Blaming Victims and Excusing Perpetrators

Imagine the following scenario. A young woman is walking down the side-walk one night when, as she moves through a darkened section of the street, all of a sudden she is set upon by a young thug who pulls her into an alley and forces himself upon her. After he finishes the rapist beats her and leaves her for dead but she is discovered in time, taken to the hospital, and survives.

After such a gruesome happening, the police, naturally, question her for as many details about her assailant as she can remember. Her friends and family help organize a neighbourhood watch in the hopes of preventing future such incidents and possibly helping the police catch the rapist.

Suppose that then someone were to come along and say that the police and the young lady’s family and friends all had a wrong attitude towards the whole situation. Rather than wanting the rapist to be tracked down, caught, and punished, this thoughtful individual suggests, the young lady should be looking at herself, peering deeply into the belly button showing in her bare midriff and asking what it is about her that invited this violent sexual assault.

Do you think that the person who were to offer this kind of suggestion would survive long and with all of his appendages still attached?

There is a phrase that has been widely used in recent decades which, taken at its literal meaning, would describe the malefaction of which our hypothetical Job’s comforter is guilty. That phrase is “blaming the victim” and when applied to a scenario like the one discussed it is quite clear what is wrong with it. You have two individuals, one of whom commits an atrocious crime against the other, and the victim is told that she and not the perpetrator bears the moral responsibility for what happened. Yet interestingly the expression is seldom used in this kind of context by those who use it the most often.

The people who use this expression the most are those who consider themselves to be the vanguard of moral and intellectual enlightenment, i.e., liberals, leftists, and other forward-thinking progressive types. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, they are the ones to have actually coined the phrase in the first place. Ordinarily, however, when they use it, the victims they have in mind are not individuals who have been the object of specific criminal acts but rather groups whom they have declared to have been the victims of society, and especially Western civilization, down through history. You know who I mean – all races except whites, all religions except Christianity, women, homosexuals, etc.

In a society dominated by the progressive way of thinking – and all Western societies, to one extent or another, usually a very large extent, are controlled by this way of thinking, even when a nominally “conservative” party is in power – these groups are “official victims” and their status as such is one of privilege. That privilege, progressives think, should include that of being above criticism and so, when anyone criticises one of these groups, or even select members of these groups, the progressive takes great offence and considers it the equivalent of holding the victim of a crime responsible for the act of its perpetrator. In the mouths of progressives, therefore, blaming the victim, is often simply a fancier way of saying “you’re a racist”, “you’re a sexist” or “you’re a homophobe”. Actually, pretty much everything progressives ever say can be reduced to these slurs which don’t really mean much more than “you disagree with me, and I can’t defend and articulate my position as well as you, so I’m going to call you a bad name”.

Thus, to a progressive, blaming the victim includes such things as making the observation that certain races in the United States have higher rates of illegitimacy, poverty, and crime than others or pointing out that the adherents of one particular religion are far more likely to strap bombs around themselves and blow up a shopping centre or hijack an air-plane and fly it into a building than any other. To speak the truth is to blame the victim to the progressive.

When normal people think of victims they think of those who have been on the receiving end of robbery, assault, murder, rape, kidnapping, or the like and not groups with social grievances of some sort or another. Normal people usually think “excusing the perpetrator” to be a worse problem than blaming the victim and, if you think about it, blaming the victim is best understood as being a form or aspect of excusing the perpetrator. The liberal’s preference for the former phrase is understandable, of course, in that they themselves are the chief practitioners of the latter. No matter how heinous and violent the crime you can always rely upon liberals to plead for leniency for the perpetrator, to argue that it is not really his fault and that society is to blame, and to condemn anyone who demands that the victim be given justice and a real sentence be handed down as atavistic vengeance seekers, out for blood.

Some might argue that when it comes to cases of rape, feminists, who are progressive and liberal, are more like normal people in their demands that perpetrators be brought to justice. A few years ago, there was an incident here in Manitoba which bears a certain resemblance to our hypothetical situation. Robert Dewar, then a Justice of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, came under heavy criticism from feminists after he handed down a conditional sentence in a rape case. A conditional sentence is a sentence that is served outside of prison in the community under certain restrictions – a rather light sentence for a crime as serious as rape. It was not the leniency of the sentence itself which drew the feminists’ ire, if you recall, but the fact that Justice Dewar chose that moment to lecture the victim on the imprudence and impropriety of her trashy attire. While the judge had clearly picked a bad time and place to make that speech, the point is that the feminists were far more outraged over his “slut shaming” than over the fact that he let a rapist off with a slap on the wrist. Anyone who pays attention to what feminists say knows that in recent years they have launched a campaign against slut shaming, i.e., criticism of the contemporary cultural trend for young women – and more than a few older women – to dress, talk, and act like cheap prostitutes and that they object to the counsel of modesty under any circumstances as a “patriarchal” attempt to restrict the freedom of female sexual expression. As for their demands that rapists be brought to justice, the observer of feminism will also be aware that in recent feminist lingo the meaning of “rapist” has been extended to include men who women are ashamed of having slept with and so allow themselves to be convinced after the fact that the sex was not truly consensual.

If progressive liberals are the chief practitioners of excusing the perpetrator when it comes to real crimes they are also no slouches when it comes to blaming the victim on a grandiose scale. Consider the liberal response to the terrorist attack in Paris a couple of weeks ago – or, for that matter, to any of the episodes of jihad that have kept the news media occupied for the last couple of decades. They wring their hands over the violence of it all, of course, but their primary concern always seems to be that the ordinary people of France, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States, or wherever the attack has taken place, might develop negative thoughts and feelings towards Muslims out of all of this. Their advice to Western Christians after one of these incidents is scarcely indistinguishable from that of the person in our scenario who advised the victim to think about what she had done to provoke the rape. Instead of thinking about military retaliation against ISIS, or even securing our borders and preventing the warriors of jihad from gaining access to our countries, they tell us we ought to be thinking about what is wrong with us to have provoked this kind of animosity.

I am not suggesting, of course, that we should ignore the problems with our own societies and civilization, of which there are plenty. To say that a rapist should not be excused for his crime on the grounds of his victim’s attire is not to say that skanky appearance and behaviour should never be criticized. Those who insist, however, that our response to a violent, murderous, attack upon our civilization ought to be to concentrate on our own faults and failings, do not in so doing take the high moral ground as they imagine. Instead, they sink into the same swamp as those who excuse rapists by saying “she was asking for it – look at the way she was dressed”.

Barbaric Cultural Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morality is the Only Thing That can be Legislated!

How often have we heard the statement “you cannot legislate morality”? Have you ever stopped to think just how foolish this statement is? If it were said instead that “you cannot make people good by passing legislation” there would be nothing wrong with this. The familiar saying, however, is understood to mean that there is something out there called morality which is forbidden territory for legislators.

The problem with that is that legislation is merely a fancy term for the government passing laws. Laws are merely rules that the government enforces. Like all rules, they place limits upon people’s choices. They tell you that you are not supposed to do this or that – kill your fellow man, steal his possessions, burn down his house, etc. – and they prescribe penalties for you if you ignore the law and go ahead and make those choices anyway.

Why do we have laws? This is a question that can be answered either generally or on a law-by-law basis. If we answer generally, we say that we have laws because they are necessary for the good of the community or the society as a whole. If we answer on a law-by-law basis, we look at what the law prohibits and show how it is something that is harmful, wrong, and evil to a degree that justifies the law. The law that says that you cannot kill your fellow man except in certain very specific circumstances, such as to prevent him from killing you first, is there because murder is just this sort of evil.

Note that both answers require the language of morality for their expression. Morality is human behaviour conceived of in terms of good and evil, right and wrong (the related term ethics refers to systematic thought about morality). Laws in general exist for the good of the society. Specific laws are passed against specific evils. Laws are all about good and evil.

In other words, far from it being the case that morality is something the law cannot or ought not to touch, morality is by definition the only thing that the law concerns itself. It is not true that you cannot legislate morality. It is rather the case that morality is the only thing that can be legislated.

What those who say “you cannot legislate morality” are usually really trying to say is that “you ought not to legislate a specific type of morality, i.e., religious morality”. In other words, the all important question for such people is the question of “who says” that certain behaviour is right or wrong. If a certain type of behaviour is determined to be wrong by the democratically arrived at consensus of the secular society (more likely, in reality, by some out-of-touch group of Ivory Tower liberals) then they are okay with laws being passed against it. If the prophets and Apostles in the Bible, Jesus Christ, the Church Fathers, and the moral theology of the Church for two thousand years says that a certain type of behaviour is wrong, then they object to laws being passed against it on the grounds that such laws would be “theocratic”.

This reflects a certain type of thinking that is based upon progressive and positivist assumptions about the history of human thought. In this type of thinking religion, theology, and metaphysics are seen as primitive forms of thought that are vastly inferior to those of the modern reason and science which have superseded and surpassed them. Religion and theology come from a dark past, according to people who think this way, in which they were the tools of oppressive rulers for controlling their people. Reason and science, they think, by contrast, are the tools of the emancipated individual. Therefore the true morality and ethics, from this point of view, must be that about which a consensus is arrived at voluntarily by these modern emancipated individuals guided by the light of their experience (or, more likely, whatever their progressive professor tells them to think). If religious codes of morality have any place at all it is in the private conscience of the individual.

This sort of thinking is, of course, utter nonsense. If there are any rules of behaviour about which anything coming even approximately close to a universal consensus, agreed to by all peoples in all place and all times, exists, it is those basic rules which are enshrined in the moral codes of religion – in, for example, the Decalogue’s “thou shalt not kill”, “thou shalt not steal”, “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, etc. Far from arriving at a superior morality, the Twentieth Century bears record of how modern, emancipated man, justified himself as he committed evils on an unprecedented scale.

That religion teaches that a certain kind of behaviour is wrong is not a valid argument for the law to stay out of it. Religion teaches that murder is wrong, only a fool would therefore argue that there must be no law against murder lest we succumb to the threat of theocracy. There is no difference in kind between the law that forbids you or I from murdering our fellow man and a law which forbids a woman from having an abortion. Indeed, the best and only argument against the latter law would be that it ought to be rendered redundant by the law against murder.

Legislation, by its very nature and definition, is all about morality. It is the government attempting to limit our personal choices, by forbidding that which is wrong, for the good of the whole society. Now, if morality is the only thing that can be legislated, it does not follow that all morality ought to be legislated. In other words, we can recognize that one kind of behaviour is right and another is wrong without insisting that the government and the law has to have a say about it. If we wish to live in a free society, and the English speaking world has traditionally placed a very high premium upon freedom, rather than a tyrannical or totalitarian society, then we will prefer that the law limit itself to prohibiting those evils about which it is absolutely necessary that there be a law. This is a principle that has long been recognized in orthodox moral theology, being identified, for example, in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. (1)

A far better principle, about what the law can and cannot do, than the foolish “you cannot legislate morality” is the principle that the law can only govern outward behaviour and not the heart. This is another way of saying that you cannot make a person good by passing laws. That is not what they are there for. You can pass a law that says that a man cannot poke his neighbour’s eye out, and, hopefully, this law will reduce the evil of blindness due to eye-poking. A law that tried to prevent a person from even thinking about poking their neighbour in the eye, on the other hand, would be silly and inane.

It is telling that the progressives, who accuse social conservatives of theocratic motives for wanting to undo the legalization of abortion and for wanting to return to what until very recently was the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, are the ones who love to recite the absurd saying that we have here debunked about not being able to legislate morality, yet they themselves are loud and shrill in their support for anti-discrimination, “human rights” and “hate” legislation. A law against abortion does not tell a woman how to think or feel – it tells her she cannot kill her unborn child. Laws against “hate” exist for no purpose other than to tell people what to think and feel.

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

Why Do We Put Up With It?

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we move to Japan, loudly announce our unwillingness to live by Japan’s rules, show utter disrespect for the Tenno, and file a lawsuit against the Japanese government demanding that Japan change its ways to accommodate us. How far do you think we would be able to get with that?

The answer is that we would not get very far at all because Japan has a far more sensible attitude towards this sort of thing than we do and would simply not put up with it. We could learn a lesson or two from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Recently the Canadian news media treated us to a story of how certain immigrants who had become permanent residents in Ontario had launched a legal challenge against our country over the requirements we impose on those who have moved here and desire and seek citizenship. It is the Oath of Citizenship that they take umbrage with and specifically the part of the Oath where the new citizen is required to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs and successors. These would-be new Canadians maintain that this is a violation of their rights and that they should be allowed to pledge their loyalty to the country without swearing fealty to its Sovereign.

It apparently did not occur to them that an oath of allegiance to the Queen would be implicit within a pledge of loyalty to the country of Canada. For Elizabeth II is Queen of Canada, Sovereign over our country through her Parliament in Ottawa. Our elected governors are her ministers, who are chosen by the people to govern in her name. That is the nature of our country and a pledge of allegiance to the Queen is therefore implicit in a pledge of loyalty to Canada. An oath of allegiance to Canada that did not imply allegiance to the Queen would be a worthless oath. The Canada that the person who swore such an oath would be pledging allegiance to, would not be the real Canada, the Canada that actually exists, but some fictional construction. What we are looking for in new Canadians, the reason we have an Oath of citizenship at all, is not loyalty to “my idea of Canada” or some such nebulous and self-referential concept but to the actual country.

Therefore, if these litigious would-be Canadians were to be allowed to swear loyalty to Canada without the explicit oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, either, a) they would not be swearing loyalty to the Queen in doing so and the oath would be worthless to us because it would not be a pledge of loyalty to the real Canada or b) they would be implicitly swearing loyalty to the Queen in swearing loyalty to Canada and would have gained nothing because the same objections they make to the explicit oath of loyalty to the Queen would apply as well to the implicit oath of loyalty to the Queen contained in the oath of loyalty to Canada.

That an oath of loyalty to the country would implicitly contain an oath of loyalty to the Queen is in a sense, even truer of Canada, than it is of the United Kingdom. The country of Canada is built upon the choice of the Loyalists to remain loyal subjects rather than join in the republican rebellion. That is our country’s history, roots, and tradition and it is a fundamental part of our collective identity. Our loyalty to the monarchy has played a significant part in the proudest moments of our country’s history, such as when the British army and the Canadians successfully fought off the American invasion together in the early 19th Century, and when Canada declared war on Nazi Germany to fight side by side with Great Britain, in the name of our common king, in the greatest armed conflict of the 20th Century.

Those who wish to eliminate the monarchy from our national identity create a vacuum which they must inevitably fill with the silliest of things. I have actually heard people say that it is our socialized health care that makes us who we are as Canadians and distinguishes us from the Americans. What a vapid and moronic thing to say! The Tommy Douglas health care system referred to, whatever else, good or bad, one might say about it, is less than one hundred years old, dating back to the 1960s. Our country was brought together in Confederation a century prior to that. One wonders what those people who think Canada’s identity is based on socialist health care are saying now that the United States has Obamacare.

But I digress. An argument one sometimes hears from those misguided souls who wish to downplay the monarchy and other institutions and symbols we have inherited from Britain is the claim that they are only of significance to Canadians descended from people from the British Isles and are therefore an insult to those whose ancestors came from other parts of the world. This argument is a non-sequitur – even if it were true, that the monarchy is only of significance to Canadians of British descent, it would not follow from this that the institution would be an insult to others. In fact, the real insult to Canadians of non-British stock is the suggestion that the monarchy should be downplayed so as not to offend them. This suggestion implies that they or their ancestors put no thought into what they were doing when they moved to Canada and came to the country in ignorance of the fact that it was a Commonwealth country, built on a history of Loyalism, with a parliamentary monarchy as its constitution. For if they or their ancestors were aware of these things about Canada when they chose to come here, then, in the act of coming here they chose to become a part of all of that and to accept the institutions of Canada, including her monarchy, as their own.

There is an important difference between traditional Canadian pluralism and the contemporary left-wing multiculturalism that is afflicting our country today. The former was all about integrating people of different backgrounds into Canada in such a way that without having to give up everything they brought with them from their ancestral lands, the British traditions of Canada, from the monarchy to the Rights of Englishmen, became their own. The latter was all about stripping Canada of as much of its British traditions as possible and downplaying the rest while encouraging newcomers not to give up anything and to keep everything they brought from their ancestral lands.

The great Canadian historian W. L. Morton, at one time head of the department of history at the University of Manitoba, and author of my favourite one-volume history of Canada, The Kingdom of Canada, explained the essential role of the monarchy in traditional Canadian pluralism:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (1)

When he said “there is no Canadian way of life” by “Canadian way of life” he meant a universal, cultural, homogeneity throughout the entire country. That has never existed in Canada at that level. At Confederation there were three major people groups with their own cultures and way of life – English Canadians who spoke English and were mostly Protestant, French Canadians who spoke French and were mostly Roman Catholic, and North American Indians. (2) There were varying degrees of homogeneity among these different groups, with the most homogeneity among the French Canadians who were united in religion as well as language and the most diversity among the Indians whose languages and religion varied according to their tribe, the degree to which they had adopted either the English or the French culture, and, of course, which one they had adopted. English Canadians fell in the middle. They were unified in language, but while they were mostly Protestant in religion, that included English Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and any number of non-conformists sects. Allegiance to the Crown was the principle around which these vastly different groups were able to come together to build a country.

Allegiance to the monarchy meant something different to each of these groups. The people who became the English Canadians had originally been Loyalists, i.e., people who remained loyal to the British Crown when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, and fled to Canada to escape persecution for their stance, after the American Revolution. Allegiance to the monarchy defined who they were.

To the French Canadians, their decision to remain loyal to the king under whose sovereignty they had only recently come rather than to join the American revolution, had secured for them their language, religion, and culture. The American leaders had wanted to make Canada entirely English speaking and Protestant but the British government had promised the French government that French Canadians would be able to keep their language, religion, and culture when the French king ceded the sovereignty of Canada to King George III in the Treaty of Paris. This was one of the things the British government and the American leaders quarrelled over. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British Parliament passed and the king signed into law, the Quebec Act, making those same guarantees directly to the French Canadian people. Had Canada joined the American revolutionaries, or had Canada been ceded to the United States at the end of the American Revolution, the French Canadians would not have been able to retain their religion, language, and culture.

For the Indians, the Crown was and is the party with whom their tribes are in a treaty relationship. (3) This continues to be important to them to this day, a fact of which we were recently reminded. (4)

While each group had its own reasons for allegiance to the Crown, that were very different from the reasons of the other two, these reasons added up to a common allegiance as the basis upon which the three groups could come together to form a country. Loyalty to the Crown is absolutely fundamental to Canadian identity. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that our country insist that those who wish to be integrated into Canada as citizens make a pledge of the allegiance that is the basis of Canadian unity.

In fact, most immigrants applying for citizenship have no objection to this requirement. The legal challenge to the oath requirement, which has been so widely reported, is not coming from some broadly supported movement but from three individual immigrants.

Why do these three object to swearing the oath?

One is a man of Irish origins whose father died in the republican cause and who therefore believes that it is a violation of his rights to be made to swear an oath to the Queen. Another is a woman who objects to the oath on the grounds of her Afrocentric Rastafari ideology and because of Britain’s historical involvement in the slave trade. The third is an Israeli of strong anti-monarchical, republican, sentiment.

Whether or not these are good and valid reasons for these three individuals to personally refuse to swear allegiance to the Queen, they are not, separately or collectively, valid reasons for Canada to set the oath aside as a requirement. The two men came here from countries that are republics with no crowned monarch. If republicanism is so important to them, they are welcome to return to Ireland and Israel or to move to the United States if that would suit them better.

One of the reasons they are giving for their demand that the oath to the Queen be removed is that it is “discriminatory”. They claim that it is discriminatory because it discriminates in favour of those who have no problem swearing loyalty to the Queen against those who do. They claim that it is discriminatory because only immigrants applying for citizenship are required to swear the oath, not those who are born here or are born to Canadian citizens abroad.

Since progressives, over the last sixty years or so, have successfully conditioned most of us to shut our brains down, curl up into the fetal position, and cry uncle at the sound of the word “discrimination”, some explanation will be required of what should be common sense and obvious to anybody.

In the most basic sense of the word to discriminate simply means to distinguish, to make or to observe a distinction or a difference. If you can tell the difference between apples and oranges you are, in so doing, discriminating. There is nothing wrong with discrimination in this sense of the word.

Discrimination is also used in a narrower sense to refer to the act of making a distinction which is to the advantage of one or some against others. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of discrimination either. All laws are by nature discriminatory in this sense. The law that says that is a criminal act to kill your neighbour, discriminates in favour of the non-murderer against the murderer. The law that forbids theft discriminates in favour of people who don’t steal against those who do. Even scientific laws are discriminatory. The law of gravity discriminates against those who jump off a cliff and in favour of those who don’t.

When is discrimination wrong?

Discrimination is wrong when it is unjust and discrimination is only unjust when those who have a legitimate right to be regarded as and treated the same are instead regarded as and treated differently. If the law forbids littering, and prescribes a certain penalty for littering, then you, your neighbour Bob, and everybody else who lives under the authority of the law, have a legitimate right to be treated the same under that law. If you and Bob are both guilty of littering and are both caught and arrested you have the legitimate right to except that you will receive the same sentence as Bob. If, the judge slaps you with the full penalty but lets Bob off because Bob is a member of all the same clubs the judge belongs to, this is a case of unjust discrimination.

Those who do not wish to swear the oath to the queen, and who claim it is discriminatory that they be required to do so, would like us to believe that it is this last kind of discrimination. People who are born into Canadian citizenship are entitled to all the benefits of Canadian citizenship without having to swear an oath to the Queen whereas those who have moved here from elsewhere have to swear the oath to obtain the benefits. If, however, this constitutes unjust discrimination, then so would the requirement that immigrants swear an oath to Canada before becoming citizens. In fact, placing any requirement of any sort on those who apply for citizenship that is not also placed on those born into citizenship would qualify as unjust discrimination if the requirement that they swear an oath to the Queen is unjust discrimination.

If a requirement placed on those applying for citizenship in a country is unjust discrimination because it is not also placed upon those born into citizenship that means that a country has no right to place requirements on people before they become citizens, that a society has no right to set rules as to how someone coming into the society from the outside can become a full member of the society.

Clearly that cannot be the case. If a society has no right to set rules as to how someone can join it from the outside then it is not a society. A society has every right to distinguish between those who are born into it and those who enter it from the outside at least up until the point where they are granted full citizenship. Unfortunately, liberalism, which teaches that a society is an artificial construction that exists for the sole purpose of serving the personal interests of generic individuals, has clouded the minds of many in this day and age as to the true nature of a society. A society is much more than this. It is a living organism, in which its individual members are joined into an organic whole like the cells in a body, in which generation succeeds generation the way new cells replace old, dying cells. As the body produces the new cells it needs to replace its old ones from its own genetic template, so the present generation of society gives birth to the next generation and raises it to take its place in the organic whole of the society. People can join the society from the outside, just as a branch can be grafted onto a tree or an organ can be transplanted from one body into another, but the tree can also reject the graft and the body can reject the organ. The more compatible the grafted branch or transplanted organ are with the hosts into which they are placed the more likely they are to be accepted. That is the nature of things.

In this case we have an organic society which began by the grafting of three different branches – the tree metaphor works better here as the body metaphor, thanks to Mary Shelley, would produce some unfortunate associations – onto a common trunk, the trunk of the monarchy, the parliamentary system in which the monarchy is incorporated, and the Common Law and rights attached to the monarchy, and of which the monarchy is a symbol. Now we have three wild branches, asking to be grafted into the tree, but in such a way that they are connected to the other branches, but not the trunk. That does not sound like the makings of a successful graft.

The real problem here, however, is not the handful of immigrants who have demanded we change our citizenship requirements to suit them. While the current three are not the first immigrants to contest the oath requirement – they are continuing a challenge first launched by an immigrant from Trinidad who died last year and who started several such challenges beginning in the 1990s - the total number who have contested the oath is negligible. Most people have the sense to realize that if they wish to move to and become part of a society they will have to adjust to the ways, traditions, institutions and rules of that society rather than expecting it to change to accommodate them. Most people have the decency to understand that accusing the institution around which a country has been built of being a symbol of racism, tyranny, and injustice is inconsistent with a desire to become a part of that country.

No, the problem is not these immigrants themselves. The problem is with us. We are the ones who put up with this nonsense. We are the ones who are allowing a handful of malcontents to waste our courts’ time with these frivolous lawsuits. We are the ones who allow people to come here, insult the institution at the heart of our constitution, and demand that we change our country to suit them, rather than telling them that if they don’t like our country’s constitution, institutions, and rules then they didn’t have to move here, are free to go elsewhere, and are no longer wanted or welcome here.

Progressive thought is the root of the problem. A progressive or forward looking person is someone who thinks that to arrive at future happiness we must leave the road cleared, paved, and marked by the landmarks of the past and skip merrily blindfolded along down the road of social, cultural, political and technological innovation. The attitude towards the monarchy, which progressivism tends to produce in Canada, is at best one of ambivalence and indifference and at worst of outright hostility. The progressive emphasizes the democratic aspect of our constitution and tends to regard the monarchy as out-dated or irrelevant.

Ironically, in taking this position, progressives show their own thought to be outdated. An institution like the monarchy is classy, and therefore timeless, and can never be outdated. It is the championing of democracy against monarchy that is outdated. As the great Canadian humourist and political scientist Stephen Leacock put it:

Look back a little in the ages to where ragged Democracy howls around the throne of defiant Kingship. This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of Democracy; (5)

The progressive view of immigration is also a problem. Progressives, whether of the liberal or the socialist variety, tend to be believers in the nonsensical and contradictory concept of universal nationalism – that their country is a “universal nation”, membership in which everyone in the world is entitled to. Whereas ordinary patriotic people regard their country and its institutions in high esteem, and except people moving into their country and joining their society to adjust to the society, progressives hold their country and its traditions in low esteem, and see large scale immigration as a means of changing their country and getting rid of its institutions and traditions. Ordinary patriotic people consider it a privilege and honour to live in their country and be a member of their society, and expect newcomers to take that same attitude. Progressives, on the other hand, think it is the highest privilege and honour for a country that even a single immigrant would deign to come to their country, and that the country should show its gratitude by bending over backwards to make whatever alterations are necessary to accommodate the immigrant. Progressives seem to believe that any disagreement with them on this matter can only come out of irrational prejudice towards and hatred of other people and do not hesitate to accuse anyone who expresses disagreement with them of the bigotry and racism. Meanwhile, they take great offence when their patriotism is called into question over their not-so-subtle contempt for their own country, its people, and its traditions.

There is a great deal of short-sightedness in the progressive position. Those who refuse to look deeply into the past will never be able to see far into the future and are oblivious to what is before them in the present. By dismissing our country’s history as our “colonial past” and our traditional institutions as “outdated relics” progressives blind themselves to both the continuing and contemporary importance and relevance of the monarchy and to the harm their approach to immigration has done, is doing, and will do to our country in the future.

The way to deal with the handful of immigrants who want us to change our citizenship laws is simple. It is to tell them that if they are not interested in joining our society on our terms, then they are no longer welcome to join our society on any terms, and we are no longer interested in having them as citizens.

Dealing with the progressive thought that has pervaded our country and which hinders us from giving the appropriate response to these immigrants will be more difficult.

(1) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) p. 85

(2) It is no longer fashionable to call this group of people “Indians” and many people consider the continued use of the term to be an insult to the people so termed. All other terms, especially the one currently in vogue “First Nations”, are to varying degrees politically correct. My intentional use of the term “Indians” is not based upon a desire to insult these people but rather a refusal to submit to the tyranny of political correctness.

(3) http://www.canadiancrown.com/first-nations-treaties-with-the-crown.html


(4) http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-must-respect-tradition-time-and-place-1.48342


(5) Stephen Leacock, “Greater Canada: an appeal”, in Alan Bowker, ed., The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 9. The article first appeared in 1907 in University Magazine and was given as an address to the Empire Club of Canada in March of that year.

The Ends of Social Policy

A policy is a general principle that a person, business, or government seeks to follow when making decisions and acting upon those decisions. Every government has many policies each of which falls into one of two broad categories, foreign and domestic. Foreign policy includes the policies the government follows in its external relations with other countries, whereas domestic policy consists of government policies that are internal, that pertain to the government’s own country. Domestic policies fall into a number of smaller categories. Fiscal policy concerns government revenue and spending whereas economic policy pertains to the production and distribution of goods and services and all related matters. A government’s social policy consists of the principles which determine government decisions that affect how people interact with each other socially.




Policies, including social policy, have both ends and means. Ends are the goals that a government seeks to accomplish. Its policies are directed towards the achievement of those goals. Means are the methods and instruments which a government uses to achieve its ends. Among the means which government has at its disposal are its powers of taxation and legislation and the funding it provides for various projects out of the revenue it receives from taxes. Policy determines the means, the ends determine the policy. It is not the means by which government enacts its policies that is our subject of discussion but the ends to which those policies are directed.



What should be the ends, the goals, the purpose, of public social policy?



Public discussion of this question is usually framed as a debate between the conservative and the liberal position. This is a false dichotomy in more ways than one. First, the conservative and liberal position, while very different, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the best of circumstances, they are complementary positions. Second, there is a third position, the progressive position, which since at least World War II has had more influence on public social policy than either conservatism or liberalism. It is because of the success of progressivism that conservatism and liberalism are no longer complementary positions.



What are the conservative, liberal, and progressive positions?



The conservative position on public social policy is that government and its laws should support and strengthen the traditional social order. The liberal position is that social interaction and cooperation should consist of the free choices of individuals with which government should not interfere. Interestingly, this can be stated in one of two ways. The first is that government should adopt a policy of laissez faire on social issues, the second is that government should have no social policy whatsoever. These sound like contradictory statements but they amount to the same thing. The progressive position is that government should actively seek to correct the “injustices” in the traditional social order by replacing it with a new, rationally engineered, social order built upon ideals of equality and fairness.



Progressivism has been very successful, not in the sense of having achieved its unachievable goal of eradicating evil and suffering from human existence, but in the sense of influencing public social policy so that it serves progressive rather than conservative or liberal ends. The success of progressivism has severely undermined and weakened the traditional social order.



To understand how progressivism has undermined the social order, we must first look at what the traditional social order is and how it emerges from the natural order of the family, after which we will look at a few examples of how government social engineering has damaged this order.



The traditional social order is part of a society’s inherited way of life. It is a complex set of relationships, responsibilities attached to those relationships, and rules governing those relationships, which slowly evolves as a society passes it down from one generation to the next. Although it varies from society to society and changes over the course of a society’s history it contains elements which are the same in every society in every time and place. This is because it is an expansion of the natural social order which arises out of human nature and can be found in the family.



The family is the most basic unit of social organization. It is not based upon a contract, an agreement between its members to cooperate together for their mutual benefit, but rather upon the natural relationships of its members. A natural relationship is a matter of who one person is to another not a matter of who two people chose to be to each other. All human children are born from a woman. They are her children and she is their mother. That is their relationship to each other. All children born from a woman were sired by a man. They are his children and he is their father. That is their relationship to each other. All people who have the same father and the same mother are siblings, brothers if they are male, sisters if they are female. That is their relationship to each other. The people who bear these relationships to one another make up a family.



It is the nature of human beings that these relationships come with responsibilities. Human children are born helpless and it is therefore the responsibility of the mother who conceived, bore and gave birth to them and of the father who sired them, to love and care for the children they brought into the world. This responsibility is not optional but is the binding responsibility that we call duty. A mother has a duty to nurture and watch over her children and a father has a duty to provide for and protect his children. Children, in turn, have a duty to love and obey their parents. Contrary to the claims of eighteenth century liberalism duties and authority do not derive their validity from personal consent. They arise in the family out of the essential nature of blood relationships.



There is one family relationship that is different in kind from all the others. The relationship between husband and wife is not like the relationship between father and son, mother and daughter, brother and sister. It is not a blood relationship. A man is not born a husband to a woman or a woman born a wife to a man. It is not an automatic relationship but one which must be entered into. This does not mean that it is an artificial, contractual relationship the terms of which we are free to define in whatever way pleases us. It too is a natural relationship, albeit one that lacks the intrinsic permanency of a blood relationship. We have seen how a father has a natural responsibility to protect and provide for the children he sires and a mother has a natural responsibility to nurture and care for the children she bears. Implicit within this is a shared responsibility on the part of both the father and the mother to cooperate with the other in looking after and raising the children they have brought into the world together. This shared responsibility creates the need for a relationship between a father and mother and it is to answer this need that the relationship we call marriage exists. A marriage is created by a set of mutual vows in which a man vows to take a woman as his wife and to be a husband to her and the woman vows to take the man as her husband and be a wife to him. In vowing this, the man and woman are vowing to live together and love each other for the rest of their lives and to raise their children together.



The relationship of marriage unites more than just a husband and wife. It unites families into an extended social network. The need for marriage generates the need for community. A family cannot survive beyond one generation in isolation from other families. Since human beings have an instinctual aversion to incest which manifests itself in a universal taboo against the practice, a man must marry a woman from outside his immediate family and vice versa. Therefore families must live in communities with other families so that when their children are old enough they can marry and perpetuate the family. This is not the only reason families form communities but it is the most important.



As network of human society expands outward from the essential relationships in the nuclear family it becomes more complex and therefore requires more complex social arrangements in order to function. These arrangements and the rules necessary to maintain them are not something that came about at a specific point in time when a group of people sat down and drew them all up on paper. They came about gradually as society became more complex and the need for them arose. They are neither fixed in stone nor infinitely malleable. They change over time as circumstances change and as the collected experience and wisdom of the community grows. Since the needs they meet arise out of human nature, however, much remains constant within these arrangements. The community passes them down from one generation to the next, making the necessary adjustments wherever necessary. This is why they are called the traditional social order, a tradition being something that is passed on from one generation to the next.



Government is not the source of a traditional social order, which can neither be rationally planned nor legislated into being. Rather it is the other way around, the traditional social order is the basis of the constitution (1) of a society from which government derives its legitimate authority. Just because government cannot create something, however, does not mean that it cannot affect it. The laws government passes can have either a positive or a negative effect upon the social order. When government does not respect a community’s social arrangements as they have been agreed upon, passed down, and slowly modified through time and when it introduces major changes to these arrangements to make them conform to a set of abstract ideals thought up by social planners, the laws it passes will have a negative effect upon the social order.



These are exactly the sort of laws which have been passed by Western governments since at least the end of World War II. In the 1960’s and 70’s, for example, Western governments amended divorce laws to make “no-fault divorces” available. A no-fault divorce is a legal dissolution of marriage that is granted without requiring that one spouse sue the other for violation of marriage vows and without legal penalty to either party. The result of the passing of these laws is that marriage is now less binding, less permanent, than a business contract.



The argument most often used by those who favour no-fault divorce and are glad that it was introduced by our governments to justify their position relies upon liberal presuppositions. It goes along this line that if a man and a woman marry and discover that they are not happy living together then we as a society should not force them to stay together in misery when they could be happy apart. Beneath this line of reasoning lies the idea that each person as an individual has a right to pursue his own happiness and that this right outweighs both his society’s need for stability and security in the family and his children’s need for a father and a mother who love and are committed to them and to each other. This idea comes out of the liberal notion that the individual comes first and is more important than the family, community, or society.



Yet, while no-fault divorce laws may rest upon an ideologically liberal foundation, they are manifestly inconsistent with liberal social policy. They are not an example of government taking a laissez-faire, hands off approach to social arrangements but of government actively intruding itself into social arrangements so as to radically transform an existing social institution and pervert it from its original purpose.



It is often difficult to get people with a strong belief in liberal individualism to understand this. Such people often look at no-fault divorce as an issue in which one side, the liberals, say that people should live with whoever they want to live with for as long as they want to live with them without outside interference, whereas the other side, the conservatives, want the government to force people intro particular living arrangements. This assessment is very superficial and shallow. Conservatives did not think up the idea that a man and woman should marry each other for life and then use the government to impose this idea upon everyone else. Marriage is a social arrangement that predates government. This is true whether one accepts Christian and Jewish Urgeschichte in which it was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden or the anthropological explanation that it began as an arrangement between families in prehistorical tribal societies. (2) That it was a binding covenant consisting of life-long vows was not something that government added to it. It is active government legislation that has reduced it to something less than what it was. (3)



The reason liberal individualists fail to grasp this because of their extremely limited understanding of voluntary human behaviour. They understand human arrangements to be voluntary only if they were thought up and agreed upon by individuals qua individuals. If individuals did not think up and agree upon their own arrangements for themselves, the liberal individualist thinks, they must have been thought up by some other group of individuals and imposed upon them by the government. He does not get that social arrangements arise out of a process called tradition that involves all members of a society, past, present, and future and therefore he does not see that government interference with these arrangements is at least as bad, and probably far more so, than government interference with the choices of individuals.



In the last two decades Western governments introduced a new round of progressive interference in the ancient social institution of marriage. This was the introduction of “same-sex marriage”. The public debate over this government initiative has reached new heights of absurdity. Conservatives who oppose “same-sex marriage” are accused by their opponents of trying to use the government to control the lives of other people. That “same-sex marriage” is a government invention created by state interference in a traditional social institution and is therefore itself an example of state intrusion into people’s lives never seems to dawn on such people. Instead they accuse everyone who wants the definition of marriage to be what it was twenty years ago of wanting to establish a theocracy.



These changes to marital laws are not the only way in which Western governments have been undermining the social order of their countries. By establishing bureaucracies which set and enforce universal standards of education throughout their countries, governments have wrested control of local public schools from parents and community. They then transformed those schools into indoctrination centres that program children with values that are often contrary to those passed on by parents in the home. Western governments have created vast networks of programs through which the government undertakes to look after people when they are sick, unemployed, impoverished, aged, etc. These programs are not temporary measures for helping people out in emergencies but permanent programs whereby the government undertakes to ensure that all needs are met from cradle to grave. This weakens the traditional social network by causing people to look to and rely upon government first rather than upon their families, churches and communities.



All of these are examples of a progressive social policy, a policy in which the government actively sets out to reshape the social order.



This influence of progressivism over social policy in recent decades affects our answer to the question of what the proper ends of public social policy should be. The basic conservative answer to that question is that public social policy, policy that determines government actions which affect society, should have as its end the support and strengthening of the traditional social order. In the days before all of this progressive meddling began the laissez faire policy of the true liberal would have been sufficient to serve this end.



Now that progressive meddling has weakened the social order and in many areas all but destroyed it the conservative answer must be amended. It is no longer a matter of strengthening and supporting an order that to a large extent no longer exists but of reviving and restoring it.



Here, however, the conservative runs into a dilemma.



What kind of social policy can possibly serve the reactionary end of restoring the social order progressivism has ruined?



This is a dilemma because of the very nature of the traditional social order as described earlier. It is not something that can be constructed from a blue print. It cannot be planned in the abstract and drawn out on paper. It cannot be legislated into existence. This is not how it came into existence in the first place and it is not how it can be recovered.



Does this mean that the liberal social policy of laissez faire would still serve the conservative end?



For it to do so it would have to be a true laissez faire policy, not social progressivism hiding behind the guise of social liberalism. The government would have to commit itself to no longer trying to bribe people’s loyalty away from family, church, and community, to no longer actively undermining the authority of parents in the home, to cease encouraging a socially and morally destructive culture of self-indulgence. It would have to commit itself to allowing other social institutions to grow strong again and not actively opposing those who seek, through non-governmental means, a cultural revival. It would have to reject the idea that a thriving, complex, social order is something that can be planned and enacted by itself, and return social arrangements to the hands of the time-honoured process of tradition.





(1) The title of the written charter of the American Republic is “The Constitution of the United States of America” and when Americans refer to their “constitution” they are referring to this document. A country’s constitution, however, is more than just its charter. All countries, even those that do not have charters, have constitutions. A country’s constitution is the way it is organized, the way it does things, and the most important part of its constitution – even in the United States – is always unwritten.

(2) These are not mutually exclusive explanations and could be regarded as the same explanation approached from two different starting points.

(3) This is true to a lesser extent of all divorce legislation, not just the “no fault” type. Government and law were not necessary for the creation of marriage, but they have the primary, if not the sole, means of its dissolution throughout history.

The Menace of Multiculturalism

The term culture is derived from the same Latin root as the verb cultivate, which refers to the act of plowing a field so as to prepare it for being sown. We use the word culture to refer to that which metaphorically “cultivates” the mind and character. This is especially true when we use the word culture in a limited sense to refer to literature, philosophy, the fine arts, and serious music. These things are “culture” because they are supposed to develop the intellect. We also speak of the traditions and habits which characterize an entire community – its language, its religion, its particular ways of doing things – as its culture. These too “cultivate” the mind and character. A community’s language is the means by which its members communicate with each other. Its customs are its prescribed ways of behaving in certain situations which facilitate social interaction. It is by learning these things that a person becomes capable of living as a full member of his community.

Culture, therefore, is vitally important to both a community or society and to its individual members. For the community it is necessary both as an adhesive which holds its individual members together and gives them a sense of unity and as a lubricant which eases social interaction so as to minimize friction and make it possible for its members to live together in community. Culture also enables the individual to identify with a group larger than himself and provides him with what he needs to get along as a member of the group.

A community is by definition monocultural, i.e., possessing a single culture shared by all its members. A community is not just a neighborhood, a place where people live in propinquity to each other regardless of whether or how they interact. To be a community, people living together in one location, must also interact in such a way as to form a social unity. The very term community points to a group of people sharing something in common, and one way of defining culture is as that which a community shares, which binds them together as a community. Therefore a community is monocultural.

This does not mean that every member of a community is absolutely identical to each of the others, having all the same mannerisms, all the same habits, attending all the same events, etc.

It does mean, at the very least, that a community has one language in common which is used for communication within the community, regardless of what other tongues individual members of the community might also speak.

What is true of a community is not necessarily true of a society or a polity. Societies and polities are usually large units which include more than one community. A polity is a group of people, living in a particular territory, under the sovereign authority of one law administered and enforced by one government. In ancient Greece cities were sovereign polities (the words polity and political come from the Greek word polis meaning city). Today most polities tend to be countries, i.e., large territories governed from a capital city. A society is what we see when we look at the group of people that make up a polity from a different angle, one which encompasses all forms of social organization and not just political sovereignty.

Sometimes polities and societies are, like communities, monocultural. Greek city-states and the European nation-states which evolved during the Late Medieval – Early Modern period are examples of these. In other instances, polities can be culturally pluralistic. There are different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic.

An empire is one form of a culturally pluralistic polity. The Roman Empire, for example, consisted of all the different people groups of the Mediterranean world who had many different languages, religions, and cultures. Their cultural plurality was tolerated by Rome so long as they submitted to the authority of Roman Law, the Senate and the Caesars. In an empire, many cultures co-exist, but one culture is dominant.

Another way in which different cultural communities can co-exist within the same polity or society, is in a decentralized confederation, with a strong degree of local self-rule. The Swiss Republic is an example of this.

Another form of cultural pluralism, is the kind which has existed in my country Canada, since its confederation in 1867. When Canada came together as a country, there were three major ethnic groups within Canada. These were French Canadians, English Canadians, and native Canadians. French Canada had been won from France by Britain during the Seven Years' War. The king had guaranteed the Canadiens their language, religion (Roman Catholic) and culture in return for their loyalty and allegiances. This angered the leaders of several of Britain’s colonies in North America, particularly the ones which had been formed by the virulently anti-Catholic Puritans. They rebelled against their king, declared their secession from the British Empire, and having won their independence formed the American Republic. Not all members of the 13 colonies agreed with the treasonous actions of their leaders. Those who remained loyal to the king and to Britain, fled north after the American Revolution. These United Empire Loyalists, and the inhabitants of British colonies such as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which had not joined in the American rebellion, became the English Canadians. Native Canadians were members of tribes which had made treaties with the British Crown.

The common factor that made it possible to unite these groups into one country, was allegiance to the Crown. It was out of loyalty to the Crown that the English Canadians had not joined with the Americans in their revolution, it was the Crown which had guaranteed the culture of French Canadians in return for their allegiance, and the Crown with which native Canadians had signed their treaties. The Fathers of Confederation established the country, as a confederation of provinces and territories, with a parliamentary government under the Crown.

So there are a number of different ways in which a polity can be culturally pluralistic in contrast with a community which is by definition monocultural.

There is another form of cultural pluralism that we hear a lot about today. That is multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is not just a synonym for cultural pluralism. Whereas other forms of cultural pluralism often “just happen” in the sense that they arise as a consequence of history, multiculturalism is a doctrine with true believers, and an official policy enforced by the state. There is one other major difference between multiculturalism and the kinds of pluralism we looked at above.

The cultural pluralism of the Roman Empire, the Swiss Republic, and the Dominion of Canada was not a threat to the cultural homogeneity of communities within these historical polities. The same cannot be said for multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of these communities.

Multiculturalism is the political doctrine that declares that while political, legal and economic unity are good, cultural unity is bad, and a country should have no cultural unity other than a commitment to plurality, and that all cultures are equal.. It is also the official policy of encouraging large scale immigration from as many different cultures as possible while also encouraging immigrants to keep their original cultures rather than assimilate into the communities to which they are immigrating.

Multiculturalism is a doctrine which contradicts itself in many ways. While it declares all cultures are equal, it does not treat all cultures equally. It encourages immigrant groups to stick together and form culturally homogeneous enclaves, while breaking up the cultural homogeneity of the communities into which the immigrants are moving. People who live in a community which was formerly homogeneous but into which large numbers of immigrants have moved, find that it is more difficult to order meals in the restaurant down the street or buy groceries in the local grocery store because the servers and cashiers have trouble speaking the language of the community. Then they find that their tax bills have gone through the roof because the government is offering these same immigrants government services and education in their own language. If they complain about all of this, they find themselves denounced as “racists”.

In Canada, Pierre Eliot Trudeau declared the country to be “officially multicultural” in 1971. This was not just a government acknowledgement of the historical cultural pluralism mentioned above which has existed in the country since Confederation. When Trudeau had become prime minister he began an aggressive immigration recruitment campaign with the purpose of changing the demographics of the country. This and the new policy of multiculturalism to discourage assimilation, was an attack upon the cultural homogeneity of communities within English and French Canada.

It was also during the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau that the symbol of unity between the different cultural communities within Canada came under attack. They removed “Royal” from the title of as many government institutions as they could get away with and did everything they could to portray our ongoing attachment to the monarchy as something archaic, belonging to the trappings of our “colonial past” which we needed to move beyond in order to fully mature as a country.

This year is the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the first monarch to open a session of Canadian parliament in person. She has visited our country several times, the latest visit being two years ago. Last year, Prince William and his new bride Kate, visited Canada after their wedding. Later that year, Prime Minister Harper, restored the “Royal” to the titles of two branches of our Armed Forces and ordered all of our consulates to hang the Queen’s picture in a laudable effort to emphasize our country’s royal heritage and ongoing ties to the Crown.

In the commentary surrounding these events, leftists whined and cried about how this was an insult to all the new Canadians who came from outside the British Isles. It did not seem to occur to them that if honouring our royal family and our Queen is an insult to new immigrants then their petulant, left-wing attack upon the monarchy is an insult to all Canadians who were born and grew up as subjects to the Queen. Or if it did occur to them it did not matter. Although all cultures are equal under multiculturalism, some, to borrow a phrase from George Orwell, are more equal than others.

Of course it makes no sense to say that to honour Canada’s traditional monarchy, our Queen and our royal family, the symbols, as we have seen, of unity between the different cultural communities which formed our country, is an insult to new Canadians. These immigrants, after all, left countries over which the Queen did not reign to move to a country over which she does reign. Surely if anyone is insulting the new Canadians it is the leftists themselves, who arrogantly profess to speak for them, by attacking the tradition they chose to move into.

Multiculturalism, then, while professing to be a belief in the equality of all cultures, attacks the cultures of the countries which adopt it and promotes the cultures of new immigrants instead. There is an interesting consequence of this which Western countries which have adopted multiculturalism have had to face in recent years. Sometimes, the culture of the new immigrants is less compatible with pluralism than the culture which is being undermined by multiculturalism.

One of the fundamental elements of culture is religion, and multiculturalism has been adopted in Western countries whose historical, traditional, religion is Christianity. Indeed, multiculturalism could not have arisen anywhere else. This is because multiculturalism is a progressive and liberal doctrine and progressivism and liberalism are secular, Christian, heresies, i.e., Christian teachings which have been twisted and distorted and then secularized. One Christian doctrine is that of the future Kingdom of God on earth. One version of this doctrine is post-millennialism, which teaches that the mission of the Church is to establish this Kingdom prior to the Second Coming of Christ. Progressivism, the idea that through reason, science, and government policy man can gradually eliminate evil and suffering from the earth, is basically a secularized post-millennialism. Another Christian doctrine is that each person is created in the image of God and has worth in the eyes of God. It is because of this doctrine that the Western and especially the English system of rights and freedoms protecting the person from the abuse of power developed. Liberalism, which provides an alternative explanation for these rights and freedoms by positing a hypothetical individualistic state of nature out of which society arose through voluntary contract, is another form of a secular Christian heresy.

Progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity. This does not mean that Christians should embrace progressivism and liberalism as manifestations of Christ’s teachings, as some misguided clergy teach, or that we should blame Christianity for the ruin of Western civilization wrought by progressivism and liberalism, as some misguided rightists teach. For the other side of the coin is that while progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a culture heavily influenced by Christianity, neither could they have evolved within a culture in which the Church had maintained its authority and orthodox Christian faith had not begun to decline. They are not orthodox Christian doctrine but secular Christian heresies.

Just as progressivism and liberalism could not have evolved outside of a Christian culture in which Christianity had gone into decline, neither could multiculturalism have come into existence apart from progressivism and liberalism. Multiculturalism is progressive in that its advocates believe that by declaring all cultures to be equal and societies to have no core culture apart from a commitment to pluralism that the evil of oppression of one cultural group by another can be eliminated (1). It is liberal in that it separates culture from its social and communitarian role and makes it a matter of individual preference.

Multiculturalism is also, far more hostile to Christianity than to any other religion. It demonizes Christians who are brave enough to stand up for orthodox Christian doctrine and morality. It does not so demonize Islam, and in recent years left-wing multiculturalists have been outspoken opponents of what they call “Islamophobia” despite overwhelming evidence that Islam is far more incompatible with their ideas of tolerance and diversity than Christianity.

Herein can be seen one of many dangers multiculturalism poses to the societies which adopt it. When the official doctrine is that all cultures are to be considered equal it is difficult if not impossible to screen out cultural incompatibility in the immigration process. Under multiculturalism, it is the person who points out that somebody from Culture X is more likely to declare a holy war and start blowing up buildings than somebody from Culture Y, who is penalized for being a “bigot”.

The biggest threat to a society which multiculturalism poses, however, is that it undermines communities. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists scream, and in some cases this is true. It is not true of all kinds of diversity however.

A community is a stronger community if it contains teachers, doctors, farmers, policemen, grocers, builders, and people of many other professions, than if it consists only of people from one profession or if everybody tries to do everything for himself. This kind of diversity strengthens the community. It is the kind of diversity St. Paul spoke about when he compared the Church to the body of Christ in the 12th chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians, and said that just as the body is one but is made up of many organs, so the Church is one but is made up of people with different roles and gifts given by the Holy Spirit. This diversity is a diversity within unity, and it is unity that St. Paul stresses in this chapter.

A community would not be a stronger community if the people in one house spoke German, in the next Lithuanian, in the next spoke Mandarin, and in the next spoke Swahili, and there was no language in common. Nor would it be a stronger community if everybody in the community followed a different calendar than everybody else. Problems would arise if what one person understood to be a friendly gesture, his neighbor understood to be an insult to his mother and a challenge to a duel to the death. This kind of diversity is not a strength and it is fatal to a sense of community. It too is illustrated in the Bible – in what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the tongues of the builders.

It is beneficial for a country to have strong communities. There is less crime and a greater sense of trust between neighbors in a small, largely homogeneous, village than in a large, very heterogeneous, city. In the former, people can leave their homes and cars unlocked, never in the latter. The less a country has to rely upon its laws, the police, courts and prisons, the better.

Multiculturalism, by making culture a matter of individual preference, and embracing diversity at the expense of unity, prevents culture from serving its social function, of uniting and strengthening communities. It is truly a menace.




(1) In reality, multiculturalism is more likely to generate hostility between different cultural groups.