The Ends of Social Policy

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




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



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



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



What are the conservative, liberal, and progressive positions?



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Here, however, the conservative runs into a dilemma.



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



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



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



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





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

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

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

Society is an Organism

There are many things I admire about former British Prime Minister, Baroness Margaret Thatcher. I admire her Cold War anti-communism and the strong leadership she provided her country during the Falkland Islands War. I admire the honourable way in which she stood up for General Pinochet, who had been a consistent friend to the West in general and to Great Britain in particular, when he was dishonourably arrested by the Blair government during a visit to Britain.

Needless to say I also agree with many of her ideas. While I am not as doctrinaire a Hayekian as she is I am in general sympathy with her belief in economic freedom and private property and her opposition to welfarism and socialism. I can think of no better response to the silliness of anti-royalism than Lady Thatcher’s remark that “Those who imagine that a politician would make a better figurehead than a hereditary monarch might perhaps make the acquaintance of more politicians.”

There is, however, a well-known statement she made with which I strongly disagree. In an interview with Douglas Keay of Women’s Own magazine in 1987, she said “There is no such thing as society.” This was a rather bizarre statement for someone who was at the time serving as Prime Minister of a society to make. As we will see it was also a statement that was particularly inappropriate in the mouth of the leader of the Conservative Party, which Lady Thatcher was at the time. She made the remark in the context of arguing that people should take responsibility for their own lives and not expect the government to solve all their problems for them. That is a perfectly sound position which makes the absurdity of her remark stand out all the more against the background of such straightforward common sense.

As it happened, we do not have to ask ourselves what on earth she was thinking. The remark generated all sorts of comment and the Sunday Times, in its July 10, 1988 published a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office explaining what she meant. The statement reiterated the point about personal responsibility and includes these illuminating remarks about her earlier words:

But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done.


This clarifies everything. She was expressing a basic concept of classical liberalism.

One of the ideas of classical liberalism is that individuals have concrete existence but societies do not. Society, according to liberalism, is an abstract idea constructed by individuals to help them better their own lives in cooperation with other individuals. Society is no more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it and to treat it as if it were something more than that, liberalism says, is to commit the fallacy of reification, the false attribution of concreteness to something that is only abstract.

Now there are some liberal ideas that a conservative can agree with. This, however, is not one of them. It is in fundamental contradiction to the conservative understanding of the nature of society. It is also a key element of the theoretical foundation for progressive social engineering. Liberalism and progressivism are both the offspring of the modern rationalist belief that human beings can create a better life and future for themselves by doing away with tradition all together and applying reason and the findings of empirical science to the planning of such a future. Progressives believe that governments should implement this planning over the objections of those who have an “irrational” preference for traditional ways of life. It is far easier to believe that a better society can be devised from scratch through rational planning and that opposition to such planning is irrational and should be overruled by the state in people’s own interests if you also believe that society itself is just an abstract concept.

Conservatives do not share the liberal and progressive faith in the ability of human reason to design a better way of living and a better society from scratch. Conservatism is the belief that a society that grows and develops, slowly and naturally, over a long period of time, will never be perfect, but will always be preferable to a society drawn up on paper by some committee of planners, no matter how intelligent they may be. A society that grows and develops naturally over time cannot be merely an abstract concept. It must exist in a more concrete sense.

The liberal idea that society is merely an abstract concept shows just how out of touch with reality liberalism is. This idea is closely connected to the liberal idea of the priority of the individual. Indeed, the two ideas are the reverse sides of one coin in that neither could be true if the other were false. The idea of the priority of the individual is that the individual is prior to all social groups and that human beings are autonomous individuals in their natural state. For this to be true society would have to be an abstract concept thought up by individuals and for society to be an abstract concept thought up by individuals the individual would have to be prior to all levels of social organization. Yet the idea that the individual is prior to society is demonstrably false. Every human being born into this world is born into a number of social groups of which he is already a member without his voluntary consent being given or even asked for. He is born into his family, both the nuclear family consisting of his parents, whatever siblings he might have, and himself, and his extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Except in the most unusual of circumstances he will have been born into a community as well. Each of these, his nuclear family, his extended family, and the community to which his family belongs, existed before he did.

The liberal theory of the priority of the individual is not only false it is the opposite of what is observably true in the real world. It follows from this that the idea that society exists only as an abstract concept and not as something concrete is false too.

If society has concrete existence it must also have a nature. The traditional society preferred by conservatives over the artificial planned society preferred by liberals, progressives, and other rationalists is organic in nature.

What exactly does it mean to say that traditional society is organic?

The first thing it means is that traditional society has the quality, already discussed, of having grown and developed naturally over time rather than having been deliberately thought up and drawn out by a group of social planners. This is why the expression “the organic model of society”, an expression I confess to being guilty of having used in the past, is a contradiction in terms. A model is a tool of the rational planner. An architect designing a large building, a civil engineer designing the traffic infrastructure of a city, and an inventor designing a piece of complex machinery, might each first build a model so as to test his design and fix the flaws he finds before the construction of the final product begins. There can be no organic model of society because an organic society cannot be designed and constructed in this manner.

The concept of an organic society is a metaphor rather than a model. It means that to understand the nature of such a society we should think of a living organism, like a human being, animal, or plant. The way in which persons and groups within a society, relate to each other and cooperate with each other to form the society, is analogous to the way cells, tissues, and organs come together to form an organism.

There are a number of different ways in which the metaphor of an organism sheds light upon the nature of society.

Take, for example, the way the body of a complex organism like a human being, is multilayered. The human body consists entirely of cells but these cells do not come together directly to form the unity which is the body. First, cells of a similar type and function form tissues. Organs, such as the heart, lungs, and brain, are then formed out of tissues, and come together themselves to form systems like the nervous, reproductive, and digestive systems. Finally these systems, cooperating together by each performing its distinct function, make up a human body.

A traditional society is like this too. A traditional society is made up of people but individuals do not come together directly to form the unity which is society. Individuals belong to families and families come together to form larger social groups of various sorts. Families with similar education, occupations, wealth, and social status come together to form classes. Families that live in proximity to one another and who tend to do business with each other, shop in the same stores, eat in the same restaurants, send their children to the same schools, and regularly meet each other in a variety of contexts of work and play, form communities. Families that regularly meet together to collectively worship their God form religions. All of these various groups together make up a society.

As with any other metaphor the details of the analogy should not be pressed too far. The correlation that is being drawn is between the relationship of the parts of the body to the whole and the relationship between the parts of society and the whole. This does not mean that every specific part of society corresponds to a specific part of the body or vice-versa. Sometimes such a correlation may exist. That the government performs the same function in society that the head performs in the body is an observation that has been around since at least the time of Plato’s Republic. (1) Other times there may be no such specific correlation.

Parallels can be drawn between the role of the individual in society and that of the cell in the body. One can also draw parallels between the family and the cell, however. If the family is the cell then the individual is the atom. Interestingly, the term social atomization is used to refer to the alienation of the individual from society that has been brought about by modern conditions.

There is another way in which the relationship between the whole of a society and its parts resembles that of the body of a living organism and that is in its longevity. The life of a complex organism is ordinarily much longer than the lifespan of most of its cells. Its cells are constantly multiplying and replacing themselves. Indeed the fact that is occurs is one of the most basic traits that distinguishes living from dead material. The lifespans of the various cells which make up the human body vary, most falling within a range that goes from a couple of days to a little over a year. Only the cells of the brain and nervous system live as long as the body itself (2) assuming that one does not kill them prematurely by consuming toxic substances or holding to progressive ideas.

In similar fashion the lifespans of the people who make up a society vary but are usually much shorter than the lifespan of the society itself. Some people live out the threescore and ten years allotted to them by the psalmist, some live longer, and some die young for one reason or another. The lifespan of a society, however, is ordinarily measured in centuries not in years. As cells multiply, replace themselves, and die within an organism that lives much longer than they do, so generation succeeds generation as people are born, reproduce, and die, within the life of their society.

An implication of this is that the good of the whole society should be considered, not just in terms of its present living members, but of past and future generations as well. (3)

Further light on the nature of an organic society can be found by considering and answering a misconception about it.

The most common objection to the organic view of society is that it is a recipe for totalitarianism. An organic society, libertarians say, is a society in which the parts are completely subordinated to the whole and therefore the organic view of society serves the interests of despotic governments looking to justify their acts of tyranny.

In answer to this objection it should be pointed out that while specific despots may have used the organic theory in this manner the idea that government should have absolute control over the lives of its people by no means follows from the view that society is best understood as an organism. Earlier, I pointed out that the contractual model of society, which is part of the classical liberal worldview held by most libertarians, is itself an important element in the theoretical justification of progressive social engineering. Progressive social engineering is when the government, in order to achieve progressive goals like universal economic and social equality, interferes with the customs, traditions, mores, and folkways which people follow in their everyday lives. The idea that society is an abstract concept, a contract drawn up by individuals for the good of individuals, eliminates many of the objections people might have to this sort of heavy-handed government interference with the way of life they have learned and inherited from their parents and ancestors. Several objections to such social engineering arise, on the other hand, out of the idea that society is a living organism.

Indeed, the idea that the government should have absolute control over the lives of its people does not logically follow the idea that society is an organism at all. Think about it. Throughout your entire life, the cells, organs, and systems in your body perform various functions. How many of these do you consciously control? Do you ordinarily think about how your lungs inhale and exhale air and instruct them on how to do a better job? Do you regularly tell your heart when to beat? Do you find yourself bossing your kidneys and your liver around or passing laws in your brain regulating the way your skin absorbs sunlight or your white blood cells fight off infection? If you had to consciously control all the internal processes in your body you would be unable to function. Neither can a society function when its government tries to micromanage all the affairs of its members. If anything, the organic metaphor suggests that government should have less control over the affairs of a society’s members than you have over the involuntary processes and functions that take place in your body. This is because the people who make up a society possess something which the cells and organs which make up a human being do not possess and that is the ability to reflect, deliberate, and make choices.

The organic understanding of society, then, is not consistent with tyranny. The idea that the members of a society are parts of an organic whole is not an excuse for government oppression. It means that when people go about their everyday lives, voluntarily acting in ways influenced by the customs and traditions that have been passed on to them, which have developed throughout their society’s history to serve its needs, their actions contribute to the greater good of the whole society. When a man and a woman marry each other, have children, raise those children to both fend for themselves and cooperate with others in accordance with the customs and rules of their society, this serves the good of their society as a whole, which cannot survive unless a new generation follows the old generation.

A conservative is someone who prefers this kind of traditional, organic, society to one drawn up on paper by even the most competent of planners. For this reason “there is no such thing as society” is a phrase that does not belong in the mouth of the leader of a party which professes to be conservative.

(1) Ironically, of course, when Plato places this observation in the mouth of his mentor Socrates in The Republic, Socrates and his friends are engaged in thinking up a hypothetical, ideal model of a city-state.

(2) The claim that all of the cells in your body are completely replaced every seven years is a myth.

(3) Those who would question how the good of people now deceased could be affected in the present are invited to read the accounts of Solon’s interview with Croesus of Lydia found in Herodotus’ Histories and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and the discussion of this interview in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. When, according to Herodotus and Plutarch, the Athenian lawgiver Solon in his travels met Croesus, the king displayed his wealth to him and asked him if he had ever known a happier man. He was not pleased when Solon answered yes and proceeded to name Tellus, Cleobis, and Biton, all of whom were dead. Solon told him that because the fortunes of man rise and fall “and him only to whom the divinity has continued happiness unto the end we call happy; to salute as happy one that is still in the midst of life and hazard, we think as little safe and conclusive as to crown and proclaim as victorious the wrestler that is yet in the ring.” Croesus would learn what Solon meant when he lost his kingdom and life to the conquest of the Persians. Aristotle, in Book One of his Nicomachean Ethics asks “Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? Or is not this quite absurd, especially for us who say that happiness is an activity?” He then takes the question further than Solon himself had taken it by questioning how the fortunes of children and descendants affect the happiness of the dead. “It would be odd, then, if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy, at another wretched; while it would also be odd if the fortunes of the descendants did not for some time have some effect on the happiness of their ancestors.” The quotation from Solon is from Plutarch’s account of his life as translated by John Dryden. The quotations from Aristotle are from W. D. Ross’ translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Caution and Change

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up” – Robert Frost

Lucius Carey, the 2nd Viscount Falkland, who died fighting for the House of Stuart in the English Civil War, once said “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” He made this remarkable statement in the context of a speech given in 1641. The previous December, the Puritans of London had presented the “Root and Branch” petition to Parliament which called for the abolition of the episcopal government of the Church of England. Out of the petition arose the Root and Branch Bill, which would have replaced the episcopacy with a presbyterian church government . The Bill passed the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords. Lord Falkland’s speech, including the famous words quoted above, was given in response to the Root and Branch petition, and in defense of the Anglican bench of bishops.

When the radicals won the English Civil War they deposed and murdered King Charles I, placing Britain under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and abolished the house of bishops. Puritan rule proved so disastrous that after Cromwell’s death, Parliament restored the episcopacy of the Church of England, its Prayer Book and its authorized Bible, and brought Charles II back from exile and placed him upon his father’s throne.

The English were lucky that they were able to undo the damage which the Puritans had done. There are other countries which have not been as fortunate. Their revolutions were so complete that the will and ability to go back was simply not present. In this we see the wisdom of Lord Falkland’s words. It is often far easier to make a change than to undo it once you have made it and found you didn’t like it. Therefore, we should exercise a great deal of caution before tampering with things, especially things that have been established for a long time and have the weight of precedent and prescription behind them.

There is a common saying which expresses this same truth that Lord Falkland stated 371 years ago. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Lord Falkland died fighting for his king and for the established episcopal Church of England. By the end of the 17th Century, those who supported the cause for which he fought and died, had organized themselves into the Tory Party, which in the 19th Century would be reorganized into the Conservative Party. While the party often seems to have moved far from the principles upon which it was founded, if asked for a quote that summarized the ideas of small-c, philosophical conservatism in a nutshell, Falkland’s remark about change would fit the bill nicely.

Liberals and progressives frequently misconstrue the conservative view of change in two ways.

The first is to say that we are blind supporters of the status quo who oppose all change. But Falkland’s maxim does not preclude all change, only unnecessary change. “Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation”, Russell Kirk wrote, in the sixth of his “canons of conservatism” (1).

The second is to say that once a change proposed by a liberal or progressive has been accomplished, we conservatives are forbidden by our own philosophy, to try and undo that change, because undoing the change is itself also a change. The word “reactionary” was originally a term of abuse coined by progressives and liberals to refer to someone who tried to undo the changes they had accomplished. “A true conservative”, the progressive claims “cannot be a reactionary”. That is nonsense, however. A large part of the reason the conservative recommendation of caution and prudence before changing something is sensible is because it is easier to make the change than to undo it if we find the change is for the worse. If that is the case, it makes no sense to take that same recommendation of caution and prudence as precluding all attempts to undo a change for the worse if it is possible so to do. Prudence, of course, should be exercised in deciding to undo a progressive change as much as it should be exercised before making the change in the first place. But conservative principles do not mean that once progressives have saddled us with an obnoxious change we must therefore consider ourselves to be forever stuck with it. A conservative can, and often should, be a reactionary.

This is all the more true because of the unfortunate fact that the wisdom of the caution and prudence counseled by conservatism, is very often best seen after the time to exercise it has passed, and an ill-conceived innovation has been made.

The period beginning with the end of the Second World War has been an era that has seen rapid and tremendous social changes in Western countries. By social changes, I mean changes to the ways we interact with other people and to the contextual framework of rules and institutions within which that interaction takes places. The social changes to which I refer are not changes to minor customs, manners, and rules. They are changes to fundamental patterns of behaviour. Indeed, the most radical changes have been to the most fundamental pattern of behaviour of all.

Human beings belong to one of two sexes, male and female. The physical union of the sexes is the means whereby the human species propagates itself. Since human beings are not immortal the propagation of the species is absolutely necessary for human survival. There is not much of a threat that the species will die out from people losing interest in sexual intercourse. The urge to seek out and form a union with someone of the other sex is one of the strongest instinctual drives hardwired into human beings. There is, however, a threat to ordered, civilized society that comes from the opposite direction, the threat that we will follow our urges wherever they may lead us.

The reason this is a threat should be obvious. The propagation of the species requires more than just sexual reproduction. Human children are not born with the ability to survive on their own. They cannot feed or clothe themselves at birth, they cannot find shelter, they cannot protect themselves if attacked. They need others to do these things for them and to train them to do these things for themselves. Furthermore, human children require more than just the basic training necessary for survival. They also need training in how to interact with and cooperate with other people in the society to which they belong.

Who are they supposed to get all of this from?

The best people to provide for and protect children when they are helpless, to train them to take care of themselves, and to raise them to be functioning members of society, are the people who brought them into the world in the first place, their father and their mother. Now that is clearly not always possible. Sometimes a child is orphaned, for example. There also needs to be the qualification that in saying that parents are the best people to raise their own children we do not mean parents by themselves. Obviously a father and mother, with the help and support of their own fathers and mothers and their siblings, is better than a father and mother by themselves, and it is better yet when the family has the further support of their friends and neighbors in the community in which they live. This qualification itself needs to be qualified, however. As valuable as the contribution of friends, neighbors and community may be, it is valuable as a support for parents in their role of child raising and not as a substitute for them. (2)

For this reason, human societies have traditionally imposed rules regarding sexual behaviour on their members. The exact details of the rules have varied from society to society but they all encourage the same basic pattern of behaviour in which a man and a woman marry each other and raise their children together, and they all discourage people from irresponsibly indulging their sexual appetites in a selfish pursuit of sensual gratification.

Surely if there is any area which requires long and hard serious thought and a high degree of caution and prudence before making any changes it is to this pattern of behaviour and to this set of rules. Yet the post-World War II era has seen change after radical change in just this area. These have not been merely cosmetic changes to the details of the rules either. The opposite of the message conveyed in the old rules is now being openly and actively proclaimed throughout society. The pattern of man and woman marry and raise their children together is now dismissed as antiquated and obsolete in many circles. Social restraints on sexual behaviour, even those not backed up by the force of law, are now widely considered to be intrusions into what is a “private” matter.

Those who defend these changes often do so on the grounds that technological advancements have rendered the old rules obsolete. (3) This argument is based upon a misunderstanding of why these rules were there in the first place. It is based upon the idea that the rules existed primarily to protect individuals from such consequences of sexual activity as unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. Since the development of effective contraception, treatments and preventative technology for venereal disease has lessened the consequences of sexual activity, the need for the old rules has been largely eliminated.

This argument is not entirely wrong. The protection of individuals from harsh consequences to sexual behaviour was part of the purpose for the old rules. It was not the whole purpose, however, or even the primary purpose. The primary reason we had those rules was because it is in the best interests of an orderly, civilized, society that children be brought up, whenever possible, by a father and mother committed to each other and the raising of their children and that it is against the interests of society and civilization for people to allow their actions to be dominated by their instinctual appetites and drives. This reason for the old rules has not been diminished in the slightest by technological developments.

That civilization rests upon human beings controlling their animal instincts and passions rather than being controlled by them is an insight as old as civilization itself. Plato, in his Republic, wrote that the human soul included reason, will, and appetite and that in the rightly ordered soul the will would enforce the rule of reason over the appetites. The rightly ordered city, he further argued, would mirror this, being governed by the philosopher-kings, whose laws would be enforced by the guardians, over the workers. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, described virtues, i.e., positive character traits, as habits of consistently choosing the middle path between the extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand and excessive austerity on the other. The cultivation of virtue in a rightly-ordered society was how these philosophers of ancient Athens conceived civilization, the closest approximation of ideal justice attainable by men on earth. (4)

Human beings are capable of civilization because of those elements of our nature which set us apart from the other animals not those elements which we have in common with the other animals and depends upon the former being in control of our actions rather than the latter. While this means that the exercise of reason and will is necessary for civilization it does not mean that they are sufficient. The last century provided abundant evidence that reason and will can be used against society, civilization, and the good of mankind, as much as they can be used in support of these things. Something else then must be necessary as well.

Another ability human beings possess, in addition to reason and will, is the ability to learn from the experience of those who have gone before us, to add our own experience to that, and to pass this cumulative, collective, body of experience down to future generations. It is this ability which enables us to acquire and pass on the skill of making right decisions, of using our reason and will wisely and well.

In the Modern Age we came to place a very high value on one part of our cumulative body of experience and knowledge at the expense of other parts. Michael Oakeshott in his essay “Rationalism and Politics” wrote that “Every science, every art, every practical activity requiring skill of any sort, indeed every human activity whatsoever, involves knowledge”. (5) He then went on to say that “universally, this knowledge is of two sorts, both of which are always involved in any actual activity.” These he identified as technical and practical knowledge. (6) Technical knowledge is knowledge of techniques or methods, i.e. of systematic ways of achieving ends. Oakeshott wrote that technical knowledge is “susceptible of formulation in rules, principles, directions, maxims – comprehensively in propositions.” Practical knowledge is knowledge which cannot be so formulated but without which “the mastery of any skill, the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible”.

According to Oakeshott:

Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge. The Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in any human activity is technical knowledge, and that what I have called practical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience which would be negligible if it were not positively mischievous. (7)

It is difficult to argue with Oakeshott’s contention that our concept of knowledge has been so truncated. (8) This sheds light on the matter which we have been considering in a number of different ways.

As we have seen, those who regard the social changes since World War II favourably, argue that modern technology has made the old rules obsolete by solving the problems which made those rules necessary. This is demonstrably false. Out of the sexual revolution came a demand for legal, easily obtainable, abortions, a demand which makes no sense if the development of effective contraception just before the sexual revolution, solved the problem of unwanted pregnancies. This claim, however, does point us to the real genesis of the revolution – faith in our unlimited ability to solve all our problems through the application of reason and science to the development of technology. Such faith could only have developed in an intellectual climate heavily influenced by the modern Rationalism of which Oakeshott wrote, which rejects all but technical knowledge. (9)

If we abandoned social rules and norms because of a misguided belief that our state of technological advancement has eliminated our need for them then the reverse side to this same coin is that we have abandoned these rules and norms because we no longer appreciate the wisdom contained in them. Moral wisdom is not technical knowledge. It is not concerned with the question of how to achieve our ends fastest, cheapest, and with the greatest ease. It is concerned with whether the ends we are seeking to achieve are right or wrong and whether the means we employ to achieve those ends are right or wrong. To someone who believes that technical knowledge is the only real knowledge, moral questions are unnecessary impediments to the achieving of goals. What does it matter that human embryos are brought into existence and made the subject of laboratory experiments if it allows us to achieve our end of preventing male pattern baldness? Such moral objections are standing in the way of our progress!

It is moral knowledge, however, and not technical knowledge, that civilization is built upon. It is more important to know how to live together and cooperate with other members of your community and society than it is to know the most efficient way of making a kitchen table. The ability to decide to do the right thing and to do so consistently so as to form a virtuous habit and build a moral character is more important than any conceivable marketable skill. This sort of knowledge cannot be formulated as a technique. It is to be found in the bank of accumulated human experience however. It can be acquired and it can be imparted to others. Moral upbringing in the home, from one’s father and mother, supported by one’s extended family, is the best way known to man of passing this kind of knowledge down. We could employ our reason and science for a million years and still not be able to improve upon it.

Perhaps then, we should have exercised a bit more prudence and caution before we introduced changes which threaten the stability of the family and the loss of the moral knowledge passed down through it.




(1)Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Seventh Revised Edition (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1953, 1986) p. 9. The sixth canon begins with the words “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress” and ends by saying “a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.”

(2) This qualification is necessary because there is a kind of pseudo-communitarianism today which uses this kind of language as a cloak for what is essentially the idea that the state should take over the responsibility of raising children, and delegate that responsibility back to parents as its closely supervised and easily replaceable deputies. This, for example, is what I understand US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to mean by “It takes a village”, the African proverb she borrowed for the title of her 1996 book.

(3) For a recent example of this kind of reasoning see Michael Lind’s article for the e-zine Salon.com entitled “What Killed Social Conservatism?” : ) http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/what_killed_social_conservatism/singleton/


(4) The word civilization comes from the Latin word for city, which was the sovereign political society at that time. In Greek the title of Plato’s Republic is Politia which refers to the condition of living in a polis, i.e., a city-state. Aristotle’s Politics which is a continuation of his Nicomachean Ethics is Politika. This term means “things which concern a city” and is, of course, the root of our English politics, which originally meant “the art of statecraft” before it degenerated to its current, less noble, meaning.

(5) Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, (London: Metheun & Co., 1962), p. 7. The essay “Rationalism in Politics”, which was originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1947, is the first essay in this book and the only essay from it which I will be quoting in this essay.

(6) This does not mean that all human knowledge can be classified as either “technical” or “practical”. He was only talking about knowledge that is required for doing things.

(7) Ibid., p. 11. The bold indicates italics in the original. The previous quotations about technical and practical knowledge come from pages 10 and 8 respectively.

(8) Consider the way the meaning of the word “science”, which our language borrowed from the Latin word for “knowledge” has changed. Originally “science” encompassed all forms of knowledge, the way the German equivalent Wissenschaft does. Today, it is limited in meaning to empirically acquired knowledge of the material world. The relationship between this and what Oakeshott was talking about is this: empirical science is primarily the means for improving technique. The explosion of empirical science in recent centuries has been driven by the search for the optimal technique for achieving our ends – the optimal technique being the one which has the best overall balance in speed, cost, ease and efficiency.

(9) There may be significance to the fact that these changes have all taken place since World War II. Historian John Lukacs maintains that we are living at the end of the Modern Age. Others maintain that the age which began with the Renaissance has already come to an end. The event that I have seen most often identified as the end of the Modern Age, by those who maintain it has already passed is World War II. “Post-modernists” usually maintain that the Modern Age ended in failure, that the calamitous events which marked its close brought about disillusionment with its ideals and a new skepticism towards all meta-narratives (theories that purport to be able to explain everything). John Lukacs, on the other hand, argues that forces which have shaped and driven the Modern Age have been victorious. He argues, for example, that liberalism is a spent force because it has accomplished all of its goals. Whatever one makes of all of this, if the rationalism that Oakeshott described as “the most remarkable fashion of post-Renaissance Europe” is a denial of all knowledge but the technical, then that Rationalism would appear to have triumphed around the time of World War II. For despite the fact that the conflict ended with the supreme demonstration of how the application of reason and science to the development of technique can be used to accomplish previously unimaginable evil this did not prevent the spread immediately thereafter of faith in technology.

GTN Tory Classics No. 9: To Admit or Not To Admit: Who is the Hypocrite?

When I began writing political essays to distribute to my friends in the spring of 2009 they were initially quite different from the essays that I would later post after starting Throne, Altar, Liberty. I do not mean different in terms of positions taken and ideas expressed. I mean that they were shorter essays and that they focused upon topics that were in the news at the time. When I started Throne, Altar, Liberty, I decided to write essays that were less a commentary on the news than an exploration and expounding of basic conservative political, philosophical, ethical, and theological concepts. This meant that I would abandon the self-imposed page limit that I had more or less stuck to n my 2009 essays.

I did intend to eventually re-post most of my 2009 essays here but the following essay but I did not think the following essay would be one of them for the simple reason that the subject matter is quite dated. The essay comments on two stories that were in the news in early 2009 – South Africa’s refusal to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama and our own government’s decision to ban British MP George Galloway from the country.

The reason I have decided to repost this essay, commenting on a couple of three-year old news stories, is because the question of who the government lets into the country is back in the news. Of course the issues and individuals are quite different than in 2009. In this essay, I expressed contempt for the decisions made by our own government and that of South Africa to exclude Galloway and the Dalai Lama, but also expressed contempt for the nonsense being spouted by self-righteous pundits around the globe that these decisions were violations of rights. A country has the right to deny entry to people. That does not always mean that it uses that right in a wise manner.

Today, the question of who the government lets in is back in the news in a rather different way. Thomas Mulcair, who has recently taken over leadership of the New Democratic Party, has been quite vocal in his opposition to the government’s decision to allow Conrad Black to return to Canada. Yet the NDP have also loudly insisted that Omar Khadr be allowed to return to Canada. Black and Khadr were both born in Canada. Both were imprisoned by the Americans. Black verbally renounced his citizenship in 2001, when, after he was offered the title of baron by the Queen, the humunculus who was our Prime Minister at the time declared that as a Canadian citizen, Black could not accept the honour. He was charged with “fraud” in the United States because he accepted large payments from Hollinger, at the time the company was falling apart, in return for non-compete agreements with the companies who were buying up Hollinger’s assets, and with “obstruction of justice” because he cleaned out his office after being told by the company to do so. Khadr did not verbally renounce his citizenship. He was captured by the Americans in Afghanistan, where he had taken up arms against the Americans and their allies, including Canada, on behalf of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, was put in Guantanamo Bay and was tried and convicted for war crimes.

How would a normal, sane Canadian, answer the question which of the two should be re-admitted to Canada? He would say that there is simply no contest. Black was born here, raised here, and lived here most of his life. Khadr was born here, but was largely raised in Pakistan. Black verbally renounced his citizenship but Khadr took up arms against our country and its allies in war, in acts which speak much louder than Black’s words. Black’s business ethics may be highly questionable, but even if his actions did cross the line from unethical over to criminal, it was fraud at the worst, which is hardly comparable to Khadr’s violent actions.

Yet the party which is now Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition in Ottawa would appear to be giving the exact opposite of the normal, sane, answer to the question.

Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney have made stupid decisions in the past as to who they should let into the country. It was foolish to ban George Galloway and, more recently, it was foolish to ban Srdja Trifkovic.

Their foolishness, however, pales in comparison to that of the socialist opposition.


To Admit or Not To Admit: Who is the Hypocrite?


By Gerry T. Neal,
March 27, 2009

The Republic of South Africa is in the news again and just like in the good old days it is inflaming world opinion against itself. What is it all about this time? Have the nationalists returned to power? Have they brought back apartheid? Have they thrown Nelson Mandela back in prison? No, no, and no. The source of the outrage this time around, is the decision of the South African government to deny a visa to the Dalai Lama who had been invited to attend a peace conference in Johannesburg.

It is difficult to decide, after reviewing the uproar, who appears the more foolish. Is it the South African government, which recently admitted that its decision was made in an attempt to please the Communist government of China, after initially giving the amusing excuse that they did not want the Dalai Lama to take attention away from the World Cup which is scheduled to take place in South Africa next summer? Or is it the countless self-righteous opinion-makers, in newspapers and on the internet, the world over who are decrying the Republic's decision as a "violation of human rights"?

Lets make the erroneous assumption, for the sake of discussion, that there are such things as "human rights", i.e., rights that belong to every human being by virtue of their humanity, rather than from prescription via membership in a particular society. Whose rights have been violated here? The Dalai Lama's? Does he have an unlimited right to visit South Africa whenever he wishes regardless of whether the South Africans want him there or not? If he has such a right, and that right is a "human right", does that not mean that the same right is also possessed by every other human being on the planet? Would there be such an outcry if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been the one denied entrance? How about Osama Bin Laden?

Recently, the Canadian government received a lot of flak over a decision to deny access to British MP George Galloway. Now, I don't like Galloway and his socialist politics very much. Nevertheless, I found the reason for his being denied entrance to be imbecilic. Galloway, had following the latest Israeli-Gaza conflict, raised humanitarian relief for the Palestinians, and delivered this relief in the form of ambulances and medical supplies to Gaza a few weeks ago. A couple of years ago, however, the terrorist organization Hamas was elected to form the government in Gaza. Thus, the Canadian government reasoned, Galloway, in bringing these supplies to Gaza, was providing support for Hamas a terrorist organization, making him a security risk for this country. The idiocy of that conclusion should be obvious to everyone. If we denied visas to everyone who provided financial and humanitarian relief to governments headed by terrorists, we would pretty much have to issue a blanket visa denial to all Western politicians. For that matter, we would have to deny access to quite a few rock stars and Hollywood actors as well. That, I suppose, is the bright side. We have set a precedent for banning Bono and Bob Geldof from Canada.


No, George Galloway is an obnoxious, left-wing nutter, but he is no threat to Canadian security, and we should have admitted him if for no other reason than that that is the proper respect officials of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa ought to show for someone serving their Queen in Her Majesty's Westminster Parliament. However, that decision as to who gets a visa and who doesn’t, lies in the hands of the Canadian government, and it should be made on the basis of what is in Canada’s interests, not on the basis of world opinion.

Likewise, South Africa's decision to grant or deny a visa to the Dalai Lama, is South Africa's decision. If they prefer to kiss the arse of Red China and keep the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and head of Tibet's government-in-exile out, that is their prerogative, and it is nobody's business but their own. It is certainly not a matter of "human rights".

But, someone might say, human rights enters the question in another way. By siding with the government of China against the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan separatists is the South African government not siding with an oppressor against the oppressed? Yes. And is that not hypocritical in the extreme, on the part of an ANC government, which fought against oppression themselves for so many years?

The outraged commentators who are asking the latter question are ill-informed as to the true nature of the ANC. The African National Congress, was and is, a Communist party. That it would side with Red China against the Tibetan separatists is natural. Prior to its 1994 rise to power, the ANC waged a terrorist war against the government of South Africa for 30 years, with their military wing the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). The Mk (as it is usually abbreviated) started out by sabotaging infrastructure and progressed into car bombings and other acts of urban violence. It committed numerous gruesome executions (often of South African blacks that refused to jump on the ANC bandwagon). The commander of the Mk was Nelson Mandela. He was responsible for the early sabotages and for the long term plan that produced the bombings and executions. It was for the sabotages he was responsible for that he was justly arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. He was not a political prisoner like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned only for his words or beliefs. Just because the World Council of Churches, Joe Clark, and countless Hollywood celebrities and humanitarian organizations claimed he was, does not make it so. Following the ANC's 1994 rise to power, the Republic of South Africa was transformed from a prosperous, self-sufficient nation, into a country that can no longer feed its own people, where violent crime runs rampant in the streets of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and where guerilla armies roam the countryside waging war on Afrikaner farmers, the new government of South Africa being unable or unwilling to stop them.

No, hypocrisy does not lie in one Communist government supporting the oppression of another Communist government. The hypocrisy lies in the self-righteous outrage of liberal commentators who allowed themselves to be blinded to the true nature of the ANC by the fact that it was fighting apartheid. While injustices and repression were undoubtedly committed by the old Nationalist government of South Africa, it was the least oppressive government in Africa at the time, apart from Ian Smith’s government in Rhodesia. Black Africans were fleeing to South Africa from all over the continent. In contrast, for the past 15 years since the ANC took control, Afrikaners have been fleeing South Africa in droves. As Ronald Reagan pointed out to Mikhail Gorbachev over 20 years ago, the oppressive country, is the one people are trying to get out of, not the one people are trying to get into.

The facts about the ANC, both during the apartheid era and today, are there for anyone to look at. Liberals have no excuse for not knowing them. Further, they have no reason to be indignant that a Marxist party whose rise to power they demanded the world force upon South Africa 15 years ago, is acting like the Marxist party it is, today. Particularly when that indignation is expressed only about the relatively minor matter of the refusal of a visa to the Dalai Lama, and not about the way the ANC has withdrawn the protection of the rule of law from citizens of South Africa.

GTN Tory Classics No. 8: First They Came for the White Supremacists...

The essay that follows was originally shared through e-mail and Facebook on May 27, 2009. This should be kept in mind in reading the essay because there are many time references such as “this week” and “last year” which mean “this week” and “last year” as of the day the essay was written.

In 2008 a young couple here in Winnipeg had their children seized by the Child and Family Services after a teacher called CFS to report that the couple’s daughter had come to school with a swastika inked on her arm. The case finally made it to the courts in May of 2009. I wrote this essay the week the case opened. I had been disgusted although not surprised, earlier that week, with the commentary that had appeared about this case in the Winnipeg Free Press. The newspaper’s progressive columnists seemed to have been having a contest to see who could call the loudest for the cruficixion of the couple in question.

Child and Family Services is a government agency that I have long detested. It exists for no purpose other than to undermine parental authority within the family. Yes, I know that on paper their raison d'être is to deal with cases of child abuse. They are notoriously incompetent at handling this task however. There are clear cut cases of child abuse where all sane people would agree the government must step in to protect children from abusive parents – cases of sexual abuse and cases where the parents deliberately injure their children. This sort of thing the police can handle without the help of an agency staffed with arrogant social workers.

CFS, like similar agencies elsewhere, was not created out of a need for a special agency to deal with such cases. It was created because the increasingly totalitarian state wants to control our lives from cradle to grave and to do so it requires control over the raising of children. Thus the creation of agencies like the CFS, which exist to let parents know that it is by permission of the state that they are allowed to raise their children, that the state will be monitoring them, and that they will lose their parental privileges if they step out of line.

In this instance, where the CFS intervened because of a complaint about the family’s political views, it was a clear cut case of political persecution. This is something that we all should have been outraged over. It does not matter that the swastika is the symbol of an ideology, National Socialism, that all sane people consider to be repugnant. All sane people also consider Communism to be repugnant. If, however, a child were to show up in school with a hammer and sickle inked on their skin, does anyone seriously think a teacher would have called the CFS to complain? In the extremely unlikely event that happened, and the even more unlikely event that the CFS, staffed with people who were spoon-fed Marxism in their social “sciences” classes in university, actually took children out of a home because its parents were Communists, how do you think the columnists in papers like the Winnipeg Free Press would respond? Would they demonize the parents in print the way they did with the parents in this case? Of course not. The moment they got wind of such a thing happening they would be screaming “McCarthyism” as loud as they possibly could.

As the case progressed in the courts, further allegations of a different nature were made against the parents. Surely, however, such allegations cannot be considered credible coming from the CFS. It had taken children out of a home because of the political views of the parents and was now trying to cover its tracks.

The title of this essay is, of course, an allusion to Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who ended up in Dachau in WWII. The poem describes how the Nazis came for the communists, trade unionists, and Jews, and he kept silent being none of those things, and then when they finally came for him there was nobody to speak out for him. The reference to this poem struck me as an appropriate title for two reasons.

First of all, the act of the government taking children from a home because of the political views of the parents is far closer to the evil of the Third Reich than the mere use of the swastika symbol.

Secondly, progressives have devoted much effort over the last several decades to instilling anti-racism in us. This effort has been largely successful and one of the results is that now most of us turn a blind eye to evil when the victim can be shown to be a “racist”. Marxist thugs prevented a controversial speaker from giving a lecture at a university where he was invited to speak to people who wanted to hear him speak by blocking access to the lecture hall, shouting him down and intimidating his would-be audience? Ah, but he is a “scientific racist”, so that means the anti-racist thugs were just expressing their “freedom of speech” rather than denying the lecturer his. The owner of a website is brought before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal and charged with violating Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act for something that was posted on his website, and he now faces a hefty fine, legal bills, and a gag order? Ah, but it was racist material that posted on his website, so it doesn’t matter. Children are taken away from their parents because of the opinions of their parents? Ah, but their parents hold racist opinions so it doesn’t matter.

So long as we continue to think this way, government agencies and thugs will continue to be able to do whatever they want to people, so long as they label them “racist”.

“But the parents really were racists, in this case,” someone who misses the point completely will object, “they identify themselves as white nationalists and drew a swastika on their daughter’s arm.”

Christopher Lasch, the “social conservative of the Left” who was professor of history at the University of Rochester until his death in 1994, wrote the following about such people:

The problem of racial intolerance is closely linked to fanaticism. Here again there is a good deal of complacency and self-righteousness mixed up in the fear of intolerance. The thinking classes seem to labor under the delusion that they alone have overcome racial prejudice. The rest of the country, in their view, remains incorrigibly racist. Their eagerness to drag every conversation back to race is enough in itself to invite the suspicion that their investment in this issue exceeds anything that is justified by the actual state of race relations. Monomania is not a sign of good judgment. But whether it spring from self-righteousness or panic or a mixture of the two, the assumption that most Americans remain racists at heart cannot stand up to close examination. The improvement of racial attitudes is one of the few positive developments of recent decades. Not that racial conflict has subsided, but it is a serious mistake to interpret every conflict as evidence of the retrograde outlook of ordinary Americans, as a revival of the historical intolerance that has played so large a part in our country’s history. The new racism is reactive rather than residual, let alone resurgent. It is a response, however inappropriate and offensive, to a double standard of racial justice that strikes most Americans as unreasonable and unfair. Since opposition to an “affirmative” double standard is routinely dismissed as racist, one reaction to this insult, from working- and lower-middle-class people harassed by affirmative action and busing and now from college students harassed by attempts to enforce politically correct language and thought, is to accept “racism” as a badge of honor, to flaunt it, with studied provocation, in the face of those who want to make racism and minority rights the only subject of public discussion. (Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democray, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995, pp. 90-91)

Here, in his last work, Prof. Lasch demonstrated far more insight into what makes these people tick than most typical leftists.

Canada and the USA, and virtually every other Western country have, after WWII, introduced:

1) Anti-discrimination laws. These forbid racial discrimination on the part of private businesses and property owners in certain situations. In practice they tend to be only enforced against whites.
2) Affirmative action policies, in which schools and employers discriminate in favour of non-whites against whites. These can either be imposed by the government or actions taken by companies themselves to ward off the threat of lawsuits under anti-discrimination laws.
3) Forced racial integration for lower and lower-middle class whites.
4) Liberal immigration policies that seem to be designed to deliberately alter the racial demographics of the countries that practice them.

These policies were all introduced by progressives. Conservatives should be the effective voice of opposition to these policies and the injustices contained within them. We have failed to be such and as long as we continue to fail those who are not willing to suffer in silence under such injustices will find other, less wholesome, movements and ideologies to speak for them.


First They Came For The White Supremacists…


By Gerry T. Neal
May 27, 2009

The big news this week, is the opening of the child-custody case that started last year here in Winnipeg, when Child and Family Services took a girl and boy into custody after the girl’s teacher reported that she had been sent to school with swastikas and racist words drawn on her skin. Following the seizure a debate arose over whether or not the state has any business taking children out of their homes because they don’t like the views of the parents. Now the legal answer to that question in Canada is going to be settled by the courts. The moral and just answer to the question, however, lies in hands other than those of the Canadian legal system.

That answer is clear, and that answer is a resounding no. When the government says that you cannot think a certain way, that you cannot hold a certain opinion, or that you cannot convey your thoughts and opinions to others, they are engaging in something called thought control. Thought control is the mark, not of a legitimate and just government, but of a totalitarian and tyrannical one. The most oppressive regimes of the 20th Century, the Communist governments of the USSR, Red China, Cuba, North Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. all engaged in thought control.

So, for that matter, did the Third Reich.

Which makes it all the more ironic the government is using people’s fears of Nazism as the basis for their experiments in thought control. What was it about Hitler’s regime that made it so terrible? I always thought that it was the fact that the Third Reich was a tyrannical regime with secret police and a fanatical leader-worship cult that encouraged people to turn in their parents, neighbors, and friends if they were suspected of disloyalty to the state, in which freedom was non-existent and the state was in the hands of a gang of petty thugs who ruled by fear. But apparently I was wrong. Everyone else seems to think it was because Hitler was a racist.

Stalin, who was our ally in WWII, ran the same kind of totalitarian state as Hitler. In fact Stalin’s regime killed more people, operated more prison camps, and ruled more ruthlessly than Hitler’s did. Communism’s total record of bloodshed, human suffering, and oppression makes Hitler’s look pretty small in comparison.

Yet you can be an avowed Marxist and remain respectable in academic circles. You can hang up the flags of murderous Communist regimes, wear T-shirts glorifying Communist mass-murderer “Che” Guevera, and praise Castro and Mao to high heaven, and nobody will say anything about it. Or, if somebody does say something about it they will be drowned out by the cry “MCCARTHYISM!!!”

The name of Senator Joseph McCarthy has become synonymous with “witch-hunting” but McCarthy never attempted to use the power of the state to persecute people merely for holding Communist views. He was dealing with a legitimate security problem – the infiltration of the American federal government by agents loyal to a hostile power. We now know, since the mid 1990’s declassification of the VENONA Project transcripts, that the problem was worse than he thought.

That is a remarkable contrast with the professional anti-racist “watchdog” groups and their liberal allies in the media and the schools. These people want the government to take action against people, not for violence, not for acts that hurt others, but for holding racist views. They want it to be against the law to express certain opinions. They want the courts to hand out harsher sentences for beating people up because of their skin color than for beating them up because they were being lippy and obnoxious. Now, apparently, they want children removed from their homes and put in the custody of the state, because the parents don’t kowtow to what liberals and the government say everybody is supposed to believe about race.

On Monday, as the custody case began before the Manitoba Court of Queens Bench in Winnipeg, social workers from Manitoba Child and Family Services informed the court that the girl had told them that “black people don’t belong” and that “black people should die” and that she gave a graphic description of how to kill a black person with a chain and spiked ball.

That’s pretty nasty stuff. Is this really what the parents in question were teaching their children, however? Or is this a case where the social workers at Child and Family Services, convinced by their ideology that “those evil racist Nazis” talk that way, interviewed the girl in such a way as to get answers that confirmed their own preconceived ideas. The latter is by far the most likely explanation. So likely that I would call it a certainty.

If you find that to be preposterous then you are obviously unfamiliar with the way social workers and government agencies like CFS think and operate. Ignorant, young idealists, enter social sciences programs in universities where their professors stuff their heads with Marxist ideology, and they emerge to take jobs with government bureaucracies convinced of the righteousness of their mandate to invade the private lives of ordinary people and boss them around for their own good. That is how the social worker is made.

The ideology the social worker is taught, identifies certain ideas and attitudes as pathologies that are harmful to society. These are ideas that are transmitted primarily by families, churches, and small communities, and which until very recently were universally regarded as healthy and normal. This reclassification of normal ideas as mental diseases provides a justification for government agencies to interfere in the workings of other societal institutions. It also allows those doing the state’s dirty work intruding on people in their homes, spying on them, and taking their children away, to feel good about themselves, to think they are doing something for the greater good.

In reality they are just obnoxious busybodies on a power trip.

What are these ideas that are being pathologized?

Do you have feelings of patriotic attachment to the ancestral people from whom you are descended and to the land they live in? Once considered one of the highest of virtues by the poets of our language, this attitude is now condemned as “racism”. Do you think that men and women have different natures leading them to behave differently and take different roles in society? If you do, you are now considered a “sexist”. More recently recognition of the obvious fact that the complementary nature of the sexes makes heterosexual coupling the norm, and same-sex attachments the exception, has been pathologized as “heterosexism” or “homophobia”.

These new ways of looking at old ideas began in the 1940’s and 50’s as part of a deliberate program on the part of neo-Marxists, such as those belonging to the Frankfurt School, to delegitimize the culture they believed was standing in the way of the revolution and the utopia they desired.

Obviously, this tactic is working well for the neo-Marxists. It is truly frightening how many young people are buying into their nonsense. Far more frightening than the thought that somewhere out there some family might be teaching its kids to admire Adolf Hitler.

More frightening yet, though, is the future of society if the government is allowed to take children away from their parents because the parents are “racists”. If it is “white supremacists” who have their children taken away today, whose children will be taken away tomorrow?

GTN Tory Classics No. 7: Production, Limits, and Private Property

There are nine words in the following essay, the fourth in the seven-part series of economic essays that I wrote in 2009, that I wish I had not included. Those are the words “The latter is not particularly relevant in this context” in reference to Dr. Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics”. What Dr. Hardin had written in “Lifeboat Ethics” is in fact very relevant to the subject matter of this essay.

This essay is both an economic and an ecological essay. It begins with the basic economic argument for growth – that a company by producing larger quantities of its product can sell its product at a lower cost per unit to the consumer and increase the wages of its employees while increasing its profits. It then moves to the ecological question of the sustainability of growth. The kind of economic growth where consumer and producer, employer and employee, all benefit from increased productivity cannot be sustained forever because we live in a finite world with finite resources. In the final part of the essay, I contrast Ronald Wright’s approach to the subject of limited resources with Garrett Hardin’s as expressed in “The Tragedy of the Commons”.

The point I was arguing towards was the goal of the conservation of resources is better served by private rather than collective ownership. Both of the Garrett Hardin essays I mentioned are on the subject of the conservation of resources. “The Tragedy of the Commons” speaks directly to the question of private resources vs. common resources. “Life-boat Ethics” does so in a less direct manner. In the late 1960’s, Kenneth Boulding had written an essay about limited resources and conservation in which he compared people living on this planet to the crew of a spaceship, who must co-operate with each other, and conserve their limited resources, for their voyage to be a success. The “spaceship earth” metaphor caught on and had become popular among ecologists when Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics” was published by Psychology Today in 1974. Hardin suggested that a more appropriate metaphor was that of lifeboats, adrift at sea, each with room and resources for a limited number of people. There are people in the sea surrounding the lifeboat, and the compassionate thing to do would seem to be to bring those people onto the lifeboat. If the boat is already at its carrying capacity, however, this will cause the boat to capsize. If that happens, then an act of compassion, intended to take people who are in a place of peril in the sea and put them in a place of safety in the boat, will have the opposite result of putting everyone on the lifeboat into the same perilous situation as those they intended to but failed to rescue.

Hardin applied this metaphor by criticizing liberal immigration and foreign aid policies. While I agree with much of this criticism I did not see it as relevant to the point I was trying to make by referring to Hardin’s other essay. It occurred to me, however, as I re-read my essay in preparation for posting it here, that there is another aspect of Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor which does speak to the matter of the conflict between growth-fuelled prosperity and limited resources. In Boulding’s original “spaceship” metaphor, the entire planet is one spaceship and ecological problems are global problems. In Hardin’s “lifeboat” metaphor there is not one lifeboat but many, every first world country being considered a lifeboat. This suggests that problems which the “Spaceship Earth” metaphor treats as global problems are better thought of as local problems and addressed on a smaller scale.

Economic growth is like biological growth. The division and multiplication of cells is necessary for good health, but only up to a point. When cells multiply past that point they cause harm rather than health. We call this cancer. Likewise, economic growth can be good and necessary or it can be harmful. When economic growth results in lower prices to the consumer, higher wages to the worker, and more profits for the company this is good. At some point, however, growth becomes harmful. Economically, that point is when more of a product is produced than there is demand for. When growth passes this point it ceases to be beneficial to everyone – sales drop off, profits decline, production has to be slowed down or halted and there are massive layoffs. This is also the point where growth necessarily becomes ecologically harmful – to produce more of a product than there is demand for is wasteful, although it is possible for growth to become ecologically harmful at an early point if demand for a product is greater than the available resources.

There is a tendency among ecologists to blame private ownership and freedom for the problems of excessive growth. This is unfortunate because, as Hardin has shown, privately owned resources are better maintained and conserved than publicly owned resources. Or, more accurately, resources are best maintained when the person who profits from their use is also the person who pays the cost for their use. The “tragedy of the commons” occurs because in a commons, people privately profit from their use of commonly owned resources in which the cost of use is divided and spread out. A person or company could try to export the cost of use of his or their privately owned resources, and it is human nature to try and do just this, but it is easier to accomplish this, especially on a large scale, with the collusion of government. Just as a private bank can inflate currency and cause an economic bubble and recession, but a large central bank can do so on a much larger scale, so a company looking to pass its costs off onto other people will find it easier to do so by making use of taxpayer funded public utilities and infrastructure and with the help of the people who make and enforce bylaws. At the heart of most if not all of the economic and ecological problems caused by excessive growth that we experience today you will find a large, heavily centralized, state.


Production, Limits, and Private Property


By Gerry T. Neal
June 21, 2009

Here’s a question: Can a business at the same time a) increase its profits, b) increase its wages/salaries, and c) lower the price of its profits?

The answers that probably spring to mind are either “Yes, if it wants to go broke” or “No, you idiot, where did you learn your math?”. Without information as to how a company would go about doing this these answers are both reasonable. After all, lowering your price lowers your revenue, while increasing wages increases your costs. How can both exist simultaneously with an increase in profit? Something doesn’t add up.

Actually, however, there is a way to do it. Let’s say you have a company that is producing 1000 units of its product an hour and selling them at $5.00 a unit. Your revenue then, after selling an hour’s worth of your product, is $5000. From this you pay the costs of that hour of production (including wages) and after costs what remains of the $5000 is your profit.

Now let’s suppose you take that profit and re-invest it in a capital-improvement project that increases your company’s productivity so that with the same labor force you can now produce 5000 units per hour. Since you are now producing more you decide to lower the price of your product by half to $2.50 a unit. At this lower price, the revenue from selling an hour’s worth of your product is now $12,500. That is 2 ½ times more than you made previously. From that you can increase the wages of your employees, which you should be doing as their productivity has gone up making their labor more valuable to you. You will still be able to make a greater profit than you did before.

When a company improves production, then, it benefits everybody – the owner/shareholders, the employees and customers of the company. They are all better off than before.

What works for a company can also work for a country. If a country’s leaders wish to improve the standard of living of their people what is the best way to do it? Pass minimum wage laws? Set price controls? Create safety nets of social benefits to create a “floor” beneath which your citizens theoretically cannot drop? No. Each of these methods is known to backfire making things worse than they were before.

A government that wishes to increase its people’s standard of living should encourage the improvement of production so that there is more material wealth being generated. Recognizing this fact, governments have attempted to do just that in one of two ways.

Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union attempted to increase industrial production with their New Economic Policy and Five Year Plans. Mao in Red China attempted to increase agricultural and industrial production in his “Great Leap Forward”. Both of these experiments in central, state-planned economic development, proved to be catastrophic failures. So has every other attempt to do it this way.

In contrast, in Western countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, production was left in the hands of privately owned companies that were allowed and encouraged to compete with one another in a free market. This is the method that has always worked. Improved production generated higher profits and wages and lower costs for the consumer increasing the standard of living in general.

Of course a large part of the benefit of improved production has been eaten up by our governments. They have raised taxes to an obscene level and generated inflation by printing more money to support their projects, most of which are wasteful and useless. Raising taxes takes money out of production in the private sector where it can be more useful. Inflation decreases the value of money which in term decreases the benefits to the consumer of lower costs in the marketplace brought about by improved production.

Now we come to another question. That question is this: Can the improvement of production go on forever?

A lot of people seem to think the answer to this is yes. These people believe that history is marching ever upwards and that human ingenuity will always find newer, better, more efficient ways of making newer and better products, causing today’s luxuries to become tomorrow’s necessities, as the standard of living keeps rising higher and higher. The name for this belief is “progress”. It is what progressives, aka liberals, used to believe before they switched over to believing in the infinite capacity of the state to bring out the natural goodness in people and morally improve society through social programs.

The answer, however, is no. While production can be improved, generating high profits, high wages, low costs and a general improved standard of living, this can only be done within certain limits. For we humans are finite, limited creatures, living in a finite, limited world. We forget this to our own peril.

What are the limits in question? Well, if we wish to have our three-fold benefit of improved production, the obvious first limit to come to mind is that of demand. Demand refers to how much of your product people are willing to buy. It is the other criteria determining market price. Remember that you and your employees only benefit as producers from improved production if you are able to sell enough of your product at the reduced price to generate more in revenue that you did prior to the improvement. Whether you are able to do this or not depends entirely on how much demand there is for your product.

A company that ignores that limit will generally harm only itself. The same cannot be said for the next limit. That limit is the availability and cost of raw materials and energy. These are limited resources. Some raw materials are renewable resources, like wood for lumber and paper companies, but being renewable does not mean being infinite. Trees take a long time to grow after all. Other raw materials, such as metals and useful stone like granite and marble, exist only in set quantities. These may be recyclable or reusable but they are not renewable. Yet other raw materials exist only in set quantities, are not recyclable or reusable, and can be used up. The obvious examples of these are petroleum and coal, which are used both as raw materials and as sources of energy.

Ecologists remind us of these limits, even if economists are often prone to forget them. Unfortunately, their recommendations for conserving resources are generally less than helpful. Ronald Wright, for example, in his 2004 Massey Lectures published as A Short History of Progress, tells of how human societies in the past have got carried away with production and ignored the limits of their resources, falling into “progress traps” that led to tremendous human suffering when the resources were depleted. He warns, in the alarmist fashion of the typical environmentalist, that we are doing the same thing today on a larger, global scale, that we are almost at the point of no return, and that this is our last chance. He is very vague in his recommendations as to how to go about fixing things, however, although one quickly picks up on the fact that he is sympathetic to socialism over the free market.

An ecologist who was helpful, on this subject, was the late Dr. Garrett J. Hardin. Apart from Hardin’s Law – “you cannot do only one thing” - his most famous contributions to ecological thought were the concepts of “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Lifeboat Ethics”. The latter is not particularly relevant in this context but “The Tragedy of the Commons” deals with the heart of the matter.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a story of a medieval commons – a pasture owned collectively by a community in which each member of the community was allowed to keep his sheep. Since the cost of maintaining the commons was shared but the profit from raising the sheep was private, everyone who kept their sheep there had a stronger motive to increasing their own number of sheep at the public expense than to try and conserve the resource. As a result the pasture became overgrazed.

The point of all this, Hardin argued, was that a system where costs were shared, but profits were private, was the worst possible system for preserving limited resources. The other options are to make the profits collective (socialism) or to privatize the costs by privatizing the resources.

The privatization of resources, Hardin argued, was the best way of conserving them. Observation easily bears Hardin out on this. Domesticated animals are never on the endangered species list. Paper and lumber companies make sure that plenty of trees are replanted. If you want to see well kept houses, green lawns, and beautiful gardens, you go to neighborhoods where people own their own homes, not to rental districts.

Conversely, if you want to find litter the best place to look is in ditches and public parks. Pollution is a problem primarily in rivers, lakes, seas, and the air, all of which are resources which are held in common.

To put it simply, people take care of their own property, and are much more likely to take a long-term view of resources which are their own, than resources that are held in common with others.

Private property, then, is the foundation of both true ecology and sound economics. Private property owners competing in a free market are the best producers. They are also the best conservers of resources. The companies that are most likely to deplete resources rather than conserve them are the companies that try keep their profits private while throwing their costs onto the public. That is accomplished through collusion with government.