How Captain Airhead Makes Andrew Scheer Look Much Better Than He Really Is

The Conservative Party of Canada really ought to be paying Captain Airhead a salary. He is the best publicity man they have. He has been doing a much better job of promoting their cause in the upcoming Dominion election than their own lackluster leadership. I do not mean merely that he makes them look good by being such a lousy, awful, and indeed, downright, horrible, alternative, although that is certainly the case. What I mean is that if there were a speck of truth to be found in any of his recent, scare-mongering, accusations against the Conservatives, the party would certainly rise in my esteem as it would that of any sensible and sane person. Evelyn Waugh once said that the problem with the Conservative Party was that it “has not turned the clock back a single second” and the Canadian incarnation of the party has given no indication that it plans to do so any time in the near future. Yet Justin Trudeau would have us believe that the Conservatives, if elected, would set the clock back by about a hundred years. My response to which is to say that if this happens, it would be a good start, but we need to go much further than that.

To say this, of course, is to commit the unpardonable sin of the Modern Age, blasphemy against the spirit of progress. It is a sin to which I gladly, and unrepentantly, plead guilty. Readers of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia might recall how in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Governor Gumpas of the Lone Islands, upon being told by King Caspian that the slave trade “must be stopped”, protests “But that would be putting the clock back”, adding “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” to which Caspian replies “I have seen then both in an egg…We call it ‘Going Bad’ in Narnia.” Needless to say, I subscribe to Caspian’s – and Lewis’ – view of progress. This is the view of genuine British and Canadian Toryism – that progress does not happen, and if it does it is a bad thing and we need to put a stop to it. Sadly, the Canadian Conservative Party of our day, like the British Conservative Party of Waugh’s day, have abandoned the more authentic views of their tradition for something closer to American republicanism, which worships at the altar of the same idol of progress as liberalism and the Left. Justin Trudeau is deluded if he seriously thinks otherwise.

I am not going to dwell at any length on Trudeau’s accusations that Andrew Scheer is in bed with “racists”, “white supremacists” and “white nationalists” as I have already dealt with this in another essay. It shows how extremely unhealthy, the political climate has become in present day Canada, that these labels can be attached to people who do not so describe themselves and who neither subscribe to a racialist ideology like National Socialism nor have engaged in violent rhetoric or action either as individuals or organized groups towards other races. All that one needs to do is to oppose a particular kind of racism – the anti-white racism manifested in the immigration policy of making the country as diverse as possible as fast as possible and hence as least white as possible as fast as possible, in the progressive notion that all whites and only whites are racists, and in the cartoonish re-writing of history into a bad melodrama in which whites are assigned the role of the moustache-twirling, villain in the top hat and large black coat and everyone else plays the helpless maiden whom he has tied to the railroad track. Heck, one does not even have to actively oppose this anti-white racism himself – it is sufficient to be seen in the same room as someone who does. My respect for Mr. Scheer and the Conservative Party would skyrocket if they actually did take a bold, consistent, and principled stand against this pervasive form of progressive anti-white racism, but I am not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. The accusations against them are entirely of the “you were seen with so-and-so, who said such-and-such” variety. Indeed, the disgusting manner in which Scheer threw Michael Cooper under the bus, the fact that he seems to have enforced silence upon his party about the Grits’ disturbing plans to bring back the vile Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and the way in which Warren Kinsella, of all people, has been defending Scheer against Trudeau’s charges using arguments amusingly similar to those that I would have used to ridicule Kinsella’s book Web of Hate twenty years ago, all point inevitably to the conclusion that Scheer, like Harper before him, is on the same side as Trudeau on these issues, leaving the many Canadians who wish for the freedom to think differently from Kinsella, Richard Warman, Bernie Farber, Harry Abrams, Helmut-Harry Loewen and others of that ilk, without anyone in Parliament to speak for them.

What I am more interested in addressing here are Captain Airhead’s accusations of what he considers to be sexism. Back when Stephen Harper was Conservative leader the Liberals were constantly accusing him of having a “hidden agenda,” i.e., to re-criminalize abortion. Trudeau, who has constructed a political image of himself as a “male feminist” which has taken a severe beating over the last couple of years for reasons that I will not get into here, and who as part of that image takes a rather clownish, over-the-top, hard-line, “it’s a woman’s right” stance on abortion, has revived the old “hidden agenda” line for use against Scheer. He has been able to use recent events south of the border, where several states have passed strong anti-abortion legislation now that there is a perceived right-wing majority on the Supreme Court in the hopes of provoking a legal battle that will end in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to help him stoke the fears of his feminist support base.

Again, if there were the slightest amount of truth to Trudeau’s accusations, the Conservative Party’s stock would certainly rise in my books. I remember very well, however, that while Stephen Harper allowed pro-life people to run for his party at a time even as the other major party leaders began telling them they were persona non grata, this was the extent of his “support” for the pro-life cause. Pro-life people were allowed to run as Conservatives but woe unto them if they actually tried to do something to end abortion. There is not the slightest amount of evidence that things are any different now. This is extremely unfortunate for Canada because the current status quo on abortion, of which Trudeau is so proud, is an ever growing bloodstain on our country that cries out to heaven for divine justice, and there are no realistic options for changing that status quo, that do not require action by the Conservatives in the Dominion parliament. Even if it could be accomplished at the provincial level, which it cannot, the provincial Conservatives seem to have no more inclination to do so than their federal counterparts. The right-populist premier of Upper Canada assured the media last month, after progressives threw a tantrum when one of his MPPs pledged at a pro-life rally “to make abortion unthinkable in our lifetime” that his government “will not re-open the abortion debate.” Even more recently the provincial Conservative government here in Manitoba has announced that an abortion pill will now be fully covered by the public. There are many health care products and services which are necessary to help people who are suffering from excruciating pain or are in danger of going blind which are not fully covered by the public, but a pill that murders babies soon will be.

It is difficult to think of anything that puts the lie to the entire left-liberal concept of progress more than this matter of abortion. The progressive position is that a pregnant woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy. Canadian progressives, including the leadership of the Liberal Party, take the most extreme degree of this position, which allows for no qualifications such as “up to this-or-that stage of development”, insists that this “right” be protected against even interference of the persuasive variety, requires that the public pay for it, insists that the debate is closed and that the other side should be made to shut up, and boasts that their victory shows how advanced we have become in our thinking. Their entire position, however, is based upon a lie. The position that a woman has or ought to have the right to terminate her pregnancy could scarcely be formulated, much less justified, apart from the notion that the pregnancy is something that concerns her, her body, and her health alone. “Pro-choice” lingo such as “the procedure”, “reproductive rights”, “control of her own body” is all carefully selected to create this impression. Yet, obviously, pregnancy is not simply a matter of a woman, her health, and her body. It also concerns her baby, whose very life is at stake in the pregnancy. An abortion is not merely a medical procedure undergone for the health of the pregnant woman. It is the termination of the life of a baby.

Far from being an advanced state of ethical thinking the so-called “pro-choice” position of the progressive left is a regression into the darkest form of paganism. In the times of ancient paganism, infanticide was not an uncommon way of keeping the family within the means of its resources. The story of Oedipus is but one of the ancient legends that address the cruelty of the practice of exposure by telling of a child rescued from this fate by a kindly couple. Worse, the worship of several pagan idols required the sacrifice of children, usually the first-born. Several of the most important ethicists of ancient Greece and Rome condemned this practice in Carthage, the city-state in what is now Tunisia in northern Africa which was Rome’s rival for control of the Mediterranean world in the third and fourth centuries BC. The Carthaginians would sacrifice their children to an idol, whom the Greek and Roman commentators identified with Kronos or Saturn from their own mythologies, by placing them in the heated arms of a huge bronze statue. This is a practice they inherited from Tyre, the Phoenician city-state in what is now Lebanon, of which Carthage was originally a colony. The Phoenicians shared this practice with their southern neighbours, the tribes of Canaan, and this practice is clearly identified in the Old Testament as one of the worst forms of the wickedness that brought divine judgement upon the Canaanites in the form of Israel being sent to conquer and drive them out of the Promised Land. Later, when the Israelites apostatized into the idolatry of their neighbours, this practice is again pointed to by the Prophets as having particularly defiled their land and led ultimately to the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities. A curse was pronounced upon the place outside Jerusalem where these sacrifices took place and by the time of the New Testament it was regarded as a defiled place, fit only for burning refuse and the bodies of criminals, and lent its name to the fate of those to be condemned at the Final Judgement.

Even before the Exodus, and the giving of the Mosaic Law which strictly forbade the Israelites from participating in the abominations of Canaan, such as child sacrifice, and required that they redeem their firstborn with animal sacrifices instead, the Book of Genesis draws a contrast between the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the false gods of the pagans. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, but prevents him from actually going through with the sacrifice, for it is faith and not his son, that God wanted from Abraham. Abraham, when asked by Isaac where the lamb for the sacrifice is, makes the prophecy that God Himself will provide a lamb, a prophecy that we see fulfilled in the New Testament when John the Baptist, speaking of Jesus, says “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” The pagan idols, who are really devils, require their worshippers to sacrifice their children, the true and living God, gave His only-begotten Son as the sacrificial Lamb Who would take away the sin of the world.

As the Christian religion grew and spread throughout the ancient world, its influence led, among other things, to the Roman Empire’s finally banning infanticide. If anything actually deserves to be described as an enlightened ethical step forward in the right direction this was it. By using this language to describe the revival of pagan baby murder, the Left demonstrates just how much its concept of “progress” really is King Caspian’s “going bad” after all. It also reveals itself to be just another form of ancient, pagan, devil worship.

The question for Andrew Scheer and the Conservative Party is, what God do you serve? Scheer, who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, claims to be a Christian but this is also the case with Justin Trudeau. As long as Scheer, like his predecessor Harper, prevents the members of his party from actively combating the evil of baby murder and instead requires them to join in the loony Left’s crusade against its chimerical bugbear of “white racism”, it is not the true and living God that he is serving.

Fortunately for him, he has Justin Trudeau to make him look so much better than he really is. How much better for us, it would be, however, if instead of relying on this, he were to come out and take a bold stand on the things for which the Conservative Party ought to be standing. He could start by promising the turn the clock back a century and a half, to right after Confederation before the Liberal Party got their grubby hands on the country and things started to go downhill.

The Tory and Globalization

As we have seen, the Tory, the classical conservative whose believes in a stable and secure social and civil order in which royal and ecclesiastical authority pursue their shared vocation to cooperate for the common good, accepts market capitalism with many reservations and qualifications, and rejects socialism with a few light reservations. The market, he insists, can only be the force for good that liberals maintain that it is, in the context of the secure civil order and a culture informed by a moral tradition that supplies the brakes on human avarice that the market itself does not contain. Completely unfettered, as the liberal believes it ought to be, market capitalism becomes an idol that enslaves man rather than a servant that works for his good and a force that dissolves the social and civil order and the moral tradition. To alleviate the misery that had been brought about by the transition from feudal, rural, agrarianism to modern, urban, industrialism and to protect against the threat of revolutionary socialism, Tories introduced modest social legislation with the goal of healing the rift between rich and poor and reuniting them into “one nation”. Social legislation, unfortunately, has the tendency to grow and expand into what today we call the welfare state, more accurately called the provider state, which is as deleterious to the social and civil order and the moral tradition as unfettered capitalism. It allows people to think of themselves as generous and charitable, not for cultivating the virtue of liberal magnanimity by the giving of what is their own, but for voting help to the needy out of what is their neighbours’. It does harm by contributing to illiteracy, illegitimacy, the absence of fathers, high rates of criminal activity and victimization, substance abuse, and multigenerational poverty and dependence, among the people it is designed to help. It hinders the reforming of the organic ties, relationships, and institutions that were uprooted by the advent of capitalism.

The provider state is also one aspect of the convergence of capitalism and socialism that has taken place over the last century. A little over a century ago, Hilaire Belloc predicted this convergence in a book entitled The Servile State. In the struggle between capitalism and socialism, Belloc argued, neither was destined to prevail over the other but both together were moving towards the creation of system in which the bulk of society would consist of a labour force that would work for the owners of capital in times of economic prosperity and be maintained by the state in times of economic hardship. What Belloc called “the servile state” is remarkably similar to what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called the provider state.

It is ironic, perhaps, that in the decades following World War II when capitalism and socialism were most at odds with each other, as their avatars in the United States and Soviet Union respectively, were locked in what James Burnham called a “struggle for the world” with each other, that it became most apparent that the two were converging in the way Belloc had predicted. That the two would ultimately converge, however, is not in itself ironic, despite the tendency of the advocates of each to represent the other as their polar opposite, for both are manifestations of modern thought. The liberal who believes in capitalism and the leftist who believes in socialism both alike think of man primarily as a producer, distributor, and consumer of material goods. Furthermore, both tend to see man on a universal scale rather than in the context of a rooted tradition. Most importantly, both conceive of human history, especially that of the modern age, as moving forward from a past of darkness and suffering to a future of happiness and light. They are both, in other words, progressive.

That which unites the liberal and the socialist, separates both from the Tory, who is not a progressive. Canada’s most distinguished Tory thinker, George Grant, explained how the modern concept of progress was a secular mutation and perversion of the Christian doctrine of the Kingdom of God. Christianity teaches that God acts through history, particularly through the events recorded in the Gospels, to accomplish man’s salvation, to be fully unveiled in the future Kingdom of God. Modern man, has retained this general idea of the shape of history, in which he has replaced the Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man, thus arriving at the concept of progress. (1) In his best known book Grant described this Kingdom of Man, the end to which the age of progress is moving, as a “universal and homogenous state”. While Marxists thought that theirs was the true vision of progress and condemned American capitalism as reactionary, Grant argued that the American liberal had the truer understanding of the nature of the future state, one in which man would be completely free to remake himself and his world according to his will and that American capitalism rather than socialism would prove to be the means whereby the universal state is to be achieved. (2) As a Tory, however, Grant took a sceptical view of that universal state, looking back to the wisdom of the ancients, who held that a universal state would be a state of tyranny.

In one sense, history has borne out his assessment that the universal state would be that of the liberal rather than the Marxist in that the side of capitalism certainly won the Cold War, ushering in a new era that has been thought of by many as a Pax Americana. In this era, countries that have retained the Communist creed, such as Red China, have introduced market reforms, so as not to repeat the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, and socialist parties in Western countries such as Roy Romanow’s NDP in Saskatchewan in the 1990s and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” in the United Kingdom have also embraced the market economy. This is only one side of the picture, however.

As socialism has embraced the market, seemingly being taken over from the inside by capitalism, liberal capitalism in turn has embraced key elements of socialism. In the second chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, identified certain means whereby the industrial workers, having seized political power and become the ruling class, would wrest capital from the bourgeoisie and centralize it in the State and revolutionize the mode of production. They listed ten such measures as being “generally applicable” in “most advanced countries”. The second, fifth, sixth, and tenth of these have been implemented in all capitalist countries as have, to one degree or another, several of the others. (3) The capitalism that has conquered socialism from the inside, in other words, has itself been deeply penetrated by Marxism.

While Grant’s assertion that capitalism, rather than socialism, is the vehicle of progress must, therefore, be qualified by the recognition that the capitalism in question is one that has converged with socialism into the servile state predicted by Belloc, that it is moving us towards the “universal and homogenous state” is evident and indeed, is a fact celebrated by some of its advocates. (4) Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of globalization, the economic integration of the markets of the world, which phenomenon gives further testimony to how capitalism and socialism have converged in that among the main charges levelled against the corporations that profit from globalization is that these capitalist companies sell good manufactured in sweatshops in Communist China.

Globalization has been brought about through the means of free trade treaties negotiated between countries, both regionally as in the European Common Market and NAFTA, and on a global scale, such as in GATT. Free trade, in which tariffs and other protections of domestic markets are dropped to facilitate trade across national boundaries, has been a key element of liberal economics since Adam Smith and while the arguments for it from an economic point of view are not entirely lacking in merit, it has long been the element of free market economics of which the Tory has been most suspicious and for good reason, not least of which being that liberal advocacy of free trade being so often dressed up in utopian dreams of establishing a permanent world peace. While the Tory’s reasons for favouring specific protection policies may vary from age to age, and place to place, from the protection of a rural agrarian economy in the early nineteenth century Corn Laws in Britain to the protection of a developing manufacturing economy in the late nineteenth century economic nationalism of the Conservative Party in Canada, he accepts that the obvious truth of Ludwig von Mises’ argument that governments lack the ability to calculate what is best economically for everyone in their country individually, does not apply to their ability to determine what is best for their country collectively. It is in no country’s best interests to so integrate national markets that those who profit the most are companies and individuals with no patriotic loyalty or attachment.

There are, of course, many who make a big show about protesting against globalization every time there is a trade summit of some sort, but to the extent that they have any motive other than “it’s the cool thing to do” or “my teacher says I ought to”, it is much more like the envy that drives socialism than any patriotic objection to global integration. Indeed, their complaints against globalization are expressed in explicitly anti-patriotic language that depicts their own countries as villains and other people on the other side of the world as virtuous victims. The Tory recognizes that these are no true allies in the patriotic fight against globalization and the progressive universal state.

(1) George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age, (Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1959), especially chapter four "History as Progress"
(2) Geroge Grant, Lament for a Nation, (Toronto: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1978, 1989 ).
(3) The second was “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”, the fifth “Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly”, the sixth “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” and the tenth “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.” Three of these have been implemented in full. The means of communication and transport have been placed under strong state regulatory bodies rather than outright nationalized. To varying extents almost all of the others have been implemented as well.
(4) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, (New York: Free Press, 1992).

Yet Another Big Leap Downwards

The Whiteoak Brothers is, in order of publication, the thirteenth in Mazo de la Roche’s series of novels chronicling the lives of the Whiteoak family of Jalna manor in rural Ontario. Set in the year 1923 it is the sixth in the series by order of internal chronology. In the sixteenth chapter of the novel, Wakefield Whiteoak, the youngest of the family’s third generation, is placed under the tutorage of the Reverend Mr. Fennell, the rector of the Anglican parish church that had been built by his grandfather Captain Whiteoak. He was unable to attend regular classes due to a diagnosis of a weak heart and had previously been taught by his older sister Meg, who now found him too much of a handful. In their first session with the vicar they discuss Wakefield’s grandmother, who is approaching her centennial, causing the rector to speculate:

“If you live to her age, I wonder what sort of world this will be. The year 2013—hm.”

We, of course, do not need to engage in such speculation as we are now living in the second year beyond the annum specified. I suspect that if a vision of the present day had been given to a clergyman ninety years ago he would have been horrified at what he saw. A great many changes have occurred since 1923 and, indeed, since 1953, the year the words quoted above saw print for the first time. They have almost all been for the worse, but that goes without saying as the vast majority of all change – a good 99.99% at least – is always for the worse.

Some of these changes have been specific to Canada, rendering our country virtually unrecognizable as the same Dominion in which the Jalna saga is set, and in which de la Roche, who died in 1961, lived all her life. We are coming up close, for example, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Pearson Liberals’ changing of our national flag from the Canadian Red Ensign to the Maple Leaf, which, despite Allan Levine’s recent remarks to the contrary in the opinion pages of the Winnipeg Free Press, was an attack on our country’s British heritage, and a slap in the face of all the Canadian veterans who fought under the Red Ensign in our country’s finest moment when we stood with Britain against the Axis powers from the beginning of the Second World War.

Other changes, however, have been part of a wave of change that has swept Western civilization as a whole. There are many factors that contributed to bringing about this wave of change. One of these was the drawing to an end of the Modern Age, itself brought about by the triumph of liberalism, the moving and energizing spirit of the Modern Age, which had more or less completed all of its original goals by the middle of the twentieth century (and had also seen its claims to be able to provide a better and brighter future for man aptly refuted and debunked by the two World Wars, the rise of a whole new scale of tyranny made possible by modernity in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the invention of the atomic bomb). Another factor was cultural Marxism, i.e., the infiltration and takeover of the political, social, academic, cultural, and other institutions of Western civilization by those who were intent upon redirecting these institutions towards the subversion of the civilization and ordered societies they comprise.

This wave of change has not yet ebbed out or shown any indication that it will do so within the foreseeable future. Instead, it has swept away yet another remnant of what used to be our civilization, as the Supreme Court of Canada, yesterday, in a unanimous decision, struck down the law against assisted suicide. Their ruling, in a case brought before them by the BC Civil Liberties Association, was that the law violated the worthless appendage to our constitution that Pierre Trudeau tacked on when he had it repatriated in 1982. Last year, Steven Fletcher, the MP for Charleswood-St. James-Assiniboia here in Winnipeg had introduced bills that would have legalized assisted suicide in certain circumstances. It is expected that Parliament will pass new laws to replace the ones struck down. If the present government’s track record is anything to go by I would not anticipate any improvement. In December of 2013 the Supreme Court struck down our laws against prostitution and the present government replaced them with a horrible new unjust law based on a bill passed by the rabidly egalitarian, socialist, and feminist government of Sweden in 1999.

There is a great deal of muddled thinking about assisted suicide today. Suicide means the deliberate taking of positive action towards ending one’s life. The person who knowingly ingests cyanide is committing suicide, the person who refuses treatment that will prolong his life, is not. It needs to be clear that to prohibit assisted suicide does not mean that people should be forced to go on life support, to take chemotherapy, or undergo any other potentially life-extending treatment. The question of assisted suicide is not even a question of whether a person has the right to take his own life or not, although the assertion that he does ought be challenged because it is itself a manifestation of an idea that is far too uncritically accepted today, namely the autonomy of the individual and his absolute right to do whatever he wills provided that others are not adversely affected It is a question of whether he has the right to involve other people in the deliberate termination of his life. This is a question to which the answer ought to be a resounding no. Of course nobody should have the right to place the burden of terminating his life on another person’s shoulders.

Allowing assisted suicide is the first step down a slippery slope. The next step is allowing doctors to decide to terminate the lives of people who cannot make the decision to terminate their lives for themselves. Make no mistake – this next step will follow the first one. For decades now, the kind of people who have been making radical changes have been pooh-poohing everyone who has warned about a slippery slope, and each time we ended up sliding down that slope. The justices of the Supreme Court of Canada must be frothing-at-the-mouth mad to think it wise or right to start the ball rolling on giving physicians, a notoriously arrogant class of people who have great difficulty with differentiating or distinguishing between themselves and God, the power of life and death. Apart from the matter of their inflated egos, physicians are required to swear a solemn oath that includes a pledge to do no harm. Terminating someone’s life is the ultimate in harmdoing. The physician willing to assist in suicide, therefore, is an oathbreaker, and hence somebody who should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted with power over whether people live or die.

Years ago, the television cartoon The Simpsons ran an episode in which Homer Simpson was put in a coma by an exploding beer can in an April Fool’s joke gone wrong. Mr. Burns, complaining of the hospital bills his company’s insurance was having to cover, brought in Dr. Nick Riviera who looked at Homer and concluded “Oh dear, I can find no signs of life. Just to be safe, we’d better pull the plug”. At the time this was brilliant satire. Now, thanks to our satire-killing Supreme Court, it seems more like a dark foreshadowing of things to come.

It would be nice to think that those who we send to Parliament to write Her Majesty’s laws for us will find away of rescuing us from the goofy decision by the clowns on the bench to allow the medical profession to decide whether we live or die. I wouldn’t wager a plugged nickel on that happening, though. I’m afraid things are only going to progress from here in the more honest meaning of the word progress, i.e., get worse.

The Beauty of Nature, Man’s Dominion, and the Environmentalist Movement

Beauty is that quality of certain sights and sounds which appeals to us and draws us back to look or listen again in appreciative contemplation. There are many different kinds of beauty. There is the human beauty which plays a large role in sexual attraction, the beauty which men see in women, and women in men. Then there is the kind of beauty which human beings create in art. The arrangement of words in a poem and of notes in a symphony are examples of this kind of beauty as are the amphitheatres and temples of ancient Greece, the cathedrals of medieval Europe, the porcelain of the Song and Ming Dynasties in China, and the sculptures and paintings of the Renaissance masters.

Then there is what is often called natural beauty – the beauty of the world around us. This is the beauty that we will be considering in this essay and we will start by noting that there are different meanings attached to the word “natural” which correspond to the radically different ways of thinking about natural beauty which exist today.

The different meanings of the word “natural” are actually different meanings of the word “nature”, for natural is an adjective that derives its meaning from a source noun by attributing the qualities of that source noun to that which it is modifying. When we say that something is “natural” we mean that in some sense it is by, of, or from nature.

The word nature is derived from the Latin word for “give birth” and its earliest English usage reflects an important concept in classical philosophy. It was originally used to refer to something’s essence, to the qualities and traits which make that something what it is and not something else. We still use the word nature in this sense today. If we say that something is a certain way “by nature” then we mean that it could not be different and still be itself.

It is from this meaning of nature that the concept of the “natural sciences” was originally derived. Today we often use the word science to refer to the natural sciences but originally the term science was used to refer to organized knowledge of all sorts. When qualified by the adjective natural, it referred to the pursuit of knowledge of how everything in the physical world works. This was because people who pursued this kind of science were trying to discover the nature of everything they observed in the world around them.

This usage, however, led to a change in the meaning of the word nature. It came to mean “that which natural scientists study”, i.e., the physical world. From this it developed a narrower sense of “living organisms in the physical world”. Very recently it took on the meaning of “everything in the physical world, especially the living organisms, except mankind”.

The difference between the oldest meaning of nature as something’s “essential qualities” and the most recent meaning of nature as “everything except mankind” is reflected in the different ways in which people think of natural beauty today. This becomes clear when we ask the question: Does beauty have to be untouched by the hand of man in order to be natural?

Those who answer this question with a “yes” are using the word “natural” in accordance with the more recent meaning of “nature”. Those who answer the question with “no” are using the word “natural” in its classical sense.

Now let me state out front that I am one of those who would answer the question “no”. To that I would add that it is this understanding of “nature” and “natural” as excluding mankind and his influence that is precisely what is wrong with the environmentalist or “Green” movement at its worst.

In saying that I do not mean to suggest that humans are incapable of acting in ways which can have a negative effect upon their world and its beauty. Of course we are, we do it all the time. Human activity can mar natural beauty severely. Human activity can also enhance that beauty, however, and the idea that we have a responsibility, in choosing our behavior, to take our impact upon the appearance of our world into consideration and select behavior that enhances rather than mars that appearance, is environmentalism at its best.

We will return to that momentarily. Before doing so, I should note that natural beauty is a fairly recent subject of serious thought. The Athenian philosophers talked and wrote about beauty but they did not have the beauty of streams and fields, forests and meadows, in mind when they did so. They wrote about the beauty of human beings, the erotic love it inspires, and the higher ideal Beauty which it is an earthly image of.

The 19th Century German historian Jacob Burckhardt describes how the natural world came to be considered an object of beauty in the Italian Renaissance:

The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful. (1)

Burckhardt believed that the ability to see the beauty in the world around us is “always the result of a long and complicated development”. He went on to summarize the history of the way people thought about the natural world – its beauty entered into the arts and poetry of the ancient world only after they had covered everything else, the Germanic peoples had a reverence for nature which they abandoned when they accepted the Christian faith, until finally around 1200 “at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence…which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of nature—spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods”. (2)

All of that, however, Burckhardt maintained, was “foreground without perspective”. It was in the writings of Dante and Petrarch that he saw the birth of modern serious contemplation of natural beauty. Of Dante he wrote:

Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning air and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view—the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. (3)

Dante and Petrarch were poets, of course, writing at the dawn of an era in which the systematic pursuit of knowledge would be divided up into numerous specialized fields. It was much later that Alexander Baumgarten took the Greek word for “feeling” or “sensitivity” and from it coined the term aesthetics to refer to the philosophy of beauty, art, and taste. It was in the 18th Century that Baumgarten coined this term and Roger Scruton – himself a philosopher who specialized in the field of aesthetics – tells us that:

When, during the course of the eighteenth century, philosophers and writers began to turn their attention to the subject of beauty, it was not art or people but nature and landscape that dominated their thinking. (4)

This did not last long. Two chapters later Scruton begins his discussion of artistic beauty by telling us how in the 19th Century “the topic of art came to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics”. (5) If natural beauty was bumped by art from the centre to the periphery of aesthetics in the 19th Century, however, it also came to be included within the context of an entirely different discussion, that of environmentalism.

Environmentalism is neither a science nor a branch of philosophy. It is an ideology and the political movement that speaks for that ideology. It purports to be based upon and informed by science, particularly the science of ecology (6), but as with all movements that make this claim it is questionable to what extent it allows scientific findings to influence its ideology rather than bending the science to fit its ideology.

Environmentalism started as a reaction against industrialization. Industrialization began a couple of centuries ago when modern science was applied to methods of producing material goods, and ways of producing goods in large quantities in short periods of time were developed. Industrialization brought many blessings to mankind – material goods became plentiful and more affordable, items previously considered to be luxury goods became more widely available, work hours were decreased and leisure time increased.

These blessings did not come without a price, however. There was a negative side to the industrialization process. The large scale production of material goods meant that the raw materials from which these goods were produced were being used up on a larger, faster scale as well. The production of usable goods from raw materials also results in byproducts which are often unusable and discarded as waste. The enhanced production of goods meant that waste was produced on a larger scale as well. Industrialized production required machinery which consumed energy resources on a larger scale than ever before and which produced smoke on a much larger scale than ever before as well.

The increase in the speed and scale with which we consume resources was a potential problem because of the danger that we would use up those resources faster than we could replace them, or, in the case of resources that cannot be renewed, that we would use them up altogether and be stuck without an alternative. The increase in the production of waste was a more concrete problem because that waste needed to go somewhere and many methods of disposing of it resulted in pollution of streams, ditches, fields, oceans, the underground water supply, and the atmosphere.

It was in order to address these problems that environmentalism was born. Originally, environmentalism had the good of human beings at heart. The concern that resources were being used up too fast was a concern that a tremendous amount of human misery would be produced when the resources are no longer sufficient to sustain the human population. The concern that the large scale production of industrial waste was creating pollution was a concern that human beings would be drinking tainted water, breathing polluted air, and would be living in an environment contaminated by pollutants.

One thing that stands out about these concerns is that they are intrinsically conservative in nature. This is even reflected in the name for the branch of environmentalism that addresses the question of resources. That branch is called conservationism a term derived from the same root as the word conservative. Those who dismiss these concerns, on the other hand, by affirming their faith that science and technology will always find an answer, are affirming a belief in progress. (7)

In North America, however, opposition to environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as conservatives and support of environmentalism is mostly found among those who identify themselves as progressives. This can partly be explained by the fact that many North American conservatives are really liberals. There is more to it than that however. (8) Environmentalism has changed from being a concern for the environment for the sake of mankind which needs that environment to being a concern for the environment for its own sake in which mankind is regarded as an enemy.

This brings us back to the meaning of nature and the question of whether natural beauty must be beauty that is untouched by man.

The topic of natural beauty inevitably became part of the environmentalist discussion because it is by definition the beauty of man’s environment. When we talk about pollution’s harmful effects upon the environment we usually think first about how waste products released into water or the air can make sick or kill the people and other animals who drink the water and breathe the air. Pollution can also harm the environment by marring its beauty and producing ugliness.

We recognize this immediately when we think about the kind of pollution we call littering. A lawn, garden, public park, or even a ditch beside a road, looks terrible when it is covered by empty potato chip bags, cigarette packages, and beer and soda pop cans.

Some people might be inclined to think that this is the most trivial of environmentalist concerns. The depletion of resources and the poisoning of others are matters which pose direct threats to human beings. It might annoy us if the appearance of our surroundings is marred by pollution but this does not threaten our existence. Are we not constantly told that outward appearances are superficial, trivial matters that only shallow people concern themselves with?

Cultural warnings against judging by outward appearances, however, pertain to how we regard other people not how we think about our environment. The idea behind them is that we should not allow a person’s appearance to overrule his character. And while it is true that other concerns might be of greater importance this does not make concern for the appearance of the world around us a trivial matter. Try and imagine living in a world where everything we regard as beautiful has disappeared and been replaced by something ugly. The thought of living in such a world should be sufficient to convince us that environmental beauty is anything but trivial.

We are able to appreciate beauty in ourselves, in art, and in the world around us because this ability is part of our nature as human beings. Our human nature also manifests itself in the universal human activity of attempting to make our personal appearances, the appearance of our homes, and the appearance of our arts and crafts, as pleasing to the eye as possible. In both of these aspects of human nature can be seen a tremendous human need for beauty. (9)

It is this human need for beauty which makes natural or environmental beauty something which we should try to conserve along with natural resources. To conserve something is to preserve it for the future by being careful not to waste it in the present. To conserve things we have inherited from past generations – our civilization, our culture, our laws and rights, our art, our resources, our environment – for future generations is to behave responsibly by taking a long view of things in which we rank our long term good higher than our immediate short term good. To take this view, requires that we think of ourselves primarily as communities or societies and only secondarily as individuals, for individuals have only brief lifespans in comparison with the multigenerational life of a community or society. It also requires that we cultivate and practice the virtue of temperance or self-control, of keeping our desires and passions subject to our reason, itself subject to the good of the community reflected in its laws.

These attitudes and behaviors are consistent with pre-modern classical and Christian thought. They are at odds with modern thought, however. Liberalism, the predominant ideology of the modern age, consists of unfettered individualism which insists upon the primacy of the individual over the community. The classical idea of governing our passions is the polar opposite of the message of “indulge yourself”, “express yourself”, and “if it feels good do it” that is found everywhere today. It should come as no surprise to us, then, that the idea of conserving our natural resources and the beauty of our environment finds itself at odds with modern utilitarianism and pragmatism.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the movement which has concerned itself with the conservation of environmental beauty and natural resources, has aligned itself, not with the classical and Christian pre-modern traditions of Western civilization, but with the radical forces dedicated to their destruction. The result of this mismatched alliance has been that the environmentalist cause has been twisted and its very understanding of nature and natural beauty has been warped.

At some point the environmentalist movement began to lay the blame for the problems created by industrialization at the feet of Christianity. In Genesis 1:26-29, God creates man and gives him dominion over the earth and all living things therein. Environmentalists pointed to this passage and identified it as the source of industrialism’s use of science and technology to exert man’s will over the natural world, and therefore of industrial depletion of resources and massive production of waste and pollution.

Having placed the blame on Christianity for the industrial threat to our ecosystem, environmentalism then adopted a worldview in which nature was elevated to the level of the divine. In some cases this was very literal as some environmentalists turned to a naturalistic, neopagan religion, in which nature or the earth was worshipped as a goddess. These were the radical fringe of the movement – most environmentalists did not go this far but they insisted that we adopt an attitude of reverence towards nature of the kind that the Abrahamic faiths teach should be reserved for God

This was a reversal of the positions held by man and the rest of the physical world in the hierarchy of Creation in Christianity. One of its effects was to remove mankind from “nature” in the thinking of the environmentalists. In Christian doctrine, God created man in His own image, gave man dominion over the natural world within which He placed man. Man’s vice-regal dominion over Creation was to be exercised from within Creation. To elevate nature above man the environmentalists had to separate nature from man.

The concept of a nature which is separate from and does not include man is a false concept, a distorted concept and this has in turn distorted the way those who hold this concept view mankind. (10) Wendell Berry comments on the unnaturalness of this dichotomous view of man and nature:

The defenders of nature and wilderness – like their enemies the defenders of the industrial economy – sometimes sound as if the natural and the human were two separate estates, radically different and radically divided. The defenders of nature and wilderness sometimes seem to feel that they must oppose any human encroachment whatsoever, just as the industrialists often apparently feel that they must make the human encroachment absolute or, as they say, “complete the conquest of nature.” But there is danger in this opposition, and it can be best dealt with by realizing that these pure and separate categories are pure ideas and do not otherwise exist. (11)

Berry goes on to say that it is not good for human beings to live for very long in either “pure nature”, i.e., wilderness unshaped by man, or in “a condition that is purely human”, i.e., completely artificial or man-made. (12) He then explains that:

People cannot live apart from nature, that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places. (13)

This is not an endorsement of industrialism, of which the agrarian Berry is a fierce critic, but it displays an understanding of the relationship between man and nature which is sorely lacking among most contemporary environmentalist critics of industrial activity.

If it is a mistake to divide “man” and “nature” into separate categories then the answer to our question about natural beauty must be no, that the condition of being unshaped or untouched by the hand of man cannot be the sine qua non of natural beauty.

Common sense would tell us this as well. A world in which cities of concrete and steel, roads of asphalt, advertising billboards, and landfills have completely hidden from view any trace of what it looked like prior to these things would be a world suffering from a beauty deficiency. But so would be a world consisting entirely of wilderness. It is no insult to creation or to its Creator to say that human activity can enhance a landscape and make it more pleasing to the eye than it was before. Since God placed man in this world, and gave him the ability to affect its appearance, it was clearly part of His intention that human activity would have just this effect.

We see this in the way in which well maintained lawns have a more refined beauty than wild grass that grows long and goes to seed, and in the way hedges which are trimmed and trees which are pruned of their dead branches have an elegant beauty that has been enhanced beyond that of the raw forest.

This is not to say that all parts of nature can be improved by mankind in this way. The world is a vast place with a wide variety of different views which respond to the influence of man in different ways. Some are best left as close to the way we found them as possible, others would seem incomplete without evidence of the presence and activity of mankind.

If God’s creation of man in His own image and placing him in the world with dominion over it included the intention that human activity which alters the appearance of creation would enhance and improve its beauty, then the free will that He gave to man, which created the potential for man to abuse his gifts and sin against his Creator, included the potential of man to mar and ruin the beauty of creation as well. Man, as the Scriptures tell and as can be seen everywhere we look, fell into sin and evidence that his sin has included the abuse of his creative abilities to distort and mar the beauty of creation is abundant.

This has been especially true in modern times. Large highways, paved with asphalt, do not complement their surroundings the way older country roads do. Large cities, in which urban dwellers can live their entire lives without seeing the beauty of the countryside, or even the beauty of a star filled heaven at night, do not blend into the country which surrounds them in the way smaller towns and villages do. The vast landfills needed to accommodate the waste of modern, industrial, urban living, are among the many eyesores which scar the beauty of the land as a result of modernization.

The modernization which produced these things does not flow out of the belief that God gave man dominion over creation. It comes rather from the belief that man must seize dominion over creation for himself by forcing creation to bend to his will rather than receive dominion over creation as a gift from the hand of his Creator. This unleashing of the human will to power is what we were left with when Christian faith began to wane in the modern age.

The desire to conserve the beauty of the world for future generations is a natural and a noble desire. It results only in folly, however, when those who posses that desire blame the Christian faith for the problems of industrialization, separate man from nature, deifying nature and demonizing man (14), and place their faith in government and international bureaucracies.



(1) Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon Press, 1944, 1960), p. 178. This is the translation by S. G. C. Middlemore which first appeared in two volumes in 1878. The German original was published in 1860.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Ibid, p. 179.

(4) Roger Scruton, Beauty, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 2011), p. 49.

(5) Ibid., p. 82.

(6) Ecology is the branch of biology which studies how living things interact with each other in a common environment. The term ecology was coined in the 19th Century to refer to this discipline. It comes from the Greek word word oikos. Oikos literally refers to a house, but the meaning that crosses over into “ecology” is “place where you dwell, surroundings”. The word economy is ultimately derived from the same root, but the Greek compound oikonomia was already in existence in ancient times to refer to “the administration of household affairs”.

(7) Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004) which consists of his Massey Lectures for that year, is a work of doomsday scare-mongering which nevertheless correctly identifies the correlation between a belief in progress and an irresponsible attitude towards the conservation of resources.

(8) The environmentalist movement has to a large degree embraced socialism, an economic system based upon the rejection of private property. Conservatives and liberals – by liberals I mean “classical liberals” - both believe strongly in private property, and hence cannot accept socialism. Environmentalists should not be so quick to reject private property either. One environmentalist, the late Garrett J. Hardin, who was professor of human ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, (and also a conservative Republican), argued in a number of essays and books, that resources which are privately owned, are better maintained and conserved, than those which are treated as common resources. This has been observably true since ancient times. Other reasons why conservatives are suspicious of the environmentalist movement are its belief in, reliance upon, and support of government and international bureaucracies who interfere in people’s lives from afar, and its increasingly addiction to alarmist rhetoric and doomsday scenarios, such as the supposed “global warming” crisis. These are good reasons to be wary of the environmentalist movement, but not to reject its basic idea that earth’s natural resources and beauty are something we should conserve for future generations to enjoy.

(9) Roger Scruton, in the chapter on natural beauty in his book cited above, points to Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty was a proper subject for philosophy because taste, the ability to appreciate beauty, was a human universal. This made natural beauty the primary object of taste, because all human beings can appreciate it, whereas appreciation for the arts is more limited. Scruton also discusses those, such as the Marxists, who held an opposing view, but he himself is quite sympathetic to Kant on this point.

(10) Environmentalism has allied itself, for example, with what Pope John Paul II called the “culture of death”, and environmentalists have frequently spoken of the propagation of the human species in extremely derogatory terms.

(11) Wendell Berry, Home Economics, (New York: North Point Press, 1987), p. 6. This is the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Getting Along with Nature”, which is the second of the fourteen essays which this book consists of.

(12) I can think of some people who would probably disagree with the second assertion but they are not good advertisements for their position because it arises out of the kind of perpetual immaturity that results from being completely immersed in technology all one’s life.

(13) Berry, op. cit., p. 7.

(14) Note, as Berry did in the first quotation above, that the environmentalists and those who see dominion over nature as something man must seize for himself, although each others enemies, have this separation of man and nature as their common ground.

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.