they act in the name of the people.

- The most misogynistic remark that I have ever heard is that a woman ought to be a feminist because she is a woman for this is the equivalent of saying that women qua women are irrational, out of touch with reality, humourless, self-righteous, obnoxious and tyrannical.

- Liberals are always using the expression “it is about time” to refer to laws that nobody dreamed of passing until the day before yesterday, that are neither necessary nor just, and which negatively affect large numbers of people for the sake of the convenience of a small handful. It is apparent that they do not know what these words actually mean.

- The Liberal Party is, and always has been, the most American political party in Canada, and the Trudeaus are the most American of the Liberals, albeit in a Hollywood lefty sort of way, being basically the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedys.

- The greatest lie in the history of mankind was the one the serpent told to Eve in the Garden of Eden. The second greatest lie was Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.”

- There can be no freedom without order, and no order without hierarchy.

- We are constantly being told that we need to build bridges rather than walls. Homes require walls not bridges. Either the bridge advocates have put no thought whatsoever into their metaphor or they do not think of their country as their home.

- There may very well be something to the frequently heard accusation that capitalism unshackles Avarice, but socialism institutionalises Envy, which in the traditional ranking of the Seven Deadly Sins is the greater of the two.

- The same people who think it a heinous and barbaric act for a government to take the life of a murderer as the just penalty for his crime believe that women should have the right to take the lives of the unborn children growing in their wombs and that people who wish to kill themselves should have the right to force another person into complicity in this action.

- While of all the sins and wickednesses in the world there are undoubtedly many that are much worse than that of being romantically and erotically attached to a member of your own sex, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins has always been thought to be Superbia or hubris as the Greeks called it, the English name of which is Pride. Think about it.

- Whenever a progressive, forward-thinking, person dismisses an idea, custom, or institution as being “old-fashioned”, “archaic”, “out-dated” or the like, this ought to be taken as evidence on behalf of its retention or revival.

- For decades we have been told that enlightened and humane people do not believe in corporal discipline by parents or teachers and today, after all these years of timeouts, we are witnessing the complete collapse of parental authority. Do you think these two things might possibly be related?

- The retributive theory of justice in which the courts exact penalties owed to the law by criminal offenders has been condemned by the more-enlightened-than-thou as being atavistic but surely treating these offenders as human Guinea pigs in experiments in behavioural corrections is far more cruel and inhumane.

- It is impossible to work for the good of generations yet to come without a proper and pious reverence for the generations that have preceded us.

- The word “hate” used to refer to the wishing of harm, violence, death and destruction on someone or something but progressives now seem to be using it to refer to all disagreement with their goals.

- We are now being told that we must consider a person to be whatever sex he, she, or it says that he, she, or it is. Does this mean that we have to consider JFK to have been a jelly doughnut?

- A morality of rules for the sake of rules themselves is just legalism. True morality, as the Latin root of the word suggests, is about the development of a character of good habits or virtues so that men can make wise and right decisions.

- Have you ever noticed how all the proposals of those who loudly proclaim their great compassion for the poor would make everything much more expensive for everybody, hurting the poor the most?

Equality is not Justice and Justice is not Equality

Western civilization in its classical and Christian manifestations saw the Good as being the chief end for which human beings, individually and as a collective whole, were to strive. Goodness, like the closely related ideas of Truth and Beauty, was what it was in itself rather than whatever we decided it to be, and it was something we were to seek after and discover. Justice, the condition and act of being and doing what is right, was the particular aspect of Goodness that was the end for which man organized his societies politically, that is to say under law and government.

Today, Western civilization has passed through its Modern era into what is called the Postmodern age, although Übermodern would probably be a more apt term for it as it takes the traits of the modern and magnifies them to the nth degree. In these eras, Justice has been supplanted by a usurper. The name of this usurper is Equality although it sometimes tries to steal the name of Justice as well as its position. Whenever, for example, you hear “Justice” spoken of with “Social” as a modifier then you can be sure that it is this modern Pretender that is being spoken of and not true and legitimate Justice.

The superficial similarities between Equality and certain aspects of Justice are such that the differences between the two need to be made absolutely clear so as to avoid confusion. Equality is the idea that in some way or another people either are or ought to be all the same and therefore should be treated the same way. Justice is the idea that all people ought to be treated right.

It is easy to see how the confusion between the two concepts can arise. If we start with Justice’s assertion that all people ought to be treated right we can see that it is saying in a sense that all people ought to be treated the same way, that is to say, rightly. It is when we start with Equality’s assertion that all people ought to be treated the same way that a problem becomes apparent because we cannot from this assertion derive any sense of the idea that all people should be treated right. This is because treating people right and treating people the same are not identical concepts. Often to treat two people right means to treat each differently.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean by this. If you were to come across a stranger in need and welcome him into your home, treating him as if he were a member of your family, your actions would meet with widespread acclamation and you would find yourself toasted for your generosity, liberality, warm-hearted humanity, and countless other virtues. If, however, your own father, who begat you and lovingly raised you, who provided you with everything you need and gave you your start in life, were to come to you and you were to turn him aside and treat him as a perfect stranger, you would find yourself rightly condemned as a cold-blooded ingrate. In the latter instance as in the former you will have treated people the same way whether they were family members or strangers. In the second instance, however, you will not have done right by doing so.

This, by the way, is the difference between the image and the reality of Equality. Equality projects the image of treating strangers like they were family, but its reality is the treating of family members as if they were strangers.

Equality is sometimes confused with the idea that within a country the law should be the same for all people, governors and governed alike. This idea is a fundamental principle of our legal tradition. Although the principle is often spoken of as isonomy or “equality under law” there is an important difference between it and the concept of Equality. The difference is that whereas the latter asserts that all the people under the law are the same, the principle asserts that the law is the same for all people. This is not a matter of semantics. When we say that the law is the same for all people we are saying that the law is one and it is this, the unity of the law, that is the essence of the principle. To assert that it is the people, who are many, that are the same is to assert nonsense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.” No greater statement of utter tripe and poppycock has ever been penned. To say that all men are created equal is to say that all men are created the same. Apart from the most peripheral and trivial of matters – that we are all born and all die, that we all have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, etc. - this is patently untrue. In matters of ability, both physical and mental, personality, quality, and character human beings are like the proverbial snowflake – no two are identical. Nor would any sane person want them to be.

“We are all equal”, those who have been conditioned to accept without question the doctrine of Equality might object to my reasoning above, “in terms of our worth or value.” While that sounds very nice and may give us warm, fuzzy, tingly feelings inside, it does not bear up under scrutiny. The words “worth” and “value” are marketplace words. They can refer to the amount that you are willing to pay for something if you are a prospective buyer, or the amount that you are willing to receive in exchange for something if you are a prospective seller. They can also refer to the intrinsic qualities of the objects upon which the buyer and seller base their decision as to how much they are willing to pay or accept. (1) To say that all people are of equal value, therefore, is either to reduce all people to the level of commodities for sale in the marketplace, which is hardly in keeping with the humanitarianism professed by most egalitarians who in other contexts would most strenuously object to the objectification of people, or to assert them to be equal in terms of some intrinsic quality that is unobservable to ordinary human beings for in all observable intrinsic qualities people are definitely not equal.

That unobservable intrinsic quality is sometimes further described as being our “worth in God’s eyes”. This is tautological, providing us with no new information about what that quality might be, for if it is unobservable to the human eye, who else can see it but God? More importantly, one would be hard pressed to find evidence for this concept in authoritative divine revelation.

The God Who revealed Himself in the words of the Christian Scriptures and in the Person of Jesus Christ is a God of Justice not of Equality. While He holds men accountable to the single standard which is His Law, He holds them accountable in varying degrees in accordance with whether they have received His Law in full or only partly through their consciences. (2) He has given men One mediator through Whom grace, mercy, and salvation can be received because it is only through the cross of Jesus Christ that He can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (3) In the Church which is His body, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”, not because these distinctions are unimportant or are to be eliminated but because “ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. (4) As with the concept of the “one law for all” in our legal tradition, it is unity – the unity of God’s Law, His Gospel, and His Church and, of course, of the One True and Living God Himself – that is taught in those passages and verses that are sometimes misconstrued as teaching egalitarianism. The God of the Christian Scriptures created people differently, giving each their own abilities, qualities, talents, and gifts, and while He holds all people accountable to one Law, He holds each person accountable for the use made of what was given him in particular. That is the difference between Justice and Equality.

(1) The difference between these two meanings of value is what Oscar Wilde alluded to in his famous quip about the cynic who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
(2) Romans 2
(3) Romans 3:26
(4) Galatians 3:28

Religious Need Not Apply?

Imagine that a national political figure made a controversial statement that was highly offensive to black people and the leader of a black organization was to publicly rebuke him for it. Suppose that you then opened your newspaper one morning, turned to the opinion page, and in a syndicated column were to read that although the politician had stuck his foot in his mouth he was now out of hot water because “Canadians don’t like black people involving themselves, at all, in politics.” Would you find this statement to be offensive? If so, what would you consider to be most offensive about it, that it expresses racist sentiments or that it presumptuously attributes those sentiments to you and your countrymen?

There are many substitutions you can make for the main variable in the above scenario. You could substitute any other racial group other than white Europeans for black people. Or you could substitute women or homosexuals. Run the scenario again with each of these substitutions and you will probably get the same results. Progressive, liberal, and forward thinking people would be appalled to read such remarks in their newspaper and would probably put pressure on the editor to stop running the column.

What if, however, we were to substitute “Christians” for “black people”? Or “religious people” used in such a way that many if not most people would automatically read it as meaning “Christians”.

This, it would appear, is somehow different because we were recently treated to just such a comment and by a progressive, liberal, forward thinking commentator, nonetheless.

The national political figure was Justin Trudeau who, a little over a year ago, was elected leader of the Liberal Party, presumably on the basis of his youth, good looks, and family name. He is the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the lawyer and far left editor, writer and activist from Quebec who entered federal politics in the 1960s as a member of the Liberal Party and succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister. Under his leadership the Liberal Party went from being the party of free trade and continentalism, founded with its lips firmly pressed against Uncle Sam’s rear end, to being the party of socialism, multiculturalism and post-modern moral relativism (in other words a huge redundancy as we already had the NDP for that). Take your pick as to which version of the Liberal Party was most repulsive – it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. In the decade and a half that Pierre Trudeau governed Canada as the head of the Liberal Party he did everything he could to undermine the political, cultural, and social traditions of both English and French Canada, while ruining the country’s economy, saddling us with an enormous debt, and creating a constitutional crisis that long threatened to tear the country apart. The reason I bring all this up is because Trudeau fils is doing an excellent job of making Trudeau père look good by comparison.

The controvers y the young Trudeau provoked a few weeks ago was over abortion. The day before the annual March for Life in Ottawa he announced that future Liberal candidates would be expected to vote the party line with regards to abortion and defined that party line as pro-choice – no legislative restriction on abortion. Needless to say, Trudeau’s stance did not impress the Roman Catholic Church, whose members have traditionally tended to vote Liberal in Canada. Trudeau himself is a member of the Roman Catholic Church and claims, despite his obvious disagreement with the Church on this key ethical issue, to be devout. Catholic leaders have condemned Trudeau’s stance and last week, in an interview with the CBC, the Catholic Bishop of Ottawa described Trudeau’s support for abortion as “scandalous”.

Enter Warren Kinsella. Warren Kinsella is, among other disagreeable things, a lawyer, a punk rocker, a former Liberal Party strategist, and a progressive, forward minded, liberal. He writes a column for the Toronto Sun which is carried by the other papers in the Sun chain, including the Winnipeg Sun. As these papers generally have a right-of-centre, neo-conservative slant, Kinsella’s left-of-centre column tends to stand out.

Last Friday an article by Kinsella entitled “Trudeau leaps blindly into abortion debate” appeared on page 9 of the Winnipeg Sun. In the first half of the column Kinsella praised as reasonable Trudeau’s earlier statement that the party’s position is “we do not reopen (the abortion) debate” but then pointed out that by declaring that future candidates would have to toe the party line Trudeau had done just that. He further observed that Trudeau has dug himself deeper into this hole with his confusing and contradictory attempts to salvage the situation.

Then, however, Kinsella went on to talk about and quote from the Catholic Bishop’s remarks, suggesting that by rebuking Trudeau, the bishop has provided him with a way out of the mess he has made. Here is the reasoning he used to arrive at this conclusion:

“As Stockwell Day learned the hard way, Canadians favour a wall between church and state. And they don’t like the religious involving themselves, at all, in politics.”

It is interesting the different ways in which different people remember certain events. When I think back to the federal election of 2000 in which Stockwell Day led the Canadian Alliance, I do not recall “Canadians” as a whole mocking or attacking Stockwell Day because of his Christian faith. I remember progressive and liberal media elites doing so, especially a certain Liberal Party strategist.

Tories, if and when they are ever true to their own principles, look to their country’s long-rooted traditions and institutions as the foundation of their policies. Progressives look instead to the “will of the people”. Since the people don’t actually have a collective will, unless you count that which is filtered through time and expressed as tradition and which is hence on the side of the Tory rather than the progressive, progressives have to supply the people with one, which inevitably is indistinguishable from the progressive’s own will. Which is why, in this country, one frequently finds progressive writers in an arrogant and condescending tone, telling Canadians what they think.

On almost any issue, Canadians have a wide diversity of ideas. There are those, like myself, who are Tories and support Canada’s traditions and institutions. Then there are those who for some reason or another – perhaps they had a nasty fall when they were children, perhaps they are lacking some important nutrient in their diet, perhaps they have been breathing in too many noxious fumes of one sort or another – are progressive and think more like Kinsella. Of course there are many other viewpoints out there as well. The closest thing to a general consensus among Canadians is that we are not Americans (referring to America in the sense of the country not the continents). Almost everyone agrees about this. Traditional Tories say that we are not Americans with a sense of patriotic pride in our country’s Loyalist heritage and traditions. Neoconservatives agree that we are not Americans but with a sense of regret that we were not part of what they consider to be the great experiment in freedom and democracy shaping the ultimate destiny of the world. Progressives like to say that we are not Americans in the context of telling us what we think, even if what they say we think has less to do with our own country’s traditions and institutions than it does with the United States.

This can be the source of great irony. Note that in the sentences quoted earlier in which the progressive Kinsella tells Canadians what they think, he attributes to them the American concept of a “wall between church and state”. The idea of a “wall between church and state” is not a Canadian idea, nor is it part of our political tradition or constitution. The expression comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Jefferson was explaining the significance of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Furthermore, when Jefferson wrote about “the wall of separation between church and state” he was clearly expressing a liberal, democratic fear of the power of the state, not a progressive contempt for religion. This wall, as Jefferson saw it, was to keep Congress out of religion, not to keep religion from having any say in politics.

Kinsella therefore, has not only attributed to Canadians the belief in a political concept that is part of the American tradition rather than our own, he has also transformed that concept into its polar opposite, a fence to keep “the religious” out of politics rather than a defensive wall protecting religion from state intrusion.

We have not yet mined the irony in Kinsella’s remarks to its full depth. The author of The Web of Hate has built a reputation for himself, among his supporters as an expert on bigotry, among his detractors as a jerk who likes to bully his opponents on the right with accusations of bigotry. You can decide for yourself which version is more accurate, but note in doing so, the irony that this same self-appointed expert on bigotry and hatred, who in the federal election of fourteen years ago publicly ridiculed the leader of the Canadian Alliance for his evangelical Christian beliefs, wrote “the religious” rather than “religion”.

Then ask yourselves whether you, as Canadians, feel complimented or insulted at having this progressive sentiment attributed to yourselves.

The Demon Idol of Equality

The word idol comes from a Greek word meaning “image”. An idol, in the most literal sense, is a physical image of a god used in worship. The word idol is also used to refer to any deity worshipped by man other than the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who became incarnate as Man in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. This meaning of the word idol is derived from the first, and there is yet another meaning which is derived from the second one. In the third sense of the word, an idol is anything which is given the honour, worship, praise, faith and obedience that is due to God alone, regardless of whether that thing is literally conceived of as a god or not. We sometimes speak of fanatical believers in economic liberalism, for example, as “marketolators”, because the faith they place in the free market often seems to be the kind which would be more appropriately placed in God, although they obviously do not believe the forces of supply and demand to be a living, sentient being that can answer their prayers.

The wickedness of idolatry is a major theme of the Old Testament. The Ten Commandments declare that the Israelites are to have no other god than The LORD and that they are not to make or bow down to idols. The Book of Genesis takes the things worshipped as deities in pagan religions and systematically declares them to be part of the creation of the one true God. In the plagues sent against Pharaoh and Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the God of Israel is revealed to be sovereign over the deities of Egypt. The Israelites are frequently warned against participating in the idolatrous worship of the peoples in the lands surrounding them. Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were miraculously saved from the furnace by God when they faithfully refused to bow down to the image Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself. When God’s judgement fell upon Israel it was frequently due to their turning to idols.

Some gruesome practices were associated with literal idol worship, including human sacrifice. Ordinarily this involved the sacrifice of enemies captured in war, which was horrible enough, but in some cases it went a step further. The heathen deity Moloch, worshipped by several people groups in the Near East, demanded that his worshippers sacrifice their own children to him. The Bible contrasts Moloch with the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Only once did the Lord demand such a sacrifice, to test the faith and obedience of Abraham, and He prevented Abraham from actually carrying out the sacrifice. In the New Testament, in the light of which the Old Testament must be understood, God gives His own Son to be the final, sufficient, and efficient sacrifice that takes away the sin of the world and propitiates divine wrath.

While all idol worship was forbidden to the Israelites, the worship of Moloch was singled out for specific condemnation in Leviticus. Disregard for these warnings brought quick and severe judgement upon Israel, and the sacrifice of children to Moloch so defiled the spot where it took place that a curse was pronounced upon it (2 Kings 23:10) and its name Tophet, and indeed the name of the valley in which it was located, Hinnom, became symbols of being utterly and absolutely cursed and under God’s wrath.

The most literal kind of idol worship is not very common these days, although idolatry, in the sense of placing ones faith in, worshipping, and serving something other than the true and living God, remains widespread and one of the root causes of other sins. Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, (1) discusses some of the more popular forms of idolatry out there today. One idol that he does not discuss however, is the Moloch of modern times, the contemporary false god who requires that his worshippers sacrifice their children. That idol is a devil indeed – the demon idol of equality.

A tremendous amount of blood has been shed in the worship of this false god since the beginning of the modern age. Equality was one of the counterfeit trinity to whom the French Revolutionaries offered up their libations of blood – fraternity and liberty being the other two. It was in the name of social, political, and economic equality that most revolutions of the 19th Century were carried out. In the 20th Century, attempts to build an egalitarian society brought about such horrors as Lenin’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s state-induced famines, the prison camps of the GULAG, and Pol Pot’s systematic slaughter of the educated, religious, and middle classes of Cambodia.

Now some idols are inherently evil whereas others are things which are good in their proper place but become idols and evil by being made to be more important than they really are. Which kind is equality?

It would be unfair to condemn equality as being inherently evil just because evil, even evil of the sort mentioned above, has been committed in its name. Evil has been done in the name of virtually every good cause that has ever existed. To demonstrate that there is something inherently wrong with equality we would have to demonstrate that the evil committed in its name was a natural and necessary consequence of the idea of equality itself.

That such a relationship exists between equality and certain kinds of evil is a theme that has long existed in traditional folklore. In ancient Greece, for example, the legend of the hero Theseus, tells of how his mother sent him to his father’s kingdom in Athens, and on the way he entered into a number of adventures. In one of those adventures, he encountered the giant Procrustes, who offered hospitality to travelers, but insisted that they be made to fit the bed he had constructed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too tall, he cut something off. Several lessons are contained in this legend, including a warning against the folly of trying to force people to fit a model they do not naturally conform to. That egalitarianism is an attempt to do just that was made clear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in his short story “Harrison Bergeron”, a modern day retelling of the Procrustean legend. The story is set in a futuristic version of the United States, where a bureaucracy makes sure all the citizens are fully equal, by handicapping anyone who possesses an advantage which others do not have. (2)

What is recognized in this tradition of story-telling is that people are not naturally equal and that attempts to make them equal against their nature, do violence to them.

This is the opposite, of the sentiment Thomas Jefferson famously expressed in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” If we reflect upon it, however, it is not difficult to see that reality is better reflected in the tradition warning us against the egalitarian ideal than in Jefferson’s wartime propaganda. It is not at all self-evident that all men are created equal, indeed, it is self-evident that they are not.

Some men are tall others are short, and while it is possible to find two or more men of equal height, it would not be true to say that all men in general are “equal” in terms of height. What is true of height is also true of weight, and of strength, intelligence, beauty, talent, and all other such measurable traits. In none of them is there a general equality and when two people can be found to be equal in any one trait, it is very unlikely that they will be equal in many of the other traits as well.

Now some might come to Jefferson’s defense by saying “that isn’t what he meant, he wasn’t talking about equality with regards to measurable qualities, but equality with regards to intrinsic worth or value and possession of natural rights”. The problem is, that while it is undoubtedly true that Jefferson had some such concept in mind, it is also true that this concept of equality is in no way “self-evident”, but can only be arrived at through revelation, philosophical deduction, or speculation.

As a matter of fact, this concept of equality is not true at all but is a perversion of the concept of justice. To be just to people, to treat them right, is to give them that which is due them. If justice, a virtue which men are supposed to practice, is giving each person their due, it necessarily follows that there are things which people are due, or entitled to. Those things are what we refer to when we speak of somebody’s “rights”. The idea that people have rights is therefore a necessary part of the concept of justice. What is not a necessary part of the concept of justice is the idea that what Person A is entitled to is identical or equal to what Person B is entitled to. Indeed, the idea which equates justice and equality and declares that what one person is entitled to, the next person must be entitled to as well, makes no sense. If two people enter into an enterprise together, in which one person contributes 80% of the investment and his partner contributes 20%, justice requires, not that they split the profits equally, but that they divide them in proportion to their investment. If peoples’ rights, in accordance with justice, can be said to be equal, they are equal only in the sense that no person is any more or any less entitled to what is his own than any other person, not in the sense that any one person is entitled to the same status, wealth, and power as every other person. As Edmund Burke put it “In this partnership [of civil society] all men have equal rights, but not to equal things”.

One form of justice is legal justice, in which a judge settles disputes between two or more parties or hears accusations of criminal wrongdoing and passes judgement on the basis of the evidence. This kind of justice is traditionally depicted as being blind. This is to indicate that in the administration of this kind of justice, only the facts of the case should be considered, and not the rank or wealth of the parties. The idea that justice should be impartial has been around since ancient times and it can also be expressed as an ideal of equality – the ideal that all people be equal in the eyes of the law. It may be best not to express the ancient concept of impartial justice in this way, however. The administration of legal justice is imperfect because it must be administered by human beings who are imperfect. When the ideal of justice is expressed in terms of equality this creates a temptation for people to blame the imperfections in human justice, not on the imperfection of the human heart, but on differences of rank and wealth between people in a society, and to demand that these differences be eliminated.

Attempts to level society in this way, however, can never bring about the perfect justice hoped for, because they misdiagnose the cause of injustice for which there is no human cure. Attempts to create a just society by artificially engineering equality are themselves acts of injustice, often injustice on a large scale. Hence the warnings against the egalitarian ideal in traditional folklore.

The ideal of equality is a favorite tool of revolutionaries. A revolution is an attempt to alter the order of society by force. Revolutionaries may be sincere in their belief that they can bring about a better world, although more often than not they are just interested in seizing power for themselves. If they are sincere, they are deluded, because evil and suffering are part of the human estate which they are powerless to change, which is why revolutions typically produce nothing but massive amounts of violence and misery.

Revolutions typically draw their supporters from the young and naïve. The idea of equality lends itself to fomenting revolutions because it presents as ideal a condition which is completely foreign to human nature and which is therefore tailor made to generate discontent.

Equality is not something like which is good in itself, but which becomes bad when we make an idol out of it. It was itself a perversion of something good, justice, before we ever made it into an idol. After we made it into an idol, it quickly became the new Moloch.

Consider the doctrine of racial equality, which has become official dogma in the Western world in the decades following World War II. In those decades white liberals in Western governments have introduced liberal immigration policies encouraging mass immigration from non-white countries, laws against racial discrimination which are selectively enforced against whites alone, and de jure discrimination policies in favour of non-whites which are euphemistically called “affirmative action”. They also began a major propaganda campaign in the media (news and entertainment) and the public education system designed to teach people that the greatest evil in the world is “racism” and that “racism” is committed solely or primarily by white people. Opposition to all of this was discouraged by quick accusations of “racism” against anyone who dared open their mouth, and in some cases by laws against “hate speech” which are never enforced against violently anti-white language but only against white people.

During that same period the fertility rates of white people groups dropped below the level needed to sustain their populations and have remained that low ever since.

What all of this amounts to is the collective sacrifice of their children on the part of white people. White people are not having the children they should be having to sustain their population. They have introduced policies that artificially handicap what children they do have to benefit other peoples’ children. They are indoctrinating their children with an ideology that renders them helpless against the hatred of other people by instilling in them a sense of collective guilt for the “racism” of their ancestors.

In the name of what god is this sacrifice of the future well-being of the children of an entire race taking place?

It is taking place in the name of racial equality. The anti-racist movement has had “racial equality” as its ideal from the beginning. Just as equality is not the same thing as justice, but is a perversion of the concept, so racial equality is not the same thing as racial justice, the idea that different races should treat each other fairly, justly, and well, but is a perversion of that concept and one which, as we have just seen, is itself the source of a major injustice against future generations of white people. (3)

Another example of how the idol of equality demands the sacrifice of children can be found in the feminist movement. The feminist movement counts as its first wave the suffragist movement which sought the vote for women. The second wave began in the 1960’s as a demand for full social and economic equality between men and women. Second-wave feminism had two wings – a radical wing, which was formed by women who had joined other radical left-wing movements and were unhappy with the way the male radicals treated them, and a more mainstream liberal wing. The demands of the two wings of feminism were often quite different, but one area where they overlapped, was in the demand for legal, unrestricted, and free and easy access to abortion. This has remained a central demand of feminism in all of its subsequent waves, albeit one which the movement has long achieved as the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada gave in to this demand decades ago.

Abortion is the deliberate termination of pregnancy resulting in death to the unborn fetus. While ethicists debate the personhood of the fetus, by splitting hairs over the definition of “person”, it is undeniable that the fetus is a) living and b) human – it possesses a full set of human chromosomes from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. Abortion is therefore the termination of a human life. Since it does not fall into any justifiable category of homicide it clearly belongs in the category of murder. Why is the demand for something this awful so central to the feminist cause?

It is central to the feminist cause, because feminism’s ideal is “equality of the sexes”. This ideal is contrary to human nature, however. Human beings are a sexual species – we are divided into two sexes, and it is through the union of the two sexes that we reproduce. The burden of reproduction does not fall upon both sexes equally, however. Pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body and lasts for nine months. After birth, a human child is helpless to fend for itself and must be looked after for years. The mother’s body is designed to produce milk to nourish the child in its initial state of helplessness before it can be weaned and move on to solid food.

Human societies have traditionally insisted that men share this burden with women, by marrying the women who bear their children and providing for them. Feminism, however, demands a different solution. Feminism demands that women be fully independent of men in a society in which they are fully equal with men politically, socially, and economically. Such a society cannot exist so long as women bear the burden of pregnancy and childbirth as a consequence of sexual activity. Thus the central place abortion has held in feminism’s demands.

Progressives today, treat the victories of the feminist and anti-racist movements in the last six decades as if they were the greatest human achievements of all time, upon which the future happiness of humanity depends. The reality is that both movements, by demanding equality rather than true justice and making equality into an ultimate good, have set up the worst kind of idol possible, the kind which demands the sacrifice of its worshippers’ children.

The Letter of Jeremiah warned the inhabitants of Jersusalem who were about to be taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, against the idols they will find there. These idols should not be feared because they are not true gods, the letter explains, they cannot raise up a king, or send rain upon men, or redress a wrong. The letter ends by saying that these idols “shall be a reproach in the country” and that:

“Better therefore is the just man that hath none idols: for he shall be far from reproach.” (verse 73, Authorized Version)

The idol of equality is our reproach in the modern Western world.

(1) Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton Adult, 2009)

(2) The first paragraph reads “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” The title character has the misfortune to be born with all of these advantages. The short story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science in October 1961, and was later republished in the Vonnegut anthology Welcome to the Monkey House.

(3) Racial equality is also a nonsensical concept. No two individuals are absolutely equal, i.e., equal in every respect. If two individuals are equal in height, they will be unequal in some other area such as weight. The same thing is true of groups as well, racial and otherwise. In the comparison of groups it is averages which matter and the averages of different groups vary. This does not mean that one group is absolutely superior to any or all others. There are areas in which one group is stronger and another weaker and areas in which it is the other way around. The dogma of racial equality hinders intelligent discussion of this matter. In 1989, J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled “Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)”. In this paper, and in his later book Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, originally published by Transaction Publishers in 1995, subsequently expanded and republished by the Charles Darwin Research Institute, Rushton argued that racial differences could be explained by the r/k selection theory. He was demonized by the press, denounced by the government of Ontario, and even investigated by the Ontario police. The anger his paper, address, and book generated, was not due to his theory, which was, after all, only an explanatory hypothesis, but rather due to the facts that theory purported to explain, i.e., the existence of racial differences. Lost in the controversy was the simple truth that whether or not his theory was right or wrong, the differences it attempted to explain are real and well-documented, and that vilifying Rushton would do absolutely nothing to change that fact.

Populism Part One: Dissent, Left and Right

On September 17, 2011, a mob descended upon Zuccotti Park in the financial district of Lower Manhattan. Calling themselves “the 99%” and declaring their intention to “Occupy Wall Street”, they have been squatting in the park ever since. Their actions have since inspired malcontents elsewhere and “Occupy” protests have sprung up in other cities in the United States, Canada, and indeed around the globe. Here in Winnipeg, “Occupy Winnipeg” has set up its tents in Memorial Park across from the provincial legislature building on Broadway.

Certain friends and family members who have asked me my opinion of these protests, expressed surprise at the strongly negative terms with which I spoke of the “Occupy” movement. They thought I would have been in support of it. This, in turn, surprised me. These are not strangers but people who know me and my opinions on most matters. What could possibly make them think I would be in favour of the “Occupy” movement?

The “Occupy” movement is all image and no substance and it is an ugly image to boot. When its members say “we are the 99%” they are representing themselves as being, or at the very least speaking for, 99% of the population as opposed to the extremely wealthy “1%”. The membership of the “Occupy” movement does not consist of anything remotely close to 99% of the population, nor, according to polls, does its support run anywhere near that high. If their membership does not consist of 99% of the population and their professed supporters and sympathizers do not add up to that amount what gives them the right to self-identify as the voice of that percentage?

The term “99%”, of course, is a gimmick chosen for its rhetorical effect not its statistical accuracy. The “Occupy movement” is a movement with a negative focus. It is much clearer about what it is against than about what it is for and what it is against is the “1%”. What is the 1%? If you arrange the population into percentiles according to wealth with the wealthiest at the top and the poorest at the bottom the “1%” is the top percentile. It is a completely arbitrary number. It does not mean anything. While there is a large distance between the top percentile and the bottom percentile in terms of wealth, as one would expect wherever there is freedom, to say that there is a huge gulf between the top 1% and the remaining 99% would be far more accurate if we were describing a country organized in accordance with the ideals the “Occupy” movement seems to admire – a country like the former Soviet Union for example.

Now I don’t much care for the concept of “too big to fail” and the way governments have bailed out large corporations and financial institutions in recent years. I do not think governments ought to reward bad management with bailouts on the principle that when you start paying for something you get more of it. And yes, I too was quite annoyed with the arrogance of banks and companies who had been bailed out by government with the taxpayer’s money then turned around and gave their executives large bonuses.

The anger of the “Occupy” movement, however, is not directed towards bad concepts like “too big to fail”, towards politicians who voted to bail out big banks and corporations, or executives who arrogantly recorded large profits and awarded themselves large bonuses after having been bailed out. It is directed rather towards “the rich” or the “top 1%”. The two are not synonymous. “The rich” and “the top 1%” are defined solely by the extent of their wealth and not by their business practices, ideas, arrogance, or whether or not they have received government bailout money.

By turning legitimate complaints against specific ideas, business and government practices, and politicians and executives, into an attack upon the wealthy in general the “Occupy” movement is engaging in what is called “class warfare” – pitting one social layer or social group against another – and what is known as “scapegoating” – placing the blame for all of the problems a society faces upon a particular class or social group.

While the “Occupy” movement is clear about what it is angry about, and who it is opposed to, it is notoriously vague about what it stands for and what its specific demands are. It claims, of course, to represent a broad spectrum of viewpoints. Progressive and left-wing groups, to whom “inclusiveness” is an ideal, frequently speak of themselves this way, although one sees little evidence of it in their boring, repetitive and redundant ideas and causes. When interviewed, the “Occupy” protesters will often say that it is “change” they are demanding – bringing to mind the vapid, substance-free, rhetoric of the campaign that swept Barack Obama into the White House in 2009. The placards and t-shirts of the movement carry anarchist and socialist slogans. The closest thing to a legible demand on the part of the movement is that government confiscate and redistribute the wealth of the “1%” through “Robin Hood” taxation.

There is no way I would ever support such an agenda. While I believe firmly in the concept of noblesse oblige – that the privileges enjoyed by the upper classes in society come with duties towards the lower classes attached to them – I do not accept the idea that a modern state should be taxing one part of society to pay the expenses of another part. The purpose of taxes is to raise the revenue of government and one of the most fundamental roles of government is to administer justice. Taking money from middle-class, working class, and poor people to bail out bankers and executives who made bad business decisions is not justice. Neither, however, is taking money from the upper and middle classes and giving it to the poor, no matter how many people falsely label this “social justice”.

The “Occupy” movement describes itself as a “leaderless” movement. This is nonsense, of course. There is no such thing as a leaderless movement, never has been, and there never will be. The “Occupy” movement is clearly organized – however poorly. Its organizers, and the people who speak for it from behind pseudonyms on its website, are leaders, whether they wish to acknowledge the fact or not. The movement’s claim to be leaderless is intended to bolster the image the movement wishes to present of itself as a spontaneous protest on the part of “the people” themselves.

The “Occupy” movement contradicts itself in its language. It describes itself as a “peaceful protest” yet its call to its supporters is a call to “occupy”. Its use of the word “occupy” evokes the military sense of the term – to take possession and/or control of something by force. It is an ugly and violent term – and perhaps the most honest term in the movement’s entire vocabulary. The idea that society should obey the “will of the people”, the concept that is the foundation of both modern democracy and populism, is a form of violence, a form of the idea “might makes right” which Plato refuted in The Republic 2400 years ago. I discussed this in my review of John Lukacs’ Democracy and Populism and will go into it at length in Populism: Part Two.

Now conceivably someone reading the last paragraph might respond with the question “What about the Tea Party? They are also a populist movement, demanding that government obey the will of the people. Would you say the same thing about them?”

My answer would be that I dislike this in the Tea Party as much as I dislike it in the “Occupy” movement. Perhaps even more.

In other areas I have much more sympathy with the Tea Party than the “Occupy Movement”. Rather than pretending to be the voice of an artificial construction like the “99%” the Tea Party purports to champion the interests of a real, if endangered group, the American middle class. Its agenda is clear and simple – less taxes and less government spending. This is an agenda I heartily approve of. Furthermore, while this is not central to the Tea Party’s platform, it is a movement which has shown itself sympathetic to the concerns of Americans who object to the cultural revolutions which have transformed their country in recent decades – liberal and illegal immigration, forced secularization, the inversion of traditional moral values, etc. These are concerns I share with conservative middle Americans because the same cultural revolutions have taken place in my own country.

Some Canadian conservatives have expressed a desire for a Canadian “Tea Party”. While I would certainly like to see taxes lowered, government spending cut, and a reversal of the social, moral, and cultural revolutions that have taken place in the name of “progress” since World War II, the thought of a Canadian “Tea Party” is unappealing to me. The biggest problems, Canada and the United States are facing, have been brought upon by revolutions conducted in our countries in the name of social progress, revolutions aided and abetted by the new corporate elites. A couple of centuries ago, Joseph de Maistre in his Considerations on France wisely wrote that “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution”. What was true of France following the Revolution of 1789, is true of 21st Century Canada and the United States.

Both Canada and the United States are extensions of the British tradition, in which most of the fundamental concepts shared by both countries, such as the importance of personal liberty, are rooted. Canada is the more conservative country of the two countries. Our country was founded, not upon a revolutionary break from our parent country, but on continuity with it and its ancient tradition. (1) As George Grant famously wrote: “As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” (2)

The United States, however, was founded out of a revolutionary break with the parent country. The Americans were fortunate that the “natural aristocracy” of which Thomas Jefferson wrote, took charge of their revolution, and prevented it from going to the radical excesses of the Revolution France succumbed to less than a decade after the United States won its independence. That natural aristocracy, kept the societies the American settlers had been building since the days of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies intact, and confederated them into a country under a classical republican constitution that served them well until they began to ignore it in the late 19th Century.

The Boston Tea Party is part of the founding mythology of the United States. It can therefore be used as a symbol, by Americans wishing to call their country back to its roots.

It can never be such a symbol in Canada. Here it is not part of our founding mythology and can only symbolize rebellion and revolution, the Whiggish forces against which the counter-revolutionary conservative must contend.

Apart from the matter of symbolism, however, there is a similarity between the populist and democratic assumptions of the Tea Party and those of the “Occupy” movement. In “Part Two” I will explain what those assumptions are and how they are closely related to some of the most fundamental errors of the times in which we live and will consider the question of how legitimate populist concerns can be addressed without falling into the pitfalls populism poses.


(1) The Dominion of Canada was founded by the Loyalists – members of the 13 colonies that remained loyal to the British Crown when the colonies rebelled and fled to what is now Ontario/Quebec to escape American persecution, together with the French Canadians who had been guaranteed their language, culture and religion in return for allegiance to the Crown after Britain won Canada from France in the Seven Years War, and British North American settlements which had not joined the 13 colonies in their rebellion.

(2) George P. Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library Edition) (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1989), p. 68.