The Tory and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fruit and Nuts

I read Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels when I was in my early teens and before I had watched more than a couple of the film series that was inspired by the books. Thus I had read Thunderball before I watched either of the two film versions of it (the second film version, which like the first starred Sean Connery as 007, was Never Say Never Again). (1) I was disappointed, therefore, to discover that my favourite part of the book had been omitted from both films. In the story’s primary plotline Bond is sent to recover two atomic bombs that had been stolen by Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his terrorist organization SPECTRE. If you have seen either of the films you will recall that before even receiving this assignment, Bond had stumbled across a clue while he was hanging out at a health spa, breaking the rules and seducing the nurses.

What is not mentioned in either of the movies is the reason why Bond was at the spa to begin with. In the novel, however, this is spelled out at great length in a hilarious secondary plot that leads into the main story. Bond has just undergone his annual physical examination and, while the report indicates he is in prime condition, M, director of the British Secret Service is not satisfied. He, having just come back from a health retreat with all the fanaticism of a new convert, summons Bond into his office and gives him a lecture about eating right and his smoking and drinking habits and then sends him away for a mandatory stay at the health spa. The cab driver who takes him there comments on how odd it is for someone of Bond’s age and health to be going to a place that caters to a clientele of old men with bad backs. While Bond seems to utterly disregard the rules of the spa during his stay, he too comes away from the spa as a convert. He quits drinking, cuts back on his smoking, even switching to a lighter, filtered brand of cigarette, and subsists on a diet of yogurt, Energen rolls and other health foods. He is now so full of pep and energy that he drives his housekeeper, his secretary, and everyone else around him crazy. This all comes to an end when the blackmail message from Blofield arrives. Bond is summoned into an emergency meeting where M, who has already reverted back to his old habits offers him a smoke, and replies with a “Humpf” when Bond says “Thanks sir. I’m trying to give it up”. Having been made aware of the crisis and given his assignment, he returns home and orders his housekeeper to cook him up a real breakfast of bacon and eggs and hot buttered toast (“not wholemeal”), and is subsequently back to normal.

I have always read this as an excellent satire of health fanaticism, although it is apparently inspired by an actual clinic that Fleming himself had attended. Eight years before the publication of Thunderball, C. S. Lewis had mocked health fanatics in the first paragraph of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third of the Narnia books by suggesting that the reason the character of Eustace Scrubb was initially so disagreeable was because of the progressive, forward thinking, advanced views of his parents, who were among other things, teetotalers, non-smokers, and vegetarians.

These books appeared shortly after World War II which, if those who believe we are living in a “post-modern” era are correct, is the prime candidate for the event that signaled the end of the Modern Age. If the Modern Age is thought of as a project that had as its goal the replacement of Medieval Christendom with secular, democratic, liberal nation-states then this project was more or less completed around the time of the war. This is directly related to the fact that health fanaticism was becoming such a nuisance that it became a major object of satire.

Orthodox Christianity does not include elaborate dietary laws, of the sort that Judaism and Islam have, but rather takes a libertarian approach to the matter of food and drink. The development of this approach can be seen in the New Testament beginning with Christ’s statement that it is that which comes out of the heart and not that which enters the mouth that defiles a man, to St. Peter’s vision in which the animals the Old Testament forbade the Jews to eat are declared clean, to the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, to St. Paul’s explanation of Christian liberty in his epistles. What the Christian church enjoins upon its members is something much more difficult than merely following a checklist of what you can and cannot eat and drink. Building upon an ethical foundation lain in both the New Testament and classical philosophy it encourages the cultivation of virtues, habits of good behavior that are typically characterized by the traits of balance and moderation. The Anglican catechism, for example, in the section which explains the Christian understanding of the Ten Commandments “according to their spirit and purpose as our Lord teaches in the Gospel” includes as part of our duty to our neighbour the following “To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity”. Temperance, as used here and in the New Testament where it is described as a fruit of the Spirit, means self-control and moderation.

The cultivation of virtue and character is the work of a lifetime and a path that lies between two ever present temptations. One of these is the temptation to give up and give oneself over to habits of excess. The other is the temptation to substitute a list of rules and to keep adding to it until you are buried under it. These temptations are never succumbed to in isolation from each other. Thus, when the North American descendants of the Puritans substituted a prohibition against the consumption of alcohol for Christianity’s traditional exhortation to sobriety a perverse culture of drunkenness began to develop.

Likewise, as the post-Christian Western world began to develop extremely unhealthy eating habits, such as the consumption of large amounts of fast food, pre-packed processed food, and junk food the health nuts began to crawl out of the woodworks, each with his own long list of what you should and should not eat. These lists frequently contradict each other - one health nut will prohibit fat, another will tell you to eat lots of fat and avoid carbohydrates, one will tell you to eat your food raw, another to eat it cooked, etc. What they have in common is that none of them recommend anything as simple as a balanced diet, and indeed one of the oldest versions, a pre-Christian pagan doctrine that was resurrected in the nineteenth century under the new name of vegetarianism for the new scientific era, prohibits the consumption of one of the major food groups entirely. Its most extreme adherents, vegans, prohibit the consumption of two of the major food groups while self-righteously proclaiming their moral superiority over everybody else.

Health nuts often believe that they have some special knowledge, that the medical establishment is conspiring to suppress and keep from the general public, which provides the secret to better health and a longer life. This resembles the doctrine of gnosis from which the Gnostics, the early enemies of apostolic authority and orthodoxy, derived their name. This too points to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christendom and Christian orthodoxy as the genesis of these ideas. Eric Voegelin argued that the very concept of a “Modern Age” had its origins in Gnostic eschatology and it is significant that he identified Puritanism, the extreme form of English Protestantism in which many of these lifestyle prohibitionist movements have their roots, as a form of Gnosticism.

As the Modern Age progressed and the Western world moved further away from orthodox Christendom, more and more of these legalistic health and lifestyle movements popped up. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the teetotal movement, vegetarianism, and sects that teach that Christians are required to eat kosher. It is not at all surprising that with the near completion of the secularization of the West by the end of World War II, the number of such movements exploded. I think the response of Ian Fleming and C. S. Lewis to these sorts of people – mockery, derision, and satire – is the right one, at least so long as they are merely an annoying, nagging, nuisance. When they try to enlist the government, which in the interest of reducing the cost of socialized medicine often seems inclined to listen to them, to compel us by law to conform to their wishes, it is a different matter and we should actively combat this sort of health tyranny. Otherwise, let us attempt to cultivate the virtues of self-control, moderation, and balance, which will do far more for our health than to follow the latest health fad, peddled by a bunch of fruits and nuts.




(1) Interestingly, Fleming had originally written Thunderball as a screenplay and adapted it into the novel, which was then in turn re-adapted into the movie versions.

This and That No. 14

My stated intentions had been to complete the series of essays on theological topics that I started at the beginning of Lent by Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday was two Sundays ago and there are three essays in the series left. There is an essay on the Christian virtues, an essay on "social justice" and a complementary essay to "The Suicide Cult" arguing for the same position from a theological perspective. I hope to have these essays completed and posted within the next couple of weeks. I interrupted the series to post a Father's Day essay, a review of Ilana Mercer's excellent new book Into the Cannibal's Pot, and am currently completing my Dominion Day essay for this Friday.

Once I have posted the last essay in the theological series I will begin my next series of essays on the topic of arts and culture. This series will begin with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture.

I have slightly altered the layout of this blog to include permanent links to certain essays on the right above the blogroll and list of recommended websites.

For Queen and Country

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

Within the question asked by these well-known lines which open the sixth canto of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel lies a declaration. That declaration is simply this: that it is natural, good, and virtuous for a man to love his country. The man who does not has a dead soul.

The term for “love of one’s country” in English is patriotism. This word is derived from the Greek work patris and its Latin cognate patria both of which mean “homeland, native country”. Their most literal translation would be “fatherland” as they are themselves derived from pater which means father in both languages. Unfortunately however, that once innocuous word suggesting the “land of one’s fathers” now has sinister, nasty, connotations that are quite foreign to its original meaning.

From its etymology it would appear that patriotism is an affection whose proper object is a place rather than a people. It is this which is the primary difference between patriotism and nationalism, which latter term indicates affection for the people one is connected to by ties of ancestry and cultural heritage. Patriotism, however, does not denote love for one’s homeland as separate from one’s people but as distinct from one’s people. Barren territory cannot command “true patriot love”. The country the patriot loves is the homeland upon which is built the civil society to which he belongs.

Twenty-six years ago Dr. Alasdair MacIntyre, who at the time was the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University and who currently is the O’Brien Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was invited to give the Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. The subject of the lecture he gave was “Is Patriotism a Virtue”?

If, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the standard by which we are to judge the answer to that question is liberal morality, the answer must be no. Liberal morality is the reigning system of ethics of the Modern Age. According to liberal ethics questions of right and wrong can only be answered by reason applied impartially and universally. Dr. MacIntyre argued that there are five central positions to liberal morality:

[F]irst, that morality is constituted by rules to which any rational person would under certain ideal conditions give assent; secondly, that those rules impose constraints upon and are neutral between rival and competing interests—morality itself is not the expression of any particular interest; thirdly, that those rules are also neutral between rival and competing sets of beliefs about what the best way for human beings to live is; fourthly, that the units which provide the subject-matter of morality as well as its agents are individual human beings and that in moral evaluations each individual is to count for one and nobody for more than one; and fifthly, that the standpoint of the moral agent constituted by allegiance to these rules is one and the same for all moral agents and as such in independent of all social particularity.


According to Dr. MacIntyre, if we accept such a moral standpoint, we are required to treat patriotism not as a virtue but as a vice. However, Dr. MacIntyre goes on to argue, liberalism is not the only way to understand morality.

Three years prior to giving that lecture, Dr. MacIntyre’s book After Virtue had been published by the University of Notre Dame Press. In this book Dr. MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment Project which had spawned the now ubiquitous system of liberal morality was doomed to failure because of its rejection of basic Aristotelian ethical concepts. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had written that virtue or moral excellence is like excellence in anything else. The purpose of a roof over your house is to protect you from the elements. A “good” roof does this well, as opposed to a roof which leaks and does its task poorly. Fishermen, farmers, police officers, etc. are “good” fishermen, farmers, and police officers to the extent that they fish, farm, and enforce the law, well. Likewise, Aristotle wrote, a man is virtuous when he fulfils the purpose of man, and fulfils it well.

By rejecting that Aristotelian teleology, Dr. MacIntyre argued, the moral philosophers of the Enlightenment Project had stripped morality of its necessary framework and foundation, and left it at the subjective whims of the individual resulting in moral chaos. He pleaded for a return to Aristotelian virtue.

In his lecture on patriotism he spelled out an alternative to liberal morality, that was particular where liberalism is universal. According to this alternative view “it is an essential characteristic of the morality which each of us acquires that it is learned from, in and through the way of life of some particular community.” Moreover, the goods “by reference to which and for the sake of which any set of rules must be justified are also going to be goods that are socially specific and particular”. Finally, it is only in the context of a community that we can be moral at all. Morality is difficult for human beings, and:

[I]t is important to morality that I can only be a moral agent, because we are moral agents, that I need those around me to reinforce my moral strengths and assist in remedying my moral weaknesses. It is in general only within a community that individuals become capable of morality, are sustained in their morality and are constituted as moral agents by the way in which other people regard them and what is owed to and by them as well as by the way in which they regard themselves.

Thus:

Loyalty to that community, to the hierarchy of particular kinship, particular local community, and particular natural community, is on this view a prerequisite for morality. So patriotism and those loyalties cognate to it are not just virtues but central virtues.

In the remainder of his lecture Dr. MacIntyre defended this alternative morality in which patriotism was indeed a virtue. Acknowledging the liberal argument that patriotism would require an uncritical attitude towards one’s country, he answers it by saying that what is permanently exempted from criticism is “the nation conceived as a project, a project somehow or other brought to birth in the past and carried on so that a morally distinctive community was brought into being which embodied a claim to political autonomy in its various organized and institutionalized expressions”. An uncritical attitude towards one’s country’s current leaders or laws is not required, and indeed, there are certain extreme circumstances where the survival of the country might inspire the patriot to take drastic actions against it’s current leader. Here MacIntyre pointed to Adam von Trott, a Christian conservative, German patriot, who tried to bring down Hitler in order to save Germany (which resulted in his arrest and execution in 1944).

Some Christians, who would not ordinarily be expected to sympathize with the ideas of liberalism, might be alarmed at the particularist system of morality MacIntyre defended in his lecture. Their fears, that particularism might lead to moral relativism, are groundless. Christianity’s requirement that we be just to all men does not exclude particular loyalties. “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men”, St. Paul wrote in the sixth chapter of his epistle to the Galatian Church, which he immediately followed up with “especially unto them who are of the household of faith.” The universal hortatory subjunctive in the first part of the verse does not exclude the amplified particular application in the second. St. Paul’s epistles are in fact full of particular duties being enjoined on certain people towards other specific people – duties of husband to wife, and wife to husband, of children to parents and parents to children, etc.

In the third chapter of his epistle to the Church in Philippi St. Paul speaks of our citizenship in heaven. He does not say, however, that it is our only citizenship, and excuse us from participation in and our duties to the temporal societies to which we belong. To interpret this verse that way would be as wrong as it would be to interpret Christ’s remark “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me” as saying that we should not display filial piety.

St. Paul did not disavow his temporal citizenship by declaring his citizenship in heaven. In the Book of Acts St. Luke records how St. Paul, after having been arrested in Jerusalem, and about to be scourged, told the centurion who was guarding him “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” Later, when he appeared before Festus, he invoked his right as a Roman citizen to have his case heard before Caesar.

St. Paul was not the kind of man who would claim the privileges of earthly citizenship while denying the duties that go along with it. In his epistle to the Church in Rome he commands obedience to temporal authorities and goes so far as to identify their role as enforcers of the law as being ordained by God.

Aristotle wrote that it was the nature of a virtue to be a mean between two extremes, one of excess and one of deficiency. It follows from this, that if the virtue of patriotism consists in loving one’s country, then there are two accompanying vices, loving one’s country too much or in the wrong way, and not loving one’s country enough.

The vice of not loving one’s country enough can manifest itself in indifference to one’s country’s survival or well-being, refusal to take up arms in defense of one’s country should the call of duty arise, or the manifestly perverse form of preferring another country, even the enemy of one’s country, to one’s own.

The vice of loving one’s country too much can also take many forms. It could take the form of jingoism or hostility towards other countries. It could take the form of blind support for all the policies of one’s government even when they are manifestly wrong, stupid, evil and deleterious to the well-being of the country. It could take the form of an ideological nationalism that demands that all other loyalties, to family, God, and local community, take second place to loyalty to country.

Those who are prone to the last mentioned form of excess would do well to remember the words of Edmund Burke:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

Patriotism is a natural affection. We love our family members, not because we can make a rational argument for it or even because we are commanded to (which if we are Christians we are) but because it is natural to do so. It is part of who we are to form bonds to the people who are closest to us, to the parents who raise us, to the siblings we grow up with. It is through forming these bonds that we learn how to form bonds of friendship to our acquaintances and neighbors in everyday life. We also develop attachment to places. We grow to love the houses we grow up in, the countryside, and the various buildings – school, grocery store, post office, etc. in which live our everyday lives. From these attachments to the people and places we know best, our love for our country, which encompasses them and countless other similar communities, is formed.

It is normal, right, and virtuous to form such attachments.

As for those who don’t, we will return in closing, to the words of Sir Walter Scott::

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.