When Duty Calls

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (1) - Horace, Odes, Book III, 2:13

Lucy Maud Montgomery is best remembered for her novel Anne of Green Gables which tells the story of a spirited and imaginative orphan girl adopted, by accident or providence, by an elderly brother and sister who raised her on their farm in Prince Edward Island. Anne of Green Gables was the first of a series of eight novels in which Montgomery continued to tell the story of Anne Shirley. The final book in the series (2) Rilla of Ingleside which was published in 1920 is set during the first World War.

The main story in Rilla of Ingleside concerns Rilla Blythe, Anne’s youngest daughter, who is forced by the war to mature into a responsible adult from the vain and frivolous person she seems to be at the beginning of the novel. In the background to this story there is an ongoing commentary on the events of the war by the characters of the novel. While some of the commentary, such as that of Dr. Gilbert Blythe and the Presbyterian minister James Meredith is more educated and informed than that of others, such as that of Blythe housekeeper Susan Baker, there is a general consensus in support of Britain and of Canada’s contributions to the war effort and against the Kaiser. The Blythe boys each feel the call to do their duty to “king, country, and empire” and are ultimately supported in this by their family, friends and neighbors. The only significant dissenting voice is of an unlikable character, Mr. Pryor, derogatorily nicknamed “Whiskers-on-the-moon”, an elder in the church who is an avowed pacifist. His only significant appearance in the story other than in the disapproving conversation of others is in the 20th chapter, where he is invited to pray at a joint prayer meeting of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in support of the war. His “prayer” ends up being a pacifist lecture when is abruptly ended when Norman Douglas, the fiery, opinionated, village infidel who is by far the most likeable character of the book, wrings his neck.

While this is a work of fiction, L. M. Montgomery generally sets her stories in what is recognizably the late 19th –early 20th Century Canada that she knew and experienced. The picture she draws of a community coming together to sacrifice for and support their country in war is a picture of the real Canada of almost one hundred years ago.

There is quite a contrast between that day and our own. Hawks and doves are still among us, and each group is still smugly certain of its own righteousness and of the wickedness of the other. It is the attitude of everybody else, the people who are neither pacifists nor members of war’s cheerleading squad, that is different. Pacifism is no longer held in contempt and barely tolerated. Our attitude towards war has completely changed.

Why is this?

It has to do, I believe, with changes in the way we think about war and the way we think about our relationship to our society. Let us consider these in turn.

For quite some time now it has been customary around the time of Remembrance Day to talk about the soldiers we are remembering and honouring as those who died “for our freedom”. This way of speaking has become so familiar to us that we may not immediately recognize what is wrong with it.

The soldiers we are honouring did not go to war to fight and die for “our freedom”. They went to war to fight and die for “their country”. The difference between these two phrases is of tremendous significance.

If we say that we are fighting a war for “our freedom” what do we mean by “our freedom”?

If the enemy we are fighting against is trying to conquer our territory and enslave our people then “our freedom” could mean “the freedom of our country”. If this is what we mean then fighting for “our freedom” is one way in which we fight for “our country”.

This is not the only possible meaning of this expression, however. When we speak of fighting for “our freedom” we could mean by “our freedom” the liberal concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. If that is what we mean then when we speak of our soldiers as having fought and died for “our freedom” we mean that we are honouring them for fighting and dying for a political ideal, an abstract concept, rather than for a real, concrete community.

If this is what we mean then we are completely out of touch with the nature of the call of duty our soldiers answered when they went to war and with the reason why it is important to honour and remember them.

Unfortunately, it seems to be this second sense that is intended by those who tell us to remember the soldiers who died for “our freedom”. This is because in the 20th Century the idea became widespread among teachers, media commentators and other opinion-formers that it is more noble to fight and die for ideals and higher values than for something as concrete and everyday as “my country”.

Now perhaps you are thinking that such a notion represents an advancement towards enlightenment in our thinking about war. Is it not better to fight for things like justice, freedom, and truth which are eternal, universal, values than to fight for your country?

The answer is no it is not.

Human nature has both a creative and a destructive side. It is man’s creative side, which is the source of art, music, and literature, that responds best to universal values of this kind. These values inspire creative man to reach new heights and this is what makes the difference between a culture and a civilization.

War, however, is a manifestation of man’s destructive side. This does not need inspiration. Rather it needs to be contained and directed so that its harmful energy does the least amount of damage and, if possible, serves the good of the community. For this reason it is better for people to fight for their families, their homes, their friends, their neighbors, their communities and their countries than to fight for things like justice and truth.

It is noble to die for an ideal only when you willingly allow yourself to submit to the injustice of being killed for that ideal. In that case you are a martyr. If you combine the willingness to die for an ideal with the intention of killing others for your ideal you are not a martyr but a fanatic.

Look at what happens when you start to think about war as being fought for universal values. You take what is a conflict between two human societies and you escalate it to the level of a cosmological battle between good and evil. When you think of war as being fought for the benefit of your country you still ask the old questions of just war theory. Do we have just cause to go to war? Are we fighting in a just manner? When you think that you are fighting for good against an enemy who is the embodiment of evil those questions become irrelevant. If you are “good” and your enemy is “evil” all that matters is that you utterly destroy your enemy.

This exponentially multiplies the destructive potential of war. Human beings instinctively recognize this and for this reason universal values and ideals are incapable of stirring the martial spirit the way the call to fight, for kith and kin, heart and hearth, queen and country can.

Lord Thomas Babbington Macauley, the 19th Century British poet, historian and statesman may have been a Whig, but he showed an understanding of what moves men to lay down their lives in battle in his retelling of Livy’s account of the story of Horatius Cocles in his Lays of Ancient Rome:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

“The temples of his Gods”. It would be unthinkable that anyone today would write these words in the spirit in which Macauley intended them. It is almost universally accepted, in Western society today, that wars should not be fought for religion.

This is because Western countries have become increasingly secular. The state has become more powerful, a wall has been erected between it and the church, and religion, no longer seen as being primarily the corporate worship of a community, has been relegated to the sphere of the private individual. If religion has any value in the contemporary way of thinking it is as a means of making higher values real to the individual, thus providing him with spiritual inspiration.

If we think about religion in those terms then fighting for religion is no different than fighting for ideals. Is this the right way to think about religion however? Secularism has become so widespread that we have perhaps forgotten just how unnatural it is.

Religion, throughout history, and in our own societies until very recently, was not primarily a personal matter between the individual and God. It was a social institution which had a social function. Religion was the heart of the community, the community at worship, the institution which presided over births, coming of age ceremonies, marriages and deaths, which provided a society with its most basic rules and its fundamental identity.

When we think of religion in those terms then a man who fights and dies “for the temples of his Gods” is a man who fights and dies for his community and society, not a man who fights for abstract ideals. This is the difference between fighting for religion and fighting over religion.

As our societies have become secularized religion’s role in war has been greatly misrepresented. How often have we heard from disciples of this new school of militant atheism that religion is “the cause of most wars”? This is, however, utter nonsense. When Xerxes tried to conquer Greece in the early 5th Century BC, when Athens went to war with Sparta for 30 years at the end of the same century, when the Macedonian kings conquered everything between Greece and Persia in the 4th Century BC, and Rome went to war with Carthage for control of the Mediterranean World in the Punic Wars of the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC, when Sulla and Marius, Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, Octavian and Mark Anthony went to war with each other in the civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic, was religion the instigator? Was it religion that drove on conquerors like Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler? Of course not.

Religion has a vital role to play in war but it is seldom the instigator. Religion’s role is to unite a society, to rally the community and the country together in support of the war effort, to remind us of our duties and obligations towards our society. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing, and ultimately a necessary thing.

The possibility of war will always be present. While we should always pray for and seek out non-violent solutions to disputes between countries, we should not be so naïve as to think that this will always be possible. It is in man’s nature to go to war and the only way to achieve the goal of the elimination of war is by eliminating human beings from the planet.

Various proposals have been made in the name of “world peace” in the last century. Disarmament, the elimination of weapons and armies, has been one of them. The privatization of religion has been another. None of these proposals can bring about world peace because the cause of war lies elsewhere. All these proposals can do is to make the country that adopts them ill-prepared when war arrives.

A country should always be prepared to fight a war, although it should not go out of its way to look for one. If war comes, the country will be in a position of danger. That danger may not be very serious – it all depends upon the strength and goals the enemy. However more or less serious it may be, it will be there, because the state of being at war is by definition the state of being in danger. It is at this point that we are expected, whether we are soldiers going off to fight, or those supporting them at home, to unite behind our country. We have a moral obligation to do so.

We may not like the people who are in government when war comes. Our duty, however, is to our country, which is more than just its government. We may think the war is a mistake, is being fought for stupid reasons, and is against the best interests of our country. That does not negate our duty.

Think of the American aviator and patriot Charles Lindbergh. Before the United States entered the second World War Lindbergh was a leader of and spokesman for the America First Committee which promoted America’s noninvolvement in the war. When the United States was attacked by the Japanese Empire on December 7, 1941, however, his arguments against the war became irrelevant and he sought to rejoin America’s air force. A vindictive FDR ordered that his request to be recommissioned be denied but despite this he voluntarily flew a number of fighter missions as a civilian volunteer.

The men we honour this weekend were men who knew and understood their duty to their country. They knew that life was about more than just earning a living and having fun. They had not fallen into the trap of thinking that they were self-made individuals who owe everything they have and enjoy in life to their own merit and effort. Nor had they fallen into the trap of thinking that the life, the world, and their society and community, owed them a living. They understood that their blessings in life came ultimately from God and immediately from the civilization and culture, the country and the society, the community and neighborhood, the family and the home they were born into, grew up in, and lived in. When the call to do their duty, take up arms, and lay down their lives on behalf of their country came, they heard it in their hearts and answered.

In doing so they bequeathed to us a duty, the duty to honour and remember them, and to follow should that call ever come again.

(1)"It is sweet and right to die for one's country".

(2) In the sense of the internal chronology of the narrative. It was the sixth to be published.

The Fate of America

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? By Patrick J. Buchanan, New York, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, 2011, 488 pp, $27.99US

In the first half of the 20th Century the European powers clashed in two major conflicts that are remembered as World War I and World War II. When the second war ended in 1945, the nations of Europe were in ruins, their empires were lost, and two strong new powers emerged triumphant. The history of the second half of the 20th Century was largely the story of their rivalry. We called these powers the superpowers and they were the United States of America on the one hand and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the other. Both had nuclear arsenals, containing weapons of mass destruction far more powerful than the atomic bomb, the development and use of which had brought WWII to an end. These weapons kept the superpowers from waging a traditional war against each other and so their conflict came to be known as the Cold War.

The Cold War brought out tremendous differences of opinion among people. Some felt that the threat of nuclear holocaust, never before present, meant that peace must be achieved no matter the cost. Others believed that the Soviet tyranny, which already held millions in its clutches, had to be prevented from spreading.

It was at the height of the Cold War that Patrick J. Buchanan began his career in journalism. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, he also worked as a speechwriter and senior advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. Both as an op/ed writer and a presidential advisor, he worked to promote America’s efforts in her struggle against the Soviet Union.

Then the Cold War ended, shortly after Reagan’s second term as US President. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. The United States was now the sole remaining superpower. The question naturally arose of what America would do with its military might in the absence of the threat of he Soviet Union. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait then-US President George H. W. Bush gave his answer. The United States would lead a coalition of free, democratic countries that would police the world, establishing a new world order and keeping it safe against aggressors like Hussein.

Pat Buchanan had a different idea. Running against Bush, he sought the Republican nomination for the 1992 Presidential election. He opposed the Gulf War and in his campaign he called for America to close its overseas bases and bring her soldiers home. Invoking George Washington’s rhetoric about “entangling alliance” he called upon the United States to return to the older, non-interventionist foreign policy of “America First”.

This was not the only plank in his platform, of course, nor would it be the only time he would run for President. He sought the Republican nomination again in 1996 and in 2000 he ran for President on the Reform Party ticket. Apart from the “America First” foreign policy that was labeled “isolationism” by his opponents, he championed economic nationalism against free trade, an end to liberal immigration, and reversing the moral, cultural, and spiritual decline of America.

Mr. Buchanan’s campaigns were unsuccessful, but his books became bestsellers. In The Great Betrayal he argued for the Hamiltonian “American system” of economic nationalism. In A Republic Not an Empire he made the case for an “America First” policy by tracing the history of American foreign policy. In The Death of the West he discussed the impending demographic crisis of Western society caused by low fertility rates, aging populations and mass immigration. In State of Emergency he took a closer look at the immigration crisis the United States is currently facing.

In his latest book, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? he revisits each of these topics in the light of current state of the United States following the economic meltdown, the quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Obama presidency. Although the final chapter offers prescriptions as to how to steer America away from the brink of doom the overall tone of the book reflects the pessimism in its title. The main theme of the book is “we have lost the country we grew up in”.(1)

In a sense that is the theme of all of Mr. Buchanan’s books and that partly explains why so many of them have become best-sellers. As a writer, Pat Buchanan is excellent at articulating what is in the hearts and minds of countless numbers of his countrymen who are unable to or do not wish to express what they are thinking. It is a theme that conservatives and patriots of other countries can sympathize with as well.

Do not be fooled by the subtitle of the book into thinking that something huge is supposed to happen in the year 2025. The subtitle is an allusion to an essay by a Russian dissident who in 1970 predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union. The predicted event which looms large in this book is actually scheduled for the year 2041. That is the year when, according to the most recent census bureau extrapolations, white Americans will become a minority in the United States.

The bulk of the book, from chapter four “The End of White America” to chapter nine “’The White Party’”, examines the question of what this will mean for America. The titles of both those chapters are quotations by the way, although only the second one uses quotation marks. The first borrows its title from an essay by Vassar professor Hua Hsu and the second from a gaffe by Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean. They seem to have been chosen to deliberately provoke the ire of the sort of people who think that emotional accusations of “racism” are a more appropriate response to people who do not consider multiculturalism and diversity to be unqualified positives than actually answering their questions and arguments.

The idea that a great deal of diversity and the absence of an ethnic core make for a stronger society is one of the sacred cows of the post-WWII, post-Civil Rights Movement, post-European colonialism/imperialism, post-apartheid South Africa world. There are no rational reasons to believe it and there is a great deal of evidence which contradicts it. When someone points out the lack of correlation between the idea and the real world that person is like the child in Hans Christian Andersons’ fairy tale who points out the obvious fact denied by everybody else that the emperor is running around buck naked.

This is what Mr. Buchanan does in Suicide of a Superpower. The attempt to transform a country from a country founded by and for a particular people with a particular language, culture, and religion into a country for all peoples of all languages, cultures, and religions, while remaining a stable, united, society with just laws protecting its citizens’ rights and liberties, is an experiment that has never been attempted before. There is little evidence to suggest the experiment will succeed and much to indicate that it is doomed to fail.

The impending demographic doom of white America has been brought upon by a combination of low fertility and high immigration. The decline in fertility resulting in rapidly aging populations that are not reproducing themselves is not strictly an American phenomenon and in chapter five we learn about how it is affecting other countries such as Russia, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan and South Korea. Some of these have opted for high immigration like the United States. Others, like Japan and South Korea “appear prepared to accept their fate, a dying population and declining nation, rather than adopt the American solution: replacement of her departing native born with millions of immigrants.” (p. 169)

The American solution is no solution at all. In chapter nine, entitled “The Triumph of Tribalism”, Mr. Buchanan begins by borrowing a thesis from a 2008 Foreign Affairs article by Jerry Muller which challenged the conventional belief that the history of the 20th Century was one of nationalism being superceded by transnationalism after it led to the devastation of the two World Wars. The peaceful coexistence of the European powers after WWII, Muller argue, was not the result of the eclipse of nationalism but of its goals having been fulfilled. Ethnonationalism has actually been on the rise throughout the 20th Century.

Mr. Buchanan then walks us through the history of the 20th Century showing how this has been the case. From the ethnic conflict in the Balkans which ignited the first World War and started up again the moment the Communist regime in Yugoslavia fell, through World War II and the crisis in the Middle East, the renewed tribalism and nationalism in Africa and Asia after the end of European colonialism, to the nationalist movements that brought down the Soviet Empire, ethnonationalism has been a consistent factor in the history of the world in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

What this suggests is that the large-scale importation of immigrants from ethnic backgrounds widely different from both your own and from each other with no program whereby to assimilate them into a common national identity such as was signified by the “melting pot” metaphor in earlier waves of American immigration will not have the result of producing a stronger nation but of balkanizing your country. The tribal nature of mankind is the final unanswerable refutation of the idea that “diversity is our strength”, which Mr. Buchanan had ably debunked in the preceding chapter “The Diversity Cult”.

Mr. Buchanan does not just debunk the diversity myth though. He asks the question we are forbidden to ask:

Is ethnonationalism a genetic disease of mankind that all good men should quarantine wherever it breaks out? Or is this drive of awakened peoples to create nations of their own where there own kind come first a force of nature that must be accommodated if we are ever to know peace? (p. 327)

He reminds us that while ethnonationalism produced horrors “from Nanking to Auschwitz to Rwanda” it also “liberated the captive nations and brought down the ‘evil empire’”. It “was behind the pogroms of Europe but created the nation of Israel” (contrary to the lies Mr. Buchanan’s opponents constantly throw at him he clearly does not intend the former to be the good and the latter the bad in this juxtaposition).

Within all of this there lies another question, asked indirectly here, but which more and more people have come to ask in the last couple of decades. If ethnonationalism is tolerated among other peoples – and it is - why should it be forbidden to white ethnic groups?

Whatever the answer may be, Mr. Buchanan is surely correct in writing:

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. (p. 328)

In today’s climate in which the leftist orthodoxy on cultural and ethnic matters that is known as “political correctness” is rigidly enforced, this is not the safe way to write a book about the impending perils which face your country. Suicide of a Superpower is about more than just ethnicity, immigration, and race. It is also about the economic crisis, the ultra-expensive military fiascos in the Middle East, and the moral and spiritual decline of America. There is even a chapter about the problems the Roman Catholic Church is facing worldwide.

The demographic crisis of America is the ongoing theme of six of the books eleven chapters however. While it may not be a safe topic it is a necessary one. Countries can survive huge military disasters. Countries can survive economic collapses. They cannot survive the loss of a central ethnic identity. A country is more than just a set of laws written on a piece of paper. Its political and legal institutions rest upon the foundation of a people with a shared history and identity which binds them together as a community and a society. When that is gone those political and legal institutions cannot stand.

(1) Variations of this phrase occur at a number of spots in this book. Although I have placed it in quotations it is not intended to be an exact quote of any one of them but an approximation of all of them.

Populism Part Three: Treacherous Elites

In Part One I explained why I don’t like the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and why, although I agree with many of the specific policies they support, I don’t much care for the populist “Tea Party”. In Part Two I objected to the core concept of modern democracy – that the will of the people is sovereign – as being a version of “might makes right” and to populism – the kind of movement which attempts to gain influence by the strength of numbers through accusing elites of betraying the public interest – because it unleashes the violence and domination through force which is inherent in the concept of popular sovereignty. Not wishing to be entirely negative, I have briefly mentioned a few of the things I, a traditional Tory, support. These include the classical idea that good government consists of harmonizing the good of the whole with the good of the parts and balancing the good of the individual with the good of the community, the good of the few with the good of the many an idea enshrined in the concept of a mixed constitution, of which the British/Canadian parliamentary monarchy is the outstanding example. Populism, which makes the democratic “will of the people” the dominant principle, is the enemy of the harmony and balance enshrined in our tradition of parliamentary monarchy.

There is a question, however, which needs to be asked. If populism is defined as a movement which purports to speak for “the people” against “the elite” and accuses the elite of betraying or conspiring against the public good, what should our response be when the populist is right about the elites?

This is very important question. Elites are easy targets for ridicule, attack, and outright scapegoating. This is partially due to the fact that the numbers of the elite are by definition few. It is also due to the fact that there is a widespread if ethically wrongheaded notion that it is “fair game” to attack the very rich, the very powerful, the very skilled, and the very strong in ways that would be considered unfair and even bullying if done to the poor and the weak. For this reason, we would do well to take populist accusations against elites with a grain of salt. In doing so, however, we must not fall into the mistake of thinking that elites can never be guilty of the accusations populists level against them.

This is especially important today because we live in an era in which evidence of elite betrayal abounds on every side. An obvious example can be seen in the way several large banks and corporations, which were on the verge of failing three years ago when the American economy did a nosedive following the bust of the housing bubble, asked for and received bailout money from the American government, then turned around and gave large bonuses to their executives, even while laying off thousands of employees.

As annoying as this example of collusion between arrogant economic and political elites to enrich themselves at the expense of the public is it is by no means the worst example of elite betrayal. Other examples include the inflation tax, the outsourcing of jobs, the mass importation of immigrants, the attack on traditional moral values and culture, and the loss of national identity and sovereignty due to official multiculturalism policies and the construction of a new world order.

The inflation tax is an effect of the expansion of the money supply. When the money supply is expanded the value of money per unit decreases relative to the goods and services which can be purchased with money. Since takes a while for the market to adjust to the expansion of the currency the first people to use the new money – governments and banks – are able to spend the new money when it has the purchasing power per unit of the old currency. As it circulates it loses purchasing power - and so does the money in your wallet and in your bank account. This amounts to a transfer of wealth from you to politicians and bankers.

The erosion of the value of our money and savings which is inflation is most noticeable to people when prices of consumer goods which everybody purchases on a regular basis begin to rise. If these prices do not rise – and even go down – it will take longer for people to notice that their money is not worth as much as it used to be. There are ways of keeping the prices of consumer goods down in periods of inflation. You could find a way of increasing production for example. Or you could move your factory to somewhere where there is an abundant supply of cheap labour and few regulations. Or you could import an abundant supply of cheap labour into your own country.

The first option is the best. In the right set of circumstances a businessman can introduce new technology which speeds up and increases production in his factory by so much that he can lower his price per unit, while increasing both his overall profit and the wages of his workers.(1) There are limits, however, to when and where you can do this. In recent decades corporations have opted for the other two methods with the help of governments who have made free trade agreements and passed liberal immigration policies. Academic elites have joined political and economic elites in this because if there is one area where “capitalists” and “socialists” come together it is in support of free trade and liberal immigration.

Liberal immigration policies tend not to be received well by the people of the country whose government introduces them. And for good reason. Such polices look suspiciously like an attempt to put into practice Bertolt Brecht’s bad joke about “dissolving the old people and electing a new one”. (2) To prevent widespread discontent with large scale immigration from threatening the entire program the political, academic, and media elites have engaged in a decades long campaign of positive and negative propaganda. The positive propaganda in favour of multiculturalism presents “diversity” as a good to be desired for its own sake. The negative propaganda uses terms like “racism” and “xenophobia” to intimidate critics of wide scale immigration and multiculturalism.

Here is how the negative propaganda works. To most people the term “racism” conveys the meaning of an irrational dislike of somebody else for no reason other than that his skin colour is different from your own. Similarly, the term “xenophobia” means an irrational fear of strangers, of people who are different from you. When the government, schools, and media constantly use these terms to explain away opposition to liberal immigration and multiculturalism they are taking what is in fact a perfectly healthy, normal, and rational way of thinking and pathologizing it, i.e., declaring it to be a mental disorder. Thus the fact that people have an entirely legitimate right to be concerned that their government is actively trying to replace them, their children, and their grandchildren with immigrants is buried under mountains of abusive name-calling.

This proved to be so successful a method of silencing criticism that it was used elsewhere. All of a sudden, all sorts of ordinary, rational ideas were now given nasty labels and treated as mental defects. Do you believe that the most fundamental division of labour among human beings, between women who bear and raise children and men who protect and provide for them, arises naturally out of the simple biological fact that women are the ones who get pregnant and not out of an all-male conspiracy to oppress all women? If so, you are a “sexist” or a “male chauvinist”. Do you believe that the fact that men have external tube-shaped genitals and women have genitals that are openings which are the right size and shape to put the male genitals in and the fact that doing so is the means of propagation of the species means that men are made for women and women for men? Then you are now a “homophobe” or a “heterosexist”. At least in the eyes of the elites in charge of the news and entertainment media, the educational system, and the state.

To summarize the charges so far, the actions of banking and political elites have eroded peoples’ savings through inflation but corporate elites have kept prices relatively low by outsourcing jobs and importing cheap labour with the help of laws passed and treaties signed by political elites while academic and media elites have, with the support and backing of the other elites, attempted to sell this to people in the ideological package of “multiculturalism” and have browbeaten those who weren’t buying with accusations of “racism”. The actions of the elites in each of these cases is an unjustifiable betrayal of the common good of the societies to which the elites belong

What would motivate elites to turn against their own societies in this way?

Christopher Lasch, who was professor of history of the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, in his final book wrote that the American “privileged classes” had:

[R]emoved themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure—of business, entertainment, information, and “information retrieval”—make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline. (3)

This is also true of the elites of other Western countries. It is notable that the decades in which everything described above has taken place saw the integration of economies on a continental (Common Market, NAFTA) and global (GATT, WTO) scale and the establishment of quasi-governmental bodies at the global level (the UN, the International Court, etc). While the kind of conspiracy theory that suggests that this 20th and 21st Century movement towards a new world order is entirely the result of plotting carried out in secretive meetings of the ultra-elite should be regarded as overly simplistic at best it would be erring in the opposite direction to absolve the elites of all active complicity in this new direction history has taken. The idea that the emerging new order on the global scale might be the means of achieving utopian goals such as world peace and universal prosperity is a vision far more common among the elites than among other people. Hence the transfer of elite loyalty that Lasch noticed, from particular communities, societies, and countries to this new international order.

Having pointed out several ways in which elites – political, academic, economic, etc. – have betrayed the common good of our societies, and offered the transfer of elite loyalty to the emerging international order as an explanation, this leaves us with the question of how to respond. I phrase it that way rather than “what to do about it” because I am not such an optimist as to assume that something can be done about it.

Populism, at least in the sense we have been looking at of a mass movement demanding that the will of the people be met, is not the answer. In parts one and two, we saw how populism and the concept of popular sovereignty are threats to prescriptive, constitutional order. Yet our objection to the new world order and the actions of the elites described above is based upon the fact that these things also threaten the constitutional order and common good of our societies. To use the one to fight the other is like trying to douse a fire with gasoline.

In the previous essay I distinguished between two senses of the word “democracy”. There is modern democracy, which knows of no mixture with other principles or elements, but which insists upon the will of the people being absolutely sovereign. There is also however, the kind of democracy in which the constitution prescribes that elected representatives of the people participate in the governing of the country alongside aristocratic and royal elements. In this kind of constitution, democracy is balanced by other principles which are just as important, and is one element of many.

It is the idea that the “will of the people” is sovereign which is the problem with modern democracy and it is this idea which makes populism a dangerous movement and a threat to constitutional order. Is a populism conceivable that does not include this element? A populism which confronts elite misdoings by insisting, not that the “will of the people” be submitted to, but that their rights within the established order be respected and not violated?

These questions are not mere exercises in semantics. When a movement is built on the idea that the will of the people is absolute and must be obeyed there are no limits to what the movement will demand. The will of the people must be provided by the leaders of the movement – for the people have no will of their own – and populist movements of this nature are the means by which one elite, deriving its strength from its skills in rhetorical manipulation of the masses, challenges another which derives its strength from its wealth. In such wars of the elites, the good of the community is likely to fall by the wayside.

When a popular movement is based upon the idea that a community and a society is established for the common good – the good of all its members – and is therefore based upon a set of mutually understood and respected rights, privileges and obligations between the individuals and the groups which make up the community, there are limits to what the movement can demand. When it charges elites with betraying the common good and demands that the rights of the people be respected it must itself respect the tradition and constitution to which it is appealing.

It is the common people who are hurt the most when the social and moral order of a society collapses. It is the common people who are most dependent upon the security and stability an established, permanent order provides. When law and order breaks down and crime rates soar it is not the elites who are the primary victims – it is people in the middle and especially the lower classes. When traditional morality comes under attack, illegitimacy rates soar, and marriages break up, it is again the lower classes who are hit the hardest because these things are major contributors to multi-generational poverty.

Yet in spite of all of this, populist movements which purport to speak for the common people against the elites, frequently embrace revolutionary rhetoric and conceive of themselves as being against the established order of society.

Populism, because of its revolutionary potential, is naturally a left-wing phenomenon. There have been right-wing populist movements in the 20th Century, but the kind of popular movement I am suggesting here must be something different. It would have to have a populist element – it is challenging the elites after all – but this cannot be the dominant element. It must be a very small-p populist, conservatism, rather than a right-wing populism.

Exactly what such a movement will look like in actual practice is something that remains to be hammered out. It will require a great deal of serious thought as to what exactly a counter-revolution, Maistre’s “opposite of a revolution” looks like. All of this is outside of the scope of this essay, as is the question of whether such a movement could possibly succeed. (4) We must not confuse the categories of “that which it is possible to succeed in” and “that which is worth doing”, however. Fighting for what is left of our civilization and the moral and social order it is built upon, is always worth doing, even if doing so permanently relegates us to the realm of what the late Samuel Francis, borrowing an expression from Leonard Cohen, called “beautiful losers”.

(1) Lets say you own a factory that employs 10 people and produces 500 units of product a day. That is 50 units of product per employee. You sell the product at $15 a unit receiving a total of $7, 500 for a days worth of product. You pay your employees $150 a day each, which works out to $18.75 per hour or $3 per unit of product. In total you pay them $1,500 a day, and you have $1,500 of other expenses a day. This leaves you with $4,500 profit per day. Now, imagine someone invents a machine that increases the productivity of your plant by 300%. Your factory now produces 1,500 units of product a day. You lower the price of your product to $10 a unit. You are now receiving $15,000 for a days worth of product. You triple the wages of your employees to $450 a day each which brings your payroll up to $4,500 a day. The cost of purchasing and running the machine causes your other expenses to go up to $2,000 a day. Your profit is now $8,500 a day. You have increased your profit, while becoming an unusually generous factory owner who pays his workers $56.25 an hour, and cutting the cost of your product at the same time.

While the numbers I placed into the hypothetical example above are absurd fictions the point remains valid. Under the right circumstances, through increasing productivity, you can make profits and wages go up while lowering the price of your product. This does not mean, of course, that it can be done under any circumstances, with any product. The great blindness of many present day liberal (capitalist) economists has been their belief that man’s science and technology will solve every problem and continue to lead us into a future of ever increasing prosperity for everyone.

(2) Bertolt Brecht was a 20th Century German poet and playwright of Marxist convictions. After the Soviets and the East Germans suppressed a popular uprising through force, he wrote a poem entitled “The Solution”, the English version of which can be read here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-solution/ . The final sentence of the poem, the question “Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?” is for obvious reasons, widely quoted among opponents of present day, large scale, liberal immigration.

(3) Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) p. 45. In this book, which was completed while the author was dying and published shortly after his death, the author argues for a number of ideals, such as egalitarianism which I do not share, some of which I consider to be quite foolish, and against some principles, such as the principle of hierarchy which I would regard as essential to a functioning civilized society. He approvingly quotes Orestes Brownson’s call for the abolition of hereditary property on the grounds that it is incompatible with democracy. Lasch (and Brownson) may very well be right about this but the abolition of inheritance is even more incompatible with Lasch’s own view of the family as a “haven in a heartless world”. One of the main concepts of The Revolt of the Elites is that meritocracy and the ideal of “social mobility” are responsible for sidetracking America from its original vision of egalitarian democracy. What these concepts actually do, Lasch argues, is give the elites the idea that they are wealthy on the basis of their personal merit alone and therefore are under no obligation to contribute to the common good. While there is some truth to this, I, who do not believe equality to be desirable in anything other than a right to justice from before the law, would argue for social mobility precisely for the reason that it helps validate a stratified society, which is desirable for other reasons. Despite all this, Lasch’s argument that the detachment of current elites from any sense of belonging and loyalty to their societies has led to their support for liberal moral, social and cultural agendas that are against the common good of their societies, is a helpful one.

(4) Full consideration of this question must involve thought about the very nature of history itself. Modern thinking about history has been dominated by the concept of progress in various forms, from the Marxist view of history as a constant struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” destined to culminate in the classless, property-less, society of communism, to the Whig history of theory in which events are constantly moving towards universal, peaceful, liberal democracy. George Grant, in Philosophy in the Mass Age, described how this concept of progress arose through the secularization of the Christian view, inherited from the Hebrew, of history as time given meaning as the flow of events towards ends determined by God. In the modern concept of progress, man has replaced God as the determiner of the ends of history. To believers in this doctrine, it is foolishness to resist the flow of history, and wickedness to attempt to move against the flow. This is the doctrine held by the elites who are overseeing the dismantling of traditional, Western civilization and the construction of the new global order. While I do not accept the doctrine of progress, especially where it identifies historical inevitability with justice (“it has to happen this way therefore you are wrong to oppose it”) a mere negation is not enough. What is needed is an alternative understanding of history.

Populism Part Two: The Dangers of Democracy

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard. – H. L. Mencken


“The European philosophical tradition”, English mathematician and philosopher A. N. Whitehead once said, “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Within the European philosophical tradition can be found the history of serious Western political thought. This too, to a great extent, is an expansion and commentary on ideas first presented by Plato in his dialogues, especially The Republic and The Laws.

After a century like the 20th, in which utopian ideologues caused never before seen levels of human suffering in their attempt to politically and socially engineer a paradise on earth, it is understandable that many look with apprehension and suspicion upon the exercise in theoretical city-state building which Socrates and his friends enter into in Plato’s Republic. As a result there has been much written which pits Plato and Aristotle against each other, purporting to find in the two Athenian philosophers the source of rival political traditions, one utopian and idealistic, the other empirical and realistic that have influenced the Western world to this day.

While there is a degree of truth to this, neo-Thomistic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that Aristotle is best understood, not as Plato’s rival, but as the first and greatest interpreter in the Platonic tradition, with the role of interpreter necessarily including that of corrector at times. (1) This view of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle in the history of Western thought seems to me to be more accurate than the other.

Moreover, those who regard Plato as the father of modern utopianism seem to have missed much of the point of The Republic. Plato was not trying to draw up blueprints for the perfect city-state which he expected actual governments to build. The city-building exercise was part of an attempt to define and defend the concept of justice against the cynical view expressed by Thrasymachus in the early part of the dialogue.

While the sophist Thrasymachus was a historical person, in Plato’s Republic he is made to be the mouthpiece for the view that justice is an irrational concept created by the strong to serve their interests. Justice constrains self-interest, but those who impose it upon others are not themselves bound by it, Thrasymachus argues. It is to the advantage of the strong to be unjust themselves and to force those weaker than themselves to answer to the demands of justice. This is encapsulated in the familiar saying in English “might makes right”.

This viewpoint expressed by Thrasymachus is what Plato wrote The Republic to refute. Justice, in the Platonic tradition, serves the common good, not just the good of the strong, and injustice ultimately serves no one’s good. It is the standards of justice which determine the right and wrong uses of power, not power which determines what is right and wrong.

Thrasymachus’ view has had its advocates down through the years. In the 19th Century, Friedrich Nietzsche distinguished between “master morality” and “slave morality”. These were two different ways of identifying “good” and “bad”, the first arising out of the thinking of the strong, the second out of the thinking of the weak. Nietzsche favoured “master morality”, which he associated with Greco-Roman civilization, over “slave morality” which he associated with Christianity. Placing an announcement of the death of the Christian God in the mouth of his fictional prophet Zarathustra, he set before mankind a choice. Embrace the values of the strong and rise to the heights of the Übermensch (Superman) or choose the morality of the slave and sink to the depths of mediocrity occupied by der letzte Mensch (the Last man).

In the 20th Century, Leo Strauss once remarked to George Grant that he was “lucky to have lived in the present period, because the most comprehensive and deepest account of the whole has been given us by Plato, and the most comprehensive criticism of that account has been given us by Nietzsche”. (2) In his The City and Man (3), Strauss radically reinterpreted Plato. He argued that the views placed in the mouth of Thrasymachus were actually Plato’s own views and that they were the central message of The Republic, that Socrates’ was in essential agreement with Thrasymachus and that the appearance of disagreeing with the view that justice is the advantage of the strong is an example of the kind of “noble lie” Socrates recommended to the rulers of his hypothetical city-state.

Nietzsche and Strauss were both opponents of modernism, who rejected pre-modern Christianity as a viable alternative to the liberalism and relativism of the modern era. They identified – falsely in my opinion – Christianity as the source of the liberalism they despised. Rightly suspicious of modern democracy, they failed to see that it is fundamentally an example of Thrasymachian “might makes right”.

Most proponents of modern democracy fail to make this connection too. Indeed, they see democracy as being quite the opposite, as the form of government that is uniquely “fair” which empowers the weak and places them on an equal level with the strong.

When I say “modern democracy” I am not speaking about all forms of democracy. I am not speaking, for example, about democracy as one element of a balanced, mixed, constitution. Canada is a parliamentary monarchy with a constitution derived from that of the United Kingdom. That constitution is a mixed constitution which includes a democratic element, along with an aristocratic and monarchical element. This is the best form of government the world has ever known, in my opinion, and the democratic element is a fundamental part of the constitution.

In our constitution of parliamentary monarchy, the constitution prescribes that certain offices of state be filled by individuals chosen by popular elections held on a regular basis. This is the democratic element of our constitution. This is how the members of our House of Commons are chosen. Other offices of state, our constitution prescribes, are to be filled in different ways. Our head of state, for example, in whom political sovereignty is vested, inherits her position according to constitutionally established rules of succession. In our constitution democracy and monarchy are two principles, both of which are necessary, and the balance between the two makes for a superior constitution than either would be on its own.

The doctrine of modern democracy is very different from this. Modern democracy is based upon the idea that “the people” possess both a) a collective “will” and b) sovereignty, which means that “the people” have a right to have their “will” enforced. 18th Century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau romanticized this idea of the “general will” and the idea that to be legitimate government must be the voice of the will of the people. From Rousseau’s day to our own, this idea has spread like wildfire, and an increasing number of people have come to regard modern democracy, based upon the idea of popular sovereignty, as the ideal form of government.

It is no such thing, of course. There is no ideal form of government and the very idea of an ideal form of government is itself a dangerous one. When I say the British/Canadian constitution of parliamentary monarchy is the best form of government the world has ever known I am not saying that it is an ideal form of government. An ideal form of government is a supposedly perfect form of government, drawn up on paper, which because of its perfection is believed to be something towards which all societies should aspire. The temptation that comes, when we think up ideal forms of government, is to try to force our imperfect societies made up of imperfect people into the mold of our ideal constitution. That, as the Twentieth Century bears witness to, causes massive problems and suffering for large numbers of people.

The problems with modern democracy, however, go beyond the mere fact that its advocates regard it as an ideal form of government. In our traditional parliamentary constitution democracy is one element which must be balanced with others. In the doctrine of modern democracy the “will of the people” is an absolute which cannot be balanced by other elements.

Now some modernists do try to balance democracy with the doctrine of liberalism. Liberalism is the idea that the individual is more important than the community or the society and is possessed of natural rights which government of any sort cannot legitimately interfere with. A “liberal democracy” is a government which is constitutionally restrained from interfering with the private affairs of individuals, but where matters which pertain to the common good of the community are decided by the principle of majority rule - or if it is a liberal representative democracy, are decided by elected representatives of the people.

Liberalism alone, however, is incapable of providing balance to democracy. If “the will of the people” is sovereign but the rights of individuals are absolute who decides what the rights of individuals are and where the dividing line between “the common good” and “the private affairs of individuals” lies? If the answer is “majority vote” then democracy overrules liberalism and liberalism balances democracy in the same way that a feather balances a large lead weight. If some higher law established rights of individuals which government of any sort cannot legitimately interfere with then it is that higher law and not the “will of the people” which is truly sovereign.

This does not matter much to the believer in modern democracy. Balance is a classical idea. To the modernist, the classical idea that good statecraft consists in harmonizing the parts with the whole, and balancing the good of the individual with the good of the community, and the good of the few with the good of the many, is outdated, a thing of the past.

So is the idea which Christians call “Original Sin” – the idea that suffering and evil in this world exist because of a flaw in human nature called sin, which resulted in man’s exile from Paradise, which man cannot regain through his own efforts. Modernism rejects this idea, which supports the classical ideas of limits and restraints on human ability, in favour of the idea that Paradise is attainable through political means if the social causes of evil – poverty, illiteracy, inequality, discrimination –etc. are eliminated by democratic government.

The modern egalitarian argument for democracy is a utopian dream. The argument goes that democracy is the “fairest” form of government. What makes it “fair”? It gives everybody an equal say – one vote per person. If democratic governments have not given us Paradise on earth, therefore, it is only because the ideal of egalitarian democracy has not yet been met. This is the thinking that lay behind the constant expansion of the franchise towards the ideal of universal suffrage that took place over the last couple of centuries.

First the vote was extended to all classes to achieve the ideal of “one man, one vote”. Then the women’s suffrage movement came along and “one man, one vote” because “one person, one vote”. Still Paradise on earth had eluded us. Now the franchise has been extended about as far as it can go – although one hears calls to eliminate the age of majority and end “age discrimination” from time to time – and so those still enamoured of the democratic dream have switched their demand from universal suffrage to “proportional representation”.

The idea of proportional representation is the idea that the makeup of the body of representatives should reflect the breakdown of the popular vote. The popular vote is the total number of votes cast by all voters in an election. If 55% of the votes went to the Rhinoceros Party, 25% of the votes went to the Christian Heritage Party, 15% of the votes went to the Libertarian Party and 5% of the votes went to the Green Party, then, each of these parties should have the percentage of seats in the House of Commons according to the notion of proportional representation.

Why does this not already happen?

It does not happen because people are not just individual members of a large body of voters. They are members of neighborhoods and communities and our constitution evolved to take this into consideration. Members of the House of Commons are elected to represent areas we call ridings and when people are asked to vote in an election they are not asked to vote for what percentage of the House should be given to a particular party but for who should represent the riding in which their neighborhood, their community, is located in the House.

The established electoral system is superior to proportional representation because proportional representation dehumanizes people. Instead of being real people, the faces and names who live in a community, proportional representation treats people as faceless numbers and percentages.

To those who believe that achieving “true democracy” will finally usher in a golden age of fairness and justice for all, however, the traditional electoral system is just another roadblock in the way of the will of the people as represented by the popular vote which must be thrust aside. While previous revolutions such as the reduction of the role of the monarch to that of ceremonial figurehead and the extension of the franchise to all men and women of the age of majority failed to achieve Paradise, this time around the proportional revolution is sure to succeed.

Some true believers in democracy have gone even further. After the most recent provincial election in Manitoba, for example, Frances Russell in her October 6, 2011 column for the Winnipeg Free Press blasted what she perceives as the injustices of the traditional electoral system and wrote:

Taken together, it builds an ever-stronger case for genuine democratic reform involving some form of proportional representation and Australian-style compulsory voting. Alone among British-origin democracies, Australia has had compulsory voting since 1924. The law is enforced with a modest fine of $20, rising to $50 if the voter cannot supply a valid reason for failing to exercise his or her franchise.(4)

So if you have a valid reason for not voting you are only fined $20? What happens if the non-voter doesn’t pay the fine? Does he go to jail?

In this suggestion we have a chilling reminder that the father of modern democracy and the father of totalitarianism were one and the same – Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Although many naively equate democracy with freedom, the more democracy has evolved in the direction of the ideally “fair” system of “one person, one vote”, the more democratic governments have felt free to impose their will upon us in areas of our lives that were until recently considered to be entirely private. The simple fact of the matter is that modern democracy is a form of “might makes right” of the imposition of the will through force.

Imagine you were walking down the street and someone came up to you and pulled out a shillelagh and said “you are now my slave, you will do everything I say, or I will bash your head in”. Would the fact that this person is armed and capable of following through on his threat mean that he has the right to boss you around?

Of course not. The use of force – or the credible threat of force – does not confer legitimate authority upon anyone. We have a word for the person who relies upon weapons and the threat of violent force to make others obey his will. That word is “tyrant”.

Lets alter the situation somewhat. This time you are walking down the street and someone comes up to you and says “you are now my slave, you will do everything I say”. This time he does not produce a weapon. You say “No way am I going to be taking orders from you”. He responds with “I will make you”. To which you answer “Oh yeah, you and what army”, at which point he says “This one” and a gang of thugs steps out from the back alley and surrounds you. You are hopelessly outnumbered. This time around would you say that the gang boss has the right to give you orders?

Of course you would not. The two situations are virtually identical. All that has changed is mode of force. The first would-be-tyrant relies upon a cudgel the second upon a gang of thugs. The force you are threatened with in the second situation is the force of numbers.

There is also, however, no substantial difference between the thinking of the second would-be-tyrant and the theory of modern democracy. The theory of modern democracy asserts that having a large enough number of supporters – a majority of the population – makes a government and its policies legitimate and just. This, like the thinking of the thugs in the hypothetical situations above, is a variation of the idea “might makes right”. Modern democracy – democracy as the theory of popular sovereignty and majority rule – is an inherently violent form of government.

This is one of the most important reasons why democracy needs aristocracy and monarchy to balance out a constitution. (5)

As we noted earlier, most advocates of modern democracy do not think of their ideal of “the sovereign will of the people” in terms of domination by force. They prefer to think of democracy as being “fair” as “empowering the weak” and “giving a voice to the voiceless”. There is, however, a kind of movement that recognizes democracy for what it is and embraces it.

Populism is the name we have for movements like this. A populist movement is a movement which charges elite groups with having betrayed the public interest. It gathers followers in the hopes of gaining large enough numbers for its claims to speak on behalf of “the people” to be taken seriously. It makes demands in the name of the sovereign will of the people.

In populism, the violence and reliance upon force that is inherent within democracy is not explained away or hidden but brought to the forefront and put on display. Populism knows of no moderating force. The will of “the people” is law and its demands must be met. Successful populism is the “tyranny of the majority” which Alexis de Tocqueville warned the Americans about in the 19th Century.

What populists and other advocates of democracy do not often tell you is that “the rule of the majority” is a fiction. Unless you live in the smallest of communities the governing of the community will always be conducted by a minority – an elite. Even if your community is small enough that every single decision pertaining to the affairs of the community can be decided by majority vote an elite will still rule. The people in the community who are the most skilled at getting the majority to vote their way will be the elite in such a community and they will call the shots.

This is inevitable. It is what Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy”. (6) It cannot be changed, it is just the way things are. Complaining about it is as foolish and unfruitful as complaining about the law of gravity.

For our purposes the significance of this fact is two-fold. First, it shows that the doctrine of modern democracy is built upon a false foundation. The reason a minority always controls a group, community, organization or society is because there is no such thing as “the general will” or “the will of the people”. Rousseau’s volonté générale does not exist. It is a fiction. Only individuals have wills.

Secondly, it shows that populism is itself a means for a few – the leaders of the populist movement – to gain and exercise power. The people – the crowds of supporters of the populist movement – do not themselves possess power. They are the power – the power which the populist elite uses to challenge the governing elite.

While it is always true that an elite minority will hold the reigns of power in any society the constitution of the society and the ideals held by the society will affect the kind of elite that a society has. When democracy becomes the overriding principle of the constitution and popular sovereignty becomes an ideal of the society, this does little to improve a society’s elite. The more democratic the constitution, the more selfish, deceptive, and power-hungry the people who compose the ruling class become. This is really quite self-evident. To win an election, you have to first run in an election. To run in an election you must desire power. The desire for power is not an admirable trait in a leader but a dangerous one. After a person decides to run in an election they must win the election before they can exercise power. That requires convincing more people to vote for you than for your opponents. That generally involves being the best liar of the bunch which might explain why so many politicians used to be lawyers.

What kind of elites do populist movements tend to produce?

Since populism embraces the force of numbers inherent within the concept of democracy it would be reasonable to conclude that successful populist movements have a tendency to give power to people who desire power and are willing for their power to be rest upon force rather than constitutional legitimacy. History bears this conclusion out. It is full of people who desiring power for themselves, gained followers by accusing the elites of corruption, then when they had enough popular support overthrew the constitution of their country and ruled tyrannically in the people’s name. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in the last days of the ancient Roman Republic, defended the ancient constitution against populist movements which condemned the Senate and the patrician aristocracy, movements which popular generals and war heroes like Gaius Marius sought to exploit for their own personal interests, and which ultimately led to the overthrow of the constitution and the rise of Caesarism. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the conservative and Catholic aristocracy in Germany, watched with dismay as Austrian demagogue Adolf Hitler gained supporters through a populist campaign, was elected into office, made himself dictator, and maintained a high level of popular support even as he madly plunged his country and the world into a disastrous war. The ultimate populist ideology – Marxism which accuses the elite “haves” of oppressing the many “have nots” and calls for a universal revolution to bring about a property-less, classless, egalitarian society – established “People’s Republics” around the globe in the 20th Century, which made slaves out of all but the elite members of the “Communist Party”, threw millions of people into forced labour camps, and murdered about a hundred million people.

While you cannot blame an ideology for everything that is done in its name, it is the very nature of populism to place the democratic concept of the will of the people above the constitution. This makes it a natural means for those who would overthrow their constitution, seize power, and rule tyrannically.

We have looked at a number of the dangers to a stable, constitutional order and a free society that lie in democracy and populism. There is an important question that arises out of this. What if the populists are right about the elites? What if they really are betraying the interests of their country, their society, and the public?

This question is vitally important because there is a great deal of evidence that says that the current elites are doing just that.

I will address that question in Populism Part Three: Treacherous Elites.


(1) This interpretation can be found in Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

(2) Grant recounts this in his essay “Nietzsche and the Ancients” in Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1986).

(3) Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).

(4) http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/the-danger-of-electoral-injustice-131203649.html

(5) There are many ways in which diluting democracy by mixing it with monarchy and aristocracy lessens its potential danger. Perhaps the most important is that it separates sovereignty from the people. In a monarchy the people are never sovereign. The constitution vests the office of the monarch with sovereignty and the king or queen who fills that office inherits his or her position from the previous monarch in accordance with a line of succession defined by the constitution. This sovereign authority is therefore derived directly from the constitution and not from the “will of the people”. This is true even if the authority of the king of queen is exercised in the sovereign’s name by elected officials.

(6) Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Collier Books, 1962), a translation by Eden and Cedar Paul of a book which first appeared in German in 1911. The phrase “iron law of oligarchy” is Michels’ but he acknowledges his dependence on Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto for the concept behind it. See also James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Gateway edition (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963) originally published by John Day in 1943.

Populism Part One: Dissent, Left and Right

On September 17, 2011, a mob descended upon Zuccotti Park in the financial district of Lower Manhattan. Calling themselves “the 99%” and declaring their intention to “Occupy Wall Street”, they have been squatting in the park ever since. Their actions have since inspired malcontents elsewhere and “Occupy” protests have sprung up in other cities in the United States, Canada, and indeed around the globe. Here in Winnipeg, “Occupy Winnipeg” has set up its tents in Memorial Park across from the provincial legislature building on Broadway.

Certain friends and family members who have asked me my opinion of these protests, expressed surprise at the strongly negative terms with which I spoke of the “Occupy” movement. They thought I would have been in support of it. This, in turn, surprised me. These are not strangers but people who know me and my opinions on most matters. What could possibly make them think I would be in favour of the “Occupy” movement?

The “Occupy” movement is all image and no substance and it is an ugly image to boot. When its members say “we are the 99%” they are representing themselves as being, or at the very least speaking for, 99% of the population as opposed to the extremely wealthy “1%”. The membership of the “Occupy” movement does not consist of anything remotely close to 99% of the population, nor, according to polls, does its support run anywhere near that high. If their membership does not consist of 99% of the population and their professed supporters and sympathizers do not add up to that amount what gives them the right to self-identify as the voice of that percentage?

The term “99%”, of course, is a gimmick chosen for its rhetorical effect not its statistical accuracy. The “Occupy movement” is a movement with a negative focus. It is much clearer about what it is against than about what it is for and what it is against is the “1%”. What is the 1%? If you arrange the population into percentiles according to wealth with the wealthiest at the top and the poorest at the bottom the “1%” is the top percentile. It is a completely arbitrary number. It does not mean anything. While there is a large distance between the top percentile and the bottom percentile in terms of wealth, as one would expect wherever there is freedom, to say that there is a huge gulf between the top 1% and the remaining 99% would be far more accurate if we were describing a country organized in accordance with the ideals the “Occupy” movement seems to admire – a country like the former Soviet Union for example.

Now I don’t much care for the concept of “too big to fail” and the way governments have bailed out large corporations and financial institutions in recent years. I do not think governments ought to reward bad management with bailouts on the principle that when you start paying for something you get more of it. And yes, I too was quite annoyed with the arrogance of banks and companies who had been bailed out by government with the taxpayer’s money then turned around and gave their executives large bonuses.

The anger of the “Occupy” movement, however, is not directed towards bad concepts like “too big to fail”, towards politicians who voted to bail out big banks and corporations, or executives who arrogantly recorded large profits and awarded themselves large bonuses after having been bailed out. It is directed rather towards “the rich” or the “top 1%”. The two are not synonymous. “The rich” and “the top 1%” are defined solely by the extent of their wealth and not by their business practices, ideas, arrogance, or whether or not they have received government bailout money.

By turning legitimate complaints against specific ideas, business and government practices, and politicians and executives, into an attack upon the wealthy in general the “Occupy” movement is engaging in what is called “class warfare” – pitting one social layer or social group against another – and what is known as “scapegoating” – placing the blame for all of the problems a society faces upon a particular class or social group.

While the “Occupy” movement is clear about what it is angry about, and who it is opposed to, it is notoriously vague about what it stands for and what its specific demands are. It claims, of course, to represent a broad spectrum of viewpoints. Progressive and left-wing groups, to whom “inclusiveness” is an ideal, frequently speak of themselves this way, although one sees little evidence of it in their boring, repetitive and redundant ideas and causes. When interviewed, the “Occupy” protesters will often say that it is “change” they are demanding – bringing to mind the vapid, substance-free, rhetoric of the campaign that swept Barack Obama into the White House in 2009. The placards and t-shirts of the movement carry anarchist and socialist slogans. The closest thing to a legible demand on the part of the movement is that government confiscate and redistribute the wealth of the “1%” through “Robin Hood” taxation.

There is no way I would ever support such an agenda. While I believe firmly in the concept of noblesse oblige – that the privileges enjoyed by the upper classes in society come with duties towards the lower classes attached to them – I do not accept the idea that a modern state should be taxing one part of society to pay the expenses of another part. The purpose of taxes is to raise the revenue of government and one of the most fundamental roles of government is to administer justice. Taking money from middle-class, working class, and poor people to bail out bankers and executives who made bad business decisions is not justice. Neither, however, is taking money from the upper and middle classes and giving it to the poor, no matter how many people falsely label this “social justice”.

The “Occupy” movement describes itself as a “leaderless” movement. This is nonsense, of course. There is no such thing as a leaderless movement, never has been, and there never will be. The “Occupy” movement is clearly organized – however poorly. Its organizers, and the people who speak for it from behind pseudonyms on its website, are leaders, whether they wish to acknowledge the fact or not. The movement’s claim to be leaderless is intended to bolster the image the movement wishes to present of itself as a spontaneous protest on the part of “the people” themselves.

The “Occupy” movement contradicts itself in its language. It describes itself as a “peaceful protest” yet its call to its supporters is a call to “occupy”. Its use of the word “occupy” evokes the military sense of the term – to take possession and/or control of something by force. It is an ugly and violent term – and perhaps the most honest term in the movement’s entire vocabulary. The idea that society should obey the “will of the people”, the concept that is the foundation of both modern democracy and populism, is a form of violence, a form of the idea “might makes right” which Plato refuted in The Republic 2400 years ago. I discussed this in my review of John Lukacs’ Democracy and Populism and will go into it at length in Populism: Part Two.

Now conceivably someone reading the last paragraph might respond with the question “What about the Tea Party? They are also a populist movement, demanding that government obey the will of the people. Would you say the same thing about them?”

My answer would be that I dislike this in the Tea Party as much as I dislike it in the “Occupy” movement. Perhaps even more.

In other areas I have much more sympathy with the Tea Party than the “Occupy Movement”. Rather than pretending to be the voice of an artificial construction like the “99%” the Tea Party purports to champion the interests of a real, if endangered group, the American middle class. Its agenda is clear and simple – less taxes and less government spending. This is an agenda I heartily approve of. Furthermore, while this is not central to the Tea Party’s platform, it is a movement which has shown itself sympathetic to the concerns of Americans who object to the cultural revolutions which have transformed their country in recent decades – liberal and illegal immigration, forced secularization, the inversion of traditional moral values, etc. These are concerns I share with conservative middle Americans because the same cultural revolutions have taken place in my own country.

Some Canadian conservatives have expressed a desire for a Canadian “Tea Party”. While I would certainly like to see taxes lowered, government spending cut, and a reversal of the social, moral, and cultural revolutions that have taken place in the name of “progress” since World War II, the thought of a Canadian “Tea Party” is unappealing to me. The biggest problems, Canada and the United States are facing, have been brought upon by revolutions conducted in our countries in the name of social progress, revolutions aided and abetted by the new corporate elites. A couple of centuries ago, Joseph de Maistre in his Considerations on France wisely wrote that “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution”. What was true of France following the Revolution of 1789, is true of 21st Century Canada and the United States.

Both Canada and the United States are extensions of the British tradition, in which most of the fundamental concepts shared by both countries, such as the importance of personal liberty, are rooted. Canada is the more conservative country of the two countries. Our country was founded, not upon a revolutionary break from our parent country, but on continuity with it and its ancient tradition. (1) As George Grant famously wrote: “As Canadians we attempted a ridiculous task in trying to build a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” (2)

The United States, however, was founded out of a revolutionary break with the parent country. The Americans were fortunate that the “natural aristocracy” of which Thomas Jefferson wrote, took charge of their revolution, and prevented it from going to the radical excesses of the Revolution France succumbed to less than a decade after the United States won its independence. That natural aristocracy, kept the societies the American settlers had been building since the days of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies intact, and confederated them into a country under a classical republican constitution that served them well until they began to ignore it in the late 19th Century.

The Boston Tea Party is part of the founding mythology of the United States. It can therefore be used as a symbol, by Americans wishing to call their country back to its roots.

It can never be such a symbol in Canada. Here it is not part of our founding mythology and can only symbolize rebellion and revolution, the Whiggish forces against which the counter-revolutionary conservative must contend.

Apart from the matter of symbolism, however, there is a similarity between the populist and democratic assumptions of the Tea Party and those of the “Occupy” movement. In “Part Two” I will explain what those assumptions are and how they are closely related to some of the most fundamental errors of the times in which we live and will consider the question of how legitimate populist concerns can be addressed without falling into the pitfalls populism poses.


(1) The Dominion of Canada was founded by the Loyalists – members of the 13 colonies that remained loyal to the British Crown when the colonies rebelled and fled to what is now Ontario/Quebec to escape American persecution, together with the French Canadians who had been guaranteed their language, culture and religion in return for allegiance to the Crown after Britain won Canada from France in the Seven Years War, and British North American settlements which had not joined the 13 colonies in their rebellion.

(2) George P. Grant, Lament For a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Carleton Library Edition) (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1965, 1989), p. 68.

All A Matter of Taste

There is an old Latin saying that goes “de gustibus non est disputandum”. Its meaning would be rendered in English by “there is no arguing about taste.” It is not a descriptive statement about the way people behave. If it were it would be palpable nonsense. People argue about taste all the time:

“You put ketchup on your toast?”
“How can you stand listening to that kind of music?”
”She has horrible taste in men!”

You hear variations of these questions and statements every day. Taste is one of the things people are most likely to disagree about and argue over.

The purpose of the Latin saying, is not to deny this reality but to declare that arguments of this nature are pointless. Taste is personal and subjective. People like what they like and dislike what they dislike and you are not going to argue them into changing their likes and dislikes.

The saying and the perspective on taste which it expresses have been around for quite some time. We do not know who coined the Latin expression although it is usually believed to date back to the late Middle Ages.

Is the saying true?

It is more important today than ever before that we ask that question. For the idea that everything in the realm of taste lies beyond the realm of that which can be legitimately judged and criticized by others has come to be a very powerful idea. As that notion has become more widely accepted, more and more elements of our everyday existence, particularly those which are considered to belong to “culture”, have been relegated to the realm of taste.

The first step in determining whether or not it is in fact true that taste is entirely subjective and not a matter for legitimate criticism is to distinguish between the different ways in which we speak of taste. We will consider three basic senses to the word taste, the first two of which are closely related to each other and could be spoken of as “literal” taste, the third of which is a metaphorical extension of the meaning of the second.

In the first and most basic sense we use the word taste to refer to a physical sense in which information is collected by the body and carried to the brain. This is the taste which is akin to sight, hearing, smell and touch. Located in the tongue it tells the brain whether food is sweet or salty, spicy or bland, sour or bitter.

After this information passes from the tongue to the brain, our mind processes it and passes judgement on whether or not we like the food. As we experience different flavours, patterns form in how we evaluate them. We develop preferences for foods which taste a certain way and aversions to others. These patterns of preferences we also refer to as tastes.

It is not only the information that we receive from our taste buds that we evaluate and form likes and dislikes over. We do the same with information we receive from our eyes and ears. We look to the east as the sun is setting, see the various shades of red, yellow, and orange that form in the sky, and liking what we see, we call it beautiful. Conversely, we walk along the sidewalk and all of a sudden a car comes racing down the street at highway speeds, swerves out of control and hits a hydro pole, and the driver is propelled through the windshield. The sight of his mangled, bloody, carcass repels us, and we use words like ugly, gruesome, and hideous to describe it. We like the sound of the birds singing in the tree outside our window. We dislike the sound of fingernails drawn across a chalkboard.

While we generally don’t think of our reaction to those types of sights and sounds as tastes we do consider our evaluation of sights and sounds which are the products of human creativity to be tastes. We look at Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the Reims Cathedral and the Venus de Milo and, taken away by their beauty, we pronounce them to be among the greatest achievements of man’s creativity in the history of the world. Or we listen to J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”, W. A. Mozart’s Mass No. 17 in C-Minor, “Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes” from Joseph Haydn’s The Creation, and Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria and make a similar evaluation of the acoustical beauty of these masterpieces.

Then again we might look at Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’Artista and be sickened, be angered by the emptiness of the void which is John Cage’s 4’33", or be absolutely appalled at the way self-indulgent, self-destructive hedonism is celebrated in lyrics sung to computer-generated formulaic tunes in the latest hits by Katy Perry, Lady Gaga or Ke$ha.

All of these are tastes.

This final, extended sense of the word taste is quite broad and covers more than just the way we think about visual art and music. It also includes our likes and dislikes when it comes to literature and theatre, and more recently television and the movies.

It is important that we recognize that these different meanings of the word taste are related to each other. Why do we describe our likes and dislikes with regards to movies, music, and books as “tastes”? We do so because they are judgements which are of a similar nature to those we form about our food. Some people develop a preference for sweet flavours over salty ones, others develop the opposite preference. Similarly some people prefer romantic comedies over spy thrillers while it is the other way around for others. The concept of taste in matters of culture is derived from the concept of taste with regards to food.

What does this tell us about the question of the subjectivity of taste?

Note that while our tastes in food are undoubtedly subjective they are based upon an objective element. When one person says “I like roast chicken with mashed potatoes” and another person responds with “I prefer fried chicken and potato salad” both statements are subjective judgements. When, however, someone says “honey is sweet” and another person says “olives are salty” they are making statements which are objective.

Both sets of statements express something about taste. What makes the one set objective and the other subjective?

An objective statement attributes a quality to something which can be verified or falsified by other people. “Sugar is sweet” says something about sugar which we can all experience for ourselves by tasting it. Everybody experiences the taste of sugar as sweet unless there is something wrong with their taste buds.

A subjective statement, on the other hand, is a statement about how you experience something which other people cannot enter into, although they might have their own similar experiences. When you say “I like Brussels sprouts” no other person can test the truth of the statement because while someone else might eat Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not he likes them, he cannot enter into your experience of Brussels sprouts to determine whether or not you like them. Now you might grimace while eating Brussels sprouts giving us cause to doubt and question the veracity of what you say. In that case, however, we doubt because your testimony contradicts itself. Your facial expressions and your words are saying two different things. Your actual experience of Brussels sprouts we cannot directly evaluate – only your testimony as to that experience.

The cause of objective tastes – the salty taste of potato chips or the sweet taste in ice cream – is found in the foods themselves, which is why if our senses of taste are all functioning normally, we agree as to what those tastes are. The causes of subjective tastes – whether we like or dislike bologna sandwiches or whether we like them more or less than we like peanut butter sandwiches – are found within us. This is why taste in the sense of our hierarchy of likes and dislikes differs from person to person. People are different and their differences affect and are reflected in what they like and dislike.

Now if you like hot dogs loaded with sauerkraut, pickles, and hot peppers you are going to think other people should like them too. That is the very nature of liking something. When you say “I like spaghetti and meatballs” what you are saying is you have judged the experience of eating spaghetti and meatballs to be an agreeable experience. Ordinarily, when people find an experience to be agreeable they wish others to share it as well, and when they find an experience to be disagreeable they wish others to avoid it. It is true that we often hear people say “Ew, this is disgusting, here try it” but when people say this they are looking for confirmation of their own evaluation and expect the other person to agree with them.

There is nothing wrong with thinking that what you like other people ought to like as well and that what you dislike should be disliked by others. If we did not think this way, if our lists of what we like and dislike were completely separated from our judgements of what other people ought to like and dislike, we would be completely isolated from others. Communication and sharing, which are fundamental elements of the cooperation between human beings necessary for us to live together in communities and societies, would be virtually impossible if we did not have an expectation that other people would like the same things we like.

There are different ways in which we can draw expectations from our own tastes as to how other people will like or dislike certain things. Lets say that you really like banana milkshakes. From this you can conclude that other people will like them as well. You might, however, draw the conclusion that everybody will like them. The first conclusion is entirely reasonable and appropriate. The second conclusion is less justifiable because it cannot be drawn without losing sight of the fact that people differ from each other.

There is also the possibility of a third conclusion. The third conclusion is that because you like banana milkshakes other people ought to like them as well. If you draw this conclusion you do not make the same mistake as someone who would draw the second conclusion. You recognize that people are different and that not all people will like the same things. Your conclusion, however, is radically different from the first two conclusions because it is a judgement about what other people ought to like rather than whether or not they will like it.

If you draw the first and most reasonable conclusion you might be inspired to act upon it in a number of ways. You might go around telling your family and friends how good banana milkshakes are because you do not wish them to miss out on something you have enjoyed and which they might potentially enjoy as well. Or you might open a banana milkshake shop in the hopes of turning your conviction that others will also like what you enjoy yourself into a profitable venture. There is nothing wrong with behaving in either of these ways.

If you draw the third conclusion, however, you might decide to try and make people like what you think they ought to like. You would not succeed. The most you could accomplish by, for example, telling people that they must like banana milkshakes or you will club them over the head, is getting them to all say they like banana milkshakes when in your presence. That does not mean that they will actually like them and more likely than not your acting in this way will in fact turn people off of banana milkshakes.

It is unlikely that you would go to the extreme of using coercive force to try and make people like banana milkshakes. People form likes and dislikes, however, about a wide spectrum of different things and when their likes and dislikes clash with another person’s there is potential for disagreement to escalate into violence. It is for this reason that we encourage the quality of civility among people. Part of that quality, involves reflecting upon the fact that no two persons are exactly alike and that if members of a community are going to live together in peace, harmony, and cooperation they will have to allow each other to differ from themselves. Out of this, the idea enshrined in the Latin expression we have been considering, arose.

Just as, however, the reasonable expectation that others will like what I like can be taken to the unhealthy extreme of “others must like what I like”, so we can take the idea that taste is subjective too far. We can say that taste is entirely subjective and does not contain an objective element. We can say that the concepts of “should” or “ought” ought never to be applied to taste. In both cases we have taken the subjectivity of taste too far.

If taste were entirely subjective then the statement “vanilla ice cream may be sweet to you but to me it salty and spicy” would be a valid statement instead of blithering nonsense. “I like vanilla ice cream” is a subjective statement. “Vanilla ice cream is sweet” is not.

Now someone might say “yes, that is true of taste concerning food, but taste concerning art, literature, or music is different”.

That, however, is manifestly not true.

There are statements about our artistic and cultural tastes which are clearly subjective. One person might say “I like Paolo Uccello’s triptych on The Battle of San Romano” to which another person might respond “Well, I prefer Pablo Picasso’s Guernica”. Or someone might express admiration for Titian’s Venus of Urbino to another person who replies by stating his preference for Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. I like Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps. You, on the other hand, might like C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker series. These are all subjective statements because no matter who is making them, or which painting is preferred, they are all “I like” statements which are statements about the person doing the liking and not about the painting which is liked.

Yet these are obviously not the only kinds of statements which can be made about art. We can also objectively discuss the works of art themselves. Pages upon pages have been written about each of the paintings mentioned above which do just that. Nor, are the two kinds of statements unconnected with each other. If I say “I like strawberries” I am saying something about myself and if I say “strawberries are sweet” I am saying something about strawberries, but what I say about myself is partially derived from what I say about the strawberries, because the sweetness of the strawberries is one reason why I like them. Similarly, when I praise the religious theme, the use of colour, and the craftsmanship in the Ghent altarpiece painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck these form part of the reason why I like the piece.

Just as it is not true that there is no objective element to artistic and cultural taste neither is it the case that we should never speak of tastes in terms of “ought” or “should”. While taste should not be enforced with coercion it is proper for us to speak of things we ought to like and things we ought to dislike. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it is better for us to like certain things than to like other things.

Consider our tastes in food. One person prefers meals which are home-cooked and nutritionally balanced. Another person prefers to eat in the kind of restaurant where you sit down and wait while your meal is cooked and a server brings it to you. A third person gets most of his meals from burger joints, pizza parlours, fried chicken places and other fast food restaurants. Finally, a fourth person seems to survive entirely on a diet of potato chips, soda pop, and chocolate bars.

Can we say that each of these preferences is equal to the others and that none of them is a better taste than any of the others?

Of course not. The first person’s taste is the best and the second person’s taste is second best. While the third person’s taste is bad the fourth person’s is even worse.

What is the basis of this judgement?

A number of factors contribute to it. The quality of the food and the method of preparation is one factor. Fast food and junk food are mass produced to be sold cheaply in large quantities. Quality is always sacrificed when things are produced in this manner. The nutritional value and effects upon health are other factors. The flavour of the food is also a factor. While some might argue that this is part of the subjective element of taste the flavour of a home cooked meal tends to be far superior to that of junk food which relies upon sugar, salt, and various chemicals to produce its very limited range of flavours.

This does not mean that we should only ever eat home cooked meals or that we should pass a law saying that people must only ever eat home cooked meals. It means that the person who shows a persistent preference for home cooking has good taste while the person who shows a persistent preference for junk food has bad taste.

The same thing is true of cultural tastes. There is good taste and there is bad taste. Or, more accurately, there are various degrees of better and worse tastes.

What is it we are judging to be good or bad, or better or worse, when we classify tastes in this way?

It is our ability to properly distinguish between the good and the bad, or between the better and the worse. Our discernment in other words. It can also be the extent to which our personal likes and dislikes reflect our discernment.

Good taste in food is the ability to distinguish between food which is nutritious, delicious, fresh, and well prepared and food which is unhealthy, mass produced, and quickly prepared and to identify the former as being better than the latter. It is also a preference for the former over the latter. Bad taste in food can refer either to a lack of discernment about which foods are better than others or a pattern of preferring the worse foods over the better.

Good taste in culture is both the ability to rightly distinguish between what is good and bad in culture and a preference for the good over the bad.

Can good and bad, or better and worse, be distinguished in literature, music, and art?

Of course they can. Natural talent is not equally distributed among artists. Some artists are tremendously talented others have only a little talent. All other considerations being equal, the works of artists with more talent will be superior to the works of artists with less talent. But other considerations are not equal. Training also contributes to the quality of art. Some artists are apprenticed, others are trained in schools, and others are self-taught. These things make a difference. So does the amount of effort an artist puts into his work. One artist may painstakingly labour over every detail of his work while another slaps his paint onto the canvas with only a minimal attention to detail. All of these factors together contribute to the quality of art.

These are not the only criteria by which we can distinguish the good and the bad in culture. Just as some foods promote good health while others tend to be unhealthy so culture can have a good or a bad effect on us. Some literature, music, and art encourages us to worship our Creator and be thankful for His many blessings, inspires feelings of piety towards God, our family, and our country, and promotes virtuous behavior. Other literature, music, and art does the exact opposite of all of this.

Culture can be good in one sense and bad in the other. Literature and music can have an entirely wholesome message yet be uninspired, dull, and boring. Or it can be original and exciting and at the same time subversive and evil.

Culture can also be good in both senses. The masters of the High Renaissance – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael – possessed inspiration and genius on top of talent, and constructed their masterpieces with precise attention to details, striving for perfection. Their works – such as The Creation of Adam, The Last Supper and The Transfiguration – are spiritually and morally uplifting.

Then there is culture which is bad in both senses. Examples include Robert Mapplethorpe's pornographic photographs, Andres Serrano’s P*** Christ, and Damien Hirst’s pickled animals. These works are not aesthetically pleasing, they display neither talent nor genius, and they are spiritually and morally subversive.

There are, of course, many other distinctions which can be made between different works of music, literature, and art which are not matters of good or bad, or better or worse. This has to be kept in mind as does the fact that when we read a book, listen to a song, or look at a painting and decide “I like this” or “I don’t like this”, these decisions are about us as well as about the works of art themselves. The ability to distinguish between differences in art which can be expressed in terms of degrees of quality and differences which should not be expressed this way and to recognize the difference between an objective evaluation of art on the one hand and your subjective response to art on the other is itself an indication of good taste – the ability to distinguish and discriminate properly.

Good taste is not something we are born with but rather something we acquire. What kind of foods do children generally prefer? Cake, cookies, candy, ice cream, soda pop, potato chips, chocolate bars, hot dogs, hamburgers, and basically everything loaded with sugar or salt. What kind of foods are children most likely to squinch up their face and say “Ew, gross” over? Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and vegetables in general, especially the green ones. It is natural for children to have these preferences. There is something seriously wrong, however, with an adult whose tastes have not matured, who has not developed an appreciation for better foods than these, and who opts to make “fun” foods the staples of his diet.

Likewise, our capacity for appreciating the better elements of our culture is more limited when we are children and must grow and develop. We begin with nonsense rhymes and as we mature develop an appreciation for the sonnets of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Milton. The music we like as children consists of songs with fun lyrics. As we mature we learn to like songs with more serious lyrics and instrumental pieces. Our attention span is quite short when we are children but it gets longer as we grow older allowing us to learn to appreciate longer music works like Mahler’s 8th or the operas in Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen.

The way in which our tastes change, expand, and hopefully improve as we get older is a vital part of the process of maturation, of growing up. The idea that taste is entirely subjective is no friend to this process and can be a hindrance to it. If one taste is just as good as another why should we learn to restrain our impulsive desire to eat nothing but cake and ice cream and learn to like those icky vegetables? If tastes are entirely subjective who are you to say that I should move on from Sesame Street to Shakespeare? If we stop distinguishing between the good and bad, or the better and the worse, we will have no conceptual framework within which to strive to improve ourselves and our tastes.

If our tastes fail to mature – if their growth is stunted somehow – then we will fail to develop good taste. There is also the possibility that our tastes will develop but in the wrong way. We may come to develop a preference for bad things over good things. Instead of learning to love Brahms’ concertos or Elgar’s marches we might develop a love for death metal or, perish the thought, gangsta rap. We might reject King Lear and Othello in favour of slasher films or “reality” TV. Of course these two ways in which taste can become bad – failing to mature or developing in the wrong way are not entirely distinct from each other. One of the most notable characteristics of contemporary North American pop culture – the very epitome of bad taste – is its immaturity. Not only is most of it now produced with a teenage target audience in mind, even that which is ostensibly produced for adults is primarily distinguished from the rest by obscenity, gratuitous violence, and profanity – all of which scream adolescence rather than maturity.

There is one final question that we need to consider. If everything I have argued above is true, if art, literature, music and other cultural works can be objectively evaluated and a hierarchy of better, good, bad, worse identified, and if our taste itself can be judged to be good or bad on the basis of our ability to properly discern the better and the worst in culture, why do so many people think otherwise?

The answer is that we live in an era in which people have become increasingly hostile to the idea that they should be held accountable to external standards. A cult has formed around the self which identifies self expression, self-discovery, self-esteem and self-worth as all-important positive values that we need to strive for. Restraint upon the self – such as that represented by external standards – is naturally rejected by this cult. This is all the more the case when the standards are applied to something like taste which does include a strong personal and subjective element.

This exaltation of self is an unhealthy development which has caused a reasonable principle to be taken too far. We should not judge a person’s “I like X” statements in the same way that we judge his “X is better than Y” statements. The two kinds of statements are completely different and are not subject to the same standards of right and wrong. If a person cannot properly distinguish between which is better, X or Y, this can reveal itself as a pattern in that person’s “I like X” statements, however. This is where the distinction between good and bad taste comes in. It cannot and should not be rejected in favour of pure subjectivity.