“No Man is an Island”

James Dobson passed away on the 21^st of August this year.  When I heard the news it was the first time in years I had heard his name.  The last time I heard his radio program, Focus on the Family, was probably in the 1990s.  Dobson was a prominent evangelical leader, although he was a psychologist by profession rather than a minister.  His father, James Dobson Sr., had been a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, one of the Wesleyan Holiness denominations, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather.  Dobson initially achieved celebrity status among evangelicals for advising parents to avoid the culture of permissiveness encouraged by the majority in his chosen profession and raise up their children with boundaries and discipline.   His first book, Dare to Discipline (1970) which is probably still his best known, was, as is evident from the title, on this subject.  In the decades since, he fought on several other fronts although   generally those which pertained to the type of issues that are categorized as moral and social, in the emerging culture war as it was dubbed in the early 1990s (1) around the time I first heard of him.

 

I first heard of Dobson’s passing, not through the news, but through a social media post by a former classmate with whom I had attended Providence College (formerly Winnipeg Bible College, now Providence University College) in the mid to late 1990s.  This post, and several others from the same former classmate whose name out of charity I shall omit, thoroughly disgusted me.  He did not merely disregard the ancient proverb de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est but went out of his way to do the very opposite of it.  He took hearty delight in Dobson’s death and was positively rejoicing over it. 

 

I was reminded of this by the reaction of several American leftists to the murder of Charlie Kirk yesterday.  Kirk, the 31 year old founder and director of Turning Point, USA, was shot in the neck on stage during a question and answer session at an event at Utah Valley University.  He died from the wound later in the afternoon.  Kirk belonged to the Calvary Chapel Association, a Pentecostal group that separated from the Foursquare Gospel and from which the Vineyard movement would later separate.  Like Dobson, he had been a culture warrior.  Since youth was his target audience he made a lot of use of social media, he had a podcast and as of earlier this year a televised talk show.  He was also the author of a number of books.  He is probably best known, however, for going to university and other campuses and promoting his own views by, among other things, challenging overconfident progressive students to informal debates.

 

I am not going to reproduce the responses of the leftists here.  Chaya Raichik has reposted several on her Libs of Tiktok account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the link to which you can find in the footnote. (2)   These are generally social media posts, exalting in Kirk’s assassination in a way similar to how my former classmate rejoiced over Dobson’s death.  In the news media, progressive commentators have made remarks to the effect that Kirk brought it on himself by the views he held and expressed.  Matthew Dowd, for example, said that Kirk’s “hate speech” had brought about “hateful actions” which remark itself brought about Dowd’s termination as a commentator on MSNBC.

 

You would think that liberals and leftists would take a break from accusing others of “hate speech” for basically saying things, usually true, about groups they think should be protected from criticism, when in the act of making remarks that essentially excuse a murder.  You would be wrong. 

 

I am not going to pretend that I was a big fan of Charlie Kirk.  The principle of de mortuis nil nisi does not require that. I agreed with him on most of the issues the liberals and the left hated him over – he was anti-abortion and anti-birth control, pro-gun, anti-CRT and DEI (Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), etc.  He had all the qualities, however, that I had found obnoxious and grating in American Republicans even before the MAGA movement degenerated into a deranged personality cult.

 

One of the more obnoxious of those qualities was the assumption that everyone was either an American Republican or some kind of liberal, leftist or progressive.  Watching the disgusting manner in which people in the latter categories have been celebrating Kirk’s murder makes me all the more glad that this assumption is entirely baseless and false.  As a Canadian who finds the thought of his country become further Americanized utterly repugnant and as a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist and royalist I could never have any sympathy with American Republicanism but I have far less sympathy with the kind of politics that teaches people to be so totally devoid of class as to celebrate the deaths of their political opponents.  Liberalism and leftism are beneath contempt.

 

I direct any liberal or leftist who may have come across this essay to the poem by John Donne from which the title has been borrowed.   The third and final is the operative stanza. Now let us conclude with the traditional Requiem prayer for the late James Dobson and Charlie Kirk.  Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

 

 

 

 (1)   The culture war itself, and the expression “culture war”, had both been around much longer, but it was in the early 1990s that the expression became attached to the thing itself as a kind of semi-official label.

(2)   https://x.com/libsoftiktok

Where the Hatred Comes From

Following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization not only unleashed the predictable barrage of largely ineffective rockets on the Jewish state, but penetrated the barrier between Gaza and Israel with a large force that killed about 1500 people and took about 150 hostage, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of progressives gathering en masse in cities and academic campuses around the West, not to protest these despicable acts, but to cheer them on.   This was immediately denounced as a display of anti-Semitism, mostly by neoconservatives many of whom called for such demonstrations to be banned.   While I don’t have much better an opinion of these demonstrators than the neocons have this call to criminalize the demonstrations is extremely foolish.    There is already too much suppression of the expression of thought and opinion, we do not need to add any more.   I don’t agree that this is an expression of anti-Semitism either.   This essay will explain why.

 

A discussion of this sort requires that we define anti-Semitism at some point so we might as well get that out of the way.   H. L. Mencken said that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes the Jews more than is absolutely necessary”.   That is amusing, at least to those who do not have a politically correct pole permanently lodged up their rectums, but not particularly helpful.   Joe Sobran said that “an anti-Semite used to be someone who didn’t like the Jews.   Now he is someone the Jews don’t like”.   This is more helpful as an explanation of the neoconservative use of the term than of what it really means.  

 

Most people, I suspect, use it to mean any dislike of the Jews for any reason.   The late rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner, objected to this promiscuous use of the term.   In an article entitled “Sorting Out Jew-Haters” that appeared in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture he gave this account of anti-Semitism:

 

According to anti-Semitism, Jews are a separate species within humanity, peculiarly wicked, responsible for the evil of the human condition. A political philosophy formulated in the world of late 19th-century Germany and Austria, anti- Semitism formed the ideological foundation of political parties and served as the basis for public policy. It provided an account of life and how the Jews corrupt it. It offered a history of Western civilization and how the Jews pervert it. It formulated a theory of the world’s future and how the Jews propose to conquer it. People make sense of the world lay appealing to anti-Semitism, and in World War II, millions of Germans willingly gave their lives for the realization of their country’s belief in an anti-Semitic ideal of national life and culture.

 

The term, he argued, should be reserved for Jew hatred of the type that fully meets this description, and to apply it to lesser prejudices trivializes it.

 

Now, you might be thinking that what we are seeing meets Neusner’s requirements to be called anti-Semitism.    The rallies that we have been talking about, after all, are not just in support of the Palestinian people, but of Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and of its actions on 7 October.    Why would anyone support such an organization and such behaviour unless their mind was in the grips of the sort of hatred described in the paragraph from Neusner’s article quoted above?

 

There are a couple of obvious problems with that way of thinking.  

 

The first is that if these progressives, academic and otherwise, were motivated by anti-Semitic hatred we would expect that their support for violent, murderous, organizations and their behaviour would be limited to Hamas and other similar groups.   This is not the case.   The progressive activist crowd has a long history of supporting violent, murderous, groups.   In the post-World War II era of the last century, for example, they supported every Communist group available from the Stalinists to the Maoists to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.   Communism killed 100 million people in the twentieth century.    Pol Pot’s group murdered about 2 million people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia.  Yet Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor who became the guru of the student activist wing of the left and who is regarded by most neoconservatives as a self-loathing Jew for his support of the Palestinians, decades ago was defending Pol Pot and claiming that the accounts of the “killing fields” were American propaganda.   My old friend Reaksa Himm, whose account of seeing his family slaughtered by these brutes and being left for dead himself, was published as The Tears of My Soul: He Survived Cambodia’s Killing Fields, His Family Didn’t, Could He Forgive? in 2003, would no doubt have a few things to say about that.   Then, of course, there are the countless progressive students who thought it “cool” to wear t-shirts or put posters up in their dorm room bearing the image of vile Communist terrorist and mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara.   So, no, this sort of stupidity on the Left, is not all about the Jews.

 

The second problem is that even when progressive bile is directed towards Israel as it is in these pro-Hamas demonstrations it is not against Jews qua Jews.   There is an element of racial hatred in it but that racial hatred is not directed against Jews as distinct from everyone else.   It is directed against Jews as white people.    Some might object to that statement on the grounds that not all Jews are white, Jewishness being primarily a religious identity.   Others, including some Jews who hate whites and Christians and some whites who don’t like Jews, would make the polar opposite objection that in their opinion no Jews are white.   These wildly differing objections aside, my statement is nevertheless true.   The hatred the immature, idiotic, Left is displaying towards Israel is the same hatred they display towards all Western countries, i.e. countries that lay claim to the heritage of Greco-Roman, Christian, white European, civilization, and to the extent that there is a racial element it is that which is on display almost ubiquitously on university campuses in the form of the claim that “whiteness” is a cultural and civilizational cancer that must be “abolished”.   The language used against Israel is the same language used against Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and basically any country and society settled and built by Europeans as an extension of Western civilization.   The only difference is that in this case the settlers were Jews rather than Christians.

 

It is not therefore a case of anti-Semitism.   Anti-Semitism and its counterpart Zionism began around the same time in the nineteenth century.   Both were the result of “Enlightenment” philosophy’s war against God, revelation, religion and faith.  For centuries Christians and Jews had been at odds over a religious issue.   We, rightly, believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament.   They, wrongly, reject Jesus as the Christ.   This was not an insurmountable divide.   Any Jew could become a Christian by believing that Jesus is the Christ and being baptized into the Church.   The “Enlightenment” brought about a loss of faith on both sides but this did not eliminate the divide.   Instead, post-Christian Gentiles and secular Jews began to regard their division as being based on biological racial differences.   Division on this basis is insurmountable.   You cannot change your race.   At least, you couldn’t until the whole “I’m whatever gender, sex, race, species, I want to be” garbage started up in the last few years.   The expression of this idea of an insurmountable race divide was anti-Semitism on the part of post-Christian Gentile Europeans and Zionism on the part of secular Jews.   In the early days of both movements they supported each other.   Each believed that the racial differences between Jew and Gentile prevented them from living in peace together, therefore the solution was for them to live in peace apart.    Whatever else might be said about this way of thinking it is clear that the animosity directed towards the Jews of Israel on the part of the pro-Hamas progressive demonstrators is not this anti-Semitism.   It is based, indeed, on the very opposite concept – that the Jews are fundamentally one with other Western Europeans rather than being fundamentally divided from them by race or even religion.

 

Just in case you mistake this as an attempt to white-wash the progressives, let me assure you my intention is quite the reverse. The progressives’ anti-Israel position arises out of a far more pernicious attitude than mere anti-Semitism.   It arises out of the hatred that is at the very heart of leftism. 

 

The Left is the openly revolutionary form of liberalism.   Sometimes liberalism tries to hide its revolutionary nature behind a mask of reform, of working within the institutions of civilization to accomplish its goals, but when that mask is removed what you get is the Left.   The Left, therefore, is the true face of liberalism, and that face is one of revolution and sedition.   Liberalism is not a constructive force but a destructive force.  In its earliest recognizable form it began as an attack on Christendom or Christian civilization, the heir to classical Greco-Roman civilization.   Its first targets were kings who are the earthly political representatives of the King of Kings Who rules over all of Creation, and the Church, the corporate body of Jesus Christ in which His Incarnational presence is sacramentally continued after His Ascension to the right hand of the Father.   In attacking God’s earthly representation in this way liberalism revealed that its ultimate hatred is of God Himself.   Liberalism is essentially the earthly continuation of Satan’s revolt against God.   After attacking king and Church, liberalism launched its siege on every other tradition and institution of Christian civilization.   From what we have just seen about liberalism’s essential nature its hatred of civilization is entirely explicable.   Liberalism hates kings because they are the earthly representation of God’s Sovereign rule over Creation.   Liberalism hates the Church because the Church is the earthly representation of Christ’s priestly intercession in Heaven.   Liberalism hates civilization because civilization is the product of man as builder and it is in his capacity as builder that man most displays the image in which man was created, the image of God the Creator.

 

That is the hatred that is on display whenever the progressive Left blithers on and on about “colonialism” and “imperialism”.   Man, in his fallen estate, is incapable of building a perfect civilization.   Imperfect civilization, however, is better than no civilization at all.   The Left is no more capable of building a perfect civilization than the builders of the past it is always decrying, sometimes for their real sins but more often for new offences they just made up yesterday, and the Left is not interested in trying to build a perfect civilization.  It is only interested in tearing down the civilization others have built.   It claims to be speaking out for “victims”.   Sometimes the “victims” are people who have suffered actual harm in some way from civilization building.   Other times, they are merely those who have not shared equally in the benefits of civilization with others.   Either way, the Left’s idea that civilization must be razed, its history erased, and its builders “cancelled” and defamed is hardly the answer and in the support they are now showing for the despicable acts of murderous terrorists they show that their motivation is not genuine concern for those who have not fared as well from civilization as others, but a Satanic hatred of civilization builders, for representing, even in an imperfect way, the image of the Creator God.

 

That is a far more vile form of hatred than the extremely banal one of which the neoconservatives are accusing them.

The Tory and Democracy

As we have seen, Toryism, the classical conservatism that upholds traditional royal and ecclesiastical authority in their shared vocation of pursuing the common good, while largely synonymous with “the right” when right and left first took on political significance in the French Revolution, is more difficult to place on the twentieth century map that makes politics into a spectrum between individualism on the right and collectivism on the left. The Tory is both an individualist, albeit in a different sense than the classical liberal, and a collectivist, but in a different sense than the leftist. Tory individualism is about real individuals whose individuality makes them stand out from the crowd, rather than the abstract individual of liberal theory whose individuality is defined by what makes him like every other individual. Tory collectivism is about a plurality of collective institutions that is both horizontal – family, parish, neighborhood – and vertical – parish, diocese, ecclesiastical province – rather than the single collective, the people, represented by a single institution, the democratic state, of leftism. We have also seen that liberal individualism and leftist collectivism converge in the direction of modern mass society – an aggregation of individuals under the modern state.

Liberalism and leftism also converge in their belief that democracy is the best form of government. Liberalism and leftism are both progressive, accepting the view that history, especially that of the modern age, is moving forward in a linear line towards a better future in a universal state. Both would identify that universal state with democracy. The word democracy has different connotations to the liberal and to the leftist, however. Liberalism is a form of representative democracy, which means that the idea of filling public offices by popular election is an essential part of the meaning of democracy to the liberal. In the leftist ideal, democracy is the state in which the distinction between governed and government is eliminated, and the state is the voice of the will of the people. A one-party state, in which the party is seen as the true voice of the people, as in Nazi Germany (1) and every Communist country, while obviously not fitting the liberal meaning of democracy, is compatible with the leftist view of democracy.

Where does democracy fit in the Tory view of things?

The Tory, being a traditionalist and a royalist, does not share the liberal and leftist belief that democracy is the best form of government. That does not mean that the Tory rejects all forms of democracy. Democracy has a long pedigree, going back two and a half millennia, to ancient Athens. Democracy there was different from modern democracy. The assembly, which voted on all legislation, did not consist of elected representatives, but of the city’s adult, male, citizens, a form of direct democracy more practical in a city-state than in a larger polity. The greatest minds of democratic Athens did not consider it to be either ideal or the best possible form of government. Aristotle continued the discussion of constitutional forms that Plato had begun in The Republic and Laws in his The Constitution of Athens, Ethics, and Politics out of which discussion emerged the classic analysis of constitutions as falling into three basic forms – the rule of the one, the few, and the many – which can be either good or bad, depending upon whether those governing, rule for the common good of all, or merely for themselves. Neither Plato nor Aristotle though very highly of democracy, which, after all, was the system of government that had put Socrates to death and both used its name for the bad form of the rule of many. They saw these forms as unstable, creating a cycle in which one form goes bad, then is replaced by the next which goes bad in turn. Aristotle suggested, however, that a superior, stable, constitution might be possible by mixing all three in a single constitution.

Our parliamentary constitution of the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries such as Canada is an example of this kind of mixed constitution. Queen Elizabeth, presides over a parliament that consists of the House of Lords – or, here in Canada, the Senate – and the House of Commons, consisting of members elected by constituencies as their representatives. The Tory does not object to the democratic element of this mixture, the House of Commons. He insists, however, that the only true authority the House of Commons possesses, is to be regarded as being rooted in tradition and prescription, like that of the other two institutions, and not as being due to it being inherently more rational than the others, or deriving some greater legitimacy due to its being filled by popular election. (2)

This is because the Tory knows that authority is not something that flows upward from below. The only thing a politician gains by convincing the masses to support him, is power. Authority is the right to command, power is the ability to coerce, and in a civilized order authority must always take precedence over power, relying upon power to back it up only when necessary. The modern theory of democracy, however, sees authority as a fiction and power as the only reality of politics. While the power represented by the majority vote in a plebiscite may be preferable to the power represented by the armed force commanded by a military junta, the Tory knows that unless it is made subordinate to the authority conveyed by tradition and prescription, that is to say, stability and order that transcends the present being ancient and established, power of any sort is a destabilizing threat to civilization.

Proponents of modern democracy might argue that in a state where the government truly embodies the will of the people, the possibility of the government ruling for their own sake rather than that of the common good is eliminated because people and government are one. The reality is, however, that the more the government sees itself as the voice of the people, the less it sees the need for restrictions on the use of its power. After all, how could we possibly need limitations on what the people do to themselves? History bears this out for over the last three centuries as government has become more and more democratic there have been less and less areas of peoples’ lives that it has not felt free to regulate. Modern democratic theory is the pathway to totalitarianism.

The liberal form of modern democracy is more palatable to the Tory than the leftist form because liberalism hinders democracy’s development into totalitarianism by placing limits on what even a democratic government can do by insisting upon the rights of the individual. Liberalism, however, has gradually been losing this ability over the course of the last century as it has become more closely aligned with the left. Today, some of the worst abuses of the power of democracy are committed in the name of liberalism. Therefore the Tory is surely right in saying that liberalism is an insufficient check upon the dark side of democracy, and that the necessary balance can only come from the other two elements of classical mixed government represented in our parliamentary tradition.

If, the advocate of modern democracy argues that it is a uniquely fair form of government, incorporating the principles of majority rule and an equal vote for all, the Tory responds that whatever fairness might be, this is not justice. The idea that majority rule is the most fair way to make group decisions assumes that good people outnumber bad, educated people outnumber ignorant, and the wise outnumber the foolish, or that collectively the masses possess more virtue, knowledge, and wisdom than they do as individuals. These assumptions, especially the last, seem incredibly naive, yet if they are not true letting the majority decide is a recipe for disaster. Nor is the idea of one person, one vote, particularly sensible. It translates into the idea that the criminal should have as much say as the law-abiding citizen, that the illiterate man’s opinion is worth as much as that of the learned man, and the village idiot’s vote is equal to that of the wisest man in town. Votes, the ancients wisely decreed, should be weighed, and not just counted. With this ancient wisdom, the Tory concurs.

Paradoxically, there is a sense in which the Tory will say that modern democracy does not extend the vote far enough or take in a large enough democracy. For he recognizes that the organic whole of society includes generations not present to cast their vote, those that have passed away and those that are yet to be born. It is through tradition that their voices can be heard and their votes counted and weighed against those of the present and living generation. G. K. Chesterton called this the "democracy of the dead" and it is only this kind of democracy to which the Tory can give his unqualified support.




(1) National Socialism (Nazism) was not a party of the “far right” as left-liberals maintain. It, and its Führer, were anti-monarchist, anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, populists, who preached an ideology that blended, as its name suggests, nationalism and socialism, both of which were leftist movements from the nineteenth century.

(2) As Enoch Powell remarked “Our whole constitution rests, uniquely in the world, upon what Burke called ‘prescription.’”