Taking Offence and Denying Defence

The late Sir Roger Scruton had much to say about the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence.”  In an interview with Douglas Murray for The Spectator about a half a year before his death, for example, he said:

 

Remember though, that there’s this great distinction between giving offence and taking offence and we’re living in a culture where people become experts in taking offence even when it hasn’t been given.  And that’s what is taught in gender studies. It teaches young women to take offence at every remark a man might make or even his being there, you know. It’s a wonderful theatrical thing to take offence but it doesn’t lead to any lasting relationships. (1)

 

The importance of this distinction has to do with more than just gender.  Every form of “identity politics” majors in taking offence.  Identity politics is informed and underlain by the contemporary “morality” that has supplanted traditional moralities, including both the older traditional morality informed by classical ethics and Christian moral theology and the more recent morality of classical liberalism, in the civilization formerly known as Christendom in the post-World War II era.  This is one of the key distinguishing feature between the contemporary “morality” and traditional moralities.  Traditional morality taught you to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to avoid giving offence.  Contemporary morality teaches you to take offence and to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to minimize the likelihood of others taking offence.

 

The distinction is quite simple.  Allow me to illustrate.  If I were to go up to you and say something to the effect of “You dirty rotten so-and-so, you are ugly and stupid, a bum and a loser, and the biggest jerk who ever lived.  Now listen to me you miserable punk, you dress like a clown and smell like a skunk, your mother is a whore and your father is a drunk” then I would be giving offence.  If, on the other hand, I were to say to you “I listened to your lecture on this-or-that historical event and I don’t like your take on what happened because I think it portrays such-and-such a group in a poor light, bolstering unfair stereotypes, and although I am not a member of that group per se, I am deeply offended by your micro-aggression and think you need to be cancelled” or some such blithering nonsense, I would be taking offence.

 

Ordinarily, when someone gives offence the offence is intentional, he is deliberately trying to hurt the feelings of the person to whom he is speaking.  To the person who takes offence, however, the intentions of the person from whom he takes offence are irrelevant. 

 

With regards to the importance of intent it is worth observing that the cultural shift from the traditional morality of avoiding giving offence to the contemporary morality of taking offence, occurred simultaneously with the rise of technocratic managers in both government and private business. (2) Traditionally, in the Westminster system, the laws by which we are governed are subject to King-in-Parliament acting through legislation.  While the form remains in Canada, in the post-World War II era, the Prime Minister and Cabinet have increasingly by-passed the constraints the traditional system placed on their ability to impose new rules on Canadians, by relying more-and-more on civil service agencies acting through regulation instead.  The counterpart to this in the private sector is the increased control of middle level managers operating through Human Resource departments.

 

The reason this is worth pointing out here is because the traditional Westminster system of legislating by King-in-Parliament was closely allied with the Common Law tradition which includes the principle with regards to criminal culpability that actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (a guilty act does not make guilty unless the mind is guilty), that is to say, there needs to be criminal intent for there to be criminal culpability.  HR departments, by contrast, seldom if ever regard intent as an essential component of any of the myriad of made-up offences in the rule books through which they micromanage their employees.  While the parallel is not perfect it is notable.

 

The other factor that distinguishes giving offence from taking offence is objectivity.  If you give offence to someone by, for example, calling him a horse’s patoot, the offence is objective because it is reasonable to assume that anyone called this would be offended by it.  When someone takes offence that has not been given, however, the offence is largely if not entirely, subjective.  In Biblical hermeneutics, we distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis.  In both of these words the basic verb means to guide or to lead.  Exegesis adds the prefix for “out” and means to bring out of the text the meaning that is already there in it.  This, of course, is the approved hermeneutical method.  The other one, eisegesis, substitutes the prefix for “in” and means to read into the text the meaning you wish to find there.   Taking offence that has not been given is similar to eisegesis in this regards.

 

In this, as in so many other areas, contemporary morality is a poor substitute for traditional morality.  Morality informs law and when an inferior morality replaces a superior morality the result will be the introduction and multiplication of bad laws. 

 

The news media recently learned that the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Blofeld has come to an agreement with the Lower Canadian separatists. (3)   The separatists agreed to support the Liberal Bill C-9, a proposed series of amendments to the section of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate.”  Over the past couple of years, Canadians have become increasingly disturbed and disgusted at a particular type of “protest” that has been popping up all over our country and the wider civilization.  Ostensibly about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, these protests openly embrace not merely the cause of the Palestinians but the organization Hamas, glorify its worst actions, and are filled with violent, revolutionary, rhetoric directed not only against Israel but against our country and Western Civilization as a whole.  Bill C-9 is the Liberals’ proposed “solution” to this problem.  It is typical of the “solutions” put forward by politicians, especially Liberals, to problems that are largely of their own creation, in that it creates new statutory offences and laws where the already existing laws are more than sufficient to handle the situation if they would only be followed and enforced.  Bill C-9 would make preventing access to a place of worship or community centre by means of intimidation – which already violates more than one law – into a distinct “hate” offence.  It would also criminalize the public display of certain symbols.  To gain the support of the separatists, the Liberals agreed to include a further amendment in the bill that would remove the existing provision in Section 319 of the Criminal Code that exempts speech that expresses what the speaker holds in “good faith” based on “a belief in a religious text” from criminal culpability.

 

To do this would be to make a bad law worse.  What I said about bill C-9’s making of new statutory offences in the previous paragraph applies to all laws about “hate speech.”  Anything prohibited by “hate speech” laws that warrants being prohibited by law was already prohibited by law before there were any “hate” laws.  The most defensible limitation on speech in “hate speech” legislation is the prohibition of incitement.  Incitement is the urging or encouraging of others to commit a criminal act.  If the other person(s) actually commit the criminal act, the person who did the inciting shares in their responsibility and therefore criminal culpability for the act.  It is reasonable, therefore, that criminal incitement be prohibited by law, at least if the incitement is acted on.  Criminal incitement, however, was already against the law before “hate speech” laws were thought up. All “hate speech” laws did was single out a specific type of incitement, as if telling people to commit a crime against person X was much worse than telling people to commit the same crime against person Y, if when telling them to commit the crime against person X, you give the person’s race, sex, religion, whatever, as part of the reason. 

 

Worse, they expanded the prohibited speech beyond actual incitement.  Actual incitement is explicit.  It involves someone saying, in so many words, that such-and-such a criminal act should be committed.  The concept of “hate speech”, however, treats as the equivalent of actual incitement, speech that portrays groups that supporters of “hate speech” laws think should be protected in such a negative light that someone might be inspired to act criminally against that group.   It is interesting, isn’t it, how the progressive supporters of these kind of laws think that in the case of groups to which they think the law should extend special protection, negative portrayals will inspire people to commit crimes who were not already inclined to do so, whereas in the case of groups they do not think should be specially protected by the law – Christians, rather than Jews or Muslims, whites rather than any other race, men rather than women, heterosexuals rather than homosexuals, actual men and women rather than transsexuals – the non-stop stream of negative rhetoric on the part of progressives themselves, usually far more full of expressions of hate in the literal sense of the word than that which they seek to ban, will have no such effect.  Basically, “hate speech” laws in effect protect groups that progressives feel are entitled to special protection from having their feelings hurt.  Here, the thinking of the contemporary morality with regards to taking offence finds its legal manifestation.

 

The old laws against actual incitement were justifiable limitations on freedom of speech because they were not there to prevent the circulation of ideas but rather to prevent the encouraging of criminal acts.  “Hate speech” laws are not similarly justifiable.  Narrowing the range of ideas that can be circulated is precisely what those who introduce such legislation have in mind.  Moreover, good laws are few in number, clear and easy to understand, protect people and their property from objective, quantifiable, harm and not from subjective hurt feelings and extend this protection to everyone in the realm and not just to certain groups that progressive political parties think need special protection.  “Hate speech” laws do not meet any of those qualifications but are rather the opposite.  They are the textbook example of bad laws.

 

After the news was leaked about the deal between the Grits and the Bloc, the apologists for removing the exemption came crawling out of the woodworks.  Unsurprisingly, foremost among them was Marc Miller, (4) whom Blofeld just named Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, replacing Steven Guilbeault who resigned from Cabinet last weekend over Blofeld’s pipeline deal with Alberta.  It was difficult, prior to last weekend, to imagine that replacing eco-extremist Guilbeault could be anything but an improvement, but lo and behold, Blofeld managed the unthinkable.  Miller, a childhood friend of Captain Airhead, belongs to the former prime minister’s innermost circle.  If Blofeld really wants to move his party and the government he leads away from the blighted legacy of his predecessor, replacing one Trudeau-insider with another is not the way to go about it.  To the point at hand, however, Miller has been shooting his mouth off for months about how he considers certain Biblical texts “hateful” and wants to see the religious text exemption for “hate speech” eliminated. (5) 

 

In a meeting of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which he was at the time the chair, just prior to All Hallows, Miller said “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans — there’s other passages — there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.”  This is a nonsensical statement.  The Bible identifies many different acts as sins.  This is not ordinarily interpreted as “hatred”, clear or otherwise, towards those who commit such acts, the late Fred Phelps notwithstanding.  When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not commit adultery”, which act carried the penalty of death under the Mosaic Law, do we understand this to be hatred against adulterers? When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, do we interpret this to be hatred against perjurers?    If identifying someone’s behaviour as sinful is expressing “hatred” against that person, then the Bible could be interpreted as expressing hatred against all mankind when it says “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  That it would be absurd to interpret it this way, however, is generally understood because the text, St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, goes immediately on to say “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  Far from an expression of hatred towards those who sin, the Scriptures are a message of God’s redeeming love to sinners.  The thought contained in the verse from St. Paul just quoted is also expressed in what is undoubtedly the best-known verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’

 

When his words were immediately understood by several commentators, members of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and provincial ministers as calling for these Scriptural texts, their being read as Scripture lessons in church, and preached on from the pulpit, to be criminalized, Mr. Miller took offence.  All he intended, he maintained, was to say that these texts should not be allowed as defences, in cases of public incitement.  This is how he is now defending the proposed removal of the religious exemption from Section 319.  Note, however, the sleight-of-hand that is at play.  He hopes that those whose suspicions he wishes to allay will understand the public incitement, to which he says sincere belief in these Scriptural texts should not be a defence, to mean someone telling other people that they should commit some kind of violent crime.  If, however, interpreting these Scriptural texts in accordance with traditional Christian orthodoxy as identifying same-sex sexual activity as sinful is itself regarded as an expression of hate, then removing the religious exemption from Section 319 would have precisely the effect that Miller’s opponents say it would have, of opening the door for criminal prosecutions of Christian ministers who faithfully preach on these portions of Scripture.

 

All one has to do is look at the track record of the Liberal Party since Miller’s lifelong intimate friend Captain Airhead took over as leader in 2013 to realize that Miller should not be trusted to mean merely that the religious defence should be removed from cases of actual, explicit, incitement to violent crime.  One of the first things that Captain Airhead did upon becoming Liberal leader was to ban anyone who held the orthodox Christian view of abortion from running for a seat in the House as a member of the Liberal party.  During Captain Airhead’s premiership, the Liberal government made a lot of noise about combatting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the same time that a wave of arson and other vandalism directed against Christian churches was underway.  Arguably, the Liberal government itself had a hand in inciting that wave.   One of Miller’s Liberal colleagues, John-Paul Danko described the factual reporting of the over 120 churches so attacked as a “conspiracy theory.”  Repeatedly, over the course of the Airhead premiership, the Liberal government promoted as “Canadian values” ideas that were contrary to orthodox Christian moral theology – and, as they discovered to their discomfort, contrary to the traditional morality of other religions as well – and sought through various measures to coerce Christian churches into changing their moral theology to align with progressive values.

 

So no, we should not believe Mr. Miller that the removal of the religious defence will not lead to a wave of litigation and even criminal charges against churches unwilling to change their orthodox moral theology or to muzzle themselves.

 

Instead of doing what the Liberals and the Bloc are planning on doing, I propose that the government do the right thing instead.  It should strike Section 319 from the Criminal Code in its entirety and abandon its plans on reintroducing legislation similar to the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the bill repealing which had gone into effect the year after it received royal assent and the year before the Liberals resumed government.  It is the right thing to do because “hate speech” legislation is by its very nature, fundamentally bad law.  (6) 

 

Since morality informs law, we will also need to repeal the contemporary new morality that encourages people to take offence over every perceived slight to their identity, real or self-chosen, and reinstate the traditional morality that merely encourages people not to give offence.  This will be more difficult to do because it cannot be accomplished simply by passing or repealing a bill, but it is here at the cultural level rather than at the political and legislative, that the real battle must be waged.

 

 

 (1)   https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ full-transcript-douglas-murray-in-conversation-with-roger-scruton/

(2)   Today, due to decades of speculative fiction and the current state of AI development, “technocratic”, probably suggests to most people the idea of machines taking over.  That is not how I am using it here.  I am referring to the fact that the professional managers – government bureaucrats and HR types in the corporate world – considered as a class, are distinguished by the use of language that is “technical” in the sense employed by Michael Oakeshott in the title essay of his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) in which he distinguishes “technical” from “traditional” knowledge.

(3)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-bloc-hate-speech-laws-religious-exemptions

(4)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/religion-is-no-excuse-for-hate-carneys-newest-minister-says-of-proposed-removal-of-hate-speech-defence

(5)   https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-mp-reciting-hateful-bible-verses-about-homosexuality-in-public-should-be-illegal/

(6)    Earlier this week, paleo-libertarian editor Lew Rockwell published an article entitled “Why Banning Hate Speech is Evil.” I agree with the premise entirely although I would employ a different line of reasoning to argue for it.  Bans on “hate speech” are attempts to legislate what is in the human heart.  The civil government that attempts to do this, however, exceeds its own jurisdiction and intrudes into that which belongs to God alone.  This is the root of the evil the ancients called tyranny and that is often called totalitarianism in our own day. https://www.lewrockwell.com/ 2025/12/lew-rockwell/why-banning-hate-speech-is-evil/ 

 

Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

 

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

 

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

 

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

 

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

 

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

 

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

 

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

 

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

 

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

 

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

 

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

 

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.

(3)   Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

The Left Abandons Liberalism

A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea.   I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism.   I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals.     This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad.   Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself.   To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is.   That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical.   Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism.   It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks.   Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.

 

The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis.   My pocket Collins  Latin Dictionary defines this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable, generous, liberal; handsome”.   Turning to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i, with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a man”.  The second definition is “befitting a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious, kind.”   I will not cite all the sub definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous, munificent, liberal”.

 

The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans, the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity.   Before it came to be used as a political label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin ancestor.   This gives us something of an idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a political designation must have thought of themselves.    Frankly, I am of the opinion that they thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres, and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons, legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories.   To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.

 

That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.   No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”.   Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property.  This, however, as Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long before Locke.   The book that I am talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859).   It is an argument for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the freedom of the governed.   While it contains much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he says about freedom and limited government has merit.   Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued, was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions, even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always bad.

 

Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from Mill on this matter.

 

That this is the case has been evident for quite some time.   For decades the Left has favoured legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”.   “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I hate you”.   Indeed, there has never been a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone could be charged for saying “I hate you”.   What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be “racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or “homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they disagree.   The Left considers “hate speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it to incitement.   There is no substance to this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups.   Rather, they prohibit the communication of information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a criminal act against them.   For all their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.

 

Although this is directly related to another way in which the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer further discussion of it until that time.  What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”, etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information and opinions which contradict its own narratives.

 

In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated no other political leader before him.    Last time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.   This time, they are accusing him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him.    Tempting as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be considered incitement.   Not when incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour.   The Left here is applying the same kind of bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a completely different kind of opinion.  

 

The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats – or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his supporters as well.   Then, having basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors, such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business.  When the internet first went online, many had seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media corporations, possessed.   Now, however, with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.

 

Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.

 

As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal, remains.

Captain Airhead Strikes Again!

It has been almost two years since a gullible Canadian electorate was duped into giving the Liberal Party a majority government in the last Dominion election. This means that that government, headed by Captain Airhead, is approaching the half-way point in its four year mandate. It has recently been reported that the Grits have passed less than half the legislation in that time than the previous Conservative government had. This is not surprising. The Prime Minister has been far too busy flying around the world, handing out money, and looking for photo-ops, all at the taxpayers’ expense, to actually do the job of governing the country. John Ibbitson, writing in the Globe and Mail, made the observation that “the amount of legislation a Parliament creates matters less than the quality of that legislation.” As true as that is, the quality of the bills the Trudeau Grits have passed is enough to make one wish that they had, the moment they were sworn in, called a term-length recess of Parliament and sent every member on a four-year paid Caribbean vacation.

One example of this is Bill C-16, which passed its third-reading in the Senate on Thursday, June 15th and which was signed into law by the Governor-General on Monday, June 19th. Bill C-16 is a bill which amends both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. To the former it adds “gender identity or expression” to the list of grounds of discrimination prohibited by the Act. To the latter it adds the same to Section 318, the “hate propaganda” clause of the Code. The Canadian Human Rights Act and Section 318 of the Criminal Code were both inflicted upon us by the present premier’s father in his long reign of terror and it would have been better had the present Parliament passed legislation striking both out of existence rather than amending them to increase the number of ways in which they can be used to persecute Canadians. When, a century and a half ago, the Fathers of Confederation put together the British North America Act which, coming into effect on July 1, 1867, established the Dominion of Canada as a new nation within what would soon develop into the British Commonwealth of Nations, their intention was to create a free country, whose citizens, English and French, as subjects of the Crown, would possess all the freedoms and the protection of all the rights that had accumulated to such in over a thousand years of legal evolution. The CHRA and Section 318 do not belong in such a country – they are more appropriate to totalitarian regimes like the former Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Third Reich.

The CHRA, which Parliament passed in 1977 during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau, prohibits discrimination on a variety of grounds including race, religion, sex, and country of origin. It applies in a number of different areas with the provision of goods and services, facilities and accommodations, and employment being chief among them. Those charged with enforcing this legislation have generally operated according to an unwritten rule that it is only discrimination when whites, Christians, and males are the perpetrators rather than the victims, but even if that were not the case, the very idea of a law of this sort runs contrary to the basic principles of our traditional freedoms and system of justice. It dictates to employers, landlords, and several other people, what they can and cannot be thinking when conducting the everyday affairs of their business. It establishes a special police force and court – the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal respectively – to investigate and sit in judgement upon those private thoughts and prejudices. Those charged do not have the protection of the presumption of innocence because the CHRA is classified as civil rather than criminal law.

There are more protections for defendants under Section 318 because it is part of the Criminal Code but it is still a bad law. Incitement of criminal violence was already against the law long before Section 318 was added. It is not, therefore, the incitement of criminal violence per se that Section 318 was introduced to combat, for the existing laws were sufficient, but the thinking and verbal expression of thoughts that the Liberal Party has decided Canadians ought not to think and speak.

Bill C-16 takes these bad laws and makes them even worse. By adding “gender identity and expression” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination the Liberals are adding people who think and say that they belong to a gender that does not match up with their biological birth sex to the groups protected from discrimination. Now, ordinarily when people think they are something they are not, like, for example, the man who thinks he is Julius Caesar, we, if we are decent people, would say that this is grounds for pity and compassion, but we would not think of compelling others to go along with the delusion. Imagine a law that says that we have to regard a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar as actually being the Roman general! Such a law would be crazier than the man himself!

Bill C-16 is exactly that kind of law. Don’t be fooled by those who claim otherwise. The discrimination that trans activists, the Trudeau Liberals and their noise machine, i.e., the Canadian media, and everyone else who supports this bill, all want to see banned, is not just the refusing of jobs or apartments to transgender people but the refusal to accept as real a “gender identity” that does not match up with biological sex. Dr. Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been fighting this sort of nonsense at the provincial level for years, and who testified against the Bill before the Senate committee that reviewed it, has warned that it could lead to someone being charged with a “hate crime” for using the pronoun – “he” or “she” – that lines up with a person's birth sex, rather than some alternative pronoun made-up to designate that person’s “gender identity.” Supporters of the bill have mocked this assertion but we have seen this sort of thing before – progressives propose some sort of measure, someone points out that the measure will have this or that negative consequence, the progressives ridicule that person, and then, when the measure is passed and has precisely the negative consequences predicted, say that those negatively affected deserved it in the first place.

Indeed, progressive assurances that Peterson’s fears are unwarranted ring incredibly hollow when we consider that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has said that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity” would be considered discrimination under a similar clause in Ontario’s provincial Human Rights Code, if it were to take place in a context where discrimination in general is prohibited, such as the workplace. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, writing in the National Post, explains that this new expansion of human rights legislation goes way beyond previous “hate speech” laws in its infringement upon freedom of speech. “When speech is merely restricted, you can at least keep your thoughts to yourself,” Pardy writes, but “Compelled speech makes people say things with which they disagree.”

It is too much, perhaps, to expect Captain Airhead to understand or care about this. Like his father before him – and indeed, every Liberal Prime Minister going back to and including Mackenzie King – he has little to no appreciation of either the traditional freedoms that are part of Canada’s British heritage or the safeguards of those freedoms bequeathed us by the Fathers of Confederation in our parliamentary government under the Crown. For a century, Liberal governments have whittled away at every parliamentary obstacle to the absolute power of a Prime Minister backed by a House majority. The powers of the Crown, Senate, and the Opposition in the House to hold the Prime Minister and his Cabinet accountable have all been dangerously eroded in this manner. Last year the present government attempted to strip Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition of what few means it has left of delaying government legislation. The motion in question was withdrawn after the Prime Minister came under strong criticism for behaving like a spoiled, bullying, petty thug in the House but it revealed his character. These Opposition powers are a necessary safeguard against Prime Ministerial dictatorship but Captain Airhead, the son of an admirer of Stalin and Mao, regards them, like the freedoms they protect, as an unacceptable hindrance to his getting his way as fast as he possibly can. Years ago, George Grant wrote that the justices of the American Supreme Court in Roe v Wade had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought - the triumph of the will.” This is also the modus operandi of Captain Airhead and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Yes Antonia, There is a Threat to Canadian Freedom of Speech

Antonia Blumberg, the Associate Religion Editor for the progressive liberal disinformation site that some consider to be the online equivalent of a newspaper, the Huffington Post, has come to the defence of the anti-Islamophobia motion that Iqra Khalid, the Liberal MP representing Mississauga-Erin Mills has introduced into the Canadian Parliament. In doing so she has lived down to the stereotype, popular here in the Dominion of Canada, of the Yankee who spouts off about things of which she knows nothing.

Regardless of whether it is a non-binding motion or a bill, there is a very real threat to freedom of speech here, of which anyone familiar with the Liberal Party’s long war on the traditional rights and freedoms of Canadians would be well aware. There are many parallels between what the Liberal Party is doing now and what it did in the 1970s under the leadership of the father of the present federal premier. Then, as now, it decided that it was the government’s place to combat ideas and attitudes that the Liberals considered to be unacceptable. At the time it was racial and religious prejudice in general, and anti-Semitism in particular that the Liberals were going after. Warning Canadians that the threat of a potential Canadian Fourth Reich existed if these attitudes were not drummed out, stomped down, and extirpated with extreme prejudice, the Liberals, bereft of any sense of irony, established a Canadian equivalent of the Gestapo and the NKVD/NKGB/MGB/KGB in the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Although progressives will undoubtedly sputter with offense and rage at the comparison in the last sentence it is entirely apt and valid. The difference between the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the secret police of the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is one of degree not of kind. If the Canadian Human Rights Commission brought you before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal you would not end up facing a firing squad or being shipped away to a forced labour camp. At most you would be fined an exorbitant and crippling amount of money, slapped with a lifetime gag order, and have your career and reputation completely and utterly destroyed. Nevertheless, the Canadian Human Rights Commission exists for the same reason its Nazi and Soviet equivalents existed – to track down and punish those considered guilty of what, in Orwellian Newspeak would be called crimethink. It was negative thoughts about those designated as “vulnerable minorities” that the Trudeau Liberals considered to be crimethink, rather than negative thoughts about the regime itself, as was the case in the Third Reich, Soviet Union, and Orwell’s 1984, but it was crimethink all the same, and those charged with crimethink found that there was very little in the way of defence available to them. More perhaps, than was available to the unfortunate victims of the totalitarian regimes, but much less than has been traditionally available to the free subject-citizens of one of Her Majesty’s realms. The Liberals were able to get away with this by classifying the legislation – the Canadian Human Rights Act – which the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Tribunal enforced as civil rather than criminal law. Civil law does not come with the same legal protections of the rights of the defendant that exist under criminal law. The progressive supporters of the Canadian Human Rights Act and its enforcing bodies deceive themselves, however, if they think this legislation exists to help people settle disputes among themselves, and not to punish people whose thoughts are considered criminal by the “Natural Ruling Party of Canada” as the Grits so arrogantly designate themselves.

Blumberg, citing the CBC, quotes Justin Trudeau as saying, in defence of Khalid’s motion “You’re not allowed to call ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theater and call that free speech.” This is not a valid comparison however, no matter how many times freedom-hating, totalitarian dolts make it. When you yell “fire” in a crowded movie theatre, you can create a panic in which people hurt or even kill people in their rush to get out. It is the act of mischief that is proscribed by law, not the idea expressed (“there is a fire in this theatre”). Indeed, if that idea were true, if there actually was a fire in the theatre, we would want that information to be conveyed, albeit in a more orderly fashion.

A law prohibiting so-called “hate speech” is not like this. If the Liberal Party passes a motion condemning Islamophobia and saying that the government must do everything in its power to combat Islamophobia, a hate speech law will be the next step they take. There is abundant evidence in their past track record to show this to be the case. It is the way they think. Such laws exist for one purpose, and one purpose only, to say “you are not allowed to think this or that.” The argument that says that “hate speech” also hurts people like yelling “fire” in a theatre because it can inspire someone to commit acts of violence is spurious, specious and downright mendacious. If one person expresses a negative view of a race, religion, sex or whatever, and another person who has heard this commits a violent act against a member of the group in question, it will not be an immediate, automatic, response like the panic in the theatre. It will involve someone thinking about the negative view expressed, deliberating on it, and concluding that violence is the right way to act on this information. Such a conclusion suggests that there was something wrong in this person’s head already, long before he heard the “hate speech”. Which is why “hate speech” is much less likely to produce a violent crime than calling “fire” in a theatre is likely to produce a panic. It would be more defensible, perhaps, to argue that speech that explicitly calls for a violent response, of the general “kill the -------s” type, ought to be proscribed, but the “hate speech” that is prohibited by such laws is never limited to just this, and at any rate, this sort of thing was already covered by the laws against incitement that have been around since long before someone dreamed up the idea of laws against hate and which are far better laws being designed to protect everyone and not some designated group.

What the Liberal Party has done in the past in the name of combatting racism and protecting “vulnerable minorities”, however worthy we may or may not consider these goals to be in themselves, is completely unacceptable in a country like Canada. It is now 150 years since men like Sir John A. MacDonald established Canada as a self-governing Dominion under the British Crown, with legislative and judicial institutions grounded in the tradition attached to the Crown, including all the rights and freedoms of the Common Law. The right way to protect “vulnerable minorities” in our country, would have been to do a better job of making sure that the full protection of these rights and freedoms was enjoyed by all of Her Majesty’s citizen-subjects in our free Dominion, whatever their race, ethnic origin, etc. might happen to be. Instead, the Liberal Party opted to give special protection to “vulnerable minorities” and to abridge the traditional rights and freedoms of all Canadians to do so, while doing everything in their power to undermine our British heritage and the tradition from which those rights and freedoms sprang.

It is evident to every patriotic Canadian who loves his country, its true heritage, and its traditional freedoms, and is aware of what is going on that the Liberal Party is preparing to do more of the same, even if an ignorant Yank writing for a silly left-wing trash site is completely clueless as to what is going on.

Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Thought

This essay is dedicated to the late Douglas H. Christie Jr., who passed away Monday, March 11, 2013.   Mr. Christie championed the cause of freedom of speech, both as the lawyer who defended James Keegstra, Ernst Zundel, Malcolm Ross, and virtually everyone else who has been charged with a “hate crime” over the things they said in the last three decades, and as the founder of the Canadian Free Speech League.

Liberalism, which became the dominant political ideology in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was wrong about a great many things.   It was also right about a number of things.   It tended to be wrong – extremely wrong – about first principles and what we might call “the big picture”.   Its view of human nature, the nature of and relationship between the individual person and society,  the relationship between religion, state, and society, the source of suffering, injustice, and other evils in the world, and of history, were completely and totally wrong.  It was in the realm of applied politics that liberalism produced its best ideas.

There is a reason for this.  The ideology of liberalism had two parents.  One of these was the English political tradition that had developed over more than a thousand years.  The other was the Enlightenment project.  The English political tradition and the Enlightenment project were not sympathetic to each other.  Indeed, they were mortal enemies.  The English tradition had evolved as part of the larger tradition of medieval Christendom.   Indeed, as Christopher Dawson explained in The Formation of Christendom, the founders of the English tradition had been very important in the development of the larger tradition. (1)   The Enlightenment project, however, was the sworn enemy of all things medieval and Christian.  It’s roots go back to Renaissance humanism (2), which sought to revive classical civilization after what it considered to be the dearth of culture and civilization in the Middle Ages (3).   The architects of the Enlightenment regarded religion in general and Christianity in particular, especially Christianity as an organized, public, institution, as the enemy of human reason, knowledge, creativity, and happiness, and sought to establish a secular society, in which religion would be entirely private and personal.  In such a society and only in such a society, the Enlightenment philosophers believed, could man, guided by reason and science, escape the suffering and evil which had plagued him from time immemorial and build a better and brighter future for himself.

So how did these two radically different sources come together to produce liberalism?

The best explanation of it that I know of is found in the essay “Rationalism in Politics” by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who was Professor of Government at the London School of Economics.(4) Ever since the Renaissance, Oakeshott explained, Western thought has gradually come to be permeated by modern rationalism. This modern kind of rationalism reduced human knowledge to technical knowledge, i.e., knowledge that can be expressed as a formula and written down. This, however, was a kind of intellectual impoverishment because technical knowledge represents only a fraction of human knowledge. A tradition of thought contains much knowledge that is valuable but which cannot be formulated as technical knowledge. Rationalism strips a tradition of this knowledge, abbreviating it and reducing it to its technical elements, thereby producing an ideology. As an example of this, he pointed to the political ideology contained in the writings of John Locke, as what you get when the English political tradition is reduced by rationalism to an ideology.

This was the genesis of liberalism, of which John Locke was the father.   The English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   Or, to be more precise, one side of the English political tradition, reduced by Enlightenment rationalism to an ideology, became liberalism.   For in the seventeenth century, in a conflict stemming from the English Reformation of the century before that, the English tradition had split into two warring sides.  One side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Tories after the Restoration, sought to preserve the ancient constitution of church and state, the traditional prerogatives of the monarch, and the organic connection via apostolic episcopal succession of the Church of England with the early Catholic Church.   The other side, which came to be represented in Parliament by the Whigs after the Restoration, consisted of radicals who wished to subvert the constitution, seize the powers of government for the House of Commons, and eliminate the remaining links between the Anglican Church and medieval Catholicism.  The Tories, in other words, emphasized the elements of the English tradition that connected it to the larger tradition of medieval Christendom, whereas the Whigs sought to purge the English tradition of those elements.   The Revolution of 1689 was the ultimate triumph of the Whigs.   John Locke was a Whig, and liberalism was his rationalist abridgement of a tradition that had already been whittled down by his party’s century long attempts to severe its roots in medieval Christendom.

Neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre described the Enlightenment project as an “attempt to discover an independent rational justification for morality.” (5)  In the case of English classical liberalism it was more an attempt to discover an independent rational justification for the common law and constitution of Great Britain, at least in the form they would take when the modifications the Whigs were undertaking at the time Locke was writing were complete.   Thus liberalism’s inheritance from the Enlightenment project was a set of theories that provided arguments justifying English laws and government that did not depend upon the Christian tradition in which those laws and government evolved.   Liberalism’s grossest errors arise out of these theories. (6)

If liberalism’s theories were tainted by Enlightenment rationalism, they were at least developed to justify good laws and a good constitution. The Whigs had modified the English tradition and constitution, but they had not obliterated them, and so classical liberalism often argued for rights, freedoms, and laws, that had their source in the pre-Modern, Christian English tradition.

In developing their rationalist case for a constitution, laws, rights and liberties that had evolved within the Medieval Christian tradition, the liberals occasionally hit upon a brilliant and worthwhile principle or ideal. The most important of these were the closely related ideas of freedom of speech and freedom of thought.

Freedom of speech is the idea that a person should be free to express the thoughts that are on his mind in whatever words he so chooses and that he should not be silenced or penalized over the content of what he says. Freedom of thought or opinion is the idea that a person should be free to use his own faculties of reason and observation to come to his own views and conclusions. These two freedoms are inseparably intertwined.

The classical liberal argument for freedom of speech and thought was penned by liberal and utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill, as part of his famous treatise on the civil liberty of the individual.     On Liberty was first published in 1859 and it was a liberal essay from start to finish.   The wrongheaded ideas of liberalism are on prominent display within it from the first page, indeed from the first sentence in which Mill declared his subject to be “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Mill thought of liberty and authority as being in perpetual conflict, of non-democratic governments as the antagonists of their subjects, and of civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks as things which patriots had to wring from the hands of the authorities by force.   All of these ideas arise out of the all too human spirit of suspicion of and rebellion against authority, which Whiggery made into a virtue, but which St. John declared to be the very essence of sin, (7) justifying Dr. Johnson’s remark that “the first Whig was the devil.”

Nevertheless, Mill had some good insights. He went on to talk about how liberals had grown dissatisfied with civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks and balances and how they had demanded that government power be placed in the hands of elected and temporary governors, but that many of them had come to think that with this new form of “popular government” that was supposed to embody the voice of the people, they could abandon civil rights and liberties and constitutional checks on the sovereign power because these things would now be a hindrance rather than a help. Reflecting upon what this line of thinking had produced in France at the end of the previous century, but also unconsciously anticipating the direction liberalism would take in the English-speaking world a century after his own time, Mill rejected this line of thinking and argued for the necessity of civil rights and freedoms and limitations on government power under any form of government, warning against the “tyranny of the majority.”

In his second chapter, entitled “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”, Mill articulated the basic concepts of freedom of thought and speech. He wrote of freedom of these freedoms as things long and well established in his own day, as indeed, they were. As he put it:

[S]peaking generally, it is not, in constitutional countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public.

What, however, if there was a government that truly was completely in tune with its people, that spoke with their voice, and only exercised power in accordance with their will?


Even then, Mill declared, it would be wrong for that government to try and control the expression of thought. The people did not have the right to do so, nor did any government good or bad, because “the power itself is illegitimate”. In one of his most memorable statements, Mill declared freedom of thought and speech to be absolutely, not to be limited by government, society or the people under any circumstances:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

This is a powerful assertion.  Mill argued, in favour of his position, that to silence an opinion is to rob mankind, and especially those who disagree with the opinion, because if it is right and they are wrong, they lose the opportunity to be corrected, whereas if it is wrong and they are right, they lose the confidence and certainty in the truth that comes from it having coming into conflict with and triumphed over opposing errors.   Over the course of the chapter he expanded this argument into four basic supporting points – that a silenced opinion might be true, it being an assertion of one’s own infallibility to claim otherwise, that the conventional view is seldom if ever the whole truth, that even if the conventional opinion is the whole truth people will accept it as a mere prejudice without understanding the reasons it is true apart from conflict with opposing views, and that people will give mere lip service to the truth apart from any real conviction in the absence of a free debate.

While many of the things Mill wrote in the course of making this case for free speech are questionable, the main idea that comes across, that the truth is better off for being allowed to compete with error in free discussion and is weakened by the suppression of dissent, rings true.

It is a great irony that Mill, in laying down the intellectual foundation for absolute freedom of thought and speech, was championing the cause of liberalism against its sworn foe – religion and religious orthodoxy.   The irony lies in the fact that freedom of speech and thought may ultimately prove to be the means of the preservation of religious orthodoxy, while liberalism evolved in the twentieth century into the archenemy of freedom of speech and thought.

Liberalism thought of religion, especially organized public religion, as the enemy of freedom.   This was in part due to real abuses of religious authority within Christendom in the late centuries of the Middle Ages, but also because of liberalism’s individualistic orientation.  Liberalism conceived of freedom in strictly individualistic terms.  Religion, on the other hand, was and is a community institution that serves a social purpose.

Religion is not, as some evangelical Protestants have grown accustomed to saying, “man’s attempt to reach God”.   The term  religion comes from the Latin word religio, which means reverence for the sacred.   Religio was itself believed to be derived from the verb religare, which means “to bind fast”. (8)   This etymology points to the social function of religion as the institution which connects the members of a community to one another and to the sacred..  Religion does this by means of shared beliefs and rituals which, because they are passed down from one generation to another, are able to connect past, future, and present generations of a community into an organic whole. (9)   This is also the role of culture, which is why, as a myriad of commentators including Christopher Dawson and T. S. Eliot have pointed out, religion is the heart and soul of culture.

Liberals like Locke and Mill, obsessed with the individual, have never fully appreciated the importance of the community, or of the essential social function of religion within the community and the larger society.  Thus they fail to appreciate the importance of orthodoxy, apart from which religion could not perform its function.   Orthodoxy, which means “right belief”, is a religion’s definition, as a community of faith, of what its essential shared beliefs are.   If a religion did not identify a set of core beliefs as its orthodoxy, it could not create a sense of organic oneness between those who share its beliefs.

While there is tension between orthodoxy, the right of religion as a community to define what its common beliefs are, and freedom of thought and speech, the right of the individual to dissent from the community and think his own thoughts, the two do not necessarily contradict each other. Indeed, if the religious community in defining a set of beliefs as orthodox and the individual in drawing his own conclusions are both guided by the ideal of what is true, there is reason to hope that the relationship between the two might be one of harmony rather than opposition. In fact, by Mill’s own arguments, free discussion should strengthen orthodoxy, by clarifying the reasons behind orthodox beliefs and deepening the believer’s convictions.


Of the rationalist, Michael Oakeshott wrote “And by some strange self-deception, he attributes to tradition (which, of course, is pre-eminently fluid) the rigidity and fixity of character which in fact belongs to ideological politics.” (10) The importance of this insight cannot be underestimated. Tradition, which includes everything that a community, society, or civilization passes down through the generations, including its religious orthodoxy, is a living thing, which like all living things, is a combination of change and constancy. From birth to death, a living organism remains the same being, but it also undergoes changes. Some of these changes, such as natural growth and the replenishing of dying cells, are necessary to sustain the life of the organism, whereas others, such as severe disease or injury can cripple or even kill the organism. The same is true of a tradition, and while liberals believed that the ideas that would arise in a free discussion would kill tradition by emancipating the individual, they may also be the fresh ideas that will keep the tradition alive.

Whichever is the case, liberalism itself has become noted for the inflexibility that Oakeshott rightly said was the attribute of ideology.   In the twentieth century it became itself the enemy of freedom of thought and religion as, in pursuit of the next stage of what it considered to be social progress, it demanded that certain ideas and forms of speech be driven from polite society.   In the phenomenon that has come to be known as “political correctness”, liberals have insisted that language they consider to be offensive to racial minorities – regardless of whether or not the racial minorities themselves consider it to be offensive – be banned, that the structure of the English language be altered to be “gender inclusive”, and that ethnic humour, unless directed at one’s own ethnic group (or against whites) be forbidden.   More disturbingly, liberals have demanded that major academic disciplines including the sciences, adhere to the egalitarian doctrines they are currently obsessed with.   Worst of all, they have in some places, including Canada at both the federal and provincial levels, introduced laws that define the expression of certain thoughts as criminal acts or as acts of discrimination that make the speaker liable to expensive civil lawsuits.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief the rascally adventurer Basil Seal, having fled England and his mother’s attempt to impose respectability and responsibility upon him, and arrived in Azania, where his Oxford friend Seth has just been crowned emperor, agrees to help Seth modernize his empire with disastrous consequences.  “You know”, he remarks to the emperor “we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago.  If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums…”  In response the emperor asks “What is all that?” to which Seal replies “Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.” (11)

  So, it would seem, freedom of thought and speech, have ceased to be liberal. The kind of thinking that Mill identified as being common in continental liberalism in his own day and which was represented in England by Jeremy Bentham in the generation prior to his own, in which constitutional rights, freedoms, and protections are regarded as hindrances to progress when the government is democratic has eclipsed Locke’s and Mill’s emphasis on personal liberty to become the mainstream of liberal thought.

In defense of their new position, some liberals make a distinction between what they call “hate speech” and “free speech”. Hate speech, they maintain, is not covered by Mill’s arguments for freedom of speech, because it has no value and would not be “robbing the human race” of anything. It is not the expression of a thought, right or wrong, they say, but a verbal assault upon “vulnerable” groups like racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and homosexuals.

The first clue that something is wrong with this reasoning is that the hate speech liberals believe should be suppressed may be true.   Liberals have argued that those accused of hate speech should not be allowed to present evidence that what they have said is in fact true in their defence.   What matters, they claim, is that the speech has the effect of casting negative aspersions on a group that hate speech laws are designed to protect.   It makes no difference if the speech is true.  Hence the wording of the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which declares speech to be defamatory if it is “likely to expose” members of protected groups “to hatred or contempt” and the ruling by the Supreme Court in the John Ross Taylor case that “truth is no defense”. 

The second clue that that distinction between hate speech and free speech is spurious can be found when we look at what is considered to be hate speech.  What is hate speech, anyway?  Actually saying “I hate you” to someone does not seem to be prohibited by any existing hate speech law.  Attempting to prove that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis in World War II was less than six million, by contrast, is prohibited by hate speech laws.   Surely there must be something terribly wrong with a theory that justifies the suppression of speech that contains hate, but allows expressions of actual emotional hate, while silencing those who claim that Hitler only murdered five million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine Jews.

The final clue that something is wrong with hate speech laws is the expanding nature of the definition of hate speech. At first, when hate speech laws were introduced, they were used against people who had extremely marginal views and few defenders. Today it is not uncommon to hear expressions of Christian opposition to the deliberate taking of the life of the unborn or of the Christian doctrine that sexual intercourse outside of marriage between a man and a woman is sinful denounced as hateful, no matter how much the Christian may say that we are to hate only the sin but love the sinner.

What we can see in all of this is that laws against hate speech are not really exceptions to the arguments Mill made for freedom of speech but examples of the very thing he was arguing against, the social engineering of public opinion by democratic governments.

Whatever else the classical liberalism of men like Mill may have gotten wrong, at least their concept of absolute freedom of thought and speech was superior to this.

(1)   Christopher Dawson, The Formation of Christendom, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), especially chapter eleven (pp. 165-177) and chapter thirteen (pp. 190-213).  In chapter eleven, Dawson describes how the Celtic monasticism of St. Columba and St. Aidan of Lindisfarne and the Benedictine monasticism of St. Augustine of Canterbury had planted a Christian culture in Northumbria and Kent respectively, and how out of this culture arose men like St. Bede “the real father of medieval history” and St. Boniface the evangelist of northern Europe.   In chapter thirteen he describes how Alfred the Great of Wessex, while the Vikings were wiping out these monasteries in the north, preserved the Christian culture they had founded in the south,  and “found time to think out afresh the problems of Christian education and to lay with his own hands the foundations of a Christian vernacular culture.”       

(2)   Richard M. Weaver traced its roots further back, to the nominalism of William of Ockham in the thirteenth century, in his Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).   Weaver saw the nominalist break with Christian Platonism by rejecting the reality of the forms as the start of the unraveling of the Christian worldview of an order of being descending from God.   Interestingly, Christopher Dawson, through a different line of reasoning, also traced the origin of the breakdown of the unity of medieval Christendom to Ockham, in  The Dividing of Christendom (London: Sidwick & Jackson, 1965), pp. 24-25, 27.

(3)   Robert Nisbet in Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) p. 261, wote “The Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century is unique among ages of claimed cultural efflorescence, or so-called golden ages, in that it is almost entirely the product of egocentric illusion.  The century was barely under way when the Italian humanists began to celebrate what they called, with consummate impudence, the eta moderna, the modern age, the age of renewal of civilization, after the long dark night of the church-dominated millennium, the medium aevum, that separated them from classical civilization.   They were destined, the humanists believed, to terminate the murk of scholasticism by calculated revival of Greek and Roman ideas, style, dress and ceremonies.  On the basis of this revival, they would bury medieval culture and at the same time build imperishably to the future.   They and they only were the true heirs of Plato and Aristotle and also the architects of the future of Europe.”   This attitude towards itself and toward medieval Christian civilization, which Nisbet went on to mercilessly tear to shreds, is the attitude, taken to the nth degree by Voltaire and Diderot, became the foundational view of the world and history of the Enlightenment project.

(4)   This essay was first published in the first volume of the Cambridge Journal in 1947.  It was later republished as the first and titular essay in a collection of his writings entitled Rationalism in Politics: And Other Essays (London: Metheun Publishing, 1962), Oakeshott’s second and best known book.

(5)   Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2^nd edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 1984) p. 39.

(6)   Locke, for example, in his Two Treatises Of Government borrowed the theory of the social contract from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.   In this theory, man in his “natural state” is an individual rather than a member of a society, and society is an artificial construction of man, external to his nature, formed by compacts made between individuals.   This in itself is obviously wrong.  It is the opposite of what is observable all around us. Human beings are born into their families, communities, and larger societies and that their individuality is something that gradually develops. Man is a social animal by nature, hence the same basic social institutions recur, albeit in different forms, wherever there are people, in every place and time. While some social relationships – friendship, business partnership, and recently marriage, are entered into voluntarily – many of the most fundamental social relationships, such as those between father and son, mother and daughter, and brother and sister, are not voluntary at all but are permanent relationships defined by blood.  As wrong-headed as social contract theory is – except for Edmund Burke’s version of an “eternal contract” written by God Himself – Locke made it even more unrealistic when he modified Hobbes’ version to fit his liberalism (if Locke’s writings put forth an “independent rational justification” for the Whig interpretation of the English political tradition, reducing it to an ideology, Hobbes’ writings could be said to have done the same for the Royalist/Tory interpretation of the English political tradition) .   Hobbes recognized what human beings in the absence of law, government, or society, would actually be like – a war of all against all.  Locke rejected this “bellum omnium contra omnes” view of man outside society – as he rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of Original Sin – in favour of an optimistic view of human nature as being basically cooperative and good.

(7)   “he hamartia estin he anomia”, 1 John 3:4

(8)  Lactantius, for example, asserted this derivation in his Divine Institutes.

(9)  Religion, of course, cannot be reduced to just its social function.  This is particularly true, I would add, of Christianity, which is built on the foundation of God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, as St. Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 12, Christianity, does perform the social function of a religion, by binding its members into an organic community, the Church.

(10) Oakeshott, op. cit.

(11) Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, [1932], 1962), p. 128.