The Evanescence of Ethics in the Epidemic

Imagine three individuals who each wish to relieve you of the burden of the contents of your wallet that they might bear this load themselves.

 

The first individual approaches you and says “I hate to ask this, but I’m in a real pickle, I owe Vinnie and Guido $50 and if I don’t pay it by the end of the day they are going to break my legs, would you be a pal and help me out.”

 

The second individual comes up to you wearing a bandana, pulls a gun, and says “stick em up” and then grabs your wallet and runs.

 

The third individual says to you “I want you to give me all your money.  It is your choice if you do or not, but if you don’t I’ll see to it that you can never work, travel, or participate in any community events again.”

 

Which of these individuals was guilty of robbery?

 

The first individual may be guilty of having made very poor choices but is not guilty of robbery. 

 

The second individual is clearly a robber and a stereotypical robber at that, going so far as to wear the traditional uniform of the robber, a mask covering the lower face.

 

The correct answer to our question, however, is that both the second and the third individuals were guilty of robbery.   Robbery is theft – the unlawful taking of another person’s possessions – through the means of coercive force, either actual or threatened.    Both the second and the third individuals used threats to force you to hand over your money.    The nature of what they threatened to do was quite different but the difference does not make what the third individual said any less of a coercive threat.

 

Is it ever right, or at least morally permissible, to use coercive force?

 

This ethical question is more complex than it might at first seem, due to a number of complicating factors.   One such factor is the nature of the coercive force.    Consider our illustration above.   The threats used by the second and third individuals differed in two ways.   One of these was in their level of credibility.   The stereotypical robber’s threat was made believable by the presence of the gun.   The credibility of the other robber’s threat depends upon who the robber is.   If he is in a position of sufficient power to actually carry it out then his threat is credible, otherwise he is obviously a nut and his threat can be disregarded as empty and crazy.   The other way, which is the one that is relevant to this discussion, is in the nature of what was threatened.   The stereotypical robber threatened the use of lethal force.   The other robber merely threatened to make your life miserable, not to take it from you.    Historically, this distinction has been very important in discussions of the ethical question at hand.   While there has been no answer to the question which could be said to have the support of a universal consensus, there has been wide agreement that lethal force is the least justifiable or permissible form of coercion.

 

Another complicating factor is that of the distinction between the state and private individual persons.    It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to conceive of the enforcement of law and the administration of criminal justice that does not in some way or another involve the use of coercive force.    Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has also been wide agreement – although not nearly as wide as with lethal force being the least justifiable or permissible – that it is more justifiable or morally permissible for the state, the institution whose raison d’etre is to enforce the law and administer criminal justice, to use such force than for private persons.    Again, support for this idea while broad, has not been as wide as for the one with which we ended the previous paragraph.   The liberal tradition, that is to say, the tradition that over the course of the Modern Age became dominant in what used to be Christendom but is now Western Civilization, has produced many different views on the matter.   One such view, which is evident today among those liberals or progressives who would argue that you should never fight back and defend yourself, your loved ones, or your property when these are under criminal attack, but  allow yourself to be victimized and let the professionals, the police, take care of it, is that the state ought to have an exclusive monopoly on all use of coercive force.    Conversely, some although not all of the liberals of the kind who began calling themselves libertarian in the last century to indicate their retention and emphasis on the individualism and suspicion of government that were predominant in the liberalism of the nineteenth century, hold that force is only justifiable when used by private persons to defend themselves, their families, and property and that the state is illegitimate.    Although these views, each the polar opposite of the other, are both supported by their proponents from ideas that belong to the mainstream of the liberal philosophical-political tradition, neither could be said to itself represent the mainstream liberal view on the matter of how much coercive force is permitted to the state and the private person.     That the use of force on others, whether on the part of the private person or the state, is ethically permissible only under certain circumstances, which are broader for the state than for the private person, with lethal force being permitted to the latter only in circumstances of self-defense, is much closer to what historically would have been the liberal mainstream.   In this, the mainstream of the liberal tradition was itself much closer to the mainstream of the tradition that preceded it, or, if you prefer, the mainstream of the Western tradition as a whole, including both liberal and pre-liberal strands, than in many other areas.

 

There is one way in which liberalism did depart from the pre-liberal Western tradition that warrants consideration in the context of this discussion, especially in that it had a direct bearing on the way the factor examined in the last paragraph was framed.   Distinguishing between the private person and the state is fairly universal in the ethical debate over the boundaries limiting when force is permissible.  Restricting the distinction to these two, on the other hand, is rather unique to the liberal tradition.   Conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet stressed throughout his career, beginning with his seminal The Quest for Community (1953), the importance of a plurality of institutions.    He described such other institutions as the family and the local community as “intermediate” between the state and the private person.   That liberalism had come to largely disregard these is evident in the radically opposite views both emerging from the liberal tradition mentioned in the previous paragraph.    What the ideas that the state should have a monopoly on force and that the state is illegitimate and only the individual person is justified in using force in self-defense have in common is that they both see the state and the individual as the only players worthy of consideration.   The other institutions that Nisbet called “intermediate” traditionally possessed a significant amount of authority.   Authority, which is the respected right to lead, is different from power, which is the ability to command obedience.      For society or any institution within it to be functional authority must take strong precedence over power but, human nature being what it is, authority cannot long exist without power backing it up.   This necessarily means that those who exercise the authority in Nisbet’s intermediate institutions must be morally able to use some kind of force, to some kind of degree.   Another way in which liberalism’s reduction of everything to the state and individual is evident has been in the way in which the liberal tradition, which in the interwar period of the last century largely abandoned its anti-statist libertarianism from the century prior and then sharply veered into statism after World War II, has been attacking the authority of all of these institutions, especially the family, by having the state strip them of their power. (1)

 

The ability to back up an order with force is the essence of power, which to some degree or another is necessary to support authority.    The force needed to support authority differs from institution to institution in both kind and degree.  That lethal force is limited to the state, except in situations where the individual needs it for defensive purposes is something to which virtually everyone in Christendom would have agreed around the time that liberalism began to convert Christendom into Western Civilization.    This consensus did not exist in the classical civilization that preceded Christendom.    In ancient Rome, the pater familias, which meant the patriarch of a household consisting of a large extended family, rather than merely the father in a domestic unit, held authority, the pater potestas, over his family that was not equal to that exercised by the Senate over the Roman city-state, but certainly comparable to it.    Classical literature abounds with stories featuring the abuse of such authority – Oedipus, the king of Thebes who features in several of the extent tragedies, bears a name (“swollen foot”) that testifies to his having been a victim of a botched attempt to end his life while an infant, carried out at the orders of his father when the latter heard the prophecy that the child would kill his father and marry his mother.     While Oedipus’s father Laius was a king, the order to have the child exposed was an expression of what would have been regarded as his patriarchal rather than his civil authority at the time.      

 

The spread of Christianity and the conversion of classical civilization into Christendom led to the elimination of the practice of infanticide by exposure and stricter limits being placed on the pater potestas leading to the Christian consensus that the legitimate use of lethal force is limited to the state except in instance of self-defense on the part of private persons.    While this meant that the power and authority of the family patriarch was no longer comparable to that of the state and that in temporal terms the civil power was now unquestionably the highest authority, the mainstream point of view in Christendom did not regard all other institutional authority as falling in the intermediate position between the state and the individual of which Nisbet spoke.   The mainstream point of view in Christendom was that there were two realms in Christian civilization, the temporal and the spiritual, the membership of which overlapped, but in which different institutions were vested with the highest authority.   In the temporal realm, the state was the highest authority.   In the spiritual realm, the church was the highest authority.  The bishops, as citizens of the temporal realm, were under the authority of the king as his subjects.   The king, as a member of the church, was subject to the authority of his bishop in the spiritual realm.   The king and the bishop, each possessing the highest earthly authority in his respective realm, required power to back that authority up, and this power was conceived of as two “swords”.   These swords were metaphorical, of course, although much less so in the case of the king, whose sword included the use of lethal force to punish crime. (2)   The bishop’s “sword” was the “keys”, given to the Apostles by Christ after St. Peter’s confession of faith, which included the power to exclude people from the Sacraments and the fellowship of the church.

 

Disagreements about the “keys” were involved in fracturing the ecclesiastical unity of Christendom in both the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, which contributed to liberalism’s takeover of Christendom and transformation of it into modern Western Civilization.    While the specifics of these disagreements is not relevant to our discussion here, it is important to note that in the Christian orthodox mainstream of Christendom neither the king nor the bishop was thought to have the right the wield his sword whenever he saw fit to serve his own selfish purposes.   Liberalism maintained otherwise, of course, because it wished to weaken the king or replace him with a republic and to reduce the church from the institution of highest earthly authority in the spiritual realm to one of many intermediate institutions in the temporal realm, but the concept of the divine gifting of the “swords” in Christian orthodoxy clearly implies that both kings and bishops were held strictly accountable to God for the right use of the swords, and a great deal of space in the writings of theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas was devoted to spelling out the limits on when these swords could be rightly used.   The importance of this lies in the fact that despite the significant differences between the orthodoxy of Christendom and the liberalism of modern Western Civilization both agreed that there were limits on when force could be used, whether by the state or by private persons, and that these limits were written in the language of ethics, of what is right and what is wrong.

 

The idea that there are limits on the right use of force even for the state is an ancient one, going back to the earliest of civilizations.   Even before the Socratic philosophers wrote the dialogues and treatises that laid the foundation of the long tradition of Western political science, Aeschylus wrote his Oresteia, a trilogy of plays that begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, continues with his being avenged by his son Orestes, and concludes with Orestes escaping the vengeance of the pursuing Furies by placing his fate in the hands of the patron goddess of Athens who establishes the first jury to adjudicate the case, resulting in an acquittal.   The trilogy illustrates how the civilized justice system with its laws and courts is superior to pre-civilized blood “justice” because it limits the violence rather than letting it continue to spiral and escalate.    The myths behind the plays are much older (Homer had drawn from the same source material in his Illiad and Odyssey three centuries prior to this).   Indeed, even the Lex Talionis that is featured prominently in the ancient Code of Hammurabi (Babylon of the eighteenth century BC) and the Mosaic Law in the Old Testament, can be understood as a limit on the permissible use of force (under it if someone puts out your eye, the maximum that you can demand as just repayment is his own eye).    That the ancients saw the force of law, exercised by the state, as being subject to the limits of morality is also attested to by manner in which they categorized their philosophy.   While modern totalitarians, who reject limits on the power of the state, have sometimes claimed Plato as an ancestor, to do so they must rely entirely upon a dialogue that is fantastical in nature, in which Socrates and his friends engage in an entirely theoretical exercise in city-building that is clearly set in a world other than the one they actually live in.    The purpose of the exercise is not to create a model for the builders of city-states in the real world to use, but to examine further an ethical question about the nature of justice.   The totalitarians’ claim on Plato, therefore, is very tenuous.   By contrast, modern constitutionalists, that is to say those who believe in constitutional restraints on the powers of government which ought to include everybody of every political stripe who is not a totalitarian, can rightly point to Plato’s disciple Aristotle as their ancestor.   Some of these have agreed with the totalitarians in assigning Plato to the latter camp, but where Plato and Aristotle were clearly in harmony was in making politics in the sense of political science, the theory of states and statecraft, a subcategory of ethics, the theory of human habits and behaviour as evaluated by the standards of what is right, good and virtuous versus what is wrong, bad, and vicious.   This is spelled out by Aristotle, who introduced politics as a subdivision in his treatise on Ethics, then wrote a sequel devoted to Politics, but it is also the obvious implication of Plato’s having made his most famous political discussion as part of a larger ethical debate.   The subordination of politics to ethics is consistent with the constitutionalist rather than the totalitarian point of view.

Over the course of the pandemic that was declared early last year and has continued to the present day it has been very disturbing to see this subordination of politics to ethics that has been so important to every phase of our civilization (or to our civilization and its two immediate predecessors depending upon how you look at it) disregarded or, worse, inverted (the use of shame and guilt to coerce people into obeying every public health order – “you are a bad selfish person who cares only about yourself if you object to being forbidden all social interaction for two years straight” – is the use of a twisted form of ethics to serve the interests of politics, not in the Platonic/Aristotelean sense of the word but in a sense of the term that is usually if, perhaps, unfairly, associated with Machiavelli).   At the beginning of the pandemic, the citizens of Western countries basically acquiesced as their governments imposed unprecedented restrictions upon them.   In imposing these restrictions Western governments overstepped the limits their constitutions place on their powers and essentially took away what for centuries Western people have regarded as their most basic civil, if not human, rights.    Telling people they can have only a limited number of people over to their house is a restriction that limits their freedom of association, but telling them they can have no visitors over to their house, as the province of Manitoba did from November of last year until this July, is taking away that freedom altogether.  This is a freedom that is identified as “fundamental” in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that was added to the Canadian constitution in 1982, the rights and freedoms in which the Supreme Court of Canada has previously ruled that governments can limit, but only if the limitation is minimal, as this one obviously was not.   Nevertheless, the province was somehow allowed to get away with this. 

 

Having gotten away with these experimental severe restrictions on our freedoms, our governments then began to add mandates on top of these.   The first of these was the mandate that we wear lower face masks in indoor spaces.   The mask mandates were controversial for a number of reasons, many of which I have discussed in other essays in the past.   What is most significant for our purposes here is that while many have seen the masks as being a lesser imposition than the lockdowns, and in one sense they are right, they represent the transition from the government forbidding us to do things that we had previously been free to do to the government requiring us to do things.   Throughout history, the laws of the freest countries have been mostly if not all prohibitions rather than requirements, and the more requirements a government has added the less free the country has become.   The laws that have been the most universal – the basic laws against such things as murder and theft – are prohibitions.

 

We have now arrived at a point where, if polls are to be believed – and this is a big “if” – the vast majority of Canadians support a different – and far worse – mandate, mandatory vaccination.    The rapidly developed vaccines for the bat flu have spawned much more controversy than the masks.   Much of the heated discussion has been over such matters as the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.    I will leave these matters to others because the ethical problem with vaccine mandates would be the same if they were 100% safe and effective.

Some would distinguish between mandatory vaccination and forced vaccination.    The distinction is false, however, and involves no real difference.   By the latter, these people would presumably have in mind a situation where someone ties you to a chair and injects you with a vaccine without your consent, either freely given or coerced.   A mandatory vaccine, however, is as much a forced vaccine as a vaccine in the circumstance just described.   The only difference is in the nature of the force used, which difference is essentially the same as that between the two robbers in our illustration at the beginning of this essay.

 

Let us use a slightly different illustration.

 

There are three young men.    Each has a young lady of whom he is in pursuit.

 

The first young man woes her with flowers, and chocolates, and sappy love poetry.

 

The second young man, clubs her over the head, drags her off to his cave, and forces himself upon her.

 

The third young man is the young lady’s immediate supervisor.   He tells her that if she wishes to advance in her career, it would be in her best interests to sleep with him, and hints that she will be fired and blackballed in her profession if she does not.

 

As with the original illustration, the first young man is innocent.   The second young man, also corresponding to his counterpart in the first illustration, is a stereotypical rapist.   

 

Is the third young man as guilty of rape, assuming his ploy to be successful, as the second?

 

If your answer is “no” you might be wise to keep your opinion to yourself in the presence of the ladies.  As Rudyard Kipling so aptly said “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.

 

The reason for this second illustration is that the crime involved is much closer in nature to forced vaccination than robbery.   In both rape and forced vaccination someone’s body is penetrated, without that person’s voluntary consent, by a foreign tube which injects a substance into the body.    The similarities far outweigh the differences and include all the elements of rape which make the act a heinous crime.

 

The rhetoric we have been hearing from political leaders, like the Prime Minister, who have imposed vaccine mandates on certain sectors, has been “it is your choice not to be vaccinated, but there will be consequences”.   Imagine a man saying to a woman “it is your choice not to sleep with me, but there will be consequences”.   It would be one thing if by “consequences” the Prime Minister meant something like “you won’t be as protected against the virus as somebody who chooses to take the vaccine.”    This is obviously not what he meant.   It was a threat of the imposition of additional negative consequences apart from whatever ones might be inherent in the choice itself on those who reject the vaccine.   This is an unjustifiable abuse of government power.   Indeed, it is ethically unacceptable for any institution to abuse its authority and power in this way.   Rather than issuing vaccine mandates for their own employees, and those of certain private sectors, governments ought to be forbidding everyone else from imposing private vaccine mandates.    The latter would be a proper and ethical use of government power.  

 

That so many people have indicated their support for vaccine mandates, government or private, demonstrates just how badly our ethical thinking, which was not exactly in great shape prior to the pandemic, has deteriorated over the course of the last two years.

 

(1)   This is what the so-called Culture War, or at least the moral aspect of it, has really been all about.

(2)  The imagery comes from the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans in the New Testament.

Morality is the Only Thing That can be Legislated!

How often have we heard the statement “you cannot legislate morality”? Have you ever stopped to think just how foolish this statement is? If it were said instead that “you cannot make people good by passing legislation” there would be nothing wrong with this. The familiar saying, however, is understood to mean that there is something out there called morality which is forbidden territory for legislators.

The problem with that is that legislation is merely a fancy term for the government passing laws. Laws are merely rules that the government enforces. Like all rules, they place limits upon people’s choices. They tell you that you are not supposed to do this or that – kill your fellow man, steal his possessions, burn down his house, etc. – and they prescribe penalties for you if you ignore the law and go ahead and make those choices anyway.

Why do we have laws? This is a question that can be answered either generally or on a law-by-law basis. If we answer generally, we say that we have laws because they are necessary for the good of the community or the society as a whole. If we answer on a law-by-law basis, we look at what the law prohibits and show how it is something that is harmful, wrong, and evil to a degree that justifies the law. The law that says that you cannot kill your fellow man except in certain very specific circumstances, such as to prevent him from killing you first, is there because murder is just this sort of evil.

Note that both answers require the language of morality for their expression. Morality is human behaviour conceived of in terms of good and evil, right and wrong (the related term ethics refers to systematic thought about morality). Laws in general exist for the good of the society. Specific laws are passed against specific evils. Laws are all about good and evil.

In other words, far from it being the case that morality is something the law cannot or ought not to touch, morality is by definition the only thing that the law concerns itself. It is not true that you cannot legislate morality. It is rather the case that morality is the only thing that can be legislated.

What those who say “you cannot legislate morality” are usually really trying to say is that “you ought not to legislate a specific type of morality, i.e., religious morality”. In other words, the all important question for such people is the question of “who says” that certain behaviour is right or wrong. If a certain type of behaviour is determined to be wrong by the democratically arrived at consensus of the secular society (more likely, in reality, by some out-of-touch group of Ivory Tower liberals) then they are okay with laws being passed against it. If the prophets and Apostles in the Bible, Jesus Christ, the Church Fathers, and the moral theology of the Church for two thousand years says that a certain type of behaviour is wrong, then they object to laws being passed against it on the grounds that such laws would be “theocratic”.

This reflects a certain type of thinking that is based upon progressive and positivist assumptions about the history of human thought. In this type of thinking religion, theology, and metaphysics are seen as primitive forms of thought that are vastly inferior to those of the modern reason and science which have superseded and surpassed them. Religion and theology come from a dark past, according to people who think this way, in which they were the tools of oppressive rulers for controlling their people. Reason and science, they think, by contrast, are the tools of the emancipated individual. Therefore the true morality and ethics, from this point of view, must be that about which a consensus is arrived at voluntarily by these modern emancipated individuals guided by the light of their experience (or, more likely, whatever their progressive professor tells them to think). If religious codes of morality have any place at all it is in the private conscience of the individual.

This sort of thinking is, of course, utter nonsense. If there are any rules of behaviour about which anything coming even approximately close to a universal consensus, agreed to by all peoples in all place and all times, exists, it is those basic rules which are enshrined in the moral codes of religion – in, for example, the Decalogue’s “thou shalt not kill”, “thou shalt not steal”, “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, etc. Far from arriving at a superior morality, the Twentieth Century bears record of how modern, emancipated man, justified himself as he committed evils on an unprecedented scale.

That religion teaches that a certain kind of behaviour is wrong is not a valid argument for the law to stay out of it. Religion teaches that murder is wrong, only a fool would therefore argue that there must be no law against murder lest we succumb to the threat of theocracy. There is no difference in kind between the law that forbids you or I from murdering our fellow man and a law which forbids a woman from having an abortion. Indeed, the best and only argument against the latter law would be that it ought to be rendered redundant by the law against murder.

Legislation, by its very nature and definition, is all about morality. It is the government attempting to limit our personal choices, by forbidding that which is wrong, for the good of the whole society. Now, if morality is the only thing that can be legislated, it does not follow that all morality ought to be legislated. In other words, we can recognize that one kind of behaviour is right and another is wrong without insisting that the government and the law has to have a say about it. If we wish to live in a free society, and the English speaking world has traditionally placed a very high premium upon freedom, rather than a tyrannical or totalitarian society, then we will prefer that the law limit itself to prohibiting those evils about which it is absolutely necessary that there be a law. This is a principle that has long been recognized in orthodox moral theology, being identified, for example, in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. (1)

A far better principle, about what the law can and cannot do, than the foolish “you cannot legislate morality” is the principle that the law can only govern outward behaviour and not the heart. This is another way of saying that you cannot make a person good by passing laws. That is not what they are there for. You can pass a law that says that a man cannot poke his neighbour’s eye out, and, hopefully, this law will reduce the evil of blindness due to eye-poking. A law that tried to prevent a person from even thinking about poking their neighbour in the eye, on the other hand, would be silly and inane.

It is telling that the progressives, who accuse social conservatives of theocratic motives for wanting to undo the legalization of abortion and for wanting to return to what until very recently was the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, are the ones who love to recite the absurd saying that we have here debunked about not being able to legislate morality, yet they themselves are loud and shrill in their support for anti-discrimination, “human rights” and “hate” legislation. A law against abortion does not tell a woman how to think or feel – it tells her she cannot kill her unborn child. Laws against “hate” exist for no purpose other than to tell people what to think and feel.

(1) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa.FS_Q96_A2.html

The Difference Between Being a Do-Gooder and Doing Good

One of the best known of Jesus’ parables is recounted by St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, verses twenty-five through thirty-seven. The passage begins with a lawyer asking Jesus the question “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Even though St. Luke tells us that the lawyer was not asking this in good faith but in an attempt, rather, to trip Jesus up, the Lord does not respond as you or I would probably be tempted to do to one of the barristers, solicitors, and attorneys in general of our own day by saying “Fat chance that someone in your line of work will ever make it”. No, Jesus passed on this opportunity to tell an excellent lawyer joke (1) and instead turned the question around and asked the lawyer what the Torah had to say about it. The lawyer answers this by quoting the two verses that Jesus Himself would quote when asked which is the greatest commandment, and Jesus commended this answer, but the lawyer then came back with a second question “Who is my neighbour?” It is then that Jesus relates the parable in which a man is robbed, stripped, and left to die on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and is left there by a priest and a Levite who happen to pass by but is rescued by a passing Samaritan who treats his wounds and takes him to an inn to take care of him. This parable has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

I would like to tell a different parable that begins in the same way Jesus’ did, but takes a rather different turn towards the end, hoping, that in doing so, I am not committing a terrible act of blasphemy. Here it goes.

A man is on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem when he is beset by thieves, robbers, and cutthroats, relieved of his possessions, and left bloody, wounded, and mangled on the side of the road. Shortly thereafter a priest comes along, followed a little later by a Levite, and both avert their eyes and walk on the other side of the road, rather than trying to help the poor soul. Then the Samaritan comes along. He is outraged at the plight of his fellow man and the callousness shown by the priest and Levite. In Jerusalem, Jericho, and all the surrounding communities he circulates a petition demanding that highways be made safer for travelers and that legislation be passed forcing people to stop and help the victims of highway robberies or face a heavy fine or possibly a lashing and prison time. He calls for the establishment of a public fund to take care of those victimized by highway crime and for taxes to be imposed on the priests and Levites to pay for this fund. He makes a nuisance of himself lobbying for these reforms before the Sanhedrin and in the courts of Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate and King Herod. Eventually, word of his crusade reaches Rome, and a committee of Senators invites him to come and present his case for highway security and social programs for robbery victims before Caesar himself. Meanwhile, the man who was robbed remains on the side of the road and dies.

This, of course, is the Parable of the Do-Gooder Samaritan.

It is one of the curiosities of the English language that the expression “do-gooder” does not refer to people who actually “do good”. Indeed, the expression is one of ironic contempt that suggests that there is a disconnect between the good the person to which it is applied thinks he is doing and the actual outcome of his actions. Sometimes it is just a matter of ineffectiveness in which the do-gooder has good intentions and a noble goal but fails to actually accomplish anything. Often, however, the do-gooder might accomplish harm either instead of the good he intends or which is greater than and outweighs the smaller good he actually achieves. A do-gooder typically displays naivety of one kind or another, ranging from a simple lack of the experience and know-how necessary to accomplish his lofty goals to a kind of tunnel vision in which he is so focused upon achieving one particular ideal that he is blinded to the negative consequences of his attempts to achieve it.

We usually associate the idea of a do-gooder with that of a social and moral crusader. A crusader of this type is someone who attempts to bring about a particular end either by persuading the government to pass legislation or by organizing private citizens to take action. The interesting thing about this methodology is that it distributes the cost of accomplishing a desired goal among many people, either the organized private citizens or the taxpayers as a whole, and can sometimes lead to the blame being distributed if something goes wrong as well. Meanwhile, the crusader or do-gooder gets the full credit if something good is actually accomplished. This may or may not justify an attitude of cynicism towards the motives of the reformer but it is worth taking note of and contrasting with the example of the Good Samaritan of Jesus’ parable, who when leaving the robbed man with the innkeeper told the latter to add the cost of any additional assistance that might be required to his bill.

Another contrast between do-gooders and people like the Good Samaritan who actually do good is that the latter are concerned with personally doing the right thing whereas the former are obsessed with improving everybody else. This leaves other people with the impression that the do-gooder is a self-satisfied, self-righteous, better-than-thou type of person, an impression that is in no way lessened when he enlists the help of the government in accomplishing his goals. All sorts of ridiculous legislation that is far more of an obnoxious nuisance to most people than it is a benefit can be attributed to this cause in the last century alone. Some of this legislation, like Prohibition, the biggest single effect of which was to make the mob rich and powerful, was long ago discredited and rescinded. Other such legislation, no-less discredited, for some reason remains on the books. Canadian and American federal drug laws are a prime example. Other laws that were initiated by do-gooders and which harass people more than they help them are laws which prohibit people from driving when their blood alcohol level is above an arbitrary percentage point regardless of whether they are capable of driving safely in that condition or not, laws which jack up the price of tobacco, prohibit smoking sections in restaurants and drive smokers out into the cold whenever they want a puff or two, laws that prevent an employer from offering a man a high enough wage to support his wife and children lest a single woman be discriminated against, and laws that ensure that that an employer, if he wishes to remain free of harassing lawsuits, will hire a certain percentage of ethnic and racial minorities regardless of their qualifications. Any legislation associated with the concept of human rights can be regarded as falling within the category we are discussing.

Ultimately though, the worst thing about being a do-gooder is that it is a cop out of the ethical or moral life. It is far easier, to sign up for some “save the world” cause or the other – take your pick, they are a dime a dozen – and try to fix other people, than it is to try and do the right thing yourself, to cultivate the virtues and good character, and to seek after the good, the true, and the beautiful. The latter is the hard work of a lifetime and the rewards, while enduring, take longer to appear whereas the former is easy and the rewards are instantly gratifying.

(1) Have you heard the one about the dispute between God and the devil over the fence between Heaven and Hell? The fence was run down and it was the devil's turn to have it fixed. He, being the blighter he is, did nothing about it. God pointed out his negligence and he replied "So sue me". When God said that He might do just that the devil came back with "Oh yeah. Where are you going to find a lawyer?".

The Ethics of Economics

Professor Ronald S. Dart of the University of the Frazer Valley in Abbotsford, B. C. is a traditional, Canadian Tory. So, for that matter, am I. His interpretation of the Tory tradition and mine differ in a number of ways. One way our interpretations differ is in the colour we each would assign to the tradition. I, who place much emphasis upon the monarchist element of traditional Toryism, insist that the proper colour of Toryism is royal blue. Professor Dart on the other hand prefers the colour red for his Toryism.


Do not mistake me. The expression “Red Tory” is used in two different ways, with two different meanings, in Canada and they are not interchangeable. One way the term is used is to refer to people who are members of the Conservative Party but whose ideas are indistinguishable from those of progressive liberals or the socialist Left. The other way the term is used is to refer to people whose ideas genuinely fall within the British-Canadian conservative tradition and more specifically within the interpretation of that tradition associated with the great Canadian philosopher George P. Grant. When the term is used the first way I mentioned it is as a term of derision, usually applied by those who would refer to themselves as small-c conservatives. When it is used in the second way mentioned it is proudly self-applied. The Red Toryism of Professor Dart is the second and by far the better of the two.

Toryism is a tradition that began in the United Kingdom in the seventeenth century but which draws upon the much older traditions of classical antiquity, medieval Christendom in general, and of England/Great Britain in particular. It is also an expression of an attitude that can be found in every time and place – that of preferring the known to the unknown and the tried, tested, and true to the inventive and innovative. The Tory tradition, which started with the royalists or cavaliers in the English Civil War, stood for the established constitution of Church and State, as grounded in prescription and divine authority, and for an organic view of society rather than a contractual model. When modern philosophy bore fruit in the violence and terror of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, even though he had been a member of the opposing party in Parliament, took Tory principles and reworked them into a philosophical defence of the English constitution and Christianity against modernity. This revitalized Toryism was the first political philosophy to bear the name conservative.

The Dominion of Canada, which never violently broke continuity with the British tradition in which she was founded in the way the United States did, inherited its conservative tradition directly from Great Britain. Furthermore, the Toryism Canada inherited is a specific branch of the Tory tradition that developed in the Victorian era, the era in which Canada came together as a country in Confederation. That branch of the Tory tradition is known as One Nation Conservatism, a title derived from a phrase in the book Sybil, by Victorian Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. What distinguishes One Nation Conservatism from other forms of Toryism is its emphasis on the idea that participation in the organic whole that is the country should be of benefit to all members and levels of society and that the security of the established constitution depends upon this being the case. Thus the One Nation Conservatives supported modest social programs that would alleviate misery and prevent the dissatisfaction from developing that is the fuel of the revolutionary demagogue.

The Red Toryism of George Grant – who disliked the expression “Red Tory” – is a further interpretation of the One Nation Conservative interpretation of the High Tory tradition. While Grant is a man I highly admired and whose writings have been quite influential on my own thinking, I disagree with his contention that socialism is more conservative than capitalism, which is the main reason his version of One Nation Conservatism has been dubbed Red.

Professor Dart, who has made significant contributions of his own to this branch of the Tory tradition, has recently posted a manifesto entitled “Red Tories of Canada Unite” at the Clarion Journal to which he is a frequent contributor. I encourage you to read it as there is much in there that is of value even to those of us Tories who are not particularly “Red”. There is one section in particular that caught my attention. I will quote it in its entirety using boldface to represent what is italicized in the original:

Third, Tories do not separate ethics from economics. When the ledger of profit and loss becomes the dominant criteria we use for evaluating the wealth, health, prosperity and development of a people, we become moral cripples. The tendency to divorce ethics and economics runs contrary to the best of historic Toryism that grounds political life in the classical virtues of courage, wisdom, justice and moderation. The cleavage between the rich and poor is a natural product of elevating trade and commerce and ignoring or subordinating an ethical plumb line by which wealth is earned and distributed. Dante, for example, placed the greedy and idle rich in the lowest level of hell. We need not read too far in Leacock’s Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich or Prime Minister William Bennett’s The Premier Speaks to the People to get a solid fix and feel for how the best of Canadian Tories have viewed the clash between ethics and economics. (http://www.clarion-journal.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2013/05/red-tories-of-canada-unite-a-manifesto-ron-dart.html#more)

It is the first sentence in this remarkable paragraph that I wish to comment on, although my comments may and probably will touch on the other sentences as well. “Third, Tories do not separate ethics from economics”. This is a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree. It is worthy of deeper reflection and I can think of no better way of beginning that reflection than by addressing three questions that arise naturally out of the statement. What is ethics? What is economics? Why should ethics and economics be inseparable? Let us think about those questions in that order before moving on to consider the implications of the inseparability of ethics and economics.

What is ethics? The term ethics comes from the Greek word for habits, manners, or patterns of behaviour, just as the term morals comes from the Latin word with a similar range of meaning. Ethics is moral philosophy, i.e., intelligent, contemplative, thought about human behaviour both as it is and as it ought to be.

Everything we human beings do we do with some end in mind. We may desire that end for it’s own sake or because it is a step towards a further end. These ends we consider to be goods and the most basic way by which we judge our actions to be good or bad is on the basis of how effectively they achieve their ends. There is often a difference, however, between the ends we actually strive after and the ends we ought to strive after. We may put all our effort into achieving a lesser good while ignoring completely a greater good. We may fail to recognize a good as a good or we may mistake as a good something that is not a good. How to distinguish a true good from a false good, a greater good from a lesser good, and the supreme good from all other goods is the subject matter of ethics.

Ethics is not just an ethereal, abstract, ivory tower discussion however. It too has an end, a good that it strives after, and that good is the formation of human character. Our actions are not carried out in isolation from each other. When we make a decision, good or bad, we increase the likelihood that we will make that same kind of decision again. We are creatures of habit, in other words, and our habits, our patterns of good and/or bad decision making, shape our character. The proper goal or good of ethics is the development of good character by the formation of habits in which we discern and choose true goods rather than false goods and value greater goods over lesser goods. These habits are called virtues and their opposites are called vices.

The introduction of ethics was the greatest contribution of the Athenian school to the Western philosophical tradition. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began the discussion of ethics to which subsequent schools of thought would later add their own contributions. In the Christian era, ethics was fundamentally transformed. Philosophy, guided by the light of reason, could only go so. It could not bring man to the highest good, for the highest good is God. Since human reason and philosophy cannot reach God, God had to come down to man, which He did in the Incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ. Christ’s Life, Death, and Resurrection forever changed the relationship between God and man and in the Self-revelation of God, man was given three new virtues to cultivate – faith, hope, and charity or Christian love. This was beautifully illustrated by Dante in the poem Professor Dart referred to. (1) Virgil, representing natural reason, could guide Dante only so far as to the entrance to the Earthly Paradise at the peak of Mt. Purgatory. After that point Beatrice, representing divine wisdom had to take over.

Let us turn now to our second question. What is economics?

Economics is also a word that comes to us from the Greeks. It is derived from the word economy which combines the Greek words for household and law. The Greeks used this combination to refer to the management of household affairs. We still sometimes use the word economy in this way, to describe the virtue of the man who manages his affairs so as to live within his means. The ordinary use of the word economy to refer to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a community, region, or country is an extrapolation from the original meaning. If you think of your community, province, or entire country as an extended household you will see how this meaning was derived. This kind of economy is properly referred to as a political economy, the affairs of the polity or commonwealth, conceived of as a large-scale household.

Economics is a modern twist on the concept of economy. Economics is an intellectual discipline that treats the kind of human activities that we would call economic because they fall under the earlier meanings of economy as the subject matter of a science. It is not a hard science, like natural sciences such as physics, biology and chemistry, but a soft science, i.e., a social or behavioural science. Whether soft or hard, however, the sciences of the modern age rest upon a number of shared assumptions – that everything we need to understand the world is available to us via our physical senses, that through empirical methodology we can convert our observations of the world into laws explaining how things work, and that we can then use the knowledge contained in those laws to obtain mastery over all we survey.

The first of those assumptions is epistemological nonsense and is arguably the root error of all modern thought. The last of those assumptions, however, has the appearance if not the substance of truth, and this is the source of the hold the sciences have had on modern man. “Look at all the wonderful things we have been able to accomplish in such a short time through science, it must surely therefore be the source of all wisdom and truth.” Even if it were the case, however, that we could obtain complete mastery over ourselves and the world through science that would not answer the question of whether or not we should do so. This question is dismissed by many in the scientific community today, as can be seen in the “because I can” justification one often encounters in debates over the moral implications of such things as stem-cell research. It is a question, however, that needs to be asked and which deserves a better answer than that. (2)

Which brings us back to ethics and to our third question, why should ethics and economics be inseparable?

The subject matter of economics is a class or category of human activity. Human beings have material needs and desires. To satisfy those needs and desires we either produce what we need and desire for ourselves, produce things that other people need or desire to exchange with them for what we need or desire, or offer services of various sorts to other people in exchange for the things we need or desire. These are the activities that are studied as economics and, like all human activities, they are subject to evaluation in terms of the questions posed by ethics.

The modern economist does not deny the claims of ethics over economics altogether. He answers those claims, however, by asserting that the science of economics, by uncovering the laws that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of material goods, will provide man with the tools needed to create material abundance for all – or at least the largest number possible - and with that material abundance will bring universal human happiness, or at least something closely akin to it. This is economics’ version of the claim made by all modern sciences. Since this is the claim of the economist regardless of whether he supports capitalism or socialism all ethical criticism of this claim applies equally to capitalism and to socialism.

There are many such criticisms to be made.

The ethics of the modern economist is utilitarian. It is based upon the idea that right action is determined by what produces the maximum amount of happiness for the largest number of people. Utilitarianism removes the qualitative element from ethical judgement and reduces it to quantitative measurement. As an ethical system this is inferior by far to those developed by classical philosophers and the theologians of Christendom.

Furthermore, it is a materialistic ethics that equates material abundance with happiness. This equation, however, is false. Economic liberalism or capitalism, the system devised by the first modern economists in the 18th Century, as it has developed to the present day has produced material abundance that would have been unimaginable in previous centuries. It has also managed to distribute this abundance widely throughout the populations of those countries that have embraced capitalism. This can be seen by everybody except those who blind themselves to it by measuring the distribution of affluence against the yardstick of absolute equality. In a sense, therefore, liberalism has fulfilled the claims of modern economics. In a larger sense, however, it has failed because this material abundance has not brought happiness with it.

Think about it. If material abundance brought happiness, why are alcoholism and drug abuse significant social problems in liberal countries? These same countries, in the period in which they saw the greatest explosion of material abundance in human history, have experienced a massive social breakdown. There has been an erosion of a sense of community, divorce rates have skyrocketed while fertility rates have plummeted. All of these problems are symptomatic of a deep and widespread unhappiness.

Capitalism’s main competitor has been socialism. Socialism was originally thought up as an alternative to capitalism by economists and political radicals in the 19th Century. According to liberal capitalist theory the road to material prosperity lay in the investment of private entrepreneurs in large scale production products carried out in a setting of freedom guided by the forces of the free market. Socialist theory taught that there would be greater material abundance which would be more fairly distributed if the means of production were publicly owned and distribution was administered for the common good by a board of intellectual experts.

Socialism was a disaster when put into practice. It had the same goal as capitalism – maximizing material abundance and distributing it to the largest number of people – but it was nowhere near as capable of accomplishing that goal as capitalism was. Worse, if neither capitalism nor socialism was capable of generating human happiness, socialism proved remarkably adept at producing the exact opposite, human misery. Everywhere it was attempted for any significant length of time it eroded human sympathy and feeling, generated mass suffering and misery, and brought about widespread spiritual and moral death.  Deducing what socialism would be like in practice, Canadian Tory Stephen Leacock declared “socialism, in other words, is slavery.”

The temptation to equate material abundance with happiness – or at least to think that the two go hand in hand – has always been with men. The ethical teachings of the great classical and Christian tradition, however, guarded against this temptation. Material goods, including such necessities as food, clothing, and shelter, are real goods, the ancient philosophers taught, i.e., things to be desired and sought, but they were among the lower goods. True happiness came through the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of the higher goods, including the transcendental ideals of truth, beauty and goodness. Men need material goods to sustain their existence, and are drawn to these and other lower goods by the appetites of their animal nature, but these goods were to be the means and not the end of their existence. Men were called to rule their appetites rather than to be ruled by them and to make the pursuit of the higher goods the end of their existence.

That the accumulation of wealth should not be the end of our existence, the purpose for which we live, is also the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. The Book of Proverbs records the request of Agur ben Jakeh that he be given “neither poverty nor riches” so as to be spared the temptations that come with each. Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, warned His disciples against making mammon their master and told them to lay up eternal treasures in heaven rather than fading treasures on earth. They should not worry about material things, He said, but should seek first the kingdom and righteousness of God. St. Paul, writing to the Philippians from his prison cell, told them that he had learned “in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

Modern economics in both its capitalist and socialist forms has inverted the hierarchy of goods contained in classical and Christian teaching.

There is, of course, a lot more in the ethical teachings of the pre-modern tradition that applies to economic matters than just the idea that we are to devote our lives to the pursuit of higher goods and to make the activity by which we obtain the material necessities of life to be merely the means to that end. I have focused on this because the deviation of modern economics on this point appears to me to be its first ethical error and the source of all the others.

The Holy Scriptures repeatedly condemn the person who allows others to perish for lack of the basic necessities of life. They even more vehemently condemn the person who does more than just stand by and watch but who actively takes advantage of the vulnerability of others. The Psalms frequently express astonishment that such people seemingly prosper and are not struck from the earth. The prophetic literature is full of rebuke after rebuke of the kings of Israel and Judah for not doing their job and administering justice for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor in general, upon the heads of their oppressors.

There are many forms of liberal capitalism, such as Social Darwinism and that taught by Ayn Rand, that come out looking very bad in the light of this Scriptural teaching.

That does not let the socialists off the hook, however. Socialist economic theory is built upon the idea that private property is the source of all evil, that man went wrong when he first pointed to what had previously been held in common, and distinguished between “mine” and “thine”, and that things can only be set right by returning everything to common ownership. Two of the famous Ten Commandments handed down to Israel and Mt. Sinai and reiterated at the edge of the Promised Land, however, are protections of people’s property against the designs of others, the commandment against stealing and the commandment against coveting.

There is no contradiction in the ethical teachings of the Scriptures here. In the condemnation of the indifferent onlooker, the oppressor, and the unjust ruler, the basic instruction to us is that we are to help others, to share what we have with those who are need, and basically to treat other people well and just. When the Scriptures forbid us from stealing or even coveting the property of others they are giving us the same basic instruction. To share what is ours with others when they are in need and to refrain from lusting for and taking what they have are two sides to what it means to “love thy neighbour as thyself”.

In interpreting these teachings of the Scriptures for the faithful down through the centuries the Christian Church has identified avarice and envy as being among the seven sins that are particularly deadly and to be avoided. Avarice, or greed, is not just the desire for material goods. Nor even is it just the desire for more material goods than one already has or for more material goods than one needs, for if those desires were a deadly sin then it would be a moral requirement for us to live in caves and possess nothing more than the spears we would need to kill our daily dinner. Avarice is best understood as being the polar opposite of the idea of sharing. It is the desire to possess as much as one possibly can while leaving as little as possible for others. To envy is both to covet what another has for oneself and to resent the other for what he has. Dorothy L. Sayers once remarked that “If Avarice is the sin of the Haves against the Have-Nots, Envy is the sin of the Have-Nots against the Haves.”

I think she was right in saying this and I do not think that I would be straying too far from her original meaning by making the paraphrase that avarice is the sin of capitalism, and envy the sin of socialism. I would add, however, a proviso, that while capitalism may create occasion and temptation for the sin of avarice, socialism requires and is fueled by the sin of envy. Businessmen are frequently accused of the sin of avarice and undoubtedly are frequently guilty of it as well. They are also frequently falsely accused of it and these false accusations arise out of the envy that is at the heart of socialism. A person does not have to be avaricious to be a businessman. There is nothing innately avaricious about running a business and wanting it to turn a profit. Socialism, on the other hand, could not exist apart from the sin of envy. It is its lifeblood.

Neither of the two main systems of economic organization, dreamed up by modern economists, measures up by the standards of traditional, classical, and Christian ethics. As we have seen, capitalism and socialism both have their own specific moral defect, but more importantly they both share in the common ethical failing of all modern economics , the mistaking of material abundance for happiness and the inversion of the hierarchy of goods so as to make the pursuit of material goods the end of human existence.

I do not mean to propose another economic system as a kind of ethical alternative to capitalism and socialism. The problem is not just with capitalism and socialism but with the whole idea that an economic system could be devised that would bring Paradise to man on earth. Tories recognize that economics in the best sense is an art rather than a science, the art practiced in each family by those who manage the affairs of the household, and the art of statesmen in managing the affairs of the country. Tories also recognize that, for those practicing that art, the most useful information does not come from blueprints drawn up in some ivory tower, but from experience, both personal, and the collective experience of the society and of the human race in general, i.e. the experience embodied in tradition. Included within that tradition, and inseparable from it, is the ancient and ongoing discussion of goods and the good (3) that we call ethics, and so for this reason, among many others, Professor Dart is indeed right in saying that “Tories do not separate ethics from economics.”

(1) There is an error in the reference. Dante did not place the greedy and the wasteful in the lowest level of hell. He placed them in the fourth circle of hell, the lowest circle of upper hell which Virgil and Dante passed through before crossing the River Styx and the city Dis into lower hell. The ninth, and lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, was the pit of Cocytus, reserved for the treacherous.

(2) Much of the published writings of George Grant is devoted to this question in one form or another. See especially his Philosophy for a Mass Age, Technology and Empire, and Technology and Justice.

(3) Part of that ongoing discussion, is the serious critique of modern economic systems, including both capitalism and socialism, from a standpoint of traditional ethics. Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is an excellent example of this. It called for social justice for the workers in industrial capitalism but condemned socialism as an unacceptable alternative to capitalism. In this it was far superior to the attempt to equate socialism with the Christian gospel that was occurring in North America at the same time. This latter so-called “Social Gospel” was found primarily among free church Protestants who had been influenced by modern philosophy into rejecting the doctrines contained in the Creeds of the ancient Church and the Confessions of their own denominations. Leo XIII’s encyclical, inspired the “distributist” critiques of capitalism and socialism among early 20th Century Catholic writers such as Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, who in turn inspired the critiques of such men as E. F. Schumacher and Wilhelm Roepke later in the 20th Century. Roepke wrote at a time when the distinction between capitalism and socialism was becoming blurred as both systems were evolving in the same direction – mass society governed by bureaucrats and technocratic managers. He was an advocate of economic liberalism, of the Austrian school type, but only within a Christian social and moral context. Schumacher wrote later on in the 20th Century, when the evolution of capitalism and socialism into a single large scale system was already more or less complete. He believed that large scale economics in mass societies dehumanized those who participated in it, and declaring that “small is beautiful” issued a call for local, small-scale, economics “as if people mattered”. That call would be repeated in the writings of many others, left and right, including Kirkpatrick Sale, Wendell Berry, Rod Dreher, and Bill Kauffman.

The Centre of Christianity

What is the essence of Christianity, the heart of the Christian message, the sine qua non of the Christian faith?

Many people today would answer this question with an ethical statement. “We should be kind to others”, would be a fairly standard example of this kind of answer.

Is this the correct answer?

Before answering that question we should ponder another question. Why do so many people think that the essence of Christianity is an ethical message about being good or kind to other people?

One answer to that question might be “Because Jesus taught us to be kind to other people”. That is true. In His most famous Sermon Jesus said “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 7:12) Since most people would prefer that others were kind to them this could be paraphrased as “be good and kind to other people.” Does this lie at the absolute centre of Jesus’ message though?

There is an implication of the idea that “being good to others” is at the heart of Jesus’ message that has perhaps not occurred to many of those who would give a knee-jerk “yes” answer to that last question. If, “being good to others” was central to Jesus’ message, with everything else He taught being peripheral, then Christ’s message would be an anthropocentric message, man-centred, rather than a theocentric message, God-centred.

This implication actually points us to the reason why so many people conceive of the Christian message as being basically ethical. There has been a revolution in Western thought over the last 500-800 years.

If we go back to the roots of Western civilization in ancient Athens, Socrates laid the intellectual foundation for two millennia of Western thought when he re-focused Greek thought away from questions about the substance of the material world, which had been the focus of earlier Greek philosophers such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Empedocles of Agrigentum, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Socrates, focused on questions about things which transcended the material world. “What is courage?” “What is justice?” “What is virtue?” He searched for answers to these questions insisting that a valid answer would be one which would apply universally to all examples of these things. Socrates’ student Plato, through whose writings his teacher is known to us today, developed out of Socrates search for universals, the idea that the material world is an imperfect, shadowy reflection of reality. Reality, according to Plato consisted of perfect, eternal, immaterial, universals which he called eidoi (usually translated “Forms”) and which man could only contemplate through the use of reason. Plato’s own pupil, Aristotle, differed from Plato in that he taught that man approached transcendent universals though particulars that one experiences empirically in this world, but agreed with his teacher that the transcendent universals themselves, are the subject of the highest, truest, and most important knowledge.

This concept of the Athenian philosophers, that things which are invisible, eternal, perfect, and beyond the world available to the senses but imperfectly represented in that world, was the foundation of Western thought for millennia. It provided the intellectual framework within which Christian theology was developed.

Then, over the last several centuries, modern philosophers began to reorient Western thought away from the universal, the invisible, the transcendent, towards the physical world. In the 14th Century, William of Occam taught a form of nominalism (the denial of the existence of metaphysical universals). In the 17th Century, René Descartes tried to develop a rational belief system in which nothing was “known” unless he could logically demonstrate it from something of which he was absolutely certain. His search for such certainty turned inward until he reasoned that since he couldn’t doubt that he was doubting, his mental activity and hence his existence, were certainties. It was a brilliant solution to his problem – brilliant, but autocentric. Immanuel Kant, in the 18th Century taught that our knowledge was subjective, that we can only ever know phenomena (external things as they appear to us) because we play an active role in how we perceive things, therefore noumena (things “as they are in themselves”, this is the term which in classical philosophy includes everything beyond the world available to the senses) are forever outside our knowledge. In the 19th Century, Auguste Comte, one of the first sociologists, argued for positivism, the idea that we can only know that which we can experience, observe, and empirically test in the material world. He taught a progressive theory of the history of human knowledge in which theology and metaphysics are primitive stages prior to the “positive” approach of modern science. In the early 20th Century an extreme version of this doctrine called “logical positivism” became popular in intellectual circles.

This reorientation of Western thought away from the transcendent, invisible, and eternal to the imminent, visible, and temporal both contributed to and was the result of the birth of modern science with all of its blessings and curses. It has also led to a way of referring to the physical world as the “real world” that is popular among parents who wish to encourage their kids to focus on their education and get good jobs, among people who have come to regard life as a long bitter struggle to sustain one’s physical existence, and various others. It has further led to a popular misconception of the relationship between the scientific and the possible. Since scientists express the summaries of their observations as “laws” many people have gotten the wrong impression that a scientific law means “such-and-such has to happen in this way under all circumstances” rather than “such-and-such has always happened in this way in our observations and experiments so there is a high probability that it will continue to always happen this way in the future”.

This in turn has led to a bias against the possibility of the supernatural, of miracles. Thus, people who had adopted these modern perspectives, and who therefore read the Gospels and dismissed the possibility of the Virgin Birth, the turning of the water into wine, the healing miracles, the calming of the storm and walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the 5000, and the Resurrection, but who still wished to think of themselves as Christians, had to look for an essence of Christianity which relegated all of the supernatural aspects of the Gospels to outward religious trappings of the Christian message. This left them with the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ.

Did Jesus Christ make ethics the heart of His message however? Do those who see Jesus as primarily an ethical teacher even understand His ethical teachings?

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” Jesus is often quoted as saying. He did say that, but He was not introducing anything new. He was quoting Leviticus 19:18. Furthermore, He made it explicitly clear that “love thy neighbor as thyself” is not the highest principle of His ethical system. It is only the second greatest commandment. The greatest is to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”. Loving God, takes precedence over loving man, in Christ’s ethical teachings. This precludes “being kind to other people” from being central to Christ’s teachings. It is important but it is not the most important thing.

Jesus said of these commandments “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”. What does this mean? “The law and the prophets” are what Christians call “the Old Testament” and what Jews call the Tanakh (from the acronym of the initials of the Hebrew words for Law, Prophets, and Writings). When Jesus says that “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” He is saying that the Old Testament is summarized in these two commandments. He is also saying that someone who truly loves God and his neighbor, will keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

That is something that people who think Jesus’ teachings can be summarized in “be nice to one another” are not likely to be very comfortable with. The Old Testament contains all sorts of commandments that such people usually don’t like. They like to think that the point of Jesus’ teachings was to do away with the Old Testament commandments and replace them with “be nice to each other”. Jesus Himself, however, warned people against interpreting His words this way:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

These words occur in the Sermon on the Mount just prior to the section where Jesus quotes six Old Testament rules and demonstrates that the standard of righteousness God requires goes beyond the mere, literal, sense of the commandments. The commandment against murder, Jesus says, means that “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” The commandment against adultery, Jesus says, is broken even by lustful thoughts. The Old Testament includes civil law provisions for divorce and swearing oaths, but the righteousness God demands of people, Jesus said, requires that you do not divorce your wife unless she has been unfaithful and that you speak the truth at all times so that an oath is redundant and unnecessary. The Old Testament includes instructions for civil judges as to how to dispense justice and commands love for one’s neighbor. Jesus adds that one is not to take the former into his own hands and avenge oneself and that love should be extended even to one’s enemies.

The “love” Jesus preached, then, goes beyond the bland “kindness” and “niceness” that the modern liberal reads into it. Jesus’ ethical teachings are extremely demanding. Furthermore, they are filled with threats of judgment and Hell. This is exactly the sort of thing that people who think Christianity is about “being nice to others” don’t like, but Jesus talked about these subjects more than anybody else in the Bible.

After Jesus’ baptism, and his 40 day fast in the wilderness, the Gospels record that He began His preaching/teaching ministry. The message, the Gospels record Him preaching throughout Galilee is “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” What did that mean?

The kingdom of heaven is what the Jews were waiting for. The Old Testament records the covenant God made with the people of Israel, and the history of how they would be unfaithful, God would judge them, they would repent, and He would restore them. The prophetic literature of the Old Testament records the words of the prophets addressed to Israel and Judah (and sometimes to the surrounding nations) in the last days of the divided Kingdom, in the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that wiped out Israel’s political sovereignty. The prophets spoke of this as God’s judgment on Israel for unfaithfulness, idolatry, and a lack of mercy and justice. The prophetic pronouncements of judgment and condemnation, however, were tempered with a message of hope. God will not be angry with His people forever. He will establish His kingdom on earth, He will establish a New Covenant in which He will write His laws, not on tablets of stone but upon the hearts of His people, He will send a Redeemer.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand” meant that that promised time had arrived at long last. Therefore, Israel was called upon to repent and to “believe the gospel (“good news”, in this case meaning that the long-awaited kingdom is finally here). At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus made it explicit what He meant by “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, when He rode into Jerusalem on the Sunday before Passover on a donkey. He was the promised Redeemer. He was the Messiah. He was the Christ. That was His message.

This had been present in His teachings all along. He said things no ordinary teacher of ethics would ever have said. In the portion of the Sermon on the Mount referred to above, where He expounded on the meaning of 6 commandments in the Old Testament, He used a formula “You have heard that it was said…but I say unto you” which placed His own teachings on the level of the writings He had declared to be authoritative Scripture. At the very end of that same Sermon, just before He compares His teachings to a rock, and people who do what He says to a man who builds a house on the rock rather than on the sinking foundation of sand, He said:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matt. 7:21-23)

Do you recognize the significance of this? Jesus is saying in these words that He will be the one who will pronounce the final judgment upon men. He was saying that He was Himself God come down from Heaven to live amongst His people.

This lay at the heart of everything He said, and everything He did, from His telling the man with palsy whom He healed “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee” to when He promised the rich young ruler that he would have treasure in heaven if he gave up everything he had and followed Jesus, statements no ordinary teacher could have made without committing blasphemy. He accepted men’s worship, commended those who displayed faith in Him and rewarded that faith, and rebuked those who did not believe, including on several occasions, His own disciples.

When He presented Himself in Jerusalem openly as the Messiah, initially the masses welcomed Him, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” By the end of the week, they were demanding His blood from Pilate, crying out “Crucify Him”. That too, lies at the heart of His message.

Jesus at one point asked His disciples Who men said that He was. They gave various answers and He then asked them Who they said He was. Peter answered “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, which answer Jesus commended. He then began telling His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, where He would be put to death, and three days later He would rise again.

On the night before His crucifixion, at the Last Supper He took bread and after blessing and breaking it, He gave it to His disciples saying “Take, eat; this is My body”, then took the cup and after giving thanks said:

Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matt. 26:27-28)

The “new testament” is the new covenant that was promised by the Prophets. What Jesus was saying here as He commissioned the Eucharist, was that He Himself, would be the sacrifice that would establish the new covenant. His sacrifice would do what no other sacrifice could. It would take away the sins of the world, making peace between God and man, a peace into which all people everywhere are invited to participate through faith.

Jesus Christ Himself, then, is the centre of Christianity. Christianity is about Who Jesus is, about His sacrificial death on the cross, and about His Resurrection from the dead. The Resurrection is the evidence which confirms that Christ is Who He claimed to be.

The Athenian philosophers 400 years before Christ came to earth, argued that true wisdom lies in contemplating the transcendent, the perfect, and the eternal, the things which lie beyond the world we know through our senses. The sort of things they had in mind were universals which correspond to categories of physical particulars. God, of course, is also beyond the world we experience through our senses. He does not, however, correspond to a category in the physical world. How then is He to be known to us? In the pagan cultures of two millennia ago, people made statues of their deities and worshipped their deities through these statues. This practice, called idolatry, is forbidden in the Ten Commandments and condemned throughout Scripture.

St. Paul writing in Colossians 1:15 refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God”. The word translated “image” there is the Greek word eikon, from which the English word icon is derived. Jesus is what no idol could ever be. He is the perfect image, the perfect representation, of the true and living, invisible God, because He is God incarnate as a true man.

God’s revelation of Himself to man in Christ, particularly the redeeming love revealed in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is what Christianity is all about.

Love and Marriage

On August the fourth, U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down Proposition 8. Proposition 8 was an amendment to the state Constitution of California voted on and passed in the November 2008 elections which declares that only sexually complementary (man and woman) marriages would be recognized as valid by the state of California. Needless to say, the overturning of Proposition 8 has resparked the debate about so-called “same-sex marriages” which the passing of the Proposition ignited 2 years ago, and which will undoubtedly flare up again whenever SCUSA issues its final ruling on the matter.

The same-sex marriage debate seems on one level to be silly and trivial, to both sides. To advocates of same-sex marriage, the idea that two men (or two women) being united in a union called marriage and recognized as such, could harm society, is ridiculous. To traditionalists (in which camp I belong) the idea that government fiat could make a same-sex relationship a marriage is as ridiculous as the suggestion that if the government were to declare two plus two to be five it would therefore be so. What then are we arguing about? A hypothetical objective observer to the debate (no such person could actually exist, of course) might ask “Why don’t the same-sex couples who wish to consider themselves married, do so, and those who consider marriage to be an exclusively man-woman relationship disagree”?

One answer is that such a compromise is not acceptable to the same-sex marriage side. It is society’s acceptance and approval they are demanding, not just to be allowed to do their own thing and to think of themselves in whatever way they wish. For the advocates of same-sex marriage to accept anything short of full societal approval vested in recognition of the official status of “married” for same-sex couples who wish that status would be concession of victory to the traditionalist side.

Likewise, for traditionalists to accept a situation in which society recognizes non-sexually complementary unions as marriages, would not be a compromise but a concession of defeat.

No compromise is therefore possible on this issue for either side. It is a zero-sum game.

It is important that the traditionalist side of this debate understand what the real issues are. To understand this, we need to recognize that “same-sex marriage” is a symptom, and not the disease itself. We should not waste our time by arguing that same-sex marriage will bring civilization crumbling to the ground (it will not). What is eroding our civilization and will lead to its collapse is liberalism, modernism, and post-modernism, apart from which there would have been no movement for same-sex marriage.

Liberalism is the disease, same-sex marriage just one of many symptoms.

What are the grounds upon which the advocates of same-sex marriage base their claims?

Essentially that argument goes like this: A) Marriage exists to make life happier for individuals who participate in marriage, B) Everybody is equally entitled to all things which make for their individual happiness, therefore C) Same-sex couples should be as entitled to marry each other as sexually complementary couples and to restrict marriage to the latter is to discriminate against the former which is an act of injustice.

Both premises and the conclusion are false as we shall see.

Before demonstrating them to be false, however, we will look at how they reflect presuppositions that are an essential part of the attack on the foundations of Western civilization that is liberalism, the spirit of the Modern Age since the so-called Enlightenment.

In the context of discussing abortion, George P. Grant said of Pope John Paul II:

I have some sympathy for him in what he is trying to oppose, something which is absolutely central to modernity: the emancipation of the passions. I don’t mean by the passions only the sexual passions. Modern politics is taken up with the passion for power, capitalism is taken up with the emancipation of the passion of greed. I’m not sure that this has been a great step in human history. (1)

Grant was right, in describing the emancipation of the passions as being central to modernity. The Modern Age began when philosophers came to the belief that through the application of reason and/or science they could construct a superior civilization to that which had been built upon the foundations of classical philosophy and Christianity. The so-called Enlightenment, and the liberalism which grew out of it rejected Aristotelian ethics and secularized and universalized Christian ethics beyond all recognition.

Plato and Aristotle both taught that virtue and happiness were only possible when reason ruled the passions and the appetites. Plato in the Phaedrus depicted reason as a charioteer who must control the chariot of the soul being drawn by two horses, one of whom, representing the unruly appetites or passions, is always trying to pull the chariot off course. In The Republic, he uses the relationship of reason ruling the appetites, the passions, as a model for the utopian city Socrates and his companions were hypothetically constructing. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, divides the soul into rational and irrational parts, and the latter into parts completely independent of reason and parts which while irrational themselves can be influenced by reason. The passions fall into the latter category, and the virtuous man, according to Aristotle, is the man who cultivates the rational habit of choosing the middle path regarding his passions, leaning neither to excess or deficiency.

The modern rejection of classical/traditional Western ethics in favor of the “emancipation of the passions” is perhaps most clearly seen in Sigmund Freud. His division of the mind into the passions (id), governed by reason (ego), with both being subject to the mores of civilization (superego) was neither original nor the basis of Freud’s fame. Freud attributed neurosis to the repression of the id, and in so doing laid the foundation for the idea of mental well-being through liberation of the passions. While Freud himself has long been dismissed, his idea that traditional morality’s restraints on the libidos is harmful to the individual psyche continues to bear fruit. In many ways, however, Freud was simply expressing in psychological terms, the goals of Enlightenment liberalism in which the happiness and liberty of the individual is the highest good.

A civilized society, as Plato and Aristotle knew, must have the good as its end, its purpose. In the Christian era, the idea of the societal good came to be moderated with recognition that the individual person has valid rights and freedoms, but these were envisioned as existing within the framework of society and traditional authority. Enlightenment liberalism made the rights and liberties of the individual the enemy of traditional society, traditional morality, and traditional authority. Those who think this is a good think, a positive step towards freedom, should consider that in the same period of centuries in which liberalism triumphed and authority declined, was a period of unprecedented growth of the central state, and concentration of power into it. The emancipation of the passions, is as Aldous Huxley warned, a cover for the loss of political liberty, as the state grows more and more powerful.

The institution of marriage, does not exist primarily for the happiness of individuals. That is not its function. It exists to bind society together, by tying parents of children to each other, as closely as they are tied to their children or their children are tied to each other, and to make of the two basic divisions of mankind, male and female, a one combing both complementary parts. As an institution it is foundational to the family, which is the basic building block of society, prior to and more important than the individual. The relationships between a father and his child, between a mother and her child, and between siblings are permanent relationships. They are based on ties of blood which cannot be untied. Marriage exists to make the relationship between father and mother as binding and permanent as these. The security that comes, from one’s father and mother being permanently tied to each other, is of immeasurable importance to the well-being of their children. Marriage is by nature, a sacrifice. It is about giving of oneself to another and to their possible offspring. It is about giving up one’s rights and liberties and taking burdens and duties upon oneself. It is a step towards maturity and responsibility.

In 2003, just as an earlier round of the same-sex marriage debate was heating up in Massachusetts, Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese delivered three lectures on the subject of marriage at Princeton University. She was in the process of expanding those lectures into a book when she died in 2007. The work was subsequently completed by her former student and editor Sheila O’Connor Ambrose and published posthumously by ISI Books in 2008 under the title Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die. The first of the lectures became Chapter One “Male and Female Created He Them”, which is not, despite its title, a sermon from the Book of Genesis, but a history of the institution of marriage, as a social, economic, and political institution, and it’s evolution into modern marriage.

Dr. Fox-Genovese writes:

Having originated more as a relation between families, tribes, or clans than as a relation between individuals, marriage has gradually been transformed into an exclusively personal relation—a matter of an individual’s “right” to specific benefits and privileges and, perhaps above all, community recognition and approval. Thus, the institution that anchored and transmitted legitimate authority has emerged as the frontline target of a comprehensive attack on any notion of legitimate authority, natural or divine. (2)

A significant contributing factor to this transformation, which Dr. Fox-Genovese focused on, was the concept of romantic love as the basis for companionate marriage. She notes that this idea goes against much ancient wisdom in the Western tradition, warning against the dangers of passionate love. For the latter she points to examples in Shakespeare, Arthurian Legend, the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and even Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Countless other examples could be pointed to. The first great epic poem of Greece was Homer’s Illiad. While the poem’s theme is a different passion, manis (wrath), specifically the wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon and its destructive consequences, we cannot miss the fact the background setting of the story is a war whose roots lay in passionate love (of Paris and Helen). Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is essentially an updated version of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. How many of the most famous classic stories of passionate love end very badly for one or both of the lovers? In addition to those already mentioned think of Dido and Aeneas, Troilus and Chriseyde, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra – the list goes on and on. Note that the love St. Paul eulogizes in the famous 13th chapter of his First Epistle to the Church in Corinth is agape – selfless, giving love, and not eros – passionate desire.

These countless cultural warnings were not to tell us that passionate love is a bad thing per se, but to warn us that it must be ruled, that we must rule our passions rather than let them rule us. This is in stark contrast to the message of Hollywood, television, popular music, and every other cultural drug mass-produced in this decadent age.

Liberalism, in seeking to free the individual and his passions, from the restraints of traditional moral society, allied itself with modern, centralized government, and secured the passing of legislation aimed at transforming marriage from the traditional institution into something like a business contract, albeit with less of a legal penalty if the contract is broken. The purpose was to make marriage about the individual rather than about the society. A young couple are in love and want to get married to “complete their happiness”. Instead of being told about responsibility, and sacrifice, and “til death do us part”, a compact breakable only by severe betrayal on the part of one of the spouses, now marriage comes with government benefits and can be dissolved by government at will at the request of one of the partners, no reason necessary. Same-sex marriage is only the latest step in this process, itself part of the larger liberal project of freeing the individual of all duties to traditional moral society (while enslaving him to modern collective power in government and big business).

People do not have a “right” to whatever they think will make them happy. They have a right to what is their own. Justice lies in seeing that everyone gets that which is due him – not that everyone gets to be “equal” with everyone else. Teaching people that they have a “right” to whatever they think will make them happy, i.e., whatever they want, and that they are or ought to be equal with everyone else, is the recipe for turning people against society.

The traditionalist side of the same-sex marriage debate needs to understand that our battle is not primarily against same-sex marriage, but for traditional marriage, which means more than just sexual complementarity. It means marriage that is more than just a contract, marriage that is demanding, marriage that cannot be broken at the whim of government or a spouse. Our fight is for traditional society, which respects the rights and liberties of individuals, while placing just demands on them in pursuit of he good of the whole.

(1) David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Concord: Anansi Press, 1995) , p., 156 (This is an edited collection of interviews Grant gave to Cayley on CBC Radio)

(2) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Marriage: The Dream That Refuses To Die (Wilmington, ISI Books, 2008), p. 4.