Barbaric Cultural Practices

Earlier this year, and especially during the long federal election campaign, the Liberal and New Democrat parties, the liberal media, progressive bloggers, and other assorted lefties, were able to get a lot of mileage out of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices”. The previous government, led by Stephen Harper, had banned the wearing of the niqab during citizenship oath ceremonies in 2011, a ban which was struck down by a Federal Court.* Harper’s government vowed to take the matter to the Supreme Court and then, in the last month of the election campaign, promised to establish an RCMP tipline for reporting cases of “barbaric cultural practices”.

The progressives condemned this as racist and xenophobic. Harper, they maintained, was appealing to fear, negativity, and hatred, and this was “unCanadian” because Canada is the land of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism. Actually, Canada was nothing of the sort prior to the premiership of Trudeau the Elder, which began in 1968. It was the Trudeau Liberals who created the new Canada of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism – that is to say tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that were imposed on the country from the top down, administered by arrogant bureaucrats, and protected by the suppression of dissent. The older, traditional, British Canada was a much superior country.

The merits of the older British Canada, and the rather odious nature of the kind of “tolerance” and “diversity” introduced by the Trudeau Liberals which make a mockery of the ordinary meaning of these terms are, of course, beyond the understanding of today’s progressives. Nor do they seem to be capable of grasping that it is one of their own chief ideals that Stephen Harper was fighting for in his campaign against “barbaric cultural practices”.

This is not intended to be laudatory of Stephen Harper. The ideal in question is that of the equality of the sexes, or, as the progressives now insist upon mislabelling it, “gender equality”, an ideal I do not share with Harper or the progressives and, indeed, regard as worthy only of ridicule. Auberon Waugh put it best, I think, years ago when he wrote:

I have never understood how equality can be said to apply, except in the most superficial sense. to any human relationship. By this I do not mean that we are all graded in some divinely-imposed pecking order, but that our essential differences make talk of equality meaningless. Study of the sexes is bound to identify the differing characteristics of each, and I cannot see how anything useful is achieved by asserting that chalk is equal to cheese, or should be equal to cheese and must be made equal.

I don’t believe in “gender equality” but the progressives all seem to believe in it and none of them more so than that vapid young twit who is our new Prime Minister and who has made a grand gesture of support for this ideal in the way he chose the Ministers for his new Cabinet.

These same progressives accused Stephen Harper of waging a “war on women”. Which, however, actually accomplishes more for the fairer sex – choosing your Cabinet Ministers on the basis of their sex so you can have an equal number of men and of women, or actively trying to keep such practices as honour killings and female circumcision from becoming prevalent in Canada? It is practices like these, which target the female sex, that the Harper government condemned as barbaric.

In 2011, the year the Harper Conservatives won a majority government, the federal government updated the “Discover Canada” brochure that is given to those who wish to immigrate to and become citizens of Canada. Among the changes was the addition of forced marriage to the following list: “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, “honour killings,” female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence” and goes on to say that those who commit these things will all be severely punished under our criminal law. Now that last part may have been more a statement of wishful thinking than an accurate description of how our criminal justice system actually functions but that is beside the point. “Spousal abuse”, runs both ways, and in fact there is recent evidence that women are more likely to be abusive in relationships than men, which, of course, would have come as no surprise to Rudyard Kipling, but this too is beside the point as the government clearly had male-on-female abuse in mind when it put that into the pamphlet. For that is what all of these “barbaric cultural practices” have in common, they all target females. The title of the subsection of the brochure that this is found in, by the way, is “The Equality of Women and Men”.

At the time, Justin Trudeau, then Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal Shadow Minister for Immigration condemned the Harper government for the use of the word “barbaric”, even though it was not itself a new addition to the publication. He received so much negative feedback over this he was forced to make a retraction the next day.

Every time the Harper government spoke of “barbaric cultural practices” it was with regards to practices in which women are treated cruelly or unfairly. The niqab controversy was no exception to this although the face veil is obviously not on the same scale as murdering one’s daughter or sister because she shamed the family by having a boyfriend, dressing inappropriately, or being raped, or removing a young girl’s clitoris to prevent her from growing up to become promiscuous. While I may not think much of the “gender equality” Mr. Harper and Mr. Trudeau both believe in, unlike Mr. Trudeau four years ago, I have no problem agreeing that these practices are utterly barbaric. Indeed, one of the things most objectionable about the false ideal of equality, is that those who believe in it tend to make a big deal out of peccadilloes while letting major injustices like these slide.

Consider the example of feminism. “The women’s movement” is a modern phenomenon, whose raison d'être is to promote the rights of women. Yet it has never concentrated its efforts on fighting honour killings or cliterodectomy or anything of the like. Instead, it has focused on such things as the “glass ceiling” and the “77 cents on the dollar” and to combat these largely imaginary bogeys, has created a barbaric cultural practice of its own, i.e., abortion on demand. It could be argued that this is because feminism is a movement which began in, grew up in, and still mostly belongs to, the Western world where the former practices were mostly unknown until quite recently. That is the whole point, however. That a revolutionary movement seeking radical societal transformation in the name of women developed in the West, where it really only became a force after women had been given the vote and barriers to their education, owning property, and having professional careers had for the most part disappeared, and not in parts of the world where girls have their genitals mutilated and may be murdered by their relatives if they “shame” their family is because the modern Western mind has been thoroughly permeated and polluted by the false ideal of equality.

Ironically, feminism is part of the larger progressivism which is itself responsible for practices like female genital mutilation and honour killings, once unknown in countries like Canada, becoming more and more common in large Western cities. For progressivism is not just about the equality of the sexes, it is about the equality of races and cultures as well and for decades now, what this has meant, is that it has insisted that all cultures ought to be equally welcome in Canada and other Western countries. This is what the first Prime Minister Trudeau’s policy of “official multiculturalism” was all about and it is clearly the reason that the younger Trudeau, heir to this dogma in which he was undoubtedly indoctrinated from an early age, initially took a foolish offence to the description of forced marriages, female genital mutilation, and honour killings as barbaric a few years ago. To call these things barbaric is to say that all cultures are not equal after all, which, of course, they are not.

Trudeau and other progressives are no more capable of admitting this than they are of admitting that there is a fundamental contradiction in their ideology – that equality of the sexes and equality of cultures are mutually incompatible ideals. They can be rejected together with consistency – which is my own position – but they cannot be consistently affirmed together. Stephen Harper got this partially right, the Trudeaus have always gotten it completely wrong, and Canada has paid a heavy price for their error.

*It has been drawn to my attention that I was mistaken in thinking that the ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal was based on the Charter. The ban, which was an instruction from the Ministry to the judges administering the citizenship oath rather than a law, was overturned because it conflicted with an older rule that requires such judges to give maximum religious freedom in the swearing-in ceremony. Thank you to the person who noticed and notified me of this factual error.

A Matter of Honour

In William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing Don Pedro, the prince of Aragon, arranges the marriage of his friend Count Claudio to Hero, who is the daughter of their host, Leonato, governor of Messina. Things would have gone smoothly, and thus have been far too uninteresting to put into a play, were it not for the actions of the prince’s illegitimate brother John. Don John, who is bitter at the world and takes delight in ruining the joy of others, plots against the happiness of the couple. With the help of his attendant Borachio, he arranges it so that Don Pedro and Claudio witness what appears to be a secret tryst between Hero and a lover at Hero’s window after midnight on the night prior to her marriage. Fooled by these machinations, Claudio denounces Hero at the altar with the support of Don Pedro and Don John, then marches out of the church.

As this play is a comedy not a tragedy it all works out in the end, but in the immediate aftermath Hero faints, her cousin Beatrice assumes she is dead, and the devastated Leonato, who has believed the accusations declares:

O Fate! take not away thy heavy hand.
Death is the fairest cover for her shame
That may be wish'd for. (Act IV, Scene 1)

In recent weeks the newspapers have been full of stories about people who obviously agree with Leonato’s sentiments but who have presumptuously assumed to themselves the role that Leonato assigned to fate. On June 15th of this year, Muhammed and Waqas Parvez pled guilty to the murder of Aqsa Parvez, who was daughter of the Muhammed and sister of Waqas. The murder had taken place in December of 2007 in Mississauga, Ontario. The reason, according to the murderers who had turned themselves in, was that she had brought dishonour upon the family by refusing to wear the hijab.

The murder of Aqsa Parvez was an unjustifiable atrocity and has been rightly condemned by virtually everybody who has commented on it. Perhaps, however, we should reflect upon the question of why this murder is so repulsive to us? Is it because our sense of justice is affronted by the idea that a trivial offense like immodesty would receive so disproportionate a penalty as death? Is it because the thought of a father and brother killing a daughter and sister offends our concept of how family members are to love and act towards one another?

Or is it because we as a society have lost all sense of honour and shame and are simply incapable of understanding those who still hold to those concepts, albeit in a warped and twisted form?

How exactly does our modern, liberal, society compare to societies whose culture encourages such things as honour killings? Do we murder our own children less often or more than they do? When we do so, do we at least do so for better reasons than they do, or for worse?

According to Statistics Canada there were 105,535 abortions in our country in 2002, 103,768 in 2003, and 91,377 in 2006. The numbers for 2006 are incomplete, as Thaddeus M. Baklinski reported for Lifesite last year. The numbers for BC, New Brunswick, and Manitoba were for one reason or another left out of the national total. (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/aug/09082607.html)

In contrast, the United Nations in 2000 estimated the total number of honour killings per year to be around 5000.

Phyllis Chesler argues convincingly, in an article entitled “Worldwide Trends in Honor Killings” which can be found in the Spring 2010 issue of the Middle East Quarterly, that these numbers too, are far too low. However, even if we were to quadruple the UN’s numbers, the total number of honour killings in the world each year would still be less than a quarter of the total number of abortions in Canada alone.

Well, alright, but that’s just numbers, you may say. At least we aren’t barbarically killing the female members of our families to satisfy some outmoded sense of honour.

That is true. Instead of killing those who, however trivially, have done something to shame us, we murder our unborn children to satisfy our own selfishness. We have abandoned our traditional culture, values, and morality, which taught us to behave responsibly and with self-control, to honour the rules of our society, and to at least pretend to virtue even if we do not possess it. In the place of this traditional culture, we have adopted a modern liberal culture of individualistic self-indulgence. We are taught, not to control our sensual desires, but to give in to them, to let them dominate us. If doing so results in pregnancies that we are not willing to take responsibility for, we are told that the solution is abortion.

Who are the barbarians again?

Do not misunderstand me. Our crimes do not excuse the crimes of others, and killing a family member to preserve the families honour, is both a crime and a perversion of the concept of honour.

However, much of the commentary on these recent “honour killings”, even by many who call themselves “conservatives”, has taken the unfortunate form of “look how superior our modern, liberal culture is to these backwards traditional cultures who still believe in honour”.

Those holding such a viewpoint consider “honour” to be a thing of the past, something appropriate to feudal society, but which has been rendered obsolete by modern advancements in democracy, law, and recognition of human rights.

They are sorely mistaken. Society cannot outgrow the need for honour and its opposite which is shame. Human beings, being by nature social, do not live in isolation from each other, but in communities, in societies. To interact socially requires a common set of rules that is understood by everybody. Some of these rules are so important they are codified into law and enforced by the state. These are the rules against criminal behavior, i.e., behavior that harms others, their property, or society itself. Other rules do not properly fall within the jurisdiction of the state but are as essential to the functioning of society as laws. These rules, which include most traditional rules regarding modesty, sexuality, etc., are enforced by society through honour and shame.

Honour is notoriously difficult to define. It occupies the space between character and reputation. Character is the actual makeup of your heart and soul, your virtues and vices. Reputation is how your character is perceived by other people. Honour is related to both, but not quite identical with either. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares honour to be the reward society bestows upon virtue. A functional society will bestow honour upon individuals and families who display virtue, and will bestow shame upon those who display vice. Honour and shame affect standing in society and so people are encouraged to protect their, and their family’s, honour, by either cultivating, or at least pretending to virtue.

In the absence of honour, society’s only means of maintaining social control, is through the law. If the law seeks to enforce the rules that should be enforced through honour/shame you end up with an oppressive political and legal system. If the rules are abandoned altogether you get the kind of moral chaos that allows people to kill the unborn children who are inconvenient to their pursuit of sensual pleasure and consider themselves morally superior for doing so.

Traditionally, there is a time and a place, for wielding the sword in defense of honour. A soldier fighting for the honour of his country in warfare is one example. A man fighting a duel in defense of his own honour, or that of a lady, is another. In the one case the sword is used against the enemy’s of one’s country. In the other case it is used against one who has insulted one’s own, or a lady’s, honour.

The traditional culture we abandoned to embrace liberal modernism encouraged fathers and brothers to defend the honour of female family members by challenging those who insulted them, and forcing those who had wronged them to do right by them. It did not tell them to defend the family’s honour by turning the sword on female family members who shamed the family.

You do not wield the sword against your own family members to defend the family’s honour. To do so is murder, which is crime, rightly punishable under Law, by the Crown. Crime is a subcategory of vice, and the reward of vice is not honour, but shame.

So-called “honour killers” in murdering their family members, bring far more shame upon their families, than the women they kill did by the actions which provoked the “honour killing”. In this way “honour killing” is a perversion of honour.

Which, however, is the greater perversion? Honour killing? Or abandoning honour and virtue and morality altogether for a self-serving hedonism that allows one to murder one’s own unborn children in service of one’s selfish pursuit of pleasure?