The Ups and Downs of Deviancy

I  have commented in the past on the sick, twisted, irony that the same period that saw tobacco use demonized, driven out of public spaces – even outdoors ones – and increasingly private spaces as well, saw the legalization, normalization, and glorification of the use of marijuana.   Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who sat as a Democrat in the American Senate representing New York in the days when Democrats, even Democrats from New York, were not all open cheerleaders for civilizational collapse, wrote an article for The American Scholar in 1993 entitled “Defining Deviancy Down”.   The gist of the article was that many were responding to the explosion of social and moral problems, such as family breakups, single-parenthood, and crime by simply lowering standards and expectations, and that this was not a good thing.   Later that year neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Moynihan’s article with a speech to the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Defining Deviancy Up” in which he argued that the Senator was right, but that he addressed only half the story, the other half being the imposition of new standards on ordinary people so that “once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant”.   A few years later Robert H. Bork, the American jurist and law professor whose appointment to the American Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan had been defeated in the Senate, expanded upon both of these themes at book length in his Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1993).   The war on tobacco which is carcinogenic, especially when chemicals have been added to it as is the case with cigarettes, but which can both calm and stimulate minds without impairing them in the slightest, fought simultaneously with a campaign to promote marijuana which is known to mess up people’s minds, is this set of complementary phenomena, defining deviancy both down and up at the same time, manifesting itself in the realm of substance use and abuse.   One could, of course, take the position that the old ideal of mens sana in corpore sano calls for opposition to both tobacco and marijuana, but the position taken by our contemporary culture shows just how much it has come to elevate the body over the mind.   Plato would be appalled.

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we are now seeing the combination of defining deviancy up/down manifesting itself in yet another way in this same area.   Earlier this week, an organization called the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction made international headlines.   Before commenting on how it did that a few words about the organization itself are appropriate.   The CCSA was established by an act of Parliament during the premiership of Brian Mulroney in 1988.   At the time it was called the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, which name is still reflected in the acronym, the new name having been adopted for reasons of political correctness.   The organization’s board is appointed by the Governor-in-Council and it operates under the oversight of Health Canada.   Therefore, while the organization was set up as a non-profit charity that accepts private funding and claims to occupy the space between government agency and non-government organization, it is questionable as to how large or how real the distance between it and the government it answers to actually is.   It made headlines by releasing a report, commissioned and funded by Health Canada, on alcohol use which basically said, in about 90 pages, that there is no safe level of consumption, that there are no health benefits to drinking, that bottles of booze should come with warning labels, and that Canadians should limit themselves to a maximum of two “standard” drinks per week.   This attracted so much attention because of how radically out of sync these recommendations are with those of health agencies in the United Kingdom and the rest of the Commonwealth, the United States, France, and basically all of Europe except the Netherlands.

 

The admirably reactionary David Warren, retired Ottawa Citizen columnist and former editor of the sadly defunct Idler, sees this as a step towards a revival of prohibition.    While some might say that this is reading too much into the report I am inclined to think that Warren is right, as he usually is about most matters that don’t pertain to the patriarch of Rome’s claim to supremacy over the entire Church.   The same media that spent the last two to three years demanding total suppression of Canadians’ basic freedoms of movement, assembly, and religion because “experts” said that “social distancing” and “lockdowns” and basically enforced isolation were “necessary” to stop the spread of a virus that they were depicting as far more lethal than it actually was (even at the beginning) and insisting that anyone who disagreed with them was promoting “misinformation” and “disinformation” and must be silenced, even as they gaslighted everyone with obvious nonsense such as their denial of natural immunity, has been promoting the CCSA’s report and recommendations in much the same manner.   Take the CBC for example.  CBC writers Ioanna Roumeliotis and Brenda Witmer wrote up the story with the same attitude of “the experts” have spoken, we must all bow down and obey that has become so nauseatingly familiar since 2020.   With regards to the CCSA report saying that “no amount of alcohol is safe” they use the words “points out that” rather than the more objective and accurate “claims”.   The appeals to the authority of the World Health Organization are there too and the gaslighting.   The gaslighting is most obvious in the denial of there being health benefits alongside the risks.   Even the claim the most Canadians are unware of the risks is highly dubious.  While the claim applies specifically to the risk focused on in the report, i.e., the risk with regards to cancer, it is absurd to say that most Canadians are unaware of the many other risks attendant upon drinking alcohol, and I very much doubt that anyone undeterred by the risk of DTs, liver cirrhosis, getting into a brawl, driving into a tree or making a total ass of oneself in public and alienating one’s friends and family, is going to care much about a risk of cancer.   Sunlight is carcinogenic.   Is that good reason to either adopt a vampire’s schedule or erect a sunblocker ala The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns?   Bill Gates, in the unlikely event you happen to be reading this, the answer to that last question is “no”.

 

Whether or not our government is about to repeat the famously failed social experiment of a century past when, due to the estrogen poisoning brought on by having given women the vote, we temporarily imposed a total ban on alcoholic beverages, (1) by sponsoring this ridiculous report they are certainly engaging in Krauthammer’s “defining deviancy up”.   One does not have to look far to find the corresponding acts of “defining deviancy down”.   The province of British Columbia is currently decriminalizing the possession of hard drugs, something that its largest city Vancouver did two years ago.    As of the last day of this month, it will be legal for adults in British Columbia to possess small amounts of cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamine.   Both city and province required the cooperation of Health Canada for this, as the federal agency needed to grant a waiver under the Controlled Drug and Substances Act.   It was not difficult to obtain such an exemption as the current Dominion premier is on board with British Columbia’s approach to the drug crisis.   Neither the Prime Minister nor the government of British Columbia nor the city council of Vancouver are libertarian purists who support decriminalization because they don’t think the government should be dictating personal choices.  These are the same people, remember, who a year ago were telling people that they had to have a new, man-made, substance injected into their bloodstream if they wanted anything resembling a normal life in society.   Their argument for decriminalization in the midst of a drug crisis is that they think it will decrease the number of drug deaths.   The reasoning behind this is that as long as hard drugs are illegal, those who use them must rely upon illicit sources, which may be tainted with such substances as fentanyl and down which can cause overdoses in amounts that are miniscule compared to other drugs.   This is also the reasoning used by those who argue that the government should provide, at the taxpayers’ expense, “safe” drugs, needles, and places to use them.    Indeed, those who argue for decriminalization for other than libertarian reasons and those who support government provided “safe injection sites” are generally the same people.    At the very least, this way of thinking can be criticized as myopic, focusing on the danger that fentanyl and other contaminants pose to drug users as if this were the whole of the drug problem, and ignoring the countless other dangers posed by hard drugs, often to other members of society who don’t use them themselves.   A man who is walking down the sidewalk, minding his own business, and gets his head punched in by someone whom he doesn’t know from Adam, because that someone is in a meth-induced paranoia and thinks that he, the man he punches that is, is an alien hitman sent after him by the demonic overlord of a planet in some distant galaxy, will require just as much stiches, hospital time, or morgue space depending on the severity of the attack, if the meth was obtained from a government-funded “safe” site as if it were obtained on the street.   At least if it were obtained from the street, the man would not have been forced to contribute to his own assault with his taxes.   Note that those who advocate this approach of dealing with the drug crisis are the ones who speak about the need to “destigmatize” drug use.   To destigmatize something, however, is to remove societal disapproval, and, as we have already seen with regards to marijuana this, if not nipped in the bud, will become a demand for societal approval of hard drug use and a cultural campaign to promote it.   We are already witnessing this taking shape around us.

 

To summarize, we are being told by the CCSA, Health Canada, and the CBC that there is no “safe” amount of alcohol that can be consumed at the same time that we are being told that hard drugs should be decriminalized and, worse, “destigmatized” and  safe” injection sites provided for their use by the government at our expense.   It is tobacco v. marijuana and the defining of deviancy both up and down at the same time all over again.

 

This time around, however, there is a spiritual aspect to this that was not there when tobacco was being driven out to make room for marijuana.   Neither tobacco, which was unknown to the Old World until imported from the Americas, nor hemp, the plant from which marijuana is obtained and which was certainly present in the Ancient Near East, are mentioned anywhere in the Holy Scriptures by name.   Alcoholic beverages, however, are certainly mentioned in the Bible and the New Testament makes use of the Greek family of words from which our “pharmacy” is derived.   With regards to the nouns φαρμακός and φαρμακεία, these are usually rendered “sorcerer” and “witchcraft” or “sorcery” respectively in English translations of the New Testament.   Their primary reference is with regards to drugs.   The first is often rendered “poisoner” in uses outside of the New Testament, and the second can mean both the administration of drugs and poisoning.    They are translated the way they are in English Bibles because the idea in the New Testament is of the use of substances in magic and communication with the spirit world.   They are never used in a positive sense. 

 

The Bible speaks of alcoholic beverages, primarily wine, far more frequently and by contrast the overwhelming majority of references are positive.   Drunkenness is condemned, but wine is spoken of as a gift of God given to cheer the heart of men.   In what St. John the Evangelist identifies as the very first miracle that Our Lord performed, He instructed the servants at a wedding He attended at Cana at some point between His Baptism and the beginning of His public ministry in Galilee to fill six stone waterpots, each capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons, with water after the wedding wine supply had run out.   He then told them to take the pots to the chief steward.   The roughly 120 gallons of water was transformed into roughly 120 gallons of wine which the chief steward proclaimed to be better than that which had already been consumed.    Four chapters later, after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the only miracle other than the Resurrection which St. John records in common with the Synoptic Evangelists, Jesus in His Bread of Life discourse with the multitude proclaimed the necessity to eat His body and drink His blood.   Later, at the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that He shared with His Apostles before the Crucifixion, Jesus would reveal how this was to be done by instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion in which His followers would partake of bread as His body, broken for us, and wine as His blood of the New Testament, shed for us and for many for the remission of sins.   Partaking of wine as Christ’s blood in this way, has been essential to the main ceremony of regular Christian worship in all the most ancient Churches ever since.   Only in the last couple of centuries in North America have certain sects – separatist groups – substituted the Islamic view of wine for the traditional Christian one, and in support of this substitution invented spurious arguments that Jesus turned the water into unfermented, concentrated grape juice and that this is what should be used in Communion. (2)   Therefore, those who define deviancy up to include the drinking of any amount of alcohol in so doing attack the central rite of the Christian faith and religion, while in defining deviancy down so as to “de-stigmatize” the use of hard drugs, they have embraced behaviour that in the Scriptures is inseparable from trafficking with evil spirits.

 

In this, the true nature of this aspect of the “culture war” is evident.   Ultimately, it is on the spiritual field, that this battle will be won or lost.

 

(1)   About the only thing positive I have to say about prohibition was that it inspired Stephen Leacock, the great Canadian humourist, economist, and political scientist to write an excellent essay against it.  Entitled “The Tyranny of Prohibition” it first appeared in the August 2, 1919 issue of The Living Age, and can be found in several anthologies of Leacock’s essays.   Prohibition is also discussed in his “The Woman Question” which was first published in 1915 and can also be found in Leacock anthologies, including Essays and Literary Studies, the first edition of which was published in 1916.   The two essays taken together can be read as a before and after look at the two big social experiments that occurred together at the end of the First World War.

 

(2)   The sects and revivalists who thought up this idea also started up, in conjunction with the early feminists, a prohibition movement that they inappropriately called “temperance”, which word used properly means the virtue of “self-control” and “moderation”.   This idea remains in circulation largely due to the influence of the book Bible Wines: The Laws of Fermentation and the Wines of the Ancients by Rev. William Patton, first published in 1871.   This book employs the same kind of arguments that Alexander Hislop used in The Two Babylons to back up his claim that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition other than the Bible itself was the pagan religion of ancient Babylon dressed up to look Christian.  There are plenty of quotes and plenty of footnotes which look very convincing unless you take the time to look up the quotes in the original sources, most of which are very obscure to discourage you from doing this.   If you do, however, you realize quickly that the entire book is pure codswallop.     I diagnose those who promote the messages of these books as suffering from a severe case of κεφαληανααυτουπρωκτόςις.  

More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- Sovereignty in its purest and most absolute sense belongs to God alone. To royal monarchs he has delegated a limited earthly sovereignty. The usurpation of sovereignty is the source of all tyranny. The first to attempt to seize sovereignty for himself was Lucifer. The notions of individual and popular sovereignty, which lie at the heart of liberalism and modern democracy respectively, are merely two more recent attempts.

- Anyone who claims to care about the poor yet who supports a carbon tax is either a moron or a liar.

- It is only those who claim a monopoly on hate for themselves who support laws against hate.

- Culture today is a complete fraud. Traditionally, high culture feeds the mind and soul, while popular culture unites the community. Most modern and post-modern “high” culture, however, poisons the mind and soul, while the “pop culture” manufactured for consumption by the masses in the studios of Los Angeles alienates individuals and atomizes communities.

- The most effective instrument of Cultural Marxism has always been corporate capitalism.

- To say that Communism is bad is not to say that capitalism is good. Communism is bad because it is subversive, egalitarian, revolutionary, atheistic, anti-royalist, anti-aristocratic, materialistic and tyrannical. Many of these things can also be said of capitalism.

- Vegetarianism kills brain cells.

- Reading the history of how regimes like the Soviet Union and the Third Reich sought to suppress dissent and control thought through secret police, charges against which there was no real defence, and the atmosphere of terror and distrust generated by the justifiable suspicion that anyone, even a close friend or family member, might be a state informer, is like reading the blueprint for everything that liberals have done in the name of “human rights” and “protecting vulnerable minorities.”

- The same people who ridicule evangelical Christians for advocating “conversion therapy” for people attracted to their own sex think that physical mutilation is a perfectly proper treatment for people who think that they belong to the other sex.

- We live in a day in which doctors routinely prescribe mood-and-behaviour-altering drugs to children, usually after diagnosing the ordinary rambunctious behaviour of boys as some sort of phony-baloney pathology, and then we wonder why so many kids are now shooting up schools and killing themselves.

- The same people who think that it is “cool” to smoke marijuana – the long term use of which turns the mind to mush, makes people into babbling idiots, and can induce paranoia and schizophrenia – and are demanding its legalization, demonize tobacco, which has been linked, like everything else on the planet, to cancer, but which has a beneficial effect on the mind.

- If all the hawks in the so-called “war on drugs” really wanted to do something about the plague of substance abuse and addiction, they would start by going after the pharmaceutical companies and their physician accomplices who push pills as the answer to all of life’s problems.

- Economists keep coming up with plans such as free trade and socialism, that on paper are supposed to increase human happiness but all they deliver when put into practice is an increase in misery.

- It is those who insist that race does not matter for whom race matters the most.

- Environmentalism is perfectly sane and sound when it insists that we ought to look after our world and conserve our natural resources and the beauty of our surroundings for the sake of future generations but it crosses over into total madness when it demands that we worship the earth and tells us that our burning of fossil fuels is altering the earth’s climate and threatens our survival.

- There is no such thing as progressive Christianity. To the extent that something is progressive it is not Christian and to the extent that it is Christian it is not progressive.

- Christianity is a universal faith in that the Gospel is a message of salvation for all people, anyone can be baptized into the Church of Christ, and the redeemed that shall gather before the throne of the Lamb will be taken from “every kindred and tongue and people and nation.” This does not mean that Christians should look in favour upon the mass immigration that is eroding the national identities of Western countries and bringing about White Genocide. On the contrary, the Christian who supports this is guilty of the sin of impiety and is, in the words of St. Paul, “worse than an infidel.”

Just Say No to the Nordic Model

In 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its ruling in R. v. Morgentaler, our laws against abortion were already quite light, having been liberalized by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, our worst Prime Minister ever and the father of the dingbat who is currently leader of the Liberal Party, within months of his taking over the reins of power from Lester Pearson. This did not prevent the Supreme Court from ruling against Her Majesty the Queen and in favour of a Polish born quack who had survived the Holocaust of Dachau to pursue a career of killing the unborn here in Canada. All existing laws against abortion were struck down and no government since has succeeded in introducing new ones. Nor has any government since Mulroney’s seriously tried. As a result, there continue to be no legal restrictions on the clinical killing of foeti prior to and up until the moment of birth and, thanks to Tommy Douglas’ single-payer health system, every Canadian with enough moral sanity to recognize that abortion is murder, has to contribute to it through his taxes.

Last December, the Supreme Court had another such Solomonic moment. Just before Christmas they decided to hand out tricks as well as treats and made it their ruling in Canada v. Bedford that the laws against running brothels, soliciting on the streets, and living off of prostitution were unconstitutional. Parliament was given one year to come up with better laws in the duration of which the old ones will remain in effect. If Parliament fails to do so, as of December there will be no legal restrictions on prostitution in Canada.

While the ruling in Morgentaler was stupid, unconscionable, and downright evil, the ruling in Bedford does make a certain amount of sense. Prostitution itself was not illegal in Canada. Therefore, all that these laws that were ruled unconstitutional actually did was to harass people engaged in what is technically a legal trade. This is hardly right and fair and those who fought for the elimination of such laws had a point when they argued that this kind of legislation made the trade more dangerous for those involved.

Why not make prostitution itself illegal then?

Well, the problem with that solution is that prostitution is just the sale of sexual intercourse. Like most Western countries, Canada has liberalized its laws so that sexual immorality itself, fornication, adultery, etc. is neither prohibited nor punished by law. There are good arguments that can be made for and against this liberalization. The case against it is that it weakens marriage, the family, and the social order in general. The case in favour of it is that to be enforceable, laws against sexual immorality would require that we empower the police to spy on people in the privacy of the bedroom. These arguments are both quite strong, indeed, they are ironclad. Whichever argument you or I might think to be the best, the political reality is that the only change we are likely to see any time in the near future is in the direction of further liberalization. This is my point – in the absence of laws against sexual immorality, laws prohibiting prostitution do not make sense. Such laws would in effect be saying to people “screw around all you want, just don’t let any money change hands while you are doing it.” Surely the stupidity in that is plain to be seen.

Given my druthers, I would have the government take the opportunity the Supreme Court has handed it, to decentralize and localize legislation restricting prostitution. Of all conceivable laws restricting the sale of sex, the kind that seem the most sensible and necessary to me are those that are passed locally, are locally enforced and which are designed to keep it out of residential neighborhoods and away from schools and playgrounds. Have Parliament hand over the regulating and restricting of prostitution entirely to city, town, and municipal governments that make laws only for themselves and the neighborhoods they live in. Nothing further is necessary.

Now, not everybody would agree with this, naturally, and it would be a dull world if that were not the case. There are those who think of prostitution in the same way that the neo-Puritans of the early twentieth century viewed the consumption of alcohol and the neo-Puritans of the late twentieth century regarded the use of narcotics – as a great and terrible evil towards the stomping out of which all the powers of government must be marshalled. We all know how well Prohibition and the War on Drugs turned out, after all.

One person who prefers the neo-Puritan, prohibitionist approach to prostitution is Joy Smith, the Conservative Member of Parliament for the constituency of Kildonan-St. Paul here in Winnipeg. Smith is a moral crusader, noted for her efforts against human trafficking. This is to her credit, of course, as no sane person could find anything defensible in human trafficking. Her response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that our prostitution laws need to be rewritten has been to campaign for what is called the “Nordic model”, i.e., the kind of laws that are in place in Sweden.

A red flag should have popped up immediately at the mention of Sweden. Sweden is a country that has much to admire including her constitutional monarchy and her national, albeit now disestablished, church that combines a Lutheran confession with the historical episcopacy. These are all centuries old, however. While Sweden may still be impressive in terms of her unusually high quality pop groups, her beautiful women and her Muppet chefs, her statesmanship has long left something to be desired. Her abandonment of her long-established traditional cultural identity for multiculturalism, extreme political correctness, and bizarre obsession with turning sex into something one chooses rather than something one is born with, all lead one to the inevitable conclusion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the members of her polite class have all gone børking mad. She is the last country whose recent political innovations we ought to consider imitating.

What the Nordic model entails is simply this – laws that target the customer rather than the provider, the john rather than the prostitute. While this approach makes a certain amount of sense from an economic point of view – cut off the demand and there will be no incentive for there to be a supply – it is highly dubious from the ethical point of view. Think of what the equivalent strategy in combatting the drug trade would look like. It would mean having law enforcement focus on arresting users for drug possession rather than going after dealers, supplies, and smugglers. Indeed, the police have often come under criticism for doing just that.

Someone might object to that comparison by saying that in drug trafficking the supplier is the victimizer, taking advantage of his client’s addiction to make a profit out of selling him the meanas of his own destruction whereas in prostitution it is the supplier, the hooker, who is the victim. The problem with that reasoning is that if prostitutes are victims as a class, their victimizers are not the people Joy Smith and company wish to punish. Individually, prostitutes may frequently suffer violence at the hands of individual clients. As a class, they can only rightly be regarded as the victims of the men who through various means force them into prostitution, i.e., their pimps. We could pass laws targeting the kind of men who kidnap girls, addict them to drugs, and force them to sell their bodies. Those laws would for the most part look identical to the laws the Supreme Court struck down.

The fact of the matter is that the clients of prostitution are a class of victims too, the victims of feminism. The true purpose of feminism, the so-called ”women’s movement”, was never to benefit women so much as to break the one woman for one man pattern of traditional, monagamous, marriage so that alpha males could horde women. It is from the deprived and desperate numbers of the beta-or-lower males that the client base for prostitution is derived. There is more than a hint of feminism in the movement to rewrite the prostitution laws to punish the clients rather than the prostitutes. This means that if the laws are changed in this way, feminism will have succeeded in victimizing this class twice over.

Rather than jump on this bandwagon of injustice, it would be far better to either return to the status quo ante, go for complete liberalization, or follow my earlier suggestion of decentralized, local regulations and restrictions.

Finally, if an attempt to starve off prostitution by cutting off the demand is still seen as desirable, then the best way to do so is not to introduce laws targetting the clients, but by cleaning up the sex-saturated culture and passing laws that strengthen rather than weaken the traditional family and marriage. Just as the trade in destructive narcotics will not go away as long as pharmacetical companies continue to promote their products as the instant cure to all your pain in their advertisements, so the demand for prostitution will not lessen as long as television, movies, magazines and books continue to preach the message "just do it" and to use sex to sell their products.