The Story of Fritz Schnitzel

Have you heard the story of Fritz Schnitzel?

Freidrich Johann Wilhelm Helmut Gerhard von Schnitzel was born in Toronto in 1925. His parents were Germans who had moved to Canada after the First World War. The family moved back to Germany in the spring of 1933 shortly after the Reichstag voted plenary powers to the newly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the first of many steps in which the famous tyrant seized total power and turned Germany into a police state. Fritz’s father was a member of the National Socialist Workers Party and when Fritz turned fourteen in 1939 he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. Already thoroughly indoctrinated in his father’s ideology, Fritz was an enthusiastic supporter of the organization, the Nazi Party, and its Fuhrer.

By this time the events leading up to the Second World War were well underway. It was not long after Fritz joined the Hitler Youth that the Third Reich signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union. This took place on August 23rd. During the night of August 31st, German agents posing as Poles attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz in the false-flag operation that provided the pretext for Germany to invade Poland. On September 1st German troops were rolling across the Polish border. Two days later, the governments of the United Kingdom and France, made good on their pre-invasion guarantees to Poland, and declared war on Nazi Germany. The British Commonwealth of Nations rallied to the support of the United Kingdom, with the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand issuing their own declarations of war that very day. One week later, the Dominion of Canada passed her declaration of war and faithfully took her place by Britain’s side.

At this point in time the Nazis had not yet thought of using the Hitler Youth as a military force – that would come out of desperation towards the end of the war after the tide had turned against them. Fritz, however, in his zeal for the Nazi cause, was determined to take part in the fighting despite his age. In 1940, through a combination of lying about his age and family connections – his father was reportedly very close to Himmler – he was enlisted in the Waffen wing of the Schutzstaffel and sent to fight in France. At the young age of fifteen, he joined in several of the Waffen-SS’s bloody massacres with ghoulish delight. He was captured by the Allies, however, and, after the United States joined the war in December of 1941, was shipped to a prisoner of war camp in America.

Finding himself a prisoner in North America, Fritz made contact with the Canadian embassy in the United States. He appealed to our diplomats to intervene with the American government and the Allied high command and arrange for him to be transferred to a camp in Canada. He naively thought he would be given more lenient treatment here, little realizing that in 1940s Canada, decades before the social and cultural revolution wrought by the Liberal Party in the 1960s, he would not find namby-pamby courts content with slapping him on the wrist, patting his head, and telling him it wasn’t his fault, that he was a basically good kid who was just misguided and misunderstood. The Canadian ambassador read his letter of request, showed it to his friends and his superiors in Ottawa, and after they had all had a good laugh over it, used it to light his cigar. Fritz remained in the American POW camp until the end of the war.

When the war ended, Fritz filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government demanding an apology and $20 000 000 in compensation. The courts threw the suit out and told him not to waste their time. He then turned to the media to air his grievances but found little to no sympathy. Eventually, during the premiership of John Diefenbaker, he was barred from even setting foot on Canadian soil.

The preceding story is, of course, fiction. It is accurate, however, in its depiction of what would have happened, in that era, had an enemy of our country attempted to capitalize on his having been born here in this way.

Sadly, we are living in a very different day and age.

In 2002 Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan where he had been fighting on the side of the Taliban. He was just short of sixteen at the time that he launched the grenade that murdered American medical officer Christopher Speer. He had been born in Toronto, but was raised by his father in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he was indoctrinated in Islamic jihad and trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as an al-Qaida terrorist. Captured by the Americans after the murder of Speer, he was held in Guantanamo Bay where he was interrogated both by American officials and, since he had Canadian citizenship, by CSIS and representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When charged before a military tribunal he pled guilty to several war crimes, including the murder of Speer, and received a light sentence of eight years, not including the time he had already spent in Gitmo. He applied for and received a transfer to a Canadian prison, which the federal government tried unsuccessfully to prevent during the Harper premiership, and under the jurisdiction of our penal system he was eventually released on bail. He launched a lawsuit against Canada, claiming that his rights under both our Charter and international treaties governing the treatment of prisoners of war had been violated, and demanding both a public apology and twenty million dollars. The media, both the CBC and most of the private media companies, fell in love with him and elevated him to superstar status. The Supreme Court ruled that his rights had been violated and most recently it was revealed that Justin Trudeau plans to issue an apology on behalf of Canada and to give him a cheque for ten and a half million dollars.

In the World War II era, Canada, her people, and her leaders, still knew who we were as a country. Consequently, they would not have made the mistake of thinking of someone who had been raised in Germany, indoctrinated in a toxic ideology like National Socialism that is hostile to our traditions of freedom and justice, and who had zealously taken up arms against our country and its allies in war, could possibly be a “Canadian” just because he had been born on our soil. Today, after decades of the Liberal Party’s relentless assault upon our traditions, history, and heritage, our politicians, judges, educators, clergymen, and other opinion-shapers, have lost sight of who we are. In their minds, Canada has been almost reduced to a mere geographical location and so they find it difficult to understand why anyone would not regard someone raised on the other side of the world, in an ideology hostile to our way of life, and who literally waged war against our country and its allies as being fully “Canadian” if he happened to have been born here. Ordinary Canadians have no such difficulty but it is ordinary Canadians who will have to pay the price – all ten and a half million dollars of it – for the folly of our leaders.

Canada needs to recover her roots, traditions, history, and heritage or we will sink yet further into this madness.

The Lessons of Poetry: Part Two - The "Good War"

War is a basic reality of human existence. Individual human beings cannot live together without generating friction that sometimes bursts out in disagreements, disputes, and fights and the same is also true of human societies. When societies clash in war destruction is generated on a much larger scale then when individuals clash and it has long been a dream of many that one day man would lay down his arms forever and war would be no more. The Christian Scriptures speak of such a day but they place it in the world-to-come, beyond the end of history and the Return of Christ. Only those with a naïve and foolish faith in the ability of human ingenuity to overcome each and every limitation placed upon us by the realities of our nature – we call such people “progressives” – envision the abolition of war as a human accomplishment to be achieved inside of history. The schemes they propose to achieve this end generally strike those of us who are not progressives as being unduly optimistic at best, pathways to evils greater than war at worst, and for better or for worse, inevitably doomed to fail.

Once we accept that war is a basic reality of our existence that we cannot, however much we may wish it to be otherwise, do away with forever we are forced to consider how we will deal with this reality. Two questions stand out as being of utmost importance. The first is what limits or boundaries, if any, we may place on war so as to lessen and minimize its destructive potential. The second is how we can best prepare our countries so as to be ready for war when it comes. This second question has two quite different facets depending upon what we have in mind when we think of preparation for war. We might think of such preparation in terms of fortifications, arsenals and military training of a strategic and technical nature. Or we might think of it in terms of the cultivation of the virtues, the habits of character, of the warrior. Since the virtues that serve a man on the battlefield serve him elsewhere as well the second would seem to be clearly the more important of these two perspectives and it is a powerful indictment of the modern mind and the education that forms and feeds it that it thinks of military preparation almost exclusively in terms of the first.

These two questions, of how we may limit war so as to lessen its destructiveness and how we may cultivate the virtues of the warrior so as to prepare our country for war are the subjects of two long-standing traditional discussions in the civilizations of the Western world and it is a further indictment of modern education that it has, to a large extent, cut the modern mind off from these discussions and the traditions which contain them. The first question is what philosophers and theologians traditionally sought to answer in their discussion of justice in war – for what causes may we justly go to war and how, once we have gone to war, we may conduct it in a just manner. The second question is the subject of an older and longer discussion that goes back at least as far as Homer in the eighth century BC, a discussion carried out in the language of poetry.

It was poetry that took the Greek word for a man of war – hero – and exalted it into a term of adoration and praise. Although poetic language is not exactly noted for its realism, poetic licence being a byword for exaggeration, hyperbole, and the dressing up of the facts, the inescapable realities of human existence – life, death, joy, suffering, love and yes, war – are its subject matter. Of the themes that recur throughout the poetry of the Great Tradition when war is the subject, it is that of the hero and his mighty deeds which stands out. It is a theme which the modern mind, formed by utilitarian education and fed by comic books, video games, fantasy novels, television, and cinematic film easily misunderstands and in such a mind the concept of the hero is inevitably reduced to that of the “good guy”.

The good guy is the person you are supposed to cheer for because he is on the side of Light opposed to Darkness. The hero is not so one-dimensional a character. He is good in a sense, for otherwise he would not be the object of praise, but his goodness does not consist of his being on the side of Light or even of his being a particularly moral person. It consists of his possessing, as evidenced through his actions, the qualities that befit a warrior. While these include such natural traits as physical strength (Achilles, Heracles) and crafty intelligence (Odysseus) it is traits of character, foremost of which is that of courage or valour, that are awarded the highest praise. Indeed, gallantry is held to be of such importance that it is worthy of glory regardless of whether it ends in victory or defeat, or even if, as is the case in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, it is wasted due to some grotesque mistake.

This immortalisation in verse and song was justly due the warrior for risking or even laying down his life in duty and service to his country and it fell to the poet to pay this due on his country’s behalf. It also served a pedagogical purpose. To hold up examples of courage and other martial virtues for adulation is to also hold them up for emulation, particularly when the learning of these verses by heart played so important a role in the training of young minds.

In one of the earliest known discussions of educational theory, that which takes place between Socrates and his friends in Plato’s Republic, the pedagogical aspect of poetry is a major concern and it is famously proposed that lines from Homer that might teach the wrong lessons be bowdlerized. It is a repugnant proposal, of course, but the concern behind it is one the poet may very well have shared, as there are varying degrees to which heroes are worthy of adulation and emulation and even the best of them possessed less desirable or even undesirable traits and qualities in addition to the heroic virtues. With this in mind, consider how Homer presented his heroes.

The main hero of the Iliad is Achilles, king of the Myrmidons. The epic begins with the poet evoking the Muse and asking her to sing of the wrath of Achilles and is structured around that wrath as first, in anger against Agamemnon, Achilles withdraws himself and his men from the siege of Troy causing the tide of the war to swing against the Achaeans then later, in sorrowful anger over the death of Patroclus he returns to battle to slay Hector, crown prince of Troy. Yet the poem ends by honouring the latter in a funeral that is made possible by divine intervention. This intervention is necessary because Achilles in his wrath is determined to defile the body of Hector by dragging it behind his chariot and leaving it to be devoured by dogs, thus incurring the anger of the gods.

It is Hector, not Achilles, nor any of the other Greeks for that matter, who comes across as the noblest, the most worthy of emulation of Homer’s heroes. It is significant that while it takes Achilles, Greece’s bravest and strongest warrior, to slay Hector, Achilles’ own death, which takes place outside of the time-frame of the Iliad but is prophetically alluded to, is at the hands of Paris, Hector’s weak and cowardly brother.

Achilles is portrayed as the embodiment of the follies of youth. He is arrogant and impetuous, easily swayed by passions, and overly concerned with his own glory. Indeed, the latter seems to be his only real purpose for going to war for, while he hints, when he reminds Agamemnon in their dispute that he has no personal quarrel with the Trojans (1), at the mercenary motivation that had shocked and offended Plato, he and his mother make frequent reference to his having been presented with a choice by fate – he could stay at home and live a long but unsung life or he could go to Troy where he would die before its gates but win a name that would live in song forever. He chooses the latter and accordingly is remembered as the greatest of the Greek heroes, with the possible exception of Heracles, but in the discontent of the words of his shade in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, expressing a preference for the lowest station on earth over the highest in the underworld, the message comes across that there can be no satisfaction in glory sought for its own sake.

It is Hector, by contrast, who fights for worthy reasons. Hector, “tamer of horses”, fights not for his personal glory but out of a sense of duty to his father and mother, his wife and son, and to their city. He fights for family and home and is all the more noble in doing so because he is aware that it will ultimately be to no avail, that he will die, the house of Priam will fall, Ilium will be destroyed, and his wife taken away into captivity. To fight and die for these things is what the poets have honoured heroes for down through the centuries from Homer to Horace to Thomas Babbington Macauley.

This view of war and the warrior, of what is worth fighting and dying for, and of the standard by which the warrior is judged worthy of praise or shame, is worlds removed from an image that has pervaded the popular consciousness in recent decades. This image began as a way of looking at and explaining the Second World War but it has grown into a paradigm by which all new conflicts are to be parsed and which has even been superimposed upon previous wars including the First World War and the war the American states fought between themselves in the 1860s. The image is the “Good War” narrative which has supplanted both the poetic idea of the heroic warrior, winning praise and renown for his gallantry as he lays down his life for family, friends, home, and country and the traditional discussion about what constitutes justice in war.

It is in keeping with the older traditions to say that the Allies were justified in going to war with Nazi Germany. By the fall of 1939 Hitler had proven himself to be thirsting for war, a threat to his neighbours, and a pathological liar who could not be trusted to keep his word given in negotiations. He had given Britain and France more than enough of a casus belli to justify their declarations of war. For countries like my own, Canada, and Australia, it was loyalty which moved us to enter the war and stand by our king and mother country in their hour of need. What could be more in keeping with the older traditions than this?

The Good War narrative goes far beyond any of this. It declares the war itself to have been good because the character of the two sides was such that it was a microcosm of the great struggle between Good and Evil. The Allies were the Forces of Light, embodying all that is pure and good, and the Axis were the very Forces of Darkness. What need is there to find a just cause for such a war? It is its own just cause. Who dare speak of limitations on how war can be justly conducted when the enemy is the avatar of Evil?

This narrative embraces a cosmology that is considered heretical by the standards of traditional, orthodox, Christianity. Dualism, the idea that the cosmos is eternally engaged in a battle between the matched forces of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, is part of the mainstream of several Eastern philosophies and religions but within the Christian West was a doctrine of Gnosticism, historically the heretical rival of orthodox, Apostolic, Christianity. The growth of the Good War narrative is, therefore, yet another evidence, as if more was needed, that the period after the Second World War is a post-Christian as well as a post-modern age.

Both of the traditions which the Good War narrative has supplanted have been accused of being instruments in the hands of hawks and warmongers. Not infrequently those who make these accusations on the one hand embrace the Good War interpretation of World War II on the other. Yet today, whenever a politician wants to bomb or invade some country it is to the rhetoric of Winston Churchill of which he can provide a poor imitation at best rather than the arguments of Cicero, St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas that he turns to make his case. The leaders of the country he wishes to attack are inevitably new Hitlers and those who oppose his plans for war are inevitably compared to Neville Chamberlain. Not to be outdone, the radicals who pour contempt on the poetic ideal of the hero and heroism and traditional just war theory and who automatically condemn any and every military action taken by their own country – or any Western country, especially the United States – regardless of the particulars, make use of the Good War narrative as well, except that in their rhetoric it is the Western leaders who are Hitler.

However did this image of the Good War arise? It could hardly be said to have been born out of the facts of the Second World War. The most repugnant and repulsive characteristics of the Third Reich – its tyrannical dictatorship, secret police, network of prison camps, and repressive totalitarian state which held the lives of its people extremely cheap - were shared by the Soviet Union. The war began with an alliance between these two powers that included a secret deal to divide the spoils between themselves. After this alliance was broken by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union the Stalinist regime joined the Allies and one of the most obvious results of the war was a significant expansion of that regime’s territory. At least as strong of a case can be made that Stalin and his Bolshevik regime were the greater of the two evils as can be made that Hitler and his Nazi regime were. More people died in this war than in any other and well over half of these were civilian deaths. Those who were the Forces of Light, according to the Good War theory, invented weapons whose destructive potential was exponentially greater than any the world had known before and brought the war to an end by dropping two of these weapons on heavily populated cities. Then, when the war was over, the Forces of Light put the leaders of the Forces of Darkness on trial before a court that operated in accordance with a concept of “justice” far closer to that of Stalin than that which is traditional to the English-speaking world. No, the facts of the Second World War do not support the Good War narrative at all.

It is surely no coincidence that this narrative arose in a period in which the old tradition of celebrating heroes and their deeds in verse and inspiring through such verse the cultivation of virtues such as courage, loyalty, and dutifulness to home, family, and country was all but dead. It had been alive and well in the Victorian era but seemed to sing its swan song in the first World War, which saw a plethora of soldier-poets, some of whom, writing in the old tradition, produced the poems that remain part of our annual ceremonies of remembrance to this day, while others concentrated on the horrors of the war and expressed cynicism towards the old tradition and the heroic virtues. War has always been horrible, of course, but poets from Homer to Housman had managed to lament the cruel reality of war with its waste of so many lives struck down prematurely while at the same time praising the patriotic valour of the warrior. This became more difficult as modern technology changed the nature of warfare. It is easy to see the gallantry of light cavalrymen charging with sword in hand against a battery of artillery at the end of a valley with enemy guns on all sides. Where can it be possibly found in the dropping of bombs that kill civilians by the thousands from aircraft miles above?

It is not just that poets have found it difficult to maintain the old tradition in the face of new, modern, technological, warfare. It is also that poetry itself has come to be supplanted, first by other forms of literature such as the novel, then later by media such as film and television that have supplanted the written word altogether. It is films and television, novels and comic books, which form and feed the modern mind. These are the genres that have reduced the complex hero to the simple good guy and it is in the minds fed by such junk food that the image of the Good War was born.


(1) Achilles was the only one of the Greek kings who could say this. Paris, prince of Troy, after enjoying the hospitality of Menelaus, king of Sparta, had absconded with his wife, Helen. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Menelaus’ brother had organized the retaliatory expedition against Troy. In doing so, according to the myth, he had reminded all of the other kings that when, in their youth, they had been rivals for Helen’s hand, the contest had been resolved when they swore an oath to support and uphold whomever Helen had chosen, which was Menelaus. Achilles, being much younger than the others, had no part in either the contest or the oath.

Day of Infamy

“A date which will live in infamy” is what United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared of December 7, 1941. That, as I am sure you are all aware, was the day that Imperial Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. What you may not be aware is that even while FDR was expressing his outrage in the only words he ever spoke in which his rhetoric approached the eloquence of that of Sir Winston Churchill – the creepy, grinning, invalid never came remotely close to approaching the class of the scion of Marlborough – inwardly, he was rejoicing. He had spent the good part of a year trying to manoeuvre Japan into attacking the United States so that he could use war with Japan as a backdoor to enter the war with Germany. He believed it was his destiny to lead his country into a war that sweep away not only the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, but the reactionary empires of Britain and France as well, paving the way for a new world that would be led by the progressive, young, forward-looking countries, namely his own and the Soviet Union. Knowing that his own people objected to the idea of becoming involved in yet another European war he settled upon this devious method to attain his ambitions. In doing so he achieved a whole new level of chicanery, albeit one that he would shortly surpass when he promised the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, having secured his agreement not to make this known before the next Presidential election (he did not want to alienate Polish voters), that the USSR could keep the country, for whose freedom Britain and France had gone to war with Germany, after the war was over. (1)


Today there is much celebration going on in Canada over the fiftieth anniversary of a date which truly deserves to live in infamy. February 15, 1965 was the day that the present Maple Leaf flag replaced the Canadian Red Ensign as the official flag of Canada through the actions of a politician who was no less of a scoundrel than FDR, our Prime Minister at the time, Lester Bowles (“Mike”) Pearson.


This change was completely unnecessary. As a true Canadian patriot, the man who led the opposition to the change in Parliament when it occurred, former Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader John G. Diefenbaker explained:


Canada had a flag. It flew over the Headquarters of the Canadian Corps in France in 1918. A meeting of the Mackenzie King Cabinet on 27 October 1943 decided that our army should fly the Canadian red ensign wherever Canadian forces were serving with the forces of other nations. It was officially recognized as Canada’s flag by Order-in-Council in 1945. On 12 November 1951 Mr. St. Laurent in reply to the question: “What steps are being taken by the government with respect to the adopting of a distinctive national flag?” answered: “See Order-in-Council P.C. 5888 of September 5, 1945.” Canada had a flag, a flag ennobled by heroes’ blood. (2)


The flag Diefenbaker was talking about was a solid red flag that contained a Union Jack in the canton and the Canadian Shield of Arms in the fly. The Shield is divided into five parts, the top left containing the three golden lions of England, the top right containing the red lion of Scotland, beneath these are the harp of Ireland on the left and the fleur-de-lis on the right, with the fifth section at the bottom containing three maple leaves branching off from a single stem. The leaves were initially green with black veins but this was later changed to red with gold veins. The province of Ontario and my own province of Manitoba have similar flags with the provincial shields substituted for the national one. When talk of changing the flag began proposals included variations on the Red Ensign theme in which the shield would be replaced by a large gold maple leaf or a large fleur-de-lis. The latter was put forward by Diefenbaker. None of these proposals was acceptable to Pearson, however, who wanted the Union Jack eliminated from the flag altogether.


Pearson, you see, although he claimed to be motivated by patriotism and nationalism – we are our own country and should have our own flag that does not borrow from those of other countries – showed that he had no real respect for the country he was governing, its traditions, heritage, and institutions. The rebellion of the thirteen American colonies in the eighteenth century eventually produced two countries because it divided English speaking North America between those who wished to cut off ties to the mother country through violent revolution and to build an entirely new country on a model they would draw up for themselves based upon liberal, republican, principles and those who wished to remain loyal to the mother country, not to participate in this revolution, and to build their own country in North America within the old tradition, adapting the British model to suit their own needs. The former built the federal republic of the United States of America. The latter built the Dominion of Canada. It too is a federation, albeit of provinces rather than states, with its own parliament under the monarch it shares with Britain. As Prime Minister Diefenbaker wonderfully put it in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 1960:


We were the first country which evolved, over a hundred years ago, by constitutional processes from colonial status to independence without severing the family connection. (3)

Pearson never really understood or respected this. He believed that for Canada to truly be its own nation it would have to throw off its Britishness and remake itself entirely on its own. This, of course, was very similar to the attitude of the Americans which had originally divided them from the Canadians. Ever since the Pearson Liberals – and the Trudeau Liberals after them – set out on this course of reshaping the country, Canadians have been trying to define what makes us different from Americans and many have opted for stupid and unworthy things. In the Cold War, which pitted the United States as the avatar of capitalism against the Soviet Union as the avatar of socialism, many latched on to socialism as the distinguishing characteristic, despite the fact that the Conservative and Liberal parties, the only two parties ever to have formed the federal government in Canada, were both firmly opposed to socialism until well into the 20th Century, that such socialist measures as progressive income taxation and the “New Deal” were both introduced in the United States before their equivalent was introduced in Canada, and that the Canadian government of R. B. Bennett was actively engaged in combating the Red Menace in the 1930s at a time when the American President was recognizing the Bolshevik government in Moscow and recalling ambassadors that did not portray Stalin and his show trials in a positive light in their reports. Before Pearson changed the flag, Canadians understood what made them Canadian rather than American and it was something positive – loyalty, being true to heritage, tradition, roots, and “the family connection” rather than engaging in ideological revolution, and an adapted version of common law and parliamentary monarchy – rather than something vile like socialism.


Pearson’s supposed patriotism and nationalism was, therefore, nothing of the sort. It was rather what John Farthing called “the pure Canada cult”. Farthing, writing a decade before Pearson changed the flag, described the emergence of this cult which sought to define Canada purely by geography rather than history and tradition, and to exclude from the new Canada traditions which had been imported from elsewhere. Inconsistently, however:


[A]ccording to the peculiar logic of the new pure Canada cult it is only British traditions which are in any sense un-Canadian, whereas a tradition coming to us from another part or parts of Europe is a tradition affirmed to be not only 100 per cent Canadian, but even to be the only tradition not distinctively un-Canadian. The one tradition that must be jettisoned, as something quite distinct from the country that gives us our existence, turns out to be the British tradition. (4)


Freedom, Farthing had pointed out, does not come from geography, it does not grow on trees, it arise out of traditions. In Canada’s case, our freedom is grounded in the tradition we received from Britain, and both Farthing and Diefenbaker foresaw that the consequence of the attack on British traditions and institutions in Canada that the Liberal Party waged in the name of the pure Canada cult in the premierships of Pearson and Trudeau would undermine our freedom. This was prescient for it is out of that era that the stifling atmosphere of bureaucratic arrogance, over-regulation, and above all political correctness that has been poisoning the Canadian spirit for decades has its origin.


There was absolutely nothing wrong with the Canadian Red Ensign. It was Canada’s flag. Note the date of the Order-in-Council that made that official. September 5, 1945. That was three days after the Second World War ended. This was the first war Canada had entered by her own Declaration of War. Since the Statute of Westminster of 1931, we were no longer automatically at war whenever Britain was. Unlike the United States, however, we entered the war from the beginning and did not have to be deceived by our leaders into doing so. Our parliament declared war on Germany on the tenth of September, one week after Great Britain did. The week’s delay was to show our independence, the declaration to show our loyalty. It was a war in which forty-five and a half thousand Canadians had died, fighting bravely under the Red Ensign. Diefenbaker had been right to say it had been ennobled by the blood of heroes. Nothing could have been more appropriate than the Order-in-Council making the Red Ensign’s status as our national flag official. Nothing could have been more disrespectful to the Canadian heroes who fought in the war, both the thousands who died and the thousands who came home as veterans, then Pearson’s deceitful and self-aggrandizing campaign to replace that flag.


For Canada, therefore, today is the day that ought to live in infamy forever.

(1) For evidence of these claims see Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, (New York: Touchstone, 2001) and Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II, (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
(2) John G. Diefenbaker, One Canada, Memoirs of the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, Volume III, The Tumultuous Years 1962-1967 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977), p. 223
(3) John G. Diefenbaker, Those Things We Treasure, (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1972), p. 124.
(4) John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957), p. 32.

Liberalism and the Inevitability of War

For as long as human societies have existed upon this planet they have fought wars against one another.

This is a statement that I believe most people would agree with. The same consensus, however, does not exist with regards to the following statement:

Wars will continue to be fought for as long as human societies continue to exist upon this planet.

This second statement is as true as the first. While specific wars have specific causes, the cause of war in general is to be found in human nature. The only way to eliminate war, therefore, is to eliminate human beings. As long as men live upon this planet they will from time to time go to war against one another.

Consider what the history of the 20th Century has to teach us. Conflicts in the Balkan region in the first decade of that century, broke out into a world-wide conflict between the great powers in the second decade. This conflict was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by those who continued to hold to the progressive optimism of the 19th Century. A little over two decades after it ended, however, it broke out again, this time to be conducted on an even larger, costlier, and more destructive scale. This time, it was brought to end by a technological innovation, the development of which would have, if anything ever could, permanently checked man’s propensity for war. That innovation was the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb. The development of nuclear weaponry raised the potential cost of war to what should have been a prohibitive level by making the extinction of the species a real possibility as an outcome of war. This did not, however, prevent the outbreak of future wars. Major, multi-national conflicts were fought in Korea in the 1950’s and Vietnam in the 1960’s and 1970’s and if the large nuclear arsenals of the United States of America and the Soviet Union prevented the superpowers from directly confronting each other in war, it did not prevent them from using smaller allies, all over the globe, like pawns on a giant chessboard. The second half of the century saw conflict after conflict in the Middle East between the Arab nations and Israel and there is no end to those hostilities in sight. In the final decade of the 20th Century, the nations of the Balkans resumed the fighting that had led to the first World War earlier in the century.

That war will be around for as long as human beings inhabit the earth is not universally recognized, however, and liberals in particular are inclined to reject this truth. In fact, liberalism’s primary error concerning war, is the idea that it can be eliminated and a permanently peaceful world order established. This is not the same thing as pacifism. Far too many conservatives make the mistake of associating liberalism with pacifism. Pacifism is the refusal to participate in war on the grounds of a belief that war is always morally wrong. Pacifists are susceptible to the charges of cowardice and free-riding (1) and for this reason accusing one’s opponents of pacifism makes for effective rhetoric. Liberals, however, are not pacifists. Indeed, history would seem to demonstrate that they are more likely than conservatives to involve their country in a war.

Consider the major wars the United States of America was involved in during the 20th Century. It was liberal Democrat Presidents who led the United States into the four largest of these wars. It was a liberal Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, who led the United States into World War I declaring that they needed to “make the world safe for democracy”. It was another liberal Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who brought the United States into the second World War. (2) Liberal Democrat Harry Truman was the president who got the United States into the Korean War and Liberal Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson got the United States into the Vietnam War. In contrast, conservative Republican President ordered the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, countless covert-ops and the support of anti-communist contras in Latin America, but he did not get his country involved in anything on the scale of World Wars I and II, Korea or Vietnam and, in fact, negotiated an end to the arms race and the 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Similarly, here in Canada, after the Statute of Westminster declared that our own Parliament would decide from then on whether or not we were at war, it was Liberal Prime Ministers who led our country into World War II (William Lyon Mackenzie King), Korea (Louis St. Laurent), and Afghanistan (Jean Chretien).

Clearly liberals are not pacifists. Liberals and conservatives have different ideas about war but those differences are not the same differences which distinguish doves from hawks. Liberalism’s error is to believe that mankind can build a world that is free of war.

This idea lies behind several significant liberal projects of the last couple of centuries. Liberals began calling for free trade – the elimination of tariffs, quotas, and other protectionist measures so as to merge the economies of all countries into one big market – as far back as the eighteenth century, arguing that the economic interdependence that free trade would bring, would merge the nations of the world into one, bringing about universal brotherhood and peace. Richard Cobden, the 19th Century British “Apostle of Free Trade”, proclaimed that free trade:

[A]rms its votaries by its own pacific nature, in that eternal truth—the more any nation trafficks abroad upon free and honest principles, the less it will be in danger of wars.(3)

In a speech given on January 15, 1846 he declared:

I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.(4)

Similar utopian sentiments can be found in the speeches and writings of many other 18th and 19th century free traders.

When Woodrow Wilson asked the American Congress to declare the United States’ entry into World War I, he told Congress that “The world must be made safe for democracy”. This goal was connected in his mind with that of world peace. He immediately went on to say “Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty”. (5)

Wilson’s idea of world peace is very similar to that of free traders such as Richard Cobden. The difference is that Wilson saw elected government as being the means to world peace rather than international commerce.

The idea that democratic governments are more likely to be peaceful government is not borne out by history. The roots of democracy go back to ancient Athens and Athenian democracy is widely regarded as having reached its peak during the years of Pericles, which are often spoken of as Athens’ Golden Age. This was not, however, an era in which Athens lived in peace and harmony with its neighbors, but the era of the Peloponnesian War fought by Athens and her allies against Sparta and her allies. This war, the history of which we know from an account written by Athenian general Thucydides, was not a conflict in which a democratic state, desiring peace, was forced to defend herself against the aggression of her non-democratic neighbors. Athens was as belligerent and ambitious as Sparta. From that day to this, democracies have been no less likely to go to war than any other kind of country. Nor is it true that democracies do not go to war with each other. Historians often refer to the War of Southern Independence (6) as the “first modern war.” Both sides in that conflict, however, the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, were democratic republics. Furthermore, this was a particularly bloody war in which more Americans died than in any other war they have ever participated, including both World Wars and Vietnam combined.

At the end of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Emperor Karl von Hapsburg I of Austria were both forced off of their thrones and Germany and Austria became democratic republics. By Wilson’s logic, this should have made these countries less likely to want to resume the conflict at a later date. In fact it had the exact opposite effect. In the 1930’s Germany and Austria came under the control of Adolf Hitler who launched a second war that was far worse from the first. Now the point might be made that under Hitler, Germany and Austria ceased to be democratic. However true that might be it is very much the case that had the German Kaiser and the Austrian Emperor kept their thrones, Hitler would never have had the opportunity to rise to power. Hitler was a demagogue and democracy is the ladder a demagogue climbs to achieve power.

The spread of democracy was not the only part of Wilson’s plan for world peace. The last of his famous Fourteen Points was that:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike. (7)

This association took the form of the League of Nations. Although it was proposed by the American President, the United States never joined it. The countries that did join need not have bothered because it failed completely in its appointed task.

The failure of the League of Nations did not prevent a second liberal American President from repeating the experiment at the end of the second World War. FDR’s United Nations was conceived of as a forum in which the nations of the world could voice their grievances with each other and resolve those grievances without resorting to war. If the League of Nations was useless, the United Nations was worse than useless. The General Assembly simply became a platform upon which the representatives of every Soviet vassal state, Third World dictatorship, and Islamic theocracy in the world, were invited to stand and espouse their poisonous drivel to the world. The Security Council is powerless to oppose wrongdoing on the part of any of its permanent members, each of which has a veto. Since the Soviet Union was one of those permanent members the Security Council was powerless against Communist aggression in the Cold War, just as it is powerless to stop the sole remaining superpower, the United States of America, from doing whatever she wants. The only thing the United Nations has proven effective at doing has been wasting the money it receives from its member states as it tries, thankfully less effectively, to tell them how to manage their own affairs, usually in the name of some inane left-wing agenda. It has not made the world a more peaceful place.

These examples, I believe, are sufficient to establish the truth of my contention that there is a strong tendency in liberalism to believe that it is possible to construct a peaceful world order in which war is eliminated and that this belief lies behind several of liberalism’s most important projects. They also demonstrate that whatever the scheme the liberal comes up with his goal of world peace continues to elude him. (8) Today the economies of the world have been integrated into a global market, democracy is widespread, and the United Nations has been established for almost seven decades, yet perpetual universal peace is nowhere in sight.


(1) A free rider is someone who benefits from participation in a group without paying his fair share of the dues. A pacifist is susceptible to the charge of free-riding because he enjoys the benefits of living in his country, including the security provided by his country’s military, although he is not willing to serve his country militarily if called upon to do so.

(2) Granted, the Japanese empire attacked the United States first. However, FDR was in favour of the United States entering the second World War long before Pearl Harbor. He and his advisors in the year leading up to Pearl Harbor talked about war with Japan as a “backdoor” into the war with Germany. At the time, public opinion in the United States was strongly against American involvement in the war with Germany. See Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001) and Robert Stinnett Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

(3) Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, (London: William Ridgway, 1878) p. 126.

(4) http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Cobden/cbdSPP20.html

(5) http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4943/

(6) This is usually called the “American Civil War”. Ordinarily, the phrase “civil war” refers to an internal struggle for control of a state. In the English Civil War, the Roundheads fought to turn England into a Puritan republic against the Cavaliers who fought to keep it an Anglican monarchy. In the Spanish Civil War, the Republicans and the Nationalists fought each other for the control of Spain. In American history, however, the North and South did not struggle for control of the United States, but over whether the secession of the Southern states and their independence from Washington D. C. would be allowed.

(7) http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62

(8) If permanent world peace is an unattainable goal and it is inevitable that men will from time to time go to war with each other it does not follow from this that any particular conflict is inevitable and that attempts to prevent particular wars are always foolish and doomed to fail.

What is Culture?

Notes towards the Definition of Culture by T. S. Eliot, London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1948, 1962, 124 pages.

Culture is a word that we use all the time but we seldom put much thought into what it means. We take for granted that we know what “culture” is, although we use it in very different ways depending upon the circumstances. Sometimes, when we speak of culture, we mean something that includes the fine visual arts, literature, theatre, architecture, and serious music, and we will speak of someone who appreciates these things as being “cultured” or “having culture”. Other times we use the word culture to mean something that includes our language, religion, and way of living. This is how we use the word when we speak of our culture as opposed to that of another people.

These meanings of culture are clearly different from each other, yet they are obviously related to each other as well. We would not go too far astray in understanding the first meaning to be a narrower, more specialized version of the second. To describe, however, is not necessarily to define. What is it that a people’s way of life and the higher products of their civilization have in common that we use the same word for both?

This is question that T. S. Eliot put a lot of serious thought into around the end of the Second World War. Eliot was a leading literary figure of the early 20th Century. He had been born an American, in St. Louis, Missouri twelve years before the end of the 19th Century, was raised in the United States and then educated in the prestigious American Harvard University, but in 1915 he moved to London where he would live for the rest of his life. This was during the first World War, the war which shattered the progressive, utopian illusions of the 19th Century. “Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold/mere anarchy Is loosed upon the world”, as a contemporary and colleague of Mr. Eliot’s, W. B. Yeats put it. A few years after the end of the War Eliot himself became famous for his poem “The Wasteland”, edited by his friend and fellow American ex-patriot Ezra Pound, and widely understood to be an expression of the hopelessness and disillusionment of that era.

The T. S. Eliot of the late 40’s however, was a more rooted and mature man than the modernist poet of the early 1920’s. In 1927 he had become a British citizen and had been baptized and confirmed into the Church of England. The following year he described himself, in a collection of essays entitled For Lancelot Andrewes, as “royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, classicist in literature”. He had become, in other words, a thoroughly conservative man. He had become an editor for the publishing house Faber and Faber which would be the job that paid his bills for the rest of his life. He continued to write though, poetry, as well as several plays and a great deal of literary and social criticism. His Notes towards the Definition of Culture was written towards the climax of his writing career.

So how did T. S. Eliot define “culture”?

We must keep in mind that this book is titled “Notes towards the Definition of Culture” which is not exactly the same thing as “A Formulation of the Definition of Culture”. In the early decades of the 20th Century much ink had been applied to contrasting culture with civilization. While this debate continues to be revived from time to time, Eliot, wisely, chose to ignore it saying only, in his introduction, that “I have made no attempt in this essay to determine the frontier between the meanings of these two words: for I came to the conclusion that any such attempt could only produce an artificial distinction, peculiar to the book , which the reader would have difficulty in retaining, and which, after closing the book, he would abandon with a sense of relief”.

In his first chapter, “The Three Senses of Culture”, he began by saying that culture exists on three levels, that of the individual, that of the group or class, and that of the entire society. The culture of the individual depends upon the culture of the group, and the culture of the group depends upon the culture of the society. Therefore it is culture at the societal level that needs to be defined because it is the most basic, the most important meaning of the word.

This assertion will go against the grain of the individualist who sees culture as the product of the creativity of the individual rather than the group but Eliot explained and defended his position well. Culture pertains to the “improvement of the human mind and spirit” and the achievements that are considered culture by and in different groups of people vary. Refined manners, learning, philosophy, the arts – all of these, Eliot pointed out, are “culture” in different kinds of people. No one of them, however, can be said to contain all of “culture” within itself, neither can any one individual be fully accomplished in all of these areas at once. We must find culture, therefore, “in the pattern of the society as a whole”, for only in an entire society can all the different achievements of individuals and groups be found and harmonized into the whole which is culture. Culture is more, however, than just the presence of all these different things among a group of isolated individuals. Culture requires cohesion which requires “an overlapping and sharing of interests” and “participation and mutual appreciation”.

Eliot noted that in societies which have achieved higher levels of civilization the various areas which make up culture are specialized fields awarded different honours and that this leads to the formation of classes. A gradation of classes he regards as an essential part of civilized society. He made the curious assertion that “I do not think that the most ardent champions of social equality dispute this: the difference of opinion turns on whether the transmission of group culture must be by inheritance—whether each cultural level must propagate itself—or whether it can be hoped that some mechanism of selection will be found, so that every individual shall in due course take his place at the highest cultural level for which his natural aptitudes qualify him.” This seems to be a strange assessment. Egalitarian thought in the present day has far more in common with the Procrustean leveling of the world described in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Harrison Bergeron than the meritocratic sentiment Eliot described here and the trend in that direction must surely have been noticeable in Eliot’s own day.

In his second chapter “The Class and the Elite”, Eliot explained more fully what he meant. He acknowledged the widespread progressive notion that society will “overcome these divisions” and that it is “therefore a duty incumbent upon us, to bring about a classless society.” What, however, would be done about differences in aptitude between individuals in such a society? Who would be the leaders of such a society?

In the early 20th Century the theory of elites was discussed by a number of different sociological writers. One version of the theory held that society was transitioning from a hierarchical class society to an elite-led mass society. This notion will seem odd to those who understand “the elite” to mean “the upper class”. The technical meaning of “elite” however, is a group of individuals who are identified by a high level of competency in a particular specialized field. Members of an elite are not necessarily tied to one another by social connections the way the members of a class are. Eliot addresses the idea that elite leadership was replacing social classes and points out that for this to happen elites would have to take over completely the function of classes within society. In reality, however, elites have always existed and tend to attach themselves to classes, generally the dominant class of society. The fact that “the primary channel of transmission of culture is the family” contributes to the likelihood of the continued existence of classes in one form or another.

Moreover, the disappearance of classes and their complete replacement with elites should not be assumed to be something desirable in itself. Eliot did not draw a complete picture of what such a society would look like but we can fill in the blanks. Institutional education would have to take over the family’s role in the transmission of culture, individuals with the capacity to become members of elites would have to be identified and sorted out of the masses at a very early age. This is Brave New World territory.

In asserting the necessity of a hierarchy of social levels for a high degree of culture and civilization, Eliot did not advocate a caste system in which people are locked into their class from birth. Eliot was a good Aristotelian and throughout this book he was always searching for the mean between opposite extremes. In this case a class society combined with a high degree of social mobility and interaction is the mean between a classless society and a rigid caste system. This is also part of the mean between the opposite extremes of an excess of unity and an excess of diversity. The other part of that mean is explored in his third chapter entitled “Unity and Diversity: The Region”.

In this chapter Eliot addressed the difference between local and national cultures and argued against the kind of centralizing nationalism that seeks to eliminate regional and local cultures by imposing a standardized culture on everybody. Eliot acknowledged the importance of a society having a common culture that transcends class and regional boundaries. He wrote about the classes that “they should all have a community of culture with each other which will give them something in common, more fundamental than the community which each class has with its counterpart in another society”. This is the opposite of what was proposed by Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci who urged Marxists to take over the institutions of culture so as to break the “cultural hegemony” that was impeding the general workers revolution.

Unity can be overemphasized, however, and Eliot argued against those who look at the kinds of measures societies take to promote unity in times of crisis such as war, and propose them in times of peace. In words that bring to mind Edmund Burke’s remarks about the little platoons, Eliot wrote:

It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family.

Patriotic affection starts at home and radiates outwards.

Eliot discussed the relationships between the various regional cultures in the British Isles and argued that the continued existence of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish cultures is a benefit to the English culture and that each of these “satellite cultures” is dependent upon the health of the English culture. If each of these cultures were to be made indistinguishable from the others all would lose – the result would be a lower level of culture than any one of them. Examples of countries that have suffered heavily from the artificial imposition of a standardized national culture were ready at hand for him to point to:

In Italy and in Germany, we have seen that a unity with politico-economic aims, imposed violently and too rapidly, had unfortunate effects upon both nations. Their cultures had developed in the course of a history of extreme and extremely sub-divided regionalism: the attempt to teach Germans to think of themselves as Germans first, and the attempt to teach Italians to think of themselves as Italians first, rather than as natives of a particular small principality or city, was to disturb the traditional culture from which alone any future culture could grow.

How local should culture get?

Eliot wrote: “Ideally, each village, and of course more visibly the larger towns, should each have its particular character”, a sentiment which the G. K. Chesterton who wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill would undoubtedly have applauded had he lived another twelve years to have read it.

This emphasis upon local and regional diversity should not be confused with what is called “multi-culturalism” today, although the word would serve the purpose if it had not been usurped to describe something sinister. Although this may seem counter-intuitive to some what we call multi-culturalism is actually far more similar to the nationalization programs of Hitler and Mussolini than to the localism and regionalism Eliot is advocating. It is an attempt by a central, bureaucratized, government to break down local culture and cohesion in order to promote a form of unity that consists of loyalty to the central state. This is all that is left to build unity around because multi-culturalism, which involves mass immigration from as many different cultures and nations as possible, breaks down the common national culture as well as all local cultures within the nation. This couldn’t be further from the concept of local and regional culture held by Eliot who wrote “On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born.”

The need for a balance between unity and diversity at different levels of culture has its counterpart in religion. One of the major themes of this book is the relationship between religion and culture. Eliot did not like the word “relation” (1) as a description of what religion and culture are to each other as he explains when he raises the subject in the first chapter. He believed the word “relation” suggests that religion and culture are separate entities which relate to each other. This, he treated as an extreme to be avoided, like the opposite extreme of identifying religion and culture completely and absolutely. At this point Eliot’s search for Aristotelian balance might seem a little obsessive but it begins to make sense when he returns to the subject in his fourth chapter “Unity and Diversity: Sect and Cult”.

The same sort of things, Eliot had argued, appear to be religious from one angle, and cultural from another, suggesting that religion and culture are different aspects of each other. He suggested that culture might be conceived of as the incarnation of religion. Latin culture, he pointed out in his fourth chapter, is the primary culture of Western Europe, just as the Church of Rome is the primary religious tradition. English culture, while distinct from the Latin culture of Western continental Europe, is derived from the latter and dependent upon the health of the mainstream for its own wellbeing. In the same way, the Protestant Churches are derived from and dependent upon the Church of Rome. In the United Kingdom, the Church of England is the primary religious tradition, but the relationship of the Free Churches to the Anglican tradition is in British society, the same as the relationship of the Protestant Churches to the Roman Catholic Church.

This is not what the relationship between the different branches of the Christian tradition appears looks like from the inside, of course. From the inside differences in theology and practice tend to be what we see first. Eliot, although a devout Anglican himself, had deliberately tried to approach this matter “from the point of view of the sociologist, and not from that of the Christian apologist”.

It is in the chapters on “Unity and Diversity” that the concerns of the immediate post-WWII era in which Eliot wrote this book are most visibly evident. The devastation caused by the two Wars had dampened the optimistic spirit of progressivism but it had also added an element of desperation to progressive schemes to unify the world and end conflict. The United Nations had been established at the end of the War and many people were treating it as the first step towards world federalism. Proposals within the ecumenical movement for the reuniting of the Christian Churches went back to the previous century but were now being looked to with new zeal. Against this desperation-driven zeal, Eliot’s words read like a plea for sanity. Neither unity nor diversity is everything, it is the balance between the two that is important.

In his final two chapters Eliot brought politics and education into the picture. The theme of decentralization is continued into chapter five “A Note on Culture and Politics” as is the theme of a class structure. Within a “healthily regional society”, he wrote “public affairs would be the business of everybody, or of the great majority, only within very small social units; and would be the business of a progressively smaller number of men in the larger units within which the smaller were comprehended”. Within a “healthily stratified society”, he then wrote “public affairs would be a responsibility not equally borne: a greater responsibility would be inherited by those who inherited special advantages, and in whom self-interest, and interest for the sake of their families (‘a stake in the country’) should cohere with public spirit.” (2)

What he has presented here is not two different and opposing models of society. Regional diversity and stratification of class have both been presented earlier in his book as desirable qualities of the same society, as different aspects of how culture within a society can be unified and diverse at the same time. The idea that societies should be the most democratic at the local level with societal affairs being handled by smaller specialized groups at higher levels and the idea that privilege and public, social and civic responsibility should go together in the upper classes of a society are both different arguments for aristocratic leadership.

Towards the end of his second chapter he had made the point that aristocracy and democracy should not be understood as antithetical terms. An egalitarian democracy would be “oppressive for the conscientious and licentious for the rest” so the only democracy that can survive long term is one with a class structure in which aristocracy has “a peculiar and essential function, as peculiar and essential as the function of any other part of society”.

The opposite of a democratic class society led by an aristocracy in which regional diversity flourishes within a common culture is a centralized mass democracy. In such a society, the central government seeks to control and standardize everything (which is why such governments require large bureaucracies), eliminating regional diversity as much as it can, and breaking down social classes and all other local units within society into atomized, isolated, individuals. This is very destructive to a society’s culture. Eliot made the point that politics should be contained within culture as one part out of many. Instead, the kind of societies that he saw developing, were ones in which politics sought to dominate culture. “Culture”, he tells us “can never be wholly conscious—there is always more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background of our planning”.

This leads naturally to Eliot’s discussion of education in his sixth and concluding chapter. Eliot critically responded to a number of common progressive assumptions about education all supporting the idea of standardized education provided by the government schools to everybody equally. Does education make people happier? Is education what everybody wants? Eliot challenged the “yes” answer to these questions that so many take for granted. He also demonstrates that the concept of “equality of opportunity” is not as practical or benign as it is often assumed to be. “It is right that the exceptional individual should have the opportunity to elevate himself in the social scale” he writes “and attain a position in which he can exercise his talents to the greatest benefit of himself and of society.” The kind of equality the progressive seeks, however, is “unattainable in practice” and if seriously attempted, would “disorganize society and debase education”. Recent history has more than validated Eliot’s assessment.

Throughout this chapter Eliot reminds us that there is more than one way of understanding “education”. Education can mean “that limited system of instruction which the Ministry of Education controls, or aims to control”. It can also mean “everything that goes to form the good individual in a good society”. If we are speaking of education in the latter sense, Eliot has no quarrel with the idea that education is the vehicle by which culture is transmitted or the idea that it is the means of repairing the breakdown of culture. If, however, we are using education in the first sense of the term to speak of it in these lofty terms is to cheapen and degrade our understanding of culture. If education means the schools and education is the vehicle for transmission of culture, culture then becomes that which is taught in school. That culture is so much more than that, the complete way of life of a society, of which that which can be taught in schools is only a fraction, is the whole point which Eliot was trying to make in this book.

An appendix to the book consists of the text of three lectures Eliot gave in Germany in 1945 after the War. In these lectures, Eliot talked about how the extensive vocabulary of the English language lends itself well to poetry and how that vocabulary developed through the influence of a number of European languages on the development of English and about his experience as the editor of a literary review (The Criterion) in the interwar years. His point was that European cultures, although different, had common roots in the Greco-Roman classics and in the Bible, and how they are enriched by communication with each other. He concluded by talking about how the Christian religion was the foundational core of European cultures, about how it was through the Christian faith that European cultures have received their patrimony from classical antiquity and how, if the Christian religion were to die out, a new culture and civilization would not spring up overnight to take its place but would require many generations in order to grow naturally.

While some of the specifics Eliot discussed in this book are dated, reflecting the conditions of the immediate post-WWII, early Cold War era, the main themes of his book continue to speak to us today. Culture is something produced by a society as a whole naturally and organically. Artificial and mechanical substitutes created by central planners simply will not suffice. The healthy culture of a healthy society is a common culture which multiple regional variations, influenced by and influencing other cultures. Such a culture is most likely to be found in society with many social strata the membership in which is not rigidly fixed but allows for movement so that individuals can find the position most suited to their capabilities. Religion is at the core of the culture of a healthy society, and a religion that conceives of itself as universal, transcending the boundaries of a particular culture and society, the way Christianity does, has greater potential for a higher level of civilization than a religion which is co-terminus with a single culture. These ideas remain vitally important to us today.

(1) Eliot uses the word “relation” in places where we would ordinarily use the word “relationship”.

(2) The italics in these quotations are Eliot’s own.