A Man of 2015

It is only just that we award credit to those to whom credit is due and a certain amount of credit is due to Justin Trudeau. It is less than a month since the Shiny Pony became Canada’s shiny new Prime Minister and he is already living down to our lowest expectations. It is too early, perhaps, to declare him to be our worst Prime Minister ever. It will take him longer than this to break his father’s record in that respect. He is well on the way to getting there, however.

On November 4th, David Johnson, who as Governor General is the Queen’s Canadian viceroy, swore in Trudeau and the thirty people selected to be the Crown Ministers who, along with the Prime Minister, will make up the Cabinet. Fifteen of these were men and fifteen were women because the new Prime Minister had decided it was important that the Cabinet have an equal number of penises and vaginas. “Gender balanced” was the way he described it. At one time it was understood that people have sexes and words have genders, but no longer.

Now, if a Prime Minister were to submit to the Crown a list of choices for Ministerial appointments that consisted entirely of men, he would, of course, be denounced as sexist. Let’s think about that for a moment. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the word sexist actually means something and is not just a verbal weapon used by liberals, progressives, and social justice warriors – a rather dubious assumption - what is it about a list of appointees that consists solely of men that would make it sexist?

Those who are capable of intelligent and sane thought would answer that it is the fact that those on the list were chosen on the basis of their sex, or, to put it a bit more precisely, that sex was a criterion in the selecting of those who would be on the list. If this, however, is what makes a list that contains only men sexist, then Justin Trudeau’s “gender balanced” Cabinet is also sexist, because sex is just as much a criterion for selection in the one as it is in the other.

This conclusion can be avoided by saying that it is not the use of sex as a criterion of selection, per se, that would make an all-male Cabinet sexist, but rather the fact that it is men who are chosen, but to say this would be a more overt admission of misandry than most progressives, except perhaps the most radical of feminists, are usually comfortable with because they like to operate under the delusion that they are morally and intellectually superior to other people. Similarly, American anti-racist liberals are unlikely to admit that in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected President of the United States on the grounds of his skin colour, and that they were the ones to so choose him on those grounds.

When asked why he choose a “gender balanced” Cabinet, Justin Trudeau answered “because it’s 2015”. While it is good to know that our Prime Minister is capable of reading the date on a calendar, showing a level of intellectual achievement of which he had previously given no indication, what is implied in his answer is the idea that in 2015 we have attained some sort of enlightenment that previous generations lacked so that of course we now know that it is absolutely vital for the health of our country that half of its Cabinet Ministers – at least – be women. Almost a century ago Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis coined a term for this way of thinking. They called it “chronological snobbery” and if there were an award for the most chronological snobbish remark of the year, “because it’s 2015” would certainly deserve to win it. Ironically, however, Mr. Trudeau’s chronological snobbery is itself clearly behind the times. It is indeed, 2015, the year in which the most recent quantum leap forward in the socially progressive enlightenment of mankind took place. I refer, of course, to the apogynosis of Bruce into Caitlyn Jenner. The earth-shattering consequences of this event are still unfolding in school divisions across North America as tough decisions have to be made about who should be allowed to enter which washroom or locker room, a question which was not a significant puzzler up until now. Even feminist icon Germaine Greer has come under the wrath of the next generation of more-enlightened-than-thou social justice warriors who recently circulated a petition to have her invitation to lecture at Cardiff University revoked on the grounds of her “transphobia”. Yet Mr. Trudeau’s choices for lady Cabinet Ministers are all cis female to the best of my knowledge. That is so 2014!

Now given the events of this weekend perhaps it is time we questioned whether the kind of attitude that comes out in expressions like “because it is 2015” is really what we want in our leaders. Friday, November 13th, proved to be a very unlucky day indeed for the residents of Paris when, on that evening, ISIS launched a multipronged terrorist attack on their city that has left 129 dead, so far, and almost 400 wounded. At least one of those who carried out this act of jihad on behalf of the Islamic State had entered Europe claiming to be a Syrian refugee.

One of the first things Justin Trudeau did after winning the federal election last month was to announce that he would be withdrawing our bombers from the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trudeau is doing it for all the wrong reasons. Throughout the entirety of his political career he has demonstrated a sappy and juvenile naivety about terrorism, Islam, geopolitics, war, and all things military. In a speech this March, explaining his opposition to the previous government’s intention of expanding Canada’s military efforts against ISIS into Syria, he gave as one of his reasons that such a mission “could very well result in Assad consolidating his grip on power in Syria.” As obnoxious as the previous government’s hawkishness could be, at times, at least Stephen Harper could tell the difference between an enemy of Canada and of all Western civilization, like ISIS, and a regime that, however unpleasant it may be, is no enemy. A month ago, just before the election, Trudeau said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “irresponsible and harmful” in the Middle East, when, in fact, Putin has demonstrated far better sense with regards to that region than any other world leader. In his election campaign Trudeau promised to bring 25, 000 “Syrian refugees” into Canada by the end of the year and a representative of his office told the press, this weekend, that the Paris attack has not altered his intention to follow through on this. Why let a small thing like a terrorist attack ruin a perfectly bad idea?

What the attack on Paris is telling us, if we have the ears to hear, is that if Justin Trudeau is a man of 2015, what the countries of the West do not need, is the leadership of men of 2015. What we rather need is the leadership of men of 732. Whether there are any of that vintage yet to be found remains to be seen.

The Pollution of the Mainstream or Turn off the Bloody Television and Read a Book!

I am not a regular television watcher and have not been one for about fifteen years now. Towards the end of my college years I realized that I had already wasted far too much of my life sitting in front of a box that projects mind numbing drivel onto a screen. So when I moved to the city and got a job and my own place I made a conscious decision to make better use of my spare time. Having been a book-lover all my life, cutting television out meant that I had more time to devote to reading and so I have never regretted this decision. Today I only watch television when I am out at my dad’s place or visiting friends.

Consequentially, I had never heard of the Duggars until their recent scandal became a news item. I now know, thanks to the scandal, that they are a family from Arkansas whose television show, “19 Kids and Counting”, had apparently become the most watched program on what used to be called The Learning Channel. It is not a television show I would ever have watched belonging to a genre of programming that I particularly despise, that in which it is assumed that the absence of scripting and directing means that what is being recorded and broadcast is therefore “reality”.

The scandal concerns the eldest of the family’s nineteen kids, Joshua. A couple of weeks ago one of those celebrity gossip rags that offend the eye at checkout stations across North America dug up a ten year old police report about how he had groped several girls when he was 14-15 years old. This had been reported to his father, who disciplined him privately, put him through some kind of a counselling program, and made him confess it to an Arkansas state trooper who in a bizarre twist is now serving time for a sex crime himself.

The media have been using these revelations to crucify the Duggar family who are fundamentalist Baptists and believe in all sorts of things such as Christianity and patriarchy which the bien pensants of the media in their politically correct chronological snobbery consider to be appallingly backwards. Thus they are downplaying the fact that Josh Duggar was himself a kid at the time the groping took place. Omar Khadr was about the same age when the Americans captured him in Afghanistan and tried and convicted him for war crimes and the media has not stopped yapping about how he was “just a kid” ever since. Khadr’s were the greater crimes, but the same people that excuse his terrorism on the grounds of his youth, are howling for Duggar’s blood in spite of his. Unfortunately for Mr. Duggar he is of the wrong race and religion to attract media sympathy despite being himself a media personality.

This weekend an article appeared in the D section of the extra thick Saturday edition of the Winnipeg Free Press entitled “Stop whitewashing religious extremism for ratings”. One might be forgiven for thinking, based on the title alone, that the column, penned by sportswriter Melissa Martin, was calling for an end to the media lovefest for Omar Khadr. Alas that was not the case. For while the Khadr family, who as members of al-Qaeda consider themselves to be mujahideen, holy warriors of Islam, waging jihad against us Western infidels in the name of Allah, are certainly religious extremists in the sense of those who resort to the rather extreme means of lethal violence to accomplish the ends of their religion, it is the faith of the Duggar family that Martin is talking about. Since the Duggars, whatever their faults and failings, whatever their sins of omission and commission, may or may not be, have as yet, to blow up buildings, kill people, and commit war crimes on behalf of the Christian God, they are clearly not extremists in this sense of the term.

By calling the Duggars’ religious beliefs “extremism” Martin is saying that they fall outside what is considered at the moment to be the mainstream. This is an accurate enough assessment. The problem is that the contemporary mainstream has become so polluted and toxic that it is not a place that any sane person would desire to be.

Martin’s article is evidence enough of that. It is a feminist diatribe that begins with a progressive cliché that would have been almost clever had it not been done a gazillion times already in the past, the bait-and-switch in which she asks her readers to think of a hypothetical faith with a very negative attitude towards women which she describes in terms that seem intended to conjure up images of the Khadrs’ religion before revealing that it is the faith of the Duggars of which she is speaking. Her complaints against the Duggars’ faith are that it stops women “from seeking true education”, that it sees “all of women's hardest-won rights” as “pathways to sin” and their bodies “as vessels from which to beget a new army for their faith”, and that it has attacked “not just abortion rights, but also protections and rights for LGBTQ people, and sometimes take aim at equal-pay laws and no-fault divorce” and has sought “limits on access to contraception”.

Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.

“Abortion rights”, while accepted as mainstream today, are a concept that is indefensible in itself. The expression refers to a woman’s supposed right to have an abortion, which feminism predicates upon the argument that a woman’s body belongs to her, that she alone has the right to decide what happens with and in it, therefore since pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body, she has the right to terminate it if she wishes. While there is a semblance of logic to this argument it vanishes completely when you realize that the right to have an abortion which feminism claims for women, would bestow upon each woman the power to decide for reasons personal to herself whether another human life lives or dies and upon women collectively the power of life and death over the entire next generation and unilateral control over human reproduction. Seen in that light, abortion rights are utter madness. That our society has given women these “rights”, in recent decades, and that the mainstream of our society accepts that women ought to have them, proves nothing except that our disregard for the value of human life is such that we now owe Adolf Hitler an apology for the way we have been judging him for the last seventy years.


I could make similar arguments against no-fault divorce and everything else on the list individually, but it would be simpler to address the glaringly obvious theme running through virtually all of them. From “access to contraception” to “abortion rights” what stands out about the modern, mainstream, things Martin finds it so incredible that anyone would oppose is that in one way or another, they tend to separate sex from reproduction, and womanhood from motherhood. Feminist ideology declares its goal to be the liberation of women and their elevation to full humanity which feminism accuses Christianity and pre-feminist Western tradition in general of having denied them by the reduction of women to being merely wives and mothers. The idea is that for a woman to be human in the fullest sense, she must first be an individual who shapes her own role and destiny according to her own will. Feminism, therefore, looks with suspicion upon motherhood and those who enthusiastically embrace it by, for example, having 19 children, while itself embracing everything that separates sex from reproduction, such as contraception, abortion, and homosexuality.

To separate sex from reproduction, however, is to separate it from life, to render it sterile. It is hardly appropriate to regard this as being a liberation. Rather than elevate human eros to something higher than the biological function we share with the animals, as everyone from Plato to the doctors and theologians of the medieval Church sought to do, it reduces it to something less than that biological function.

What if, similarly, feminism got it wrong and the path to full humanity is not a generic, plastic, individuality but manhood for a man and womanhood for a woman? What if it was not Christianity, tradition, and “the patriarchy” which reduced women to something less than fully human by seeing them as wives and mothers – just as men were seen as husbands and fathers – but feminism which has reduced womanhood to something less than fully human by separating motherhood from it? While feminists love to accuse their opponents of being narrow-minded and bigoted feminism itself is such a narrow ideology that those within it find it difficult to formulate such outside-the-box questions for themselves. When a feminist does ask herself such questions and honestly strives for the answers she will usually find herself outside feminism, like the late Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Unfortunately, susceptibility to narrow ideologies like feminism is the norm rather than the exception.

It is ironic, therefore, that the first accusation Martin makes against the Duggars’ Christian faith is that it stops women from seeking “true education”. For the very fact that Martin is undoubtedly correct in identifying her own views as those accepted as mainstream today is an indicator that true education has simply not been available to most people of either sex for decades. True education begins by training people to think - to learn and understand what others have said, thought and written, to reflect critically upon it, and then to express intelligently their own thoughts - and it develops and expands through contemplative exposure to “the best that has been said and thought in the world” from the earliest ages down to the present.

A mind that has truly been educated is unlikely to fall prey to indoctrination by the kind of narrow ideology that expresses itself in such shibboleths as “women's hardest-won rights” and “long dominated by a white Christian majority” or to the chronological snobbery that assumes that the ideas that are generally accepted by the public today are therefore superior and enlightened, even if they would have been regarded as sheer lunacy in all times and places previous to our own day, and regardless of whether or not they can withstand scrutiny. We could do with more true education today, but it can no longer be found in the public schools or the universities, or anything else belonging to the now hopelessly polluted mainstream. Men and women seeking that education today, will have to look for it outside the mainstream, in the territory that the Melissa Martins of this world call extreme.

Yes, It Is the Twenty-First Century. So What?

The local left-liberal newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, recently ran an article on the angst, humanists, atheists, and agnostics were feeling over the Christian faith of Devon Clunis, the chief of the Winnipeg Police Force. Several people wrote to the editor to comment on this. One of the letters printed on November 12th, attributed to the pseudonym “OBSERVER6” asked “Why, in the 21st century, are these practices still around?” The practices in question were those of offering Bibles to police recruits and using material prepared by John C. Maxwell in leadership seminars.

OBSERVER6’s remark is a variation of words that are frequently used by progressive, forward-thinking people as a one-size fits all answer to everything they find objectionable. Those words are “this is the twenty-first century”. The number of situations in which progressives seem to think this is an unanswerable argument is astonishing.

Do you still believe the teachings of the Christian faith? If so, do you allow your Christian faith to affect how you live your life in every aspect, publicly as well as privately, including professionally and politically? “Get with the program”, the progressive says, “This is the twenty-first century” as if the truth of Christianity and the validity of Christ’s claims as Lord over the entirety of the lives of His believers are determined by the date on the calendar.

Do you think that men are men and women are women, that it is more meaningful and more important to be a man or a woman than it is to be an “individual”, that men and women are different and complementary rather than equal and interchangeable, and that men are made by God and nature for women and women for men? If so, you are really out of step with the times and the progressive will say to you “This is the twenty-first century.”

I could go on giving other examples but I think you get the idea.

As an argument “This is the twenty-first century” makes little sense. Whether a person ought to believe the teachings of Christianity or not does not depend upon what year, decade, century or even millennium it is. It depends upon whether or not those teachings are true. Did Jesus of Nazareth, after being crucified by the Romans to appease the Jewish mob, rise from the dead? If so, this validates His claim to be the Christ, the Son of God come down from Heaven to save mankind, which in turn validates everything else He ever said. As it so happens, the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth did indeed rise from the dead is very strong – strong enough that more than one, convinced skeptic who set out to disprove it ended up converting. The empty tomb that prevented the account of the Resurrection from being snuffed out by the Romans and Jewish leaders in the first century, the transformation of the Apostles from the men who fled at Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion into men who went to their deaths as martyrs for their conviction that He had risen from the tomb, the five hundred plus eyewitnesses that St. Paul could refer to as being still alive when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthian church, and indeed the conversion of St. Paul himself, from a man hostile to the faith to its foremost proponent due to an encounter with the Risen Christ, provide a very strong case indeed for the truth and historicity of the Resurrection of Christ. The truth and historicity of the Resurrection and of Christianity itself do not diminish the longer in time we are removed from the event. Indeed, the truth that the Son of God came down from heaven, lived among us, was crucified and rose again, cannot help but be the most important truth in human history and will remain that way throughout human history. Indeed, the fact that we are in the twenty-first century since these events took place – note that we date the centuries from these events – makes it more important than ever that we believe these truths and live our lives accordingly because one of the things Jesus said, that is verified by His being the Son of God, which in turn is verified by His having risen from the dead, is that He will come back to judge the living and the dead, and event which inevitably grows nearer the further removed from His Ascension that we get.

When progressives say “this is the twenty-first century” to dismiss Christianity, traditional ethics, private property, the differences between the sexes, monarchy, the survival of Caucasian ethnicity, and everything else from the past that they despise, they are clearly not making a valid argument as far as sound reasoning goes. They are expressing an attitude, an attitude held by all progressives, and by far too many who would not consider themselves to be progressive. Thanks to C. S. Lewis we have a term for that attitude – “chronological snobbery”.

In Surprised by Joy Lewis tells how he himself had held this attitude in his earlier days, how he had dismissed old ideas and customs as belonging to older and therefore outdated periods. He was cured of the attitude by his friend Owen Barfield who demolished all the assumptions it rests upon. Lewis described chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”.

Now it is true, to an extent, that we have more knowledge in the sense of accumulated information available to us in the present than was available in the past. I say “to an extent” because information is lost as well as accumulated with the passing of time. This fact, however, calls for a very different attitude than that of chronological snobbery. . The knowledge that we have available today that was not available in the past is knowledge of the past – the knowledge of what has been thought and said, done and accomplished, discovered and accumulated, by all the generations that have preceded us. This ought to command an attitude of respect towards the past – not an attitude of “who cares what they thought in the past, we know so much more today.”

Of course people thought things in the past that are not true. People continue to think things today that are not true. I do not mean the things that have held over from previous ages that are dismissed with “this is the twenty-first century” but ideas that are modern, progressive, and in keeping with the prevalent spirit of the present age. An ideas being new and modern, is no guarantee of its being true, and an ideas being old and unfashionable is no guarantee of its being false.

Indeed, if it were to come down to a question of the presumption of truth, with regards to ideas that cannot be demonstrated to be false, then the presumption of truth ought to go to ideas that are older in the sense of having been held for long periods of time in the past (as opposed to older in the sense of having been thought up millennia ago and discarded in the first generation) rather than to ideas that are new and innovative. Their having endured the passing of ages past, is an argument in their favour, rather than against them.

So the next time some progressive tries to dismiss a timeless truth as being outdated by the fact that it is "the twenty-first century" congratulate him on being able to read the date on the calendar and ask "So what?"