Condemn Captain Airhead – But For the Right Reason

Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as unimaginative types like to call him, has received a lot of much deserved criticism this week. As was the case in the notorious “blackface” scandal of last year’s Dominion election, in which it was revealed that on at least three occasions he had worn skin-darkening makeup which, had any of his subordinates or opponents done, would have resulted in him requiring that they resign and be sent in permanent exile to the land of perpetual shame, a hypocritical double standard was the problem.

Captain Airhead, like his Communist father before him, hates the rights and freedoms of Her Majesty’s free subjects in Canada and the Common Law tradition from which they arise. C. S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy has the Tisroc of Calormen utter these words to his Grand Vizier and to his son Rabadash “It is very grievous…Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.” This is very similar to the sentiment of Captain Airhead, except that he is the Grand Vizier, which is another name for Prime Minister, and it is his own country’s freedom that he hates.

In what used to be called Christendom, but is now called “Western Civilization”, people who hate freedom tend to hate Christianity. Christianity teaches that God, after liberating Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, made a Covenant of Law with them, and promised that one day He would make a New and better Covenant, which promise He fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, events which took place on the anniversary of the original Passover, and which brought spiritual liberty to the entire world. St. Paul, especially in his epistle to the Romans but in many of his other epistles as well, emphasizes that through our union with Christ in His death we die to the sin which enslaved us and that through our union with Him in His Resurrection we are raised to the new life, which is a life of liberty. This is the reason why totalitarians have always hated Christianity above all other religions.

Needless to say, the Christian Passover, known as Easter in countries with Germanic languages, and Pascha everywhere else, which commemorates the liberation of the world from spiritual bondage in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is not the favourite holiday of freedom haters.

With all the necessary apologies to Dr. Seuss, the following is what I suspect went down in the Prime Minister’s residence as Lent drew to a close and Holy Week approached. Captain Airhead, whose heart and whose brain are at least two sizes too small, was stewing away and saying to himself “I’ve got to stop Easter from coming, but how?”

So he consulted with Hajdu, he consulted with Tam, he called on his Cabinet to think up a plan.

Then Captain Airhead, he had an idea – a terrible, monstrous, horrendous idea.

Said Captain Airhead:

“I know what I’ll do, I’ll frighten them all with catching bat flu. The virus from China is now over here, I’ll shut down the country for over a year. I’ll close all the churches, I’ll close all the schools, I’ll close all the libraries, malls, parks and pools. I’ll close all the businesses, except grocery stores, I’ll clear out the sidewalks, and lock all the doors. I’ll scold them and nag them and boss them around, I’ll bully, I’ll badger, I’ll act like a clown. After eighteen months straight of only TV, they all will forget that they ever were free. And then when Easter is just round the bend, I’ll tell everybody ‘Stay home this weekend!’”

He’s a mean one, that Captain Airhead.

Well, we all know what happened. After telling Canadians to sacrifice their Easter plans, he then took off from Ottawa to Harrington Lake, Quebec to be with his family at their cottage for the weekend.

Did Captain Airhead’s heart and his brain grow three sizes that weekend?

Sadly, I’m afraid not. He still insisted that the rest of us give up Easter, put our lives on hold, and surrender our freedoms to the total control of the public health officials.

He has not escaped criticism in the press for his double standard, but that criticism, or at least the portion of it that I have read, has all been rather wrongheaded in my opinion. It has taken the form: Trudeau told all the rest of us to sacrifice our Easter plans, therefore he should have sacrificed his own. It should have taken this form instead: Trudeau was not willing to sacrifice his own family plans for Easter weekend, therefore he should not have told all of the rest of us to do so.

The problem is not that he spent the weekend at the cottage with his family. That at least is a human thing to do. The problem is that he has been bullying and threatening and scolding the rest of us into giving up our lives and our freedoms. That is a despotic thing to do.

Should the fourth estate finally start criticizing Trudeau for piling on rule after rule on top of an already excessive heap of rules, this will be the first sign of our recovery from our true affliction, which is not some batty coronavirus from China but a lack of appreciation of our fundamental rights and liberties.

Shall Past and Future Generations Rise in the Judgement and Condemn us for our Folly at This Moment?

Suppose that for some reason – let us say that you are looking to graduate with a degree in Mad Science from Evil Genius University and are required to demonstrate that you can practically apply what you have learned in theory - you wanted to create a shortage of essential goods during a crisis. How would you go about doing so?

The simplest way by far would be to get people to panic over the very shortage you wish to create. Start spreading the word that due to the crisis we are facing an impending economic shutdown and that everybody should grab as much as they can while they still can to prepare for the days ahead. The word would spread like wildfire through the masses, who, despite any number of sober, sane voices warning them to keep calm and behaver rationally, can be relied upon to do their part by rushing to the markets, hording everything in sight, and creating the very shortages you have warned them about.

Bada bing, bada boom. You are now able to pick up your degree, rub your hands, cackle maniacally and say “Fools! I’ll destroy them all!” Although you might wish to express that infamous sentiment in the perfect tense.

That the masses can be depended upon to do their part in the above, not so hypothetical, scenario is due to one of the quirks of fallen human nature, the one we normally think of in terms of crowd psychology or, if we wish to use a more pejorative expression, mob mentality. People, when they act together as a crowd, mob or mass, do not act in an informed, rational manner, regardless of how educated or intelligent they may be individually. Every demagogue, that is to say, every would-be tyrant hoping to be swept into power on a wave of popular support, knows this to be true, and seeks to capitalize on it.

There is a saying of Edmund Burke’s that Russell Kirk was fond of quoting that could be taken as a contradiction of this if misunderstood. The saying was “The individual is foolish; but the species is wise.” By “the species”, Burke meant the human race considered collectively, not just at a moment in time, as in the phenomenon of the masses, but over the course of generations. His point, which is a very true one, is that the judgement of such a collective as it has come down to us in folkways and mores, habits and customs, tradition and prescription, is far more trustworthy than the judgement of any individual. It is helpful to consider Burke’s original statement, in its original, unabridged, albeit less pithy, form:

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right. (bold added by myself for emphasis)

What, one hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years down the road, will be the judgement of the species, upon us who are alive today, for how we have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic?

If you have not already figured it out from the question asked in the title of this essay, a paraphrase of Our Lord’s biting judgement on the generation that saw His earthly ministry and rejected Him, I suspect it will not be a favourable one.

Those who will receive the least condemnation from this assize, that of the collective judgement of the human race over the course of human history, will be those who are receiving the largest share of the blame at the moment, namely the hording masses, who have descended like a swarm of locusts upon the shelves that once contained toilet paper, medication, canned goods, and other emergency supplies. It is not in the nature of crowds to behave in an informed, rational, manner, and so they can neither be expected to do so nor held accountable when they fail to do so.

Far greater condemnation will fall upon those who generated the panic in the first place, namely the mainstream media. Ever since they learned, in December of last year, that a new strain of coronavirus was behind an outbreak of respiratory disease in Wuhan and the surrounding region in China, they have bombarded the public with non-stop coverage of the disease, irresponsibly focusing on the unknown rather than what is known – namely, that the majority of people who are infected with this virus experience only mild symptoms similar to a cold or the flu and that those most at risk for experiencing the disease at its worst – severe difficulty in breathing, organ failure, intense pain and death – are the same demographic most at risk of dying from seasonal influenza or, for that matter, any other infectious disease, those over the age of 65, those who have pre-existing medical problems, and most especially those who fall into both categories. The mortality rate for this virus appears to be about ten times higher than for regular strains of the flu but this does not mean that everybody is ten times more likely to die from it than from the flu. Those who belong to the at-risk demographics are more likely to die from this virus than they are from the flu but this does not mean that this is true of everybody else. It also does not mean that those in the at-risk demographics are more likely to die than they are to survive. Even for those in the most-at-risk demographic, the survival rate is still much, much higher than the mortality rate. For people under fifty, the mortality rate is below the one percent that represents the ten times worse than the flu figure. Eighty percent of fatalities have been among people sixty or older, and over ninety percent of fatalities have had other, complicating, medical conditions. Note, that since most who contract the virus experience mild symptoms and many experience no symptoms at all, the total number of people who have been infected is much higher and consequently the true mortality rate much lower, than what is reflected in the official statistics.

These are the sort of things – the facts, what we do know – that the media should have been emphasizing, especially the fact that the vast majority of those who contract this virus experience nothing worse than the average cold or flu. Instead they focused on what we do not know and so, when the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, they generated a panic. .

The worst condemnation will be reserved for those who are most responsible for behaving in a calm, rational, manner, those who have a duty to set an example for the masses and provide them with leadership, rather than following them into an irrational panic or, worse, exploiting that panic for their own ends. Here I refer to our civil and ecclesiastical leaders.

With regards to our ecclesiastical leadership, allow me to remind them that Our Lord calls us to walk by faith not by fear – except the “fear of God” which is something entirely different from the kind of worldly paranoia we see on display in those Churches that are shutting their doors. Advising those most at risk to stay home is one thing. Cancelling all services in entire dioceses is another thing altogether. There are plenty of other ways to reduce the risk for those attending public worship. I refer you to the recent article “Keep The Churches Open” by R. R. Reno, editor of First Things, for an excellent discussion of this matter. I refer you to A. N. Bethune’s Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto, in particular the account of his heroic efforts during the choleric outbreaks of the 1830s for an example of what walking by faith rather than fear in a time of plague looks like.

As for our civil leaders, there are no words strong enough to express my contempt for their exploiting this mass panic to impose what is essentially Communism on us. Here is what a rational response to this pandemic would have been:

A) Quarantine all that we know to be infected for the duration of the period in which they are contagious.
B) Quarantine all who are at special risk.
C) Quarantine anyone coming into the country for two weeks.
D) Advise everybody to take the same special precautions that they are normally advised to do during flu season. Make an extra effort to impress upon people the importance of this. Recommend frequent handwashing, sunlight, fresh air, Vitamins C and D and the like.
E) Otherwise let everybody continue their normal affairs.

The preceding is what a government truly concerned about the health and welfare of the country they are supposed to be leading would do. Instead, they are exploiting the situation to gain a totalitarian level of control over our countries.

Do some research about what life was like in the Soviet Union prior to perestroika, glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You needed the state’s permission to go anywhere. Large meetings, other than the events organized by the Communist Party that you were required to attend, were forbidden. There were shortages of essential goods. You had to wait in line for hours to get a loaf of bread. The state promised everything to everybody but failed to deliver. Churches were closed. Any form of social organization that was not under the control of the omnipotent state was actively discouraged. Friends, neighbours and family members were encouraged to spy on each other and report if the rules were being broken.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease COVID-19, has come and it will go. Will we ever regain the precious freedoms that we are sacrificing in order to fight it? It took seventy years before the Soviet regime loosened its iron grip on the Russian nation and empire.

I do not wish to create a different sort of paranoia. Perhaps, and let us all hope and pray that it turns out this way, the “curve” will be “flattened” as appears to have happened in South Korea and as the Chinese, who are probably lying, say has happened in their Communist hell-hole which begat the whole problem in the first place, and within weeks – a couple of months at the most – the government will loosen its draconian controls, and we can return to some semblance of normalcy. Let us hope that the “months” that Prime Minister Trudeau has been talking about mean “two at the most” and not the “eighteen” as some have been recommending. Let us hope that this is not the beginning of forcing us to live this way on a permanent basis, as is desired by the climate change alarmist lunatics. Let us hope that nobody listens to those bat soup crazy individuals who are already claiming that the government is not being draconian enough.

If however, the aforementioned desired outcome does not occur and we end up living under this kind of totalitarian control for the long haul, past generations looking upon us from beyond shall condemn us for having thrown away the heritage of freedom they bequeathed to us, and future generations shall condemn us for leaving to them nothing but a heritage of Communist slavery.

Hic et Ille, II

My Last Two Essays in a Nutshell

The ancients maintained that governments exist to establish and protect the common good of the political communities they govern. Liberals maintain that governments exist to safeguard the freedom of individuals. This is a self-defeating goal. The more governments seek to safeguard individual liberty by adding to the evergrowing list of "rights" that are formally recognized and officially protected, the more areas of our everyday lives they regulate until their cramping presence is felt everywhere. The ancients, as classical Tories recognize, had it right. The common good of the entire country is the end for which government exists, and when governments seek that end, with past and future generations in mind not just those living in the present, freedom, which is a big part of the good but not the whole, is better secured, than when it is actively and aggressively pursued in the liberal fashion.

A Leader Who Does Not Give a Fig For the Good of His Country

Earlier this month Canada received offers of assistance from Russia, the United States, Mexico, Australia, Israel, Taiwan and even the Palestinian Authority to assist in fighting the wildfire that was devastating northern Alberta. Justin Trudeau, in his typical snotty and haughty manner, told them that no help was needed, on the same day that he announced that he would be pouring $785 million in foreign relief to Africa over the next three years. One wonders if Trudeau, who six years ago told an interviewer on a Quebec station that "Canada isn't doing well right now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn't work", would have been singing a different tune if the fire had been elsewhere than Alberta, say in Quebec.

This Tuesday the Trudeau Liberals introduced Bill C-16 which, if passed, will make it illegal to discriminate against men who think they are women, women who think they are men, or men and women who think they are some other gender altogether. The "discrimination" that Trudeau wants to forbid includes "hate speech", which means that if you are a sane person, who thinks that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, your freedom to speak your opinion, is about to be curtailed severely.

The same Justin Trudeau who wants to make it illegal for you or I to say that a man who thinks that he is a woman is still a man is the Justin Trudeau who has been bringing refugees into the country by the thousands, and who wants to bring thousands more in, most of whom are Muslims. I wonder if they will be expected to obey the new transgender rights bill as well? I wonder if the Liberals really do not see the conflict between these two policies seemingly so dear to them?

Whatever the case, Justin Trudeau clearly does not give a fig for the good of this country.

Mrs. Trudeau In the News

Justin Trudeau's wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau has been in the news almost as much as her husband this month with the controversy she sparked when she requested a larger staff to assist her. Canada is not the United States. The Prime Minister's spouse does not have an official title and role the way the spouse of the American President does. There is a very good reason for that. The Americans, in electing the head of their republic, choose the person who will be both head of state and head of government. In Canada, as in all the parliamentary monarchies of the Commonwealth, the Queen is the head of state, and the Prime Minister is merely the head of the government, a fact of which the Trudeaus need to be reminded. The Queen, currently a Queen regnant, during the reign of a king, a Queen consort, is the First Lady of Canada. The Queen's representative in Canada is the Governor-General and his wife has the title "Her Excellency" as befits a vice-regal spouse.

I was amused to read Lorne Gunter's comments on this matter in his Sun media column this weekend. Mr. Gunter, who was the managing editor of the defunct Alberta Report, and who writes regularly for the National Post and the Sun chain of newspapers, is the kind of commentator from whose columns I generally walk away saying that I more or less agree on the issue at hand, but have either deep reservations or at times am outright opposed, to the underlying ideals and principles brought to bear on the issue. Mr. Gunter is one of those individuals, of whom Alberta has plenty, who thinks he is a conservative but is not. He is actually, a pro-American, classical liberal, republican which is something quite different. To be a conservative in Canada you have to be a monarchist.

Mr. Gunter, writing from his American-style populist democratic worldview, ridicules Mrs. Trudeau's desire for a larger role and staff, writing that:

The point is Canada doesn’t need a First Lady or a queen consort or even a prime minister’s wife with a lot of pretentions.

Gregoire Trudeau hasn’t been elected by Canadians to any official position. She needs to remember that.

No Mr. Gunter. The reason Mrs. Trudeau needs to be humbled is not because Canadians have not elected her to anything. We elected her husband, and look at how well that turned out! She needs to be reminded that Canada is a Commonwealth country, that we have a Queen Regnant, and that her husband merely leads Her Majesty's government in the currently elected Parliament.

The Tory and Freedom

Democracy, which liberal and leftist alike consider to be the best form of government, is widely equated with freedom. As we have seen, however, democracy as conceived by the left is the pathway to totalitarianism, for when the distinction between governed and government is eliminated and the state is regarded as the voice of the people, it ceases to see the need for restrictions on the use of its power. Liberalism contained restraints on this tendency of democracy, in the form of protections of the rights of the individual, but as liberalism has moved away from its original individualism towards a realignment with the collectivist left over the course of the last century it has gradually ceased to be a roadblock to totalitarianism.

The Tory, the classical conservative who sees royal and ecclesiastical authority as being irrevocably called to cooperate for the common good of the whole society, accepts democracy, only as a part of a mixed government, under the monarchy and the upper house and deriving its legitimate authority from the same source as these institutions, tradition and prescription. He sees liberalism’s restraints on democracy as necessary and good, but insufficient, because only by making the power of democracy subordinate to the authority vested by prescription in monarchy and aristocracy – or in Canada, the substitute for aristocracy that is our Senate – in a mixed government, can democracy’s tendency to slide into demagoguery, mob rule, and totalitarianism be checked.

Liberalism, from its very beginning has claimed the freedom of the individual as its lodestar but as its ability to restrain democratic totalitarianism has waned it would seem to have lost its bearings and run adrift. As Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne put it nine years ago “with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again”. (1)

Toryism, by contrast with the neoconservatism of the last four decades which is actually a form of liberalism, does not march under the banner of freedom but seeks stability and continuity in order established in tradition. These, however, are not hostile to freedom, as liberalism so often has assumed they are, but are the very things which make freedom possible. The Tory, therefore, is, albeit in an indirect manner, the more consistent supporter of liberty.

In saying that freedom is made possible by a stable, order, established in tradition, the Tory expresses a different view of the nature of freedom, than that espoused by the liberal. The liberal sees freedom as the natural possession of man, but as belonging to him outside of society rather than inside society. This is because he regards man’s natural condition as being individual and society as an artificial construction of individuals. This concept of the individual as prior to society conflicts with what we know of actual individuals, however, who are born into social existence in their families, neighbourhoods, and nations. The Tory recognizes man’s social existence as his natural state, and the condition of an individual isolated from society, such as a hermit who has withdrawn into the desert, as being manifestly unnatural. Man possesses and enjoys freedom, he insists, in and through society, rather than outside of it.

Freedom, the Tory says, cannot exist outside of the context and boundaries of ordered society. While the liberal, who thinks of freedom in terms of the absence of context and boundary, finds this to be absurd, the folly of his position was well illustrated by G. K. Chesterton in the short story in which a professor who wrote a book about “the Psychology of Liberty” reveals himself to have gone dangerously mad by taking his doctrine to the extreme of “liberating” a goldfish from its bowl. (2)

Liberalism further mistakes the nature of freedom by conceiving of it as leading to the end of human happiness through the means of indulging human appetites. This element of liberal thought has grown stronger over the century in which liberalism has given up most of its ability to restrain the totalitarian impulse in democracy to protect the individual. Aldous Huxley saw this coming and in his Brave New World depicted a society in which everyone lives out a life that has been predetermined for him by the state but in which he is free to indulge his appetites for drugs and sex and encouraged by the state to do so.

This view of liberalism is a fundamental contradiction of the wisdom of the ancients and the teachings of Christianity the sources of the tradition to which the Tory looks for light. Plato and Aristotle taught that to achieve true happiness, man must form good habits of behaviour, virtues, in which he masters his appetites and passions – his internal desires and drives for such things as food, sex, wealth, and power – and keeps them in submission to his reason and will, for if he does not these will enslave him. Orthodox Christian theology teaches that man was given freedom in Creation, but lost it when he enslaved himself to sin in the Fall. God redeemed man – the literal meaning of redemption is the purchase for the purpose of emancipation of a slave – from slavery to sin, through the Incarnation, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his restored freedom, man is no longer chained to the fallen, Adamic, nature that remains with him in this life, but is to walk in his freedom through faith.

There is a harmony between the classical and Christian teachings here. In both, true happiness is to be found in the mastery of internal forces that seek to master us - our natural appetites and passions in classical thought, our sinful flesh in the Christian. In both, an established institution exists to help us in this struggle - the state in the classical teaching of the ancients, the church in Christian theology. Both would see the unfettered indulgence of human desire as slavery rather than freedom. In classical thought virtue is the prerequisite for true freedom, which is part of happiness. In Christian thought freedom is the prerequisite for virtue, both in the sense that the redemption of Christ is necessary to free man from slavery to sin that he might be virtuous and that good behaviour is not virtuous unless it is freely chosen. If Huxley’s novel illustrates the classical point of view, the much misunderstood A Clockwork Orange by polymath, novelist, and High Tory Anthony Burgess, is an illustration of the Christian. (3) These are two ways of saying the same thing, that both freedom and virtue require the other, and that to pursue either separately and at the expense of the other is a road that leads to neither.

Freedom, therefore, is an absolutely essential part of the common good of society that the Tory sees as the end of royal and ecclesiastical authority and neither church nor state can assist man in the pursuit of virtue if they do not also seek to secure his liberty. The church proclaims the redemption of man from sin by Christ through her ministry of Word and Sacrament, so that people may follow righteousness through faith in the liberty Christ has purchased for them. Laws, Christianity teaches us, can help us recognize virtue by defining right and wrong, but are powerless to make us virtuous, (4) and so should be kept as few in number as is consistent with order and the common good. The laws of the state, rightly ordered, however, secure our lives and property. As the Tory’s patron saint, King Charles the Martyr, put it in his final speech before he was killed by the Puritans in 1649, the people’s “liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own.” (5) Thus, do church and state, in the traditional order of society, create the context in which freedom can flourish.

(1) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2

(2) “The Yellow Bird” from G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics.

(3) In the novel, the state uses a form of brainwashing, “the Ludovico Method”, to reform the narrator Alex, a violent young hooligan, but the process does not make him good, it merely takes away his freedom. That it cannot make him good because it takes away his freedom is an objection raised by a priest who serves as chaplain, and in raising this objection, the priest vocalizes the entire point the author, who is falling back upon the Catholicism in which he was raised, is seeking to make.

(4) This is a major theme of St. Paul’s epistles to the Roman and Galatian churches.

(5) He wisely contrasted this with the people’s having a “share in government”, for democracy, by making the government and the people one, leads to the opposite of freedom, total control, for any and every law can be excused when it is a law the people make for themselves.

GTN Tory Classics No. 2: Our Traditional Liberties and the State

I originally wrote the following essay in May of 2009 as a companion essay to "On Being a Tory in the Age of Whigs". In "On Being a Tory in the Age of Whigs" I made a case for social institutions like the family, church, and community and for the authority within these institutions - parents in the family, for example - based upon tradition and prescription. In this essay, "Our Traditional Liberties and the State", I made the case for personal liberty against statism.

I wrote both of these essays before I started this blog but the theme of both is reflected in the blog's title. "Throne and altar" is an old expression summarizing what the Tories, the original conservatives, stood for, i.e, social order and continuity grounded in the ancient constitution of church (altar) and state (throne). Liberty is personal freedom.

When William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review in the 1950s to be the printed voice of the American conservative movement, his writers included traditionalists like Russell Kirk who drew inspiration from the older conservative tradition that included high Tories like Samuel Johnson and classical conservatives like Edmund Burke. Buckley's writers also included libertarians, i.e., liberals who continued to believe in the individualistic liberalism of the 19th Century after mainstream liberalism became collectivist in the 20th Century. One of the men Buckley invited to join him in editing National Review was Frank S. Meyer. Meyer is best remembered as the proponent of fusionism - a theoretical attempt at synthesizing classical conservative traditionalism with classical liberal libertarianism.

My joining the idea of "liberty" to the "throne and altar" of Toryism is similar, in one sense, to what Meyer was attempting with fusionism. In another sense it is very different. All periods of liberalism, both classical and modern, have been periods in which the modern state has developed, grown, and concentrated power that had formerly been diffused throughout society into itself. The root ideas of contemporary, North American, progressive or collectivist liberalism, can be found in the ideas of classical individualist liberalism. In titling my blog Throne, Altar, Liberty therefore, I was not, like Meyer, trying to create an artificial synthesis between classical conservatism and classical liberalism, but stating outright that old Toryism is more consistent with personal liberty than any form of liberalism.

Since this essay goes with "On Being a Tory in the Age of Whigs", I recommend reading the two essays together. It is an ovesight on my part that I did not post this essay here much earlier, when I posted its companion. The theme that links the two essays is the idea that prescription and tradition is the source of both our liberty and government authority, and that the modern state, by growing so big and intrusive, threatens both the foundation of its own authority and our personal liberty.


Our Traditional Liberties and the State


By Gerry T. Neal
May 4, 2009

Liberty or freedom is the state of being able to choose for yourself, what you will think, say, or do, rather than having your every thought, word and deed dictated to you by others. Liberty is a good thing, something which men ought to value and seek, both for what it is in and of itself, and for other good which arises out of it.

Liberty, like most good things, has its limits. The man who wishes for unlimited liberty can obtain it only by giving up other goods, namely every good which arises out of living with other people in society. If he goes off on his own, to live on a desert island apart from other people entirely, he will have his unlimited freedom. But if he wishes to enjoy the benefits that come from living among other people in a civilized society, he will have to accept the limitations that come from living under rules. Society and civilization cannot exist without certain basic rules being in place and being enforceable..

There is an old saying that illustrates very well the reason why this is so. It goes: “your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”. In addition to cleverly explaining the limits to liberty which naturally arise from living with other people, this saw also gives us a hint as to the principles determining when it is appropriate for society to limit individual freedom and when it is not. If your activity harms someone else, such as when your swinging fist makes contact with the nose of the person next to you, that is when society, with its government and laws, has the right to step in and tell you to cease and desist. That is what laws and governments are there for.

If the only person your action harms is yourself it is not the government’s place to tell you to stop. If what you are doing causes injury to yourself and/or your property but does not cause harm to other people and their property, your activity is private, and the government has no legitimate authority over it. The legitimate authority of government, is over public activity, i.e., activity that affects others. When your acts cause harm to other people, to their property, to the institutions of society or property belonging to the institutions of society, that is when the government has the authority, and the duty, to step in and prohibit your behavior.

When the state fails to make this distinction and prohibits private acts it threatens our liberty, an essential part of our traditional heritage. The freedom to make our choices for ourselves must include the freedom to make wrong choices, choices which will harm us. We are not free, if we are free only to make right choices, choices which have only good consequences.

The modern state has greatly overstepped the bounds of its legitimate, prescriptive authority over the public sphere.

Today the government tells you that you need its permission to build a house on a piece of land you own. Moreover, you must get its approval for the design of your house, and use materials it has permitted, and builders it has licensed.

To get from one city to another, in a vehicle which you own, the government tells you that you need their permission, in the form of a driver’s license. Moreover, the government tells you that you cannot exceed a speed limit they have arbitrarily chosen, or have alcohol in your bloodstream over a certain percentage they have arbitrarily set. It is one thing for the government to say that if you kill or injure someone else with your reckless speeding or by driving under the influence of alcohol, that you will face a severe penalty. It is quite another thing for the government to say that if even you have caused no damage to other people or property you will still face a severe penalty for driving too fast or too drunk. The latter is an abuse of state power.

Seat belts are installed in vehicles for you to use for your own protection. It is your choice whether you want to use them or not. If you do not buckle up, the only one who can be hurt by it is you. Yet the state insists that if its agents catch you driving without your seatbelt done up they can ticket and fine you. Tyranny done in the name of “your own good” is still tyranny.

The government’s legitimate authority is over public activity. The state has no business telling us what we can or cannot think. It has no business telling us what we can or cannot say. The only time it is appropriate for law to limit what you can say is in a case like a crowded theater, where it is illegal to yell “Fire!”. Yelling “Fire!” in such a situation is an act of mischief, designed to spark a riot, and get other people hurt. So in that instance it is really an act, and not words themselves, that are prohibited.

Today, however, the government criminalizes certain forms of speech because of the thoughts they express. This is what so-called “hate crimes” laws are about. For example, Section 13 (1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act reads:


It is a discriminatory practice for a person or a group of persons acting in concert to communicate telephonically or to cause to be so communicated, repeatedly, in whole or in part by means of the facilities of a telecommunication undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.

This amounts to a prohibition because the Canadian Human Rights Act exists for the purpose of prohibiting discriminatory practices. It is also utterly draconian. Note that the words communicated electronically (the courts have extended “telephonically” to include other forms of electronic communication) don’t have to express “hatred or contempt”. They don’t even have to actually expose anyone to hatred or contempt. They just have to be “likely to” do so.

But lets suppose someone’s words went beyond that. Lets suppose they did expose someone protected by the CHRA against discrimination to “hatred and contempt”. Lets suppose they expressed such “hatred and contempt” themselves. Even in that case it would be none of the government’s business. The government is there to protect people, property, and society itself from harmful actions, not to protect people’s feelings from hurtful words. The freedom to think our own thoughts and express them in our own words is one of the most fundamental of our traditional freedoms. It is too important to sacrifice to the cause of political correctness.

In fact the entire Canadian Human Rights Act is an attack on our basic freedoms. It would be one thing for the government to say that it will treat all of its citizens equally in providing the protection of the rule of law and justice. It is quite another thing for the government to prohibit private discrimination, which is what the Canadian Human Rights Act does. If we aren’t free to decide who we want to associate with, who we want to live with, work with, or do business with, how can we be said to be free at all? Freedom of association, another one of our basic traditional freedoms, is too important to sacrifice to the egalitarian agenda.

We need to stand up firmly for our traditional rights and freedoms and demand that our government return to the limits of its traditional authority over the public sphere and abide therein.

The Tory Cause - a mission statement in verse

To stand for our country, the Crown and the Church
And all the values the leftists besmirch

To honor the Queen not the Ottawa crooks
And revere fine art, music, taste and old books

To ridicule progress of every kind
And reclaim the good that we have left behind

To love the good things God has placed here below
Like small towns, and farms, and the places you know

To stand up for freedom by night and by day
By saying the things that they say you can’t say.

Freedom in Society

The basic political definition of freedom within the tradition of the English-speaking world could be “the right to do whatever is not specifically forbidden by law”. Anarchists, who regard freedom as the absence of law, would obviously object to this definition. It is an important starting point however, because it is the opposite of the notion that people are only allowed to do whatever they are expressly permitted to do by the law.

In these two concepts we see the essential difference between a society that is constitutionally free, and a society that is constitutionally tyrannical or totalitarian. A constitutionally free society has clear, specific rules as to what you are not allowed to do but otherwise leaves you free to make your own choices. A constitutionally tyrannical society has specific rules as to what you are permitted to do and if you do something that is not on that list you could be in trouble with the government. English-speaking countries are by a long-standing tradition constitutionally free societies.

It should be apparent from this that freedom is quantifiable. In a constitutionally free society, the more laws there are the less freedom you have. There is a form of tyranny which can exist within the form of a constitutionally free society because “the right to do whatever is not specifically forbidden by law” does not particularly mean much when there are laws against everything.

Clearly then if we wish to live in a free society we should be aiming for less laws rather than more. This brings us to the question of what kinds of actions should laws forbid.

Evelyn Waugh admirably expressed the Tory (1) position on this question when he wrote:

I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that these should be kept at the bare minimum of safety. (2)

Laws should be limited to what is necessary. This is true, not only for the sake of maintaining liberty in a free society, but also in order to ensure that the laws we do have are effectively enforced. When laws are multiplied, society’s law enforcement agencies have a tendency to concentrate on laws that are easily enforced but less important over laws that are more important and more difficult to enforce. This produces the situation that Dr. Samuel Francis dubbed “anarcho-tyranny”. (3) Picture a city where the police department goes to great effort to make sure the traffic regulations are kept while gang violence runs amok and unsolved homicide after homicide cases pile up, and will you get the idea.

Now, you have undoubtedly noticed that I have not actually answered the question of what kinds of actions should laws forbid in asserting that laws should be limited to those which are necessary. That assertion merely leads to the question being rephrased as “what laws are necessary?”

How do we determine whether a law is necessary or not?

We can only do so, by examining the purpose of law itself. Laws exist as a means to a particular end and their necessity is determined by whether they are essential to achieving that end.

What purpose do laws serve? What is their ultimate end?

The right answer to this question is that laws exist to facilitate society and to ensure its safety and security.

Society consists of people and between people conflicts often arise. It is to be preferred that people settle their disputes peacefully themselves, but if they cannot do so, the need arises for the dispute to be arbitrated. This produces a need for laws which we would categorize as “civil”. Their purpose is to keep disputes from escalating into violence that threatens the fabric of society.

Lets say you and your neighbor disagree as to where the property line dividing your yards is to be located. Your neighbor would like to put up a fence that will cut through your flower garden whereas you believe the fence should be erected so as to include an apple tree your neighbor claims as his own on your property.

How is this to be resolved?

One way is for you and your neighbor to go throughout the neighborhood, gathering support from your friends, and then fight it out between the two parties, destroying property and shedding blood in the process. This is not the optimal solution.

The other way is for society to have clear laws as to how disputes of this nature are to be settled and a magistrate with the authority to hear your side and your neighbor’s and issue a ruling based on the law which both you and your neighbor must abide by.

Civil laws of this nature facilitate society, that is, they make it possible for people to live in peace together in that collective venture we call society.

The other major category of law is “criminal law”. Criminal laws prohibit acts like taking or vandalizing another person’s property, assaulting or killing another person, or raping or kidnapping someone. If you commit a criminal act you are forced to pay a penalty to society, after you have been caught, arrested, and been proven guilty in a court of law. The purpose of criminal law is to protect society and its members from harmful and destructive behavior.

This brings us back to the question of which acts should be proscribed by law – and to the classical liberal answer to that question.

Classical liberalism or libertarianism as it is more commonly known as today asserts that society’s laws should only prohibit actions which harm people other than the person committing the action in their person or property. This is called the “harm principle”. It was the basic thesis of John Stuart Mill’s famous On Liberty (4) but the concept is present in the writings of earlier liberal thinkers as well.

Liberalism’s harm principle should not be dismissed lightly. As an answer to the question of which acts should be illegal and which should not, there is much to commend it. Actions, the criminality of which are uncontroversial among sane people, such as murder, rape, theft and the like, all fall under the category of actions which are harmful to others.

There are, however, problems with the libertarian position which appear when we look at the underlying philosophy behind it and its application to controversial actions.

The philosophy behind the harm principle is the philosophy of classical liberalism. This philosophy asserts that only “individuals” (persons by themselves, not as members of any larger group) are real, that society is a voluntary association of individuals, and that political society and its laws exist to protect the rights of the individual.

One of the earliest liberal thinkers was the 17th century English empiricist John Locke. Locke’s held that in a hypothetical (not necessarily historical) “state of nature” prior to society, all men as individuals are absolutely sovereign over themselves and possess absolute rights to their life, liberty, and property. In this “state of nature”, however, men are vulnerable to violence from other people. Therefore, to protect themselves and their rights, men form societies, which are contracts between sovereign individuals in which they agree to relinquish a portion of their sovereignty to society, so as to obtain laws to protect their rights against the violence of others. (5)

The problem with all this, however, is that it is manifestly wrong and is indeed the exact opposite of what is observable about the nature of human beings and their societies.

All human societies that are older than a single generation existed prior to the people who make up their membership. More importantly, when we look at society in its most basic form, the family, we see that it is not a “voluntary association of individuals”.

The family is the simple form of society, the building block from which more complex societies are established. Each of us entered the world as a member of a family that we did not choose to enter. We were sired by a father, and born to a mother, neither of which we chose. We do not chose our relationships to our parents, nor do we chose our relationships to our siblings.

The family is prior to the individual person, therefore society is prior to the individual person.

Indeed, there is no such thing as an “individual” the way liberalism conceives him. Liberalism’s “individual” is a person, detached from all society, identified not by that which distinguishes him from other people, but by that which supposedly makes him the same as all other people, i.e., a set of “natural rights” which all individuals are supposed to possess equally.

A person apart from society, however, is not living in a “natural state”. Take a hermit living on top of a mountain, in a remote cave, or out in the desert somewhere? Is such a person living in a more “natural” state than a man living with his wife and children in a community with other men who live with their wives and children? Of course not! These kinds of people, are extremely rare, for precisely the reason that their behavior is not normal or natural for human beings.

Furthermore, a person in isolation from society, is not in the position of having rights but no means to enforce and protect them. Isolated from society, a person has no rights whatsoever. A “right” is by definition a claim on other people and therefore cannot exist in the absence of society.

If liberalism’s philosophy of the sovereign individual being logically prior to society is false and contrary to all observable evidence (and it is), it follows that liberalism’s answer to the question of what is the primary purpose of law, i.e., to protect the rights of individuals, cannot be correct.

Now, if the philosophy of classical liberalism is wrong, and its view of the purpose of law is wrong, does that mean the harm principle is also wrong?

No.

As mentioned previously, if we look for laws which are found universally throughout civilized human societies and which forbid actions that few if any would dispute are criminally wrong, we find these laws tend to correspond to the harm principle.

We also find, when we look into the thought of pre-liberal Western ethical philosophers and theologians, that the harm principle itself is older than liberal individualism.

The most famous work of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th Century Dominican priest, is his Summa Theologica. The second part of this treatise is devoted to ethics. Here Aquinas raises the question of “Whether it belongs to the human law to repress all vices?”

In his answer, Aquinas states:

Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like. (6)

The Thomistic position is both similar to and different from the liberal harm principle. The main difference is that Aquinas’ view affirms society and lawfully constituted authority whereas the libertarian view of J. S. Mill is subversive of society and authority.

The subversive nature of liberalism is such that, despite its protestations to the contrary, liberalism is no friend to the free society. When society and legitimate authority within society are undermined, the result that ensues will be either chaos, tyranny, or a mixture of both. It will never be a free society in which people enjoy both freedom and the benefits of society.

Society as we have seen, is not a “voluntary association of individuals”. It is organic in nature, consisting of a variety of social institutions (family, church, cultural and economic associations of various natures, neighborhoods, communities, etc.) which exist in multiple layers in which society expands outward from the family to become the sovereign polity. Within each social institution and every level of society there are positions of authority.

What is authority?

Authority is the right to command obedience. It is distinct from power, which is the ability to compel obedience by force. It is not completely separate from power, however, because authority includes the right to use an appropriate degree of force to ensure that rules are obeyed.

Where is authority located?

Authority is vested in offices or positions, rather than in the people who occupy those positions and exercise the authority.

What is the source of authority?

The source of authority is the constitution of society. The constitution of society is not a charter written on paper like the British North America Act or the Constitution of the United States of America, important as those documents may be. The true constitution of any society is its system of organization, written in its traditions, and established by prescription.

Society’s constitution is not the voluntary contract that liberalism conceived it to be. Rather, it is as Edmund Burke (7) conceived it:

a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection…not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born…linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. (8)

That description could better be called a “covenant” than a contract. The covenant of society, like all covenants, functions according to the faith of its members.

When members of a society believe in their constitution they will respect the offices of authority established by that constitution (if not necessarily the people who occupy the offices at any given time). The more faith people have in their constitution, the more respect they have for the constitutional authorities, and the more they voluntarily obey the rules without the use of force.

This has a direct relationship to the degree of freedom in society. A wise ruler will seek to govern so as to maintain faith in society and its authorities, and will therefore seek to effectively enforce essential laws without burdening the people with excessive regulations. A foolish ruler, who prefers to maintain order through naked power, will not be concerned about maintaining people’s faith in society by limiting the laws to the few essential laws effectively enforced.

Thus is a functioning society held together by faith. Governors keep faith with the people on their part, by enforcing the laws that are necessary and not passing excessive laws. The people keep faith with the government by respecting the authorities and voluntarily obeying the laws.

In this we see that there is a relationship between legitimate government and consent. It is not the relationship liberalism suggests, however, but rather the inverse. Liberal theory once again has the cart before the horse. Government does not derive the legitimacy of its authority from the consent of those it governs. Rather people voluntarily consent to government when they believe it to be exercising legitimate authority derived from a legitimate constitution.

How does a constitution obtain legitimacy?

The one word answer is “prescription”.

Prescription is the word we use to describe the process whereby a social arrangement gains legitimacy by virtue of having passed the test of time. Rationalists will scoff, but people have far more faith in a social arrangement that has weathered the storms of time and served society well for generations than in an abstract theory that looks good on paper as to why such-and-such a social arrangement is best.

Do not mistake me. I am not saying that we should accept something that is obviously unjust simply because “that is the way it has always been”. I am saying that the generally accepted legitimacy of a stable constitution of society is something that develops over the course of generations through a long period of time.

It can be overthrown, however, in a very short period of time, by government which abuses its authority and betrays the faith of the people, or by subversive doctrines like liberalism which tell people that their personal interests are more important than those of society.

Most of us in the English-speaking world wish to be free. We also wish to be, like all normal human beings, members of societies. We therefore wish to enjoy freedom within society.

The traditional constitution of English-speaking countries in which we are legally free to do whatever the law does not specifically proscribe, contributes towards the fulfillment of that wish. So does the basic idea expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas, that human laws exist to restrict not all vices, but major vices, primarily those in which harm is done to others.

Since we value being part of a society, however, a real society and not liberalism’s “voluntary association of individuals”, we must resist allowing Aquinas’ concept to be twisted into the anti-social, subversive individualism found in the theories of classical liberals like J. S. Mill.

(1) As is my usual custom, here I use “Tory”, not to mean a member/supporter of the Conservative Party necessarily, but a traditionalist conservative, particularly those within the British and Canadian traditions who support the parliamentary monarchy and the Christian Church.

(2) “A Conservative Manifesto” found on page 161 of the 1986 Penguin edition of The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh edited by Donat Gallagher, taken from Waugh’s Robbery Under Law.

(3) The oldest reference I can find for this is “Anarcho-Tyranny USA”, the speech Dr. Francis’ gave to the John Randolph Club in 1993 and published on pages 14-19 of the July 1994 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. In the text of the address Dr. Francis makes reference to his having used the term in earlier columns, but I have no bibliographic details about these. He wrote about it until the end of his life, and revisited the topic in “Synthesizing Tyranny”, the last essay he wrote for Chronicles published in their April 2005 issue.

(4) Mill defines the principle in the 9th paragraph of his introductory chapter. Note that Mill begins this paragraph by saying that the principle should limit all social control over the individual, whether it be by actual laws enforced by the state or the “moral coercion of public opinion”.

(5) Locke’s views can be found in his Two Treatises of Government, originally published in 1689, particularly the second treatise.

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

or

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2096.htm

(7) Edmund Burke was an 18th Century British statesman who was originally a classical liberal himself. He entered politics as a member of the Whig Party (the liberal party of the 18th century). He was a friend of Samuel Johnson, the prominent 18th century man of letters, who was noted for his Tory views. Burke once wrote to Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell that he had dined with Johnson and “we had a very good day, as we had not a sentence, word, syllable, letter, comma, or tittle of any of the elements that make politics”. Burke may very well have been the “scoundrel” Dr. Johnson had in mind in his famous remark about (false) patriotism, recorded by Boswell. The French Revolution changed all that. Seeing the horrible violence that sprung from the “armed doctrines” of the “Enlightenment”, Burke took up cudgels for tradition, organic society, the ancient constitution, monarchy, and the church – the traditional articles of Tory faith - in a treatise entitled Reflections on the Revolution in France originally published in 1790. When Marie Antoinette was beheaded in 1793, Burke bemoaned the fact that in a “nation of gallant men…honor…and of cavaliers”, “ten thousand swords” had not “leaped from their scabbards” to defend her, and mourned the death of the “age of chivalry” and the rise of that of “sophisters, economists and calculators”. Burke had, to paraphrase Irving Kristol, become a “Whig mugged by reality” , a “neo-Tory” if you will.

(8)Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Gateway Edition, (Henry Regnery Company: Chicago, 1955), pp. 139-140.

A Tradition of Liberty

In recent essays I have been harshly critical of liberalism, the Modern Age ideology which attempted to lay a foundation for political liberty in the notion of the sovereignty of the individual. I criticized liberalism for making liberty the enemy of society, tradition, and authority. The subject of this essay will be liberty in its proper context – the tradition of a stable, civilized society.

In the Book of Genesis, the first book in the sacred canon of both Christianity and Judaism, we find the account of creation, in which God makes the heavens and the earth, and all that is therein, then makes man. In the second chapter of Genesis, God, after having placed Adam in the Garden of Paradise in Eden, tells him “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Note the nature of this commandment. Man is prohibited from eating the fruit of one specific tree. He is free to eat fruit of all the other trees.

The Garden of Eden was not a democracy. Adam and Eve were not sovereign individuals. It was an absolute monarchy. God was King, His word was law, He did not derive His powers from “the consent of the governed”, He did not hold regular plebiscites on His right to rule, He did not poll His people. Yet Adam and Eve were free, and arguably a lot freer than any of their descendants. The laws were few (the only other one was “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”), and clear, and Adam and Eve were free to do whatever was not proscribed by law. The law prohibited the eating of one fruit, all other fruit they were free to eat.

Now regardless of the degree of literalness with which you take the Genesis account, we find in this arrangement the illustration of how law and freedom work together. Good laws are few and clear, and tell you what you are not supposed to do rather than what you are permitted to do, leaving you free to do whatever is not specifically proscribed. Throughout the Holy Scriptures, this is the way God governs His people, first Israel, then the Church.

If God, the Absolute Sovereign of all Creation, governs His people with a few basic rules, leaving them otherwise free to do whatever He has not prohibited, how much more then should human governors, who are fallible and prone to error, do the same?

The British legal system, which evolved under Christianity for centuries, and to which Canada as a country under the British Crown is heir, reflects this understanding of the complementary relationship between law and freedom. Under Common Law, personal liberty is limited only by what positive law requires and prohibits. If the law does not say you cannot do this, you are free to do it. The prescriptive rights which evolved alongside with and under Common Law protect this freedom. If an agent of the Crown, possessed of the duty of maintaining the Queen’s peace by enforcing the law, is to detain you, you have the right to be informed of the charge under which you are being detained. You have the right to have a magistrate hear your case and determine whether the officer had just cause to arrest you. You have the right to have your case heard and determined before a jury of your peers. What all of these rights are designed to guarantee is that you are free to go about your daily business, without fear of the police arresting you so long as you are not doing what the law specifically says you cannot do.

A different understanding of the relationship between law and liberty is held by those who gave us the “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”. In 1982 Prime Minister Trudeau achieved the crowning goal of his premiership with the repatriation and renaming of the British North America Act. At the same time that the Canadian constitution was made made subject to amendment by the Canadian parliament and provinces, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was added to it. At the time, there was a huge propaganda campaign aimed at selling the Charter to Canadians, which told us that we desperately needed such a Charter to tell us what our rights and freedoms were. (1)

The problem with such an approach is that it designed to create the attitude of “I am free to do whatever the government permits me to do”. Notice the difference between that attitude and “I am free to do whatever I want, so long as the law does not prohibit it”? There is a huge difference between “freedom to do whatever the law permits” and “freedom to do whatever the law does not prohibit”.

This Charter of Rights and Freedoms contains a clause in Section 33, which allows the federal and provincial governments to pass laws which conflict with the rights and freedoms in section 2 and sections 7-15, for up to 5 years. At the five year point these laws can be renewed. This effectively nullified Section 2 and sections 7-15. Section 2 says that Canadians have the fundamental freedoms of freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief, and expression, etc. Section 7-15 include our rights to life, liberty, and security of our person, our freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and arbitrary detainment, our right to legal counsel and right of habeas corpus, and our rights of presumption of innocence and against self-incrimination. All of these rights and freedoms, were more secure before the Charter was passed than since the Charter was passed, because the Charter gives the government a right it did not possess prior to the Charter – the right to take those rights and freedoms away.

Those who look to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to secure liberty in Canada are clearly misguided. So are those who look to democracy. Remember how the Reform Party used to demand “direct democracy” (plebiscites on important issues) and a “Triple-E Senate” (elected, efficienct, equal)? With all due respect to the old Reform Party (2) which was right-wing populist rather than conservative (3), democracy is not the friend of liberty. As power has shifted, from the Crown to the Commons, in the English-speaking world over the last five centuries, size of government and of government's role in people's everyday lives has consistently increased rather than decreased. So are those who look to the Lockean doctrine of “natural rights” (i.e., rights derived from a pre-social “state of nature”), to making all relationships in society voluntary/contractual relationships mirroring the relationships of the business world, and to the doctrine of “individual sovereignty”. Such concepts make liberty the enemy of law, society, authority, and tradition, when in reality these things are the friends of liberty.

All of these things – Charter, democracy, “natural rights”, contractual society, individual sovereignty, are abstract ideals, thought up by rationalist philosophers as progressive improvements on a traditional civilized society, with classical and Christian roots. They are not improvements. Simple laws, which are few and clear, which prohibit certain acts of criminally vicious behavior, but otherwise leave us free to live our lives as we wish, as individuals, but also and more importantly, as families, communities, churches, and a society, are the best laws.

(1) For a good discussion of Common Law versus Charter Law see William D. Gairdner, The Trouble With Canada: A Citizen Speaks Out (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Company, 1990), especially chapter 16 “Political Sleight of Hand”. A new and revised edition of this book is due out sometime this fall. Also see a number of books and booklets by Kenneth McDonald, especially The Monstrous Trick (APEC Books, 1998), and Alexis In Charterland (Belleville: Epic Press, 2004).

(2) I joined the Reform Party in my college days and remained in it in its Canadian-Alliance stage. My membership expired before it absorbed what was left of the old Progressive Conservatives and became the current Conservative Party. I did not renew. While I agreed with, and still agree with many, probably most, of the right-wing positions on social and economic issues, taken by the Reform Party in its early years, on the level of basic political philosophy I have always been more in sympathy with the older Tory tradition represented by Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott, T. S. Eliot, and in the USA by Russell Kirk.

(3) I will be looking at populism, its strengths and weaknesses, and its differences and its overlaps with conservatism, in an upcoming essay. In the meantime, I refer you to Dr. John Lukacs’ excellent book on the subject, entitled Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, which was published by Yale University Press in 2005. My essay may take the form of a review of Lukacs’ book. It has been 5 years since I read it last and will be picking it up for a re-read in the new few weeks.

Freedom and the Individual

In philosophical liberalism, the concepts of “freedom” and “the individual” are closely related to each other, perhaps inseparably. This may come as a surprise to those who associate the word “liberalism” primarily with 20th and 21st Century political liberalism. That liberalism frequently uses the language of the common good to justify ever increasing attempts on the part of the state bureaucracy to administer our everyday lives. Usually, the only time contemporary political liberalism reverts to the language of individual freedom is when it is speaking of freedom of the individual, not from political control, i.e., the control of the state, but from the control of tradition, religion, and morality in the realm of lifestyle ethics.

Many conservatives, in response to the abuse of the concept of the “common good” on the part of contemporary political liberals have grown suspicious of any and all use of this concept. This is unfortunate because this concept, which so dominated the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle is fundamental to any stable model of society. A stable society is the only kind of society in which the rights, dignity, and freedoms of individual human beings are ever truly protected by law. It is also the essential goal of conservatism. Conservatism conceives of society as an organic whole uniting past, present and future generations in a union in which the present generation enjoys society as a possession as an inheritance from past generations, held in trust for future generations, with an ensuing duty to preserve that society intact. This is the sine qua non of conservatism.

Conservatives who adopt the language of liberal individualism in response to the more recent collectivist political liberalism are in fact espousing philosophical liberalism. Those who recognize this fact usually prefer to call themselves libertarians rather than conservatives, although this is not always the case.

When we speak of philosophical liberalism or libertarianism, we can be referring either to a general idea or to a complete political ideology.

Libertarianism as a general idea, is the idea that people should be free to live their own lives, should let other people live their own lives and that laws (rules enforced by government) should prohibit only actions which harm others, whether in their persons or their property.

There is nothing wrong with that kind of libertarianism, indeed there is much to commend it. It raises a number of questions however, to which the answers of libertarianism the political ideology, prove unsatisfactory.

When we say people should be free to live their own lives, by “people” do we mean individuals considered as separate from everybody else or do we mean people as they really are – people who live their lives as part of families, who make up communities, which make up a society? The answer to this question greatly affects our understanding of freedom, for freedom cannot be understood apart from an answer to the questions “Free from what?” and “Free for what purpose?”.

Ideological libertarianism asserts that only individuals are “real”. Society in all of its manifestations, and all of its institutions from the state down to the family and the family up to the state, exist solely for the benefit of individuals qua individuals, according to this ideology. Freedom is the sovereignty of the individual over his person, life, and property, and this means freedom from all external control. The only legitimate social relationships are those carried out on a mutually voluntary contractual basis and the only legitimate social institutions are those defined by such relationships.

From this we see, that for liberalism the question “free for what purpose” has no meaningful answer. For while liberals may still give lip service to Aristotle’s identification of “happiness” as the highest good and argue that freedom is a means to that end, in actuality their understanding of the individual, society, and freedom demands that freedom be regarded as an end, indeed the end, in and of itself.

This ideology is unsound for a number of reasons.

First, it’s understanding of human nature clashes with what is observably real. People are not first individuals, then everything else they are by voluntary choice. The most fundamental relationships in life are not contractual relationships and, apart from marriage and friendship, are not entered into on a mutually voluntary basis. You do not choose to be the son of your father or the daughter of your mother. You do not choose whom you will be siblings with. You do not choose to be the grandchild of your grandparents, and they, apart from their initial decision to become parents themselves opening up the possibility of grandchildren, do not chose to be your grandparents.

These relationships exist within the family. The family is a social unit consisting of several people. It is society in microcosm and it is also prior to the individual. You are born into your family which existed prior to you. The family, and not the individual, is the basic unit of society.

Liberal individualism is also unsound and in a dangerous way because it sets the “individual” against society. By effectually if not nominally making the freedom of the individual the supreme good liberalism teaches the individual to regard any and all limitations on his freedom as prison walls. It doesn’t matter if the limitation is a genuinely unjust law, like a law telling you that you cannot smoke in your own home, or a perfectly reasonable and just one, or even a social limitation imposed through means other than government power, such as most limitations on individual freedom will be in a civilized society. If you are a “sovereign individual” these limitations will all seem like unfair confinement in a jail cell to you.

In G. K. Chesterton’s book The Poet and the Lunatics, there is a short story entitled “The Yellow Bird”. In this story, a young man named Mallow who is jealous that Laura the girl he loves has fallen for another man, visits her house with a couple of friends where they have an interview with his rival, a Russian professor named Imanhov, who was the author of a book called “The Psychology of Liberty” and who had escaped from a prison in Siberia by blowing up the wall of his prison. After Imanhov has explained some of his progressive views, about a future where man will “conquer the planets and colonize the fixed stars”, Mallow and Laura go off and discuss his views. Their conversation is interrupted by Mallow’s friend Gabriel Gale – the poet and hero of the book – who rushes them away from the house as fast as he can. When they finally force him to explain, he tells them how he had seen a canary that Imanhov had “liberated” from its cage earlier that day, torn to pieces by the other birds. This suggested that the professor had taken his ideas on liberty a bit too far. But when Gale noticed that the professor had also “liberated” goldfish from their bowl by smashing it, he knew the man had rapidly progressed into madness, and there was no telling what he would do next. At this point the house explodes and Gale comments “It was only the prison gun…the signal that a prisoner has escaped.”

In telling this story, Chesterton explains that true liberty is impossible without limits. He tells it both by the illustration which is the story itself, and directly in these words he places in the mouth of Gabriel Gale:

What exactly is liberty? First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage. It was free to be alone. It was free to sing. In the forest its feathers would be torn to pieces and its voice choked for ever. Then I began to think that being oneself, which is liberty, is itself limitation. We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

Liberal individualism is like the madman in Chesterton’s story. By taking individual liberty to an extreme, making society subservient to the individual, and refusing to allow any concept of the “common good” to balance it, it lost sight of the distinction between the walls of a prison, which exist only to confine those within, and the walls of one’s home which generate a living space within which one can live, free and secure from the elements and intruders.

Philosophical liberalism’s origins go back to the Social Contract theory of the so-called “Enlightenment”. This theory held that the state of nature for mankind, was one of absolutely free and sovereign individuals, who formed society as an artificial construction by making contracts with one another in which they voluntarily gave up a part of their freedom in return for some benefits. This theory, as we have seen, does not correspond to the reality of human nature. We are born into social units (families). Society is our nature. The individual outside of society is the unnatural person.

The idea, however, that the individual human being has dignity and value, that society should protect with guaranteed rights and liberties, is much older than liberalism. Long before the Enlightenment Project and the Modern Age Christianity taught that each individual human being possessed value in the eyes of God. From the Genesis creation account, in the Scriptures Christianity inherited from the Hebrew faith, Christianity taught that each individual was made in the image and likeness of God, an image that remains although marred by sin. Christianity further taught, that on the Last Day, at the Final Judgment, each individual would stand before God and give an account of his life on earth.

Christianity shaped the Western world for well over a thousand years, teaching the importance of the individual within rather than outside and against the context of the family, community, and society. The conservative today, seeking a restoration of personal liberties that have been swallowed up by contemporary collectivist liberalism, must look for a foundation for personal liberty that is older than the Modern Age, one grounded in Western traditions that draw from Christianity and the Greco-Roman classical heritage and which are not hostile to stable society and the common good.

Toryism and Personal Liberty

There are many who would see a fundamental inconsistency in standing for "throne and altar" and "liberty" at the same time.  I see no such inconsistency.  In my essay "On Being A Tory in the Age of Whigs" I provided an argument for how and why one can uphold the authority of social institutions, including government, while simultaneously upholding personal liberty against intrusive government.  Both the authority of the institutions and our traditional liberties are rooted in societal prescription, in the ancient constitution of society.  To promote either at the expense of the other is to attack the foundation of both.

Many who call themselves "conservatives" today argue for limits on government out of reasons that are essentially liberal.  I will try to avoid such arguments at this blog.  This is not because classical liberalism never had any good arguments but because there is a solid Tory case for non-intrusive government that has never been linked to such erroneous concepts as progress, the inherent goodness of mankind, contractual society, or the universal brotherhood of man.

Evelyn Waugh, the 20th Century British satirist and novelist, was a convert to Roman Catholic Christianity and a High Tory.  In an appendix to his book Robbery Under Law, which arose out of his trip to Mexico in the 1930's, he gave a brief statement of his political beliefs.  Donat Gallagher, in his anthology of Waugh's prose entitled The Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, reprinted this statement under the title "A Conservative Manifesto".  In this Waugh states:

 I believe in government; that men cannot live together without rules but that these should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.

Here we find the Tory position on limited government in a nutshell - government is necessary and good, but the rules should be kept to what is necessary.  Government, in other words, should be non-intrusive.

This position has a long pedigree in Tory thought.

Robert Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, the 19th Century British peer and Prime Minister, is said by the conservative journal that bears his name to have declared that "good government consisted in doing as little as possible".

Samuel Johnson, who dominated 18th Century English literature, and was the quintessential Tory of that era, in verse he wrote for Oliver Goldsmith declared: How small, of all that human hearts endure,/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

To the Tory, the true conservative, the truly important events in human life and human society, do not take place in the sphere of the political, or, for that matter, in the sphere of the economical.  What truly matters is not what occurs in the halls of Parliament or in the marketplace.  It is what happens in the home, in the church, and in your local neighborhood.  It is there that civilization stands or falls.  It is there that government should have the least amount of say - if any at all.

To the progressive, who believes in the inherent goodness of man and that a better world is possible through reason and science, the temptation has always existed to regard the government as an instrument for effecting whatever social change he regards as desirable at the particular moment (it changes from age to age).  This was true even in the days when classical liberalism and progressivism were more or less synonymous.  Consider the case of Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, who had no patience for the prescriptive "Rights of Englishmen", i.e. to trial by jury, habeas corpus, etc., regarding these as a hindrance to government in the work of improving society.  It fell to Sir William Blackstone, the famous British jurist and commentator on the Common Law, to defend these basic rights.  Blackstone, a High Tory, believed in the ancient constitution, and the Divine Right of Kings.

As government has become more democratic, the temptation of the progressive has increased.  Modern democratic governments have asserted a larger, more intrusive role in the societies they govern.  The standard model of the modern democratic-administrative state, is of a strong central government, consisting of elected politicians, who appoint large departments of "experts" to write regulation after regulation covering every conceivable area of life, and then hire armies of inspectors to knock on the doors of your homes, churches, schools, and businesses to make sure you are complying.  It is the progressives' dream come true, but the Tory's nightmare.

As government has become more and more intrusive into our everyday lives it has become increasingly less effective at providing the basic protection of the rule of law to society that has been the basis of its existence for as long as there has been government.  The late and brilliant American conservative commentator, Dr. Samuel Francis, coined the term anarcho-tyranny to describe this situation.

Among North American "conservatives" the idea has become popular, as of late, that the democratic-administrative state can be "taken over" and turned into an instrument of a "conservative" agenda.  This is essentially the view of the "neo-conservatives" in the United States ('50's and '60's era Cold War liberals who supposedly moved to the Right in the '70's) and it appears to be the philosophy of Stephen Harper here in Canada as well.  It is a sad age we live in, when Tories have fallen prey, to the progressive temptation.

Government exists to enforce the law and keep the peace.  It does not exist to change society.  It does not exist to advance anyone's agenda.

My new essay "Authority and Power" is now complete and I will be posting it shortly.  Dr. Robert Nisbet, who I reference in the first paragraph, wrote that "Authority is, along with property, one of the two central concepts in conservative philosophy". (Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, p. 49).  From his first book, The Quest for Community, to the end of his life, Dr. Nisbet argued for a plurality of social authorities against the concentration of authority and power in the hands of the centralized, bureaucratic, administrative state.  Those libertarians whose starting point is their fanciful notion of the sovereignty of the individual might object.  If they are consistent with their absurd worldview, they would have to argue that the difference between a parent telling his kid to eat his vegetables and the state telling us what we can and cannot do in our own homes is a difference of degree rather than of kind.  Dr. Nisbet believed, however, that the plurality of social authorities, was the best guarantee of personal liberty against the abuses of concentrated power.  In this, I believe he was absolutely correct.

On Being a Tory in an Age of Whigs

written by Gerry T. Neal on May 4, 2009

I am a Tory. Not necessarily in the sense of “a member or supporter of the Conservative Party”, but certainly in the sense of being a High Tory in principle and belief, i.e., a “throne and altar conservative”. Enoch Powell, the greatest British statesman of the 20th Century, and himself a Tory (even after he left the party) defined the term this way “a Tory is a person who regards authority as immanent in institutions”. That is probably the best simple definition of a Tory that I have ever come across.

What is authority? It is often considered identical to power but they are not the same thing. Power is effectual influence over the minds and wills of other people. Power can be obtained in various ways. In some cases it is the equivalent of brute strength and operates by the use or threat of force. Other times, power is obtained more subtly.. Regardless of the manner in which it is obtained, however, power does not make the imposition of your will legitimate. Might does not make right. That is where the difference between power and authority lies. Authority is the right to be listened to and obeyed. To illustrate, lets say that a kid is walking to school and a bully shows up and demands “Give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up”. The kid does so, because the bully is bigger and stronger than he is and is easily capable of following through on the threat. That bully has power. Later, the kid gets home after school. He drops his schoolbag on the floor, throws his coat towards the coat rack and misses, and heads towards his room without cleaning up his mess. His mother sees this and says “Stop right there young man, hang up your coat, and put your book bag where it belongs”. Whether or not the mother backs up her words with a threat of punishment, they carry something the bully’s words never could, i.e., authority. She has the right to be obeyed. If she uses a threat of punishment to back up her command, she is using power legitimately, whereas the bully was not.

To say that “authority is immanent in institutions” as Powell put it, is to say that authority rests with an office rather than a person. The queen’s authority, rests in the office of monarch and not in the person of Elizabeth II who occupies it.

What are institutions? They are the building blocks of society. Most exist in every society, although some are unique to a particular society, and those which are universal take on particular characteristics to suit the society to which they belong. The family is the most basic institution. The church is another basic institution. The highest institution (or set of institutions) in any society is the government, the institution which exists to make and enforce society’s rules, to represent that society’s interests to other societies, and to protect the society from attacks from the outside. In the United Kingdom and Canada, the government consists of the institution of the monarchy in which sovereignty rests and the parliament through which people have a say in how they are governed. Other government institutions carry out the day to day business of enforcing the laws the government makes.

The Enlightenment Project, which marked the beginning of what is called “the Modern Age” launched a war against the institutions of society that continues to this very day. The sophists of the Enlightenment blamed society and its institutions for the ills that have assailed human society through the generations. Some argued that society and its institutions needed to be reformed and reshaped in accordance with ideals thought up by rationalist philosophers, among these being equality, popular sovereignty, the rights of man. Others argued that society could not be reformed, but needed to be razed to the ground, and rebuilt anew in accordance to these same ideals.

Tories recognize the foolishness and danger in all of that. Evil cannot be eliminated from the world by human means. Its source, is not society or its institutions, but the human heart, and so it will always be with us, as long as the present world lasts. In theology, this is called the doctrine of Original Sin, a doctrine taught by every major branch of historical, traditional, and Biblical Christianity – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. The purpose of law and government is not to eliminate evil but to contain it to a certain extent by prohibiting and punishing acts of evil which harm others and society itself. This is, as it should be, a very small role. As Dr. Johnston, the 18th Century Tory wrote “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

Today, government has taken upon itself a larger role, which exceeds the legitimate authority vested in it by tradition and prescription. The “nanny state” watches over its citizens like a mother hen with the aim of preventing them from making mistakes that could possibly injure themselves. Thus, we now have laws against smoking inside buildings and vehicles, laws against drinking and driving, laws against speeding and laws saying one must wear a seat belt in a moving vehicle. The “surveillance state”, in the name of providing us with around the clock security against criminals and terrorists, spies on us night and day. The “welfare state” takes upon itself the responsibility for maintaining our existence from the cradle to the grave.

Each of these expansions of the role and responsibility of government find their origins in some philosophy or another derived from the Enlightenment Project. When the rationalist philosophers began their war against the institutions of traditional society they declared themselves to be fighting for freedom and liberty. But the inevitable result of their efforts has been the creation of the modern state which is the enemy of freedom and liberty. The true defenders of liberty and freedom, the true libertarians, have always been Tories. For our rights and freedoms ultimately are derived from the same source as the authority vested in traditional institutions.

To Christians the ultimate source of liberty and of authority is God. The immediate source, however, from which liberty, rights, and legitimate authority are derived, is the social order, embodied in tradition, and prescription. The word tradition is derived from the Latin tradere – to give up, hand over, pass on. It refers in English to customs, habits, and ways of life, which have been inherited from our ancestors, and which we are expected to keep and pass on to our posterity. Prescription, was defined by American Tory Russell Kirk as “things established by immemorial usage”. Through tradition and prescription the social order, each particular society’s variation on the natural order, is transmitted from generation to generation. From the social order, the institutions of society including government, derive their authority. Note this is the exact opposite of what the modern state and its defenders would have you believe, i.e., that order in society comes from the state down.

The state would also have us believe that it is the source of our rights and freedoms. But when the state is the source of our rights and freedoms, the state can take those rights away. Our real rights and freedoms, are prescriptive rights and freedoms, i.e., rights and freedoms vested in us as individuals, by our membership in a society in which those rights and freedoms have been passed down by tradition. Since tradition and prescription are the source of the authority vested in government as an institution, it cannot take away the rights and freedoms which tradition and prescription have vested in us as individuals, without attacking the source of its own authority. Thus, do tradition and prescription, place limits on the authority they make immanent in the institutions of society.

If we would recover the rights and freedoms that have been taken from us and recover the social order that has eroded away to almost nothing, we must reconnect with the English and broader Western tradition, which the heirs of the Enlightenment Project have done so much to sever us from.