Logic and Science

 

Let us compare two different hypothetical exchanges.

 

Person A: The moon is made out of green cheese.

 

Person B: You dimwitted fool, you ignorant, know-nothing, moron, you addlepated twit.  Cheese is a man-made product, formed by the fermentation of milk solids, which is perishable.   It grows mold and goes bad over time.   The moon was not made by man and has been observed in the sky for thousands of years.   Parts of it have broken off and fallen to earth and these are clearly made of rock.   You would know this if you weren’t such a silly, brain-dead loser, who is as ugly as a monkey’s behind and smells like a cross between a garbage dump, a rendering factory and a sewer to boot, who comes from a long line of horse thieves and whose mother turned tricks.

 

That was the first exchange.   Now here is the second:

 

Person C: I don’t think anthropogenic climate change is something we should be alarmed about.   Climate has never been constant but is constantly going through cycles.   These are caused by factors that are almost entirely outside human influence.   Mankind has learned to adjust to the ever-changing climate and historically has done much better in warmer periods rather than cooler periods.   It makes no sense to treat carbon dioxide, the natural product of our own exhalation and the food which vegetation relies upon, as a pollutant.

 

Person D:  I am terribly sorry but I cannot accept that because you are not a climatologist.  

 

Which of the two, Person B or Person D, responded with an ad hominem argument?

 

If you answered “Person D”, then congratulations.   You understand the difference between an insult and the logical fallacy known as the ad hominem argument.   Either that or you reasoned that the abusive language of Person B was so over-the-top that it had to be the other guy.   Most people, I suspect, unless they used the latter reasoning, would have answered with “Person B.”

 

To insult somebody is to speak about him in a disparaging, contemptuous way.   Person B, in the first exchange, did this to Person A with spades.   He did not, however, rest upon his crass, offensive, name-calling to rebut Person A’s statement, but provided actual reasons for rejecting the suggestion that the moon is made out of cheese.    Person D, by contrast, was polite to the point of excess, even going so far as to apologize for not agreeing with Person C.   At no point, however, did he speak to the reasons Person C gave for opposing climate change alarmism.   Instead, he based his refusal to accept Person C’s position entirely upon Person C’s lack of credentials as a scientific expert in the area of climatology.   His answer, in other words, spoke entirely “to the man” (the literal translation of ad hominem), rather than to the man’s arguments.   This is the essence of the fallacy known as the argumentum ad hominem.    

 

The confusion of an insult (a defect in manners) with an ad hominem (a defect in logic) is a fairly common mistake, one that has been observed for years.   This year, however, I have noticed there has been a plethora of other mistakes in the usage of logical terminology, usually from people whom I would have expected to know better.     Take the argumentum ab auctoritate, for example, the argument from authority.    Whether this constitutes a valid argument or a logical fallacy depends upon a number of qualifying circumstances.    Its validity or fallaciousness aside, however, it is identified by the form “X says Y, therefore Y”.    An argument about authority, such as one that take the form “First X said Y, now X says non-Y, therefore X has contradicted himself”, is not an argument from authority.    In discussing the big mask controversy earlier this year, I found myself accused of making an argumentum ab auctoritate when I was in fact using the latter form of argument to call into question the medical authorities when they began demanding mask use of us.   I have also seen, in the same type of discussion, actual arguments from authority made, but confused with arguments from evidence.   This is precisely what citing an article in a medical journal amounts to when it is offered as the sole answer to reasoned arguments against mask wearing, regardless of whether or not the article itself even speaks to, let alone rebuts, the specific points that had been made against mask wearing. 

 

The last example, you will note, is the mirror image of the ad hominem used by Person D in our illustration above.    Person D’s argument could be expressed as “C has no scientific credentials, therefore C cannot be believed”.   The argument of the person who has no answer to a set of reasoned arguments but to cite an article in medical journal could be expressed as “E has scientific credentials, therefore E must be believed.”   The equation of scientific credentials with authority, either requiring belief when it is present, or negating belief when it is absent, not only defies the rules of logic, but contradicts the fundamental nature of science itself.   Science, properly understood, does not speak with this kind of authoritative voice.   It investigates, seeking answers to the questions “how does this work” and ultimately “how can I make this work for me”, but while it can rebut and say “this is not so”, it can never authoritatively pronounce “this is so.”   Anything that does make the latter kind of pronunciation, is not science.

 

One of the paradoxes of the Modern Age, is that while the advent of rationalism would seem to have stacked the ancient debate about which has epistemic priority, logic, the rules determining the validity of arguments, or evidence, in favour of logic simply by throwing out two whole branches of evidence, tradition and divine revelation, altogether, reducing what remains on the evidence side to the historical and the empirical (scientific), in the long run it has seemed to have had the opposite effect.    Science is now customarily awarded an authority it never claimed for itself, while the basic rules of logic have been neglected and discarded.   Michael Oakeshott noted almost a century ago, that rationalism had introduced a radical change in what reason itself was understood to be.   It had meant one thing from ancient times through St. Thomas on to Richard Hooker, but rationalism had redefined it into something else altogether.   Science also underwent a radical redefinition at the beginning of the Modern Age but evidently, if “science” is now speaking with the voice of authority, it has undergone a second one much more recently.

 

At the risk of committing the ultimate blasphemy of the age, might I suggest that neither reason nor science has been improved by any of these redefinitions, and that we ought to go back to the original meanings of both?

It is Way Too Late for That Brian

Brian Pallister should have been an actor.   Judging from his performance last Thursday he would have been much better in that career than in his chosen profession of politics.   Granted, prior to this year, he did a fairly decent job as premier of the province of Manitoba.   He was certainly a major improvement over his predecessor, Greg Selinger of the NDP, although that is setting the bar of comparison extremely low.   This year however, faced with the true test of leadership, a crisis manufactured by the irresponsible news media and the even more irresponsible medical profession, he failed that test big time.   His tear-jerking, emotional-laden, speech on Thursday may very well indicate that he has missed his true calling, the stage.   His timing, however, needs some work, for the performance would have been much more convincing had it come in March.   Adjustments would have had to be made, of course, as it would have made little sense to talk about stealing Christmas in the middle of Lent.   An emotional appeal to Manitobans to follow public health guidelines would have been much better received if he had led with that, however, instead of tacking it on after nine months of arrogant posturing, threats, and bullying.

 

Pallister’s speech came a couple of days after the release of an Angus Reid Institute survey that indicated that his approval rating had dropped to the lowest of all premiers in the Dominion.   Although he had been asked to comment about this on the day the poll results were released and gave a brief answer it is generally understood that his remarks on Thursday were his real response.  

 

He claimed that he understood why do not like him.  “I understand that, I totally do” he said.   Certainly, he seemed to be aware of the reasons:

 

I’m the guy who has told you that you cannot shop…I am the person who has told you you can’t go to work.  I am the premier who has said you can’t run your business because we have the toughest restrictions in Canada, and it affects people who put their lives into their businesses.  I am the person who has come before you and said you can’t go to church, you can’t see your friends, you can’t travel. I’m that guy.

 

While some dispute this explanation for his drop in approval – Wab Kinew, the current NDP leader, and his butt-kissers in the media think it is due to his having re-opened the economy, which, except for the fact that he shouldn't have closed it in the first place, was the one thing he did right this year – these all seem to be fairly good reasons for disliking him.  It would appear that being aware of the reasons does not actually translate into understanding them, however, because from this starting point, Pallister launched into a bunch of self-justifying hocus pocus about the difference between being liked and respected, illustrated by a story from his school days about being disciplined by the principal for being late and told by the headmaster “You don’t like me right now, son, and that’s okay.  I want you to respect me in ten years.”

 

Does he seriously think that lesson applies here?

 

A teacher who disciplines a child for being late does so to prevent the bad habit of tardiness from forming.   Tardiness is a habit which hurts people both professionally, because employers don’t like to either hire or advance people who are tardy, and socially, because, formal occasions where it is fashionable to be late aside, people do not like to be kept waiting by their friends, dates, etc., all the time.   Like all bad habits, it is easier to break when it is just forming than when it is fully developed.   The principal who yells at a student for being late is, indeed, doing him a favour, and so the line from Pallister’s anecdote does indeed apply in that situation.

 

What Pallister is doing is completely different.

 

To tell people that they cannot go to work or run their business is to do the very opposite of what the teacher who tries to discipline tardiness out of his student does.   Rather than correcting behaviour that is bad and harmful it forbids behaviour that is both good and necessary.   Rather than helping people it is hurting them.   There is nothing in what Pallister is doing that deserves respect, either now or years down the road.

 

He, of course, justifies what he is doing on the grounds that it is “saving lives”.   He said:

 

I will do what I believe is right, and right now I need to save lives.

 

We have been hearing this from him for quite some time.   It is, however, utter nonsense.  

 

It is only ethically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B under certain very limited circumstances.   If Person A pulls a knife on Person B with the intent to kill then we are justified in harming Person A to prevent Person B from being killed.   In this scenario, however, the action of Person A which threatens Person B will definitely have the effect of the death of Person B if not prevented and is done with malicious intent.   Neither of these things is true with regards to the lockdown scenario.    If Person A opens his store there is no certainty that anyone will die from the Wuhan bat flu as a result.   Indeed, when we consider the survival rate of the disease, who the people most likely to die from it are, and the circumstances pertaining to their contracting it, it is, in fact, extremely unlikely that anyone will die as a direct result of Person A opening his store.   Furthermore, there is no malicious intent, no mens rea, in Person A’s opening his store.   His intent is quite good and honourable, to earn a living for himself and his family, by selling people goods that they want or need rather than to be a burden on the public purse.   There is nothing wrong with what he is doing, unless, of course, he is selling nuclear waste to children or some such thing.   Finally, that forbidding Person A from opening his store will harm him is certain, the only uncertainty being the extent of the harm, whether it completely destroys his business and drives him into bankruptcy or not.   The lockdown scenario simply does not meet the standards of when it is ethnically permissible to hurt Person A to save Person B.

 

Immediately after that self-justifying prattle about saving lives Pallister said the following:

 

If you don’t think that Covid is real, right now you’re an idiot. 

 

What an interesting remark from someone who claims that he is doing the right thing and hopes we will eventually respect him for it.    In the same sentence he completely misrepresents the views of those who oppose him and insults them.   To say that someone does not think that Covid real is to say that he questions the existence of either the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the sickness it can produce with symptoms ranging from shortness of breath, fever, and cough to a life-threatening, organ-damaging, severely painful, pneumonia.   I think very few of those who oppose the lockdown question the existence of either of these things.   Opposition to the lockdown is based upon the fact that lockdowns do a lot of very real harm - they devastate the economy, load future generations with piles of debt, damage the fabric of society, dissolve communities, and create mental health problems that themselves result in many fatalities that would not have occurred sans lockdown - and only a small amount at best, of questionable good.   The most informed opposition to the lockdown is also based on the fact that the government imposing what amounts to a total suspension of our constitutional and prescriptive basic freedoms for the supposed sake of keeping us safe from a disease with a survival rate higher than the seasonal flu for otherwise healthy people under the age of 65 and with which the average age of those who die is higher than the average lifespan of Canadians is a giant leap away from civil freedom and towards totalitarianism.

If Mr. Pallister really wants to do the right thing and be respected for it then he had better learn to himself respect the Common Law, the constitution, and the limits these place on his powers as First Minister of the Crown in this province, for until he respects these he is a disgrace to his office.

His speech culminated in an emotional appeal to Manitobans to stay apart at Christmas, full of self-pity about having to be the Grinch that steals Christmas from us this year to keep us safe, so that we will have plenty to celebrate next year.

Well, it was a good performance, but to return to the point made at the beginning, it would have been a lot more persuasive if it had not followed ten months of ordering us around, telling us to snitch on neighbours who don't do as their told, threatening us with punishment, calling us names, setting obscenely high fines for breaking very petty rules, and wasting a million dollars that would have been put to better use hiring extra hospital staff and opening extra beds on contracting a private security organization to help enforce his draconian rules.

Romans 13 and State-Ordered Church Closures

 The thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans poses a problem for those who profess the Christian faith and also subscribe to either the doctrine of civil disobedience as taught by Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century and exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth or to any other version of Whiggism, for that matter, including the founding ideology of the American republic.    This dilemma has inspired a number of very creative attempts at interpreting the passage to  say other than what it says.   Perhaps my favourite of these is the one thing that says St. Paul was being sarcastic.

I do not have this difficulty myself.   I have always thought Thoreau to be an overrated nincompoop, am not part of the idolatrous cult that worships Gandhi and King, do not believe in civil disobedience, and wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Johnson that "the first Whig was the devil."    I therefore accept the New Testament passage at face value, as enjoining civil obedience upon Christians and teaching the "divine right of kings".  As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay it is the first of these two items that is our primary concern here.   Therefore, I shall discuss the second first to get it out of the way.

The divine right of kings is a doctrine that is widely misunderstood.    This is undoubtedly due to the fact that its opponents, the Whigs to whom we have already alluded and their myriad of ideological descendants, have written most of our history books since the late eighteenth century.   Although Herbert Butterfield  exposed the fundamental fallacies of their method of interpreting history , id est to take the progressive liberal values of the present and interpret the past as movement towards those values with people cast in the role of hero or villain according as they are perceived to have advanced or fought to retard the march of progress, in a short volume first published in 1931, with a few notable exceptions such as the dean of Canadian historians Donald G. Creighton and the Hungarian-American Catholic historian John Lukacs, the Whigs have continued to dominate the field.  Most people, therefore, first encounter the divine right of kings in the caricature of its foes.   The doctrine does not mean that God gives kings unlimited, autocratic, power to rule their subjects as they see fit.   It means precisely the opposite of this, that because the king's office is vested with authority the recognized ultimate source of which is God, the exercise of that authority is a sacred duty and vocation for which God holds him strictly accountable and he is therefore by no means free to abuse his authority by tyrannizing his subjects.   Should any of you have been reading my essays since the beginning you may recall that the first posted here, "The Divine Right of Kings versus the Tyranny of the People", made the case that contrary to the Modern belief that freedom and democracy go together, it is democracy and not divine-right kingship, the internal logic of which leads inevitably to tyranny and totalitarianism.   If government exists by the will of the people, whatever that nonsensical phrase which attributes to a collective something that only individuals possess is taken as meaning, and to serve that will, then it need not recognize any limits on what it does to the people it governs, provided that is what the people want.   That this is where the internal logic of democracy ultimately leads was recognized as a problem long ago.   Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous commentary on Democracy in America (1835, 1840), warned about the "tyranny of the majority" and the twentieth century attempt to get around this by redefining the principle of democracy from "whatever the majority wants" to "whatever we all agree upon" was no improvement in this regards for it ultimately means that everybody must be forced to agree and dissent not tolerated, tyranny in its most extreme, totalitarian, form.    The ancient wise men, such as Plato and Aristotle, knew that democracy is the mother of tyranny.   The Whiggish attempt to circumvent the destiny of democratic tyranny by moderating democracy with liberalism, the recognition of individual rights as a limitation on even democratic government , was doomed to failure.   The evidence of that failure now surrounds us.   All it took for elected politicians to shatter completely the fetters placed upon them by constitutional protections of rights and freedoms was for the public to be persuaded that it was "necessary" to "save lives".   Democracy, far from being held back from evolving into its tyrannical, totalitarian form, by liberalism, broke liberalism's bonds like they were made of straw.    Indeed, it broke not only liberalism but the older safeguards of freedom that predated the rise of Modern Whiggery.   Parliamentary control over government spending, a safeguard of freedom the roots of which go back to the Magna Carta, was attacked in both Parliament and our provincial legislatures as both levels of government sought to be released from this oversight in order to deal with the pandemic.   The distinction between public and private, another safeguard of freedom which goes back to the feudal recognition that "every man's home is his castle", was obliterated by the public health mandarins' demands for technology-enhanced total surveillance of everyone to facilitate "contact tracing" in the name of keeping us safe.   These and other examples of pre-Modern safeguards of liberty, belong to the ancient ideal of constitutional government, with which the divine right of kings is consistent and compatible, and which can be summed up as the idea that the civil authority itself is subject to and bound by the law.   Indeed, the divine right of kings properly understood, and not as the Whigs caricatured it, requires the ideal of constitutional government, which is why monarchs are required as part of their sacred coronation oath to vow to uphold and protect the law.   Democracy, as we have seen from the events of this year, is not consistent with this ancient ideal, and indeed, it could be said that democracy in Modern thought has usurped the place of constitutional government in pre-Modern thought (remember that tyranny and usurpation were originally one and the same concept).

When the divine right of kings is stated within the context of moral theology rather than political philosophy it is pretty much what you find in the thirteenth chapter of Romans.   St. Paul says that the civil authority, the "higher powers" in the Authorized Bible, are "ordained by God" and, switching to the singular, are "the minister of God to thee for good".   More specifically "he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."  Some might object that this is a generic "divine right of civil authority" that contains no endorsement with regards to specific constitutional forms.   I will grant that, but point out that the Scriptures as a whole are hardly silent on the latter subject.   If you turn to the passage that "Christian" republicans use as their chief proof-text, the eighth chapter of I Samuel, and read it through, note first that a democratic republic was not what Israel had prior to this chapter and second that every single negative thing Samuel is instructed to tell the Israelites about what the king they have asked for will be like, has historically also been true of republican and democratic governments, and, indeed, democracies and republics have been historically much harder on their people in the way of taxes than kings ever were.   You will find good kings and bad kings in the Bible, and God Himself is identified as the King of kings.   You will not find a good republic or democracy mentioned in the Bible and, indeed, in the numerous examples from Genesis to Revelation of the people getting together to demand something, either of their governors or of God, it far more often than not displeased God, Who not infrequently punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for.

Now, let us turn back to the civil obedience enjoined upon Christians in this passage.    Does this passage require that the Christian Church close its doors and cease meeting together when the state orders it to?   Is there any way I can answer that question with "no" that does not require a clever re-interpretation of the passage like the ones I referred to and rejected at the beginning of the essay?

The answer to the first question is "no" and the answer to the second question is "yes".

The reason the answer to the first question is no is because it involves a situation that is an obvious exception to the general rule.   It is an obvious exception for two reasons.

The first is that if the civil obedience St. Paul enjoined upon Christians involved shutting the Church down and not meeting if so ordered by the state, then Christianity would not have survived the first century.   Christianity began within the Roman Empire and while the Empire was for the most part quite tolerant when it came to religion in various locations the Roman authorities became hostile to the Christian faith, usually when enemies of the faith went to them and accused Christianity of being a subversive political movement.   That Christianity is nothing of the sort is evinced by the passage we are considering, whose author likely had the false accusations against the Church in mind when he penned it.   However, at various times the accusations against Christianity reached to the very highest level and a general persecution of the Christians was ordered by a Caesar.   If St. Paul did not mean meeting together as a Church to be an exception to civil obedience if forbidden, then all a hostile Caesar would have needed to do was forbid the Church to ever meet again and it would have had to have dissolved permanently.   The Roman authorities did, in fact, outlaw Christianity at various times, and the Church had to meet in secret.   This was not "civil disobedience" in the Thoreau/Gandhi/King sense of defiantly breaking the law to challenge injustice.   It was simply not obeying a civil order that would  have required them to disobey a command from the Highest Authority.

This brings us to the second reason, which is that this very type of scenario occurs in the Scriptures and the way the Scriptures deal with these scenarios makes it clear that an exception to civil obedience is to be found here.

These examples can be found in both Testaments.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is set in the period of the Babylonian Captivity.   You might recall from the Book of Jeremiah that when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and carried everyone away captive, the Lord's instructions through the prophet were that they were to go away, be good subjects of the Babylonian king, and they would live and one day He would return them to the Promised Land.   Daniel and his three friends were among the youth of the Hebrew nobility who were taken captive.   Being devout, they set out to obey the Lord's command and be good Babylonian citizens.   At various points in the book, however, they were required to do something that would break the Law of God.   In the third chapter, for example, Nebuchadnezzar ordered a giant gold idol to be erected in the plain of Dura and commanded all of his high officials to fall down and worship it.   Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, Daniel's three friends who had been raised to such positions at the end of the second chapter as part of Daniel's reward for revealing and interpreting the king's dream (of a giant image with a gold head interpreted to be Nebuchadnezzar himself, presumably the inspiration for his misguided actions in this incident, and the reason, although the text doesn't spell it out, why the image is widely thought to have been of the king himself) were among those so commanded but, since this would be the idolatry forbidden by the Second Commandment, they did not worship the image, and were cast into a fiery furnace as punishment, from which they were miraculously delivered.   Later in the book, in the sixth chapter after the Persians have conquered Babylon, and Daniel is promoted to an even higher position, other officials envious of him persuade Darius to make a decree forbidding anyone to make a petition to any other God or man except himself for the period of a month.   When Daniel continues, despite the edict, to pray to the Lord three times a day, he is accused, and thrown into a den of lions.  Like his friends he is miraculously spared.

The second  example, you will note, is closer to the scenario we are contemplating because rather than requiring something wrong, idolatry, as was the case with the first example, it involves the forbidding of a duty owed to God.

In the New Testament, after the Ascension the disciples of Jesus wait in Jerusalem as commanded until the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost comes upon them and empowers them.   St. Peter preaches a bold sermon to the crowd and about three thousand are converted and baptized.  These continue to meet on a daily basis in the Jewish Temple and, for their specifically Christian fellowship, involving the Apostles' teaching, the Eucharist ("breaking of bread") and prayer, from house to house, as there were no buildings assigned to the purpose and consecrated for it as of yet.   Daily their numbers increased.   Evidently they did not believe in the Satanic lies of "social distancing" and "limiting gatherings" but this was because they put their faith in God, living two millennia before George Bernard Shaw could sadly but accurately say "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession".   In the third chapter of Acts, SS Peter and John heal a man born lame at the gate of the Temple.  This leads to another sermon by St. Peter in Solomon's porch.   Five thousand are converted but the Apostles are arrested.   Brought before the chief priests the next day, they preach to them as well.   The Jewish authorities forbid them to preach and teach in the name of Jesus and their answer is "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.  For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard".  In the fifth chapter, after they have continued their ministry and the Church has continued to grow, the Apostles are imprisoned, miraculously set free, and, after they have resumed their teaching the next day, brought before the Sanhedrin.  Their answer to the council began with the words "We ought rather to obey God rather than men."

It is these words that express the response of the faithful when those in authority forbid the practice of the Christian religion.   

So clearly a command from the state not to meet as the Church is an exception to the civil obedience commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans.    This does not mean that when the state orders the Church to close, as it has done this year, that we ought to conduct sit-ins, or behave in any of the other ways that have come to be associated with civil disobedience.   When refusing to obey orders of this nature it must be with the attitude that this is an exception to a general rule that is necessary because to obey such orders would be to disobey the very Higher Authority that enjoined civil obedience upon us through St. Paul's words.

There is no Church if she does not meet.   This is something that those whose ecclesiology begins and ends with "the Church is the people not the building" overlook.   Yes, the Church is the people and not the building in which they meet.   The individualist spin so often put on this phrase has no warrant in Scripture.  The very name given to the Body of Christ in the New Testament, ekklesia, is the Greek word for "assembly".   It is people, but people joined together as an assembly or congregation, not people apart from each other doing their own thing on an individual basis.   When the state orders the  Church not to meet - and remember in the first days of the Church they met daily not once a week - it is commanding the Church not to be the Church.   When it tells the Church we can meet but only "virtually" not "in-person" it is commanding us to live a lie.   For that is what being apart, mutually watching an online video, and calling it "being together" is.   It is pretending that this artificial "virtual space" that exists only as an image on our computer screens is reality.   That is an incredibly dangerous road down which to go.

It has been very disappointing, therefore, that this year, the Churches have with few exceptions, chosen to obey man rather than God on this matter.   Medical doctors, who belong to the profession with the least respect for privacy, rights, and freedoms, and therefore ought never to be trusted with any sort of civil authority, have been handed dictatorial powers because of a virus that they have been allowed to blow completely out of proportion, and they have ordered Churches to close, to offer virtual services only, and, in the brief respite from this over the summer, to limit their numbers, forbid congregations from singing, require them to register in advance, sit in designated places, and muzzle their faces.   It is very sad that most Churches have followed these evil orders, despite their being a clear exception to the rule of civil obedience, while those following the Apostles in saying "we ought rather to obey God than men" have been mostly the separatist sects and outright heretics.

God save the Queen and may He punish the politicians who do evil in her name!

Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.

 

The Great Stereopticon - Enemy of Freedom

In 1946, the Reverend Dr. Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist Presbyterian minister from Collingwood, New Jersey, editor of The Christian Beacon newspaper, radio preacher on The 20^th Century Reformation Hour, and a pioneer of sorts in the field of Christian ecumenism – he tried to build an orthodox, Protestant, alternative to the mainstream, liberal, ecumenical movement, although his separatism and his personality both frequently got in the way of his efforts – published a book entitled The Author of Liberty.   Through his entire ministry, McIntire combined his fiery, fundamentalist version of Scottish Calvinism with American political conservatism and was, most admirably, a fervent opponent of totalitarianism, in both its Nazi and Communist forms.   I disagree, of course, with his tendency to equate freedom with American democracy and republicanism, holding instead to the views of John Farthing, son of the Anglican Bishop of Montreal of the same name (1), expressed in his posthumously published work Freedom Wears a Crown.   Nevertheless, I do very much agree with McIntire’s having identified God as the author of liberty or freedom.   God created man in His own image, as a rational being with moral agency, and initially the only limit placed on that agency, outside of those built into the very structure and order of the universe itself, was a single negative command (the positive command to multiply and fill the earth can hardly be said to constitute a limitation).   When man’s disobedience enslaved him to his own sinfulness, further commandments were added out of necessity, but the entire plan of salvation revealed in the Scriptures and centred in the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is about setting men free from slavery to sin.    That is why the term redemption – literally, purchasing the freedom of a slave – is so frequently used to describe the saving work of Jesus Christ.

 

If God is the author of liberty, and He is, then obviously the ultimate enemy of freedom is Satan.   It is worth noting, in this regards, that the traditional theological explanation of Satan’s origin is of an angel who got too full of himself and tried to usurp the place of God.   The ancient term for the opposite of freedom, tyranny, is a term that originally had strong connotations of usurpation.   Satan is traditionally and Scripturally depicted as a tyrant who holds men in bondage through his lies and their own sins.   

 

All that having been said, it is not Satan himself that I wish to focus on in this essay, since I have already basically covered that topic in a previous and quite recent one. (2)   I shall instead be looking at what is most evidently his chief means of deceiving people and attacking their freedom in the day in which we live.  

 

This instrument, like the sinister being whose purposes it presently serves, goes by many names.   Earlier this year, I used one of its oldest names, the fourth estate, in making the observation that while, under this label, it presents itself as the watchdog policing the powerful on behalf of our rights and freedoms, the answer to Juvenal’s famous question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes in its usual broader application (3), the question, in fact, needs to be asked of it as much as of any other watcher.    Here in this context, however, I prefer the term “The Great Stereopticon” used by Richard M. Weaver in his Ideas Have Consequences (1948), because it emphasizes the inhuman, mechanical nature of that which is most often simply called the media.

 

The Great Stereopticon is both the title and the subject matter of the fifth chapter of Weaver’s book.    This chapter ought to be read in the context of the work at a whole by anyone who really wants a grasp on the nature and purpose of this perception-generating machine.    Weaver’s book, originally written as a contemplative response to the invention and use of the atomic bomb, traces the decline and decay of Western civilization over the course of centuries starting with the abandonment of the unifying, integrated, worldview of the ancients and Medievals in which the temporal world and the passing things of it were perceived as subordinate to the greater and permanent reality of an eternal order.    The decay of civilization is the result of a process of literal disintegration that removes the individual from his place in the larger order which gave him meaning and purpose and throws him onto his own resources to invent these for himself.   While he is told that this is liberating, it in fact makes his existence less human and more mechanical, and thus less free rather than more.   Weaver’s insights closely harmonize with the parallel observations of other Anglican Christian Platonists such as C. S. Lewis and George Grant about the way in which Modern thinking has reversed the ancient concept of liberty, both personal and political.   Whereas to the ancients, personal liberty consisted in mastering the inner appetites which strive to dominate us, to the Moderns personal liberty consisted of the emancipation of such desires and thus, by the standards of the ancients, our own enslavement.    Furthermore, in Modern thinking political liberty is when the laws of the civil order assist in the cause of the emancipation of desire even from the constraints placed upon it by the order of reality itself.   To obtain such “liberty”, Grant frequently warned, required a technological mastery of nature which, ironically, in turn required an increased degree of social control, that would have been recognized as tyranny by the ancients.   Political liberty in the older and traditional sense, of laws that secure to each person his life and his property, would be lessened rather than increased.

 

The “Great Stereopticon”, Weaver told us, is a “wonderful machine” constructed by the “vested interests of our age”, the function of which is “to project selected pictures of life in the hope that what is seen will be imitated.”   The intent behind this is to fill the vacuum of an orderly, unifying, vision that was left by the disintegration of the ancient “metaphysical dream”.   “The Great Stereopticon”, Weaver wrote, “like most gadgets, has been progressively improved and added to until today it is a machine of three parts: the press, the motion picture, and the radio.”   Obviously, that is in need of an update.   Indeed, it arguably needed an update even as it went to press, for that was about the time that televisions were becoming standard household items.   Today, of course, computers and the worldwide web that connects them together are the dominant part of the latest model of the Great Stereopticon.  

 

Weaver proceeded to go part by part through the machine, eviscerating each piece in turn.  The newspaper, “a spawn of the machine” and “a mechanism itself” he wrote, “has ever been closely linked with the kind of exploitation, financial and political, which accompanies industrialism.”   It is evidence, he suggested, that Plato was on to something when, in the Phaedrus, he presented arguments that he invention of the written word led to the propagation of false knowledge, forgetfulness, and the fossilization of accounts of truth.   “Faith in the printed word”, he said, “has raised journalists to the rank of oracles”, but added that they were better described by Plato’s words “They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome, having the reputation of knowledge, without the reality”.

 

While Weaver’s negative appraisal of the Great Stereopticon went much further than the threat it posed to freedom, this threat was raised within his criticism.   The danger, as Weaver saw it, was that rather than facilitating the discussion and dialogue upon which freedom depend, as it presented itself as doing, the machine limited and minimized dialogue.   He wrote:

 

There is much to indicate that modern publication wishes to minimize discussion.  Despite many artful pretensions to the contrary, it does not want an exchange of views, save perhaps on academic measures.   Instead, it encourages men to read in the hope that they will absorb.   For one thing, there is the technique of display, with its implied evaluations.   This does more of the average man’s thinking for him than he suspects.   For another, there is the stereotyping of whole phrases.   These are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation.   Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as fairly treasonable, like refusal to salute the flag.  

 

Today we have gone far past that point.   Think of how everyone who has failed to make the stock response of shaking with fear, curling up in the fetal position, sucking one’s thumb, and hiding under one’s bed, waiting for some big pharmaceutical company to save them from the Bogeyman of the bat flu, that the newspapers and television news stations, aided and abetted by the social media companies, have been working so hard to evoke this year, has been treated.   They have indeed been treated as if they had committed a form of treason.  The message of the Great Stereopticon has been that everything that our governments have inflicted on us has been necessary for our own good and safety and that therefore “we are all in this together”.    By opposing the government measures, saying that it is not right to suspend everyone’s constitutional civil rights and basic freedoms just because a virus is circulating, and that the harm done by lockdowns has exceeded any harm the virus had potential of causing, those who dare to take this stand are putting the lie to the Great Stereopticon’s message by saying “we are not in this together with you.”     When faced with such contradiction, those saying “we are all in this together” show that despite their warm and fuzzy slogan, what they really mean is “dissent will not be tolerated, so put up and shut up.”

 

Sixteen years after Weaver wrote about the Great Stereopticon, Marshall McLuhan, a convert to Roman Catholicism who taught at the University of Toronto and had made communications theory his primary field of interest, published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.    This was not his first book, but it would become his best known work.    Indeed, a short five word meme that summarizes the thesis of the book, is what he is most remembered for today. (4)   That meme is “the medium is the message.”   What McLuhan was saying here was that communications media are not what the convention wisdom of his day took them to be, neutral means of transmitting information that did not matter as much as the content of the information they conveyed.   Against this conventional wisdom, he argued that the opposite was in fact the case, that the nature of the medium itself was what shaped what people heard and saw and thought and, therefore, shaped culture, society, and civilization.  By contrast, the content of what the media convey was relatively unimportant and almost irrelevant.  Thus, when new media replace old, as with the invention of the movable type printing press in the fifteenth century, and broadcasting technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the changes that were effected were largely the inevitable result of the new media and would have been more or less the same had the content of what was printed and broadcast been completely different..  

 

There are many parallels between McLuhan’s thesis and George Grant’s response to the idea that technology is morally neutral.  Indeed, since for McLuhan “the media” included not just the parts of the Great Stereopticon identified by Weaver, or even all the extra parts that we would recognize today, but “any new technology”, their arguments are even closer than what would be the case if McLuhan’s “media” were merely a subcategory of Grant’s “technology”.    While Grant dealt with this subject throughout his entire corpus of writing, it is his answer to the assertion made by a computer scientist that “the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used” in his essay “Thinking About Theology” that I have in mind here. (5)    This sentence, Grant maintained, although it is incontrovertible at one level, the identification of the computer as an instrument that serves human ends, good or bad, is misleading, because it separates the computer from the paradigm of thought that produced it and that paradigm is a destiny which does indeed impose itself upon people.    Machines have been moving us towards universal homogeneity, both because there is a tendency for societies that use the same kind of machines to resemble each other (here Grant used the automobile as an example) and because of the additional homogenizing factor of the “vast corporate structures” needed to produce and maintain them.

 

To bring what we have gleaned from Weaver, McLuhan and Grant together, the downside to the development of technology has frequently by described in terms of the mechanization of human life.    While we invent machines to serve us, a consequence of their invention is that our society itself is transformed into something resembling a large machine in which we are human parts.    Existence as a cog in a machine falls far short of what the ancients recognized as freedom.    The technological media pose a more specific threat to this kind of freedom because this freedom consists in the exercise of moral agency, which depends upon rational decision making, which requires information, and the technological media exist to control the flow of said information.    

 

The threat the media poses to liberty, therefore, goes much deeper than the mere “bias” which is the extent of the media criticism that you will hear from the average “conservative” and by which is meant a partisan slant on the part of those reporting the news.   Granted, the bias they are talking about exists, as has been even more evident this year than previously, especially in the coverage of the American election, but this is merely the surface problem.    Ironically, although they get practically everything else about the matter wrong, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, writing from the liberal-left in Manufacturing Consent (1988), displayed a better grasp on the fact that mass communications media itself is intrinsically subversive of freedom within liberal democracy.  Bias of a partisan nature is hardly the explanation of the media’s fomenting fear so that we would accept the curtailing of our basic constitutional and prescriptive freedoms of association, assembly and religion, and sacrifice the moral agency of making informed, rational, decisions including calculated risks with regards to the Wuhan bat flu.

 

Indeed, it is evident in what we have been seeing from the Great Stereopticon this year, not merely in the hysteria they have generated about the bat flu but in their treatment of other matters as well, especially the American presidential election and the anti-white hate fest that broke out into violent riots all over the Western world earlier this year, that the Great Stereopticon has undergone a complete overhaul, an upgrade in both hardware and software, that goes far beyond the mere addition of a few new components since the time Weaver penned his classic description of it seventy years ago.    The image the machine now projects is so disjointed from reality, things as they are, that it warrants comparison to the Matrix.   Astonishingly, this is true even in the detail of most people being unaware of the artificial nature of the image they mistake for reality.   I use the adverb astonishingly because unlike with the artificial world depicted in the motion picture franchise, the Great Stereopticon is not putting much effort into convincingly hiding the disconnect between its images and reality.    It has been telling us that the bat flu is a plague of apocalyptic proportions and that the rising numbers are “staggering” even though the absence of any significant amount of excess morality this year is not difficult to discover, it has labelled the violent riots of the racist anti-white hate fest “peaceful protests”, even using this deceptive description when describing police officers being assaulted and showing video of cities burning, and has told us that claims of voter fraud in the American election are without substantiating evidence as if hundreds of affidavits of eyewitness testimony did not constitute evidence.

The best “update” of Weaver’s account of the Great Stereopticon of which I am aware, actually an expansion upon McLuhan’s famous meme, is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton’s Addicted to Distraction (2014).    Since I have already reviewed this book at length (6), I shall simply say here that it explores the Matrix-like extent of the image projected by the machine which Dr. Charlton calls the Mass Media with capitals to distinguish it as a singular, integrated, system from the mere plural of medium, and demonstrates that it is not merely biased towards the Left in a partisan sense, but indistinguishable from the Left in the nihilistic sense of the ongoing revolution that seeks to tear down all that is good, if imperfect, in actual reality.      

 

Since freedom as the ancients knew it can only be found in submission to the actual reality of the order of things as they are under God, the media machine’s attacks on that reality and efforts to trap us in a fake one, constitute a double assault on our freedom.    This tells us, to return in conclusion to the point made in the second paragraph, in whose hands the Great Stereopticon is ultimately an instrument.

(1)   They had different middle names, albeit with the same initial letter, so this is not a case of a senior and junior.   The Right Reverend John C. Farthing’s middle name was Cragg.   His son, the Tory philosopher, was John Colborne Farthing.

(2)   Satan is the Author of the New Normal

(3)   Juvenal’s immediate application was to a guard hired by a jealous husband to ensure his wife’s fidelity.   See my How Juvenal! – The Fourth Estate.

(4)   Actually, it is one of two memes for which he is remembered.   The other is “global village”.   He would be appalled at much of the use to which the latter has been put.

(5)   This is the first essay in Technology and Justice, 1986.

(6)   A Cave of Our Own Construction