The Gods of the Copybook Headings

GCH VI: Undiscovered Blogsphere

The typical blog lasts about six weeks, succumbing to the common death of boredom. My own estimate. This blog has now lasted exactly six years to the day. What do you get a blogger for his sixth anniversary? A straight jacket. No sane person would do this for so long, without being paid. Indeed most long-term bloggers are also professional writers. Being a writer is a bizarre compulsion. You gotta do it, or you explode. Or worse, bore everyone around you to death. Better to bore perfect strangers in the anonymity of cyberspace. 

Every year I drop my urbane, historically obsessed and indefatigably Whig persona and speak to you directly, yes you the loyal reader of The Gods of the Copybook Headings. Each year I ask why you keep showing up. More and more of you every year, in fact. Scarcely a landslide of traffic, but enough to form a sizeable, pro-freedom minded, lynch mob. Though, of course, you are all too well mannered, and productive, to form a lynch mob. Perhaps a discussion group or wine society.

When I started up this blog, with two co-bloggers who have since vanished into the hills, I wrote a spoof biography for myself, as well as assuming the blogging name of Publius. I thought Publius was a rather clever name, an obvious nod both to the Federalist Papers and the founder of the Roman Republic. I'm sometimes asked why I don't use my real name - amazingly enough, people don't name their children Publius anymore. Well I work at a very large financial services company. Contrary to popular mythology corporations are not inherently right-wing. 

Most big businesses, especially in our tight modern regulatory environment, are really large private sector bureaucracies. The people who manage these large private empires are a far cry from swashbuckling heroes like Ayn Rand's Hank Rearden, or historical capitalists like J.J. Hill. They like bureaucracies, they like paper pushing, and are sympathetic - at some level - to government controls. I also live in Toronto, a very liberal city. Offering conservative / libertarian opinions is something akin to admitting you are a porn actor, or saying that all the people with the funny names should be deported. I wanted to write with as much freedom as possible. I don't want to have to worry if some co-worker Googles my name, and discovers that my views are not mainstream - at least not in downtown Toronto. 

Now some of you are thinking, oh Publius you are just being paranoid, the ordinary person isn't as politically minded as you. They probably wouldn't care. Probably not, but anyone who has worked in an office environment knows that all you need is one well motivated prick, to make your life a living hell. Nor can you tell in advance who the pricks might be. I used to work with a Pakistani who was militantly pro-British and hated the Liberal Party. Another was an observant Somali Muslim who spoke eloquently about abolishing the capital gains tax, his wife was a northern European who dressed business casual. 

It is to a surprising extent the old WASPs, filled with self-hatred, who are the militantly intolerant Leftists. I've never had much patience with the line, advocated by many conservatives, that immigrants, mostly from Third World hell holes, are destroying Canada. Most immigrants are desperately grateful to be here, and very glad here is not like where they came from. Multiculturalism isn't something foisted on Canada by ethnic immigrants, most of whom were assimilating quite happily until the 1970s. It was introduced as government policy by a French Canadian-Scot Catholic, and a Quebec Irish Catholic. Socialized health care was imposed on Saskatchewan by a well meaning Baptist, and on the whole country by the son of a Methodist minister. All were as Canadian as maple syrup. If Canada, the free, tolerant, prosperous, humane and civilized society we know is ever destroyed, it will not be because of burka clad women. It will be at the hands of the descendants of Simcoe and Champlain, who have forgotten or forsaken the accomplishments and values of their ancestors. Great nations can only die by suicide.

Bummer. If you're looking for upbeat, go elsewhere. I do sometimes do hope, hope is very important. We live in an age, which among its many vices, that exudes a syrupy optimism. Don't worry be happy is less often a cheerful disregarding of daily misfortunes, and more a Panglossian obliviousness expressed demotically. I will not go so far as John Derbyshire, NR's resident curmudgeon, and proclaimed ourselves to be doomed. I do not even believe that Obama is destroying America. America is too great to be destroyed by one President, even one so statist as the current occupant of the White House. Dying by suicide, yes, but a suicide by many hands over many years.

One of my major themes, over the last half-decade and a bit, is decline. A decline of manners, a decline of standards, a decline of some basic driving spirit that once suffused the Western world. I can be accused, not without some merit, of being nostalgic about an age I never knew. I'm relying on the memories of old men, and as Shakespeare reminded us, old men forget. 

A few days ago I overheard two such old men, they were reminiscing about the TTC, about how people used to let you exit a subway car, without barging the door. I winced a bit, because I too barge the door. Not consciously. But the other fellow next to me is barging the door, so I need to get in before he does. It's a weird kind of competition among large groups of people. A phenomenon similar to the broken window theory of crime. If everyone is civil, then everyone tends to remain civil. But if just enough people stop being civil, often just a small minority, then the standard of civility drops or disappears. Complex patterns of behaviour, like civilizations and subways, can be easily disrupted by only a handful of malicious, or callous, individuals. Think about it. How many men, driving how many trucks, could paralyze the 400 series highways that surround Toronto? A few dozen so minded men can cause havoc to millions. That is how fragile the modern life really is, even without bombs or bullets. Driving on a highway is a modern miracle. It works only because virtually everyone is behaving in a certain way, if that behaviour changes, chaos can result. 

A society as finely calibrated as ours can be destroyed very easily. Not by bombs and bullets, the free world is preeminent in military strength, but by bad men in key places. The obvious candidates are politicians, but most politicians are not bad men. They are helpless mediocrities, buffeted by the wisp o'willow of public opinion, and the broader intellectual and economic trends of their time and place. They are surprisingly powerless men. 

Stephen Harper, with or without a majority, has a fraction of the power an intellectual like Saul Alinsky or F.A. Hayek. Shelley remarked that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He was wrong, but moving in the right direction.  It is the philosophers. They define the questions and answers. Don't believe me? Read Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. What one generation finds to be common sense, another will find abhorrent. Such transition is taken for granted, but who does the moving? A handful of thinkers have influenced the basic way we view the world. Their influence is so profound very few are even aware. Ideas and attitudes which become part of the ether. 

This makes our job, those of us who believe in civility, freedom and decency, much harder and easier. We are opposed on all sides, the momentum is clearly in favour of the neo-Jacobins and their immediate heirs, the neo-barbarians. We need to remind ourselves that such a momentum is just that, momentum, it is dead ideas moving the unthinking. More than we sometimes understand, we are pushing at an unlocked door. The best question here is the simplest: Why? The modern world has no answer to that question, just - as Lionel Trilling said of conservatism - a series of irritable mental gestures in response. Having spent decades being conditioned that everyone has a right to an opinion, and that every opinion matters, very few have a reasoning behind their opinions. They believe what they've been taught or heard or read. Into this void bad ideas have spread. There is no reason that good opinions could not return.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

GCH V: The Final Blogtier

"What does God need with a starship?"

It's the central line of Star Trek V, easily the worst (and funniest) 2 hours in the series' forty year plus history. The movie, if watched repeatedly, does eventually grow on one. The appallingly low production standards, a result of Paramount's meager budgeting, the bizarre plot twists and above all the remarkable piece of madness that allowed William Shatner to both direct and write. A competent actor who found a legendary niche, sometime around 1977 he became a shtick laden parody of himself. Carefully hemmed in by directors (including Leonard Nimoy) and writers with some talent, he could still play a space bound Horatio Hornblower (one of the role models for Captain Kirk). Star Trek V was Bill being Bill. Worse than that it was Bill being Bill circa 1989. More than once, watching the film, you can feel the presence not of the Almighty, but of Henny Youngman.  "Take My Vulcan - Please!"

The critic, of which this blog has many, may say that The Gods of the Copybook Headings is Publius' Star Trek V. Publius being Publius. Rambling historical asides. Rants against the government. Circuitous pieces of logic that somehow link obscure references to The Fountainhead, Reflections on the Revolution in France and a rather too detailed understanding of Trek arcana - though I am piker compared to people I have met. Trust me. It all makes sense. Just another few paragraphs, it will all come together. As we note this blog's fifth anniversary - or blogversary as I called it after year one - one is compelled to ask how have we lasted so long. I say "we" not referring to Publius' multiple personalities, or imperial sense of self, but you and me. 

I keep writing because I'm an eccentric. It's either this or talk to the TV. Whatever person is sitting next me, they tuned out awhile back. I sometimes have no idea why any of you keep showing up. Some of you, I know, are fellow eccentrics. Objectivists, monarchists, atheists, non-mainline Christians, Anglophiles and others caught in a kind of time warp. Pardon the pun. I say eccentric as in "deviating from the recognized or customary character." Ever been told you were born at the wrong time? Yeap, I get it about once a week. Right now JS Bach's Concerto in C Minor for 2 Harpsichords is playing on my iTunes. Exactly. The word you're looking for, the WFB word anyway, is discomfiture. Sometimes you're embarrassed, sometimes you're embarrassed for other people. You show up at the 20 screen megaplex with your date, she wants to see some ghastly chick flick that will make you're skin crawl and you....there is no alternate. 

The chick flick is the least worst thing available. At least it involves human being doing recognizably human things. The rest is just nihilism and bubble gum. Nothing wrong with bubble gum, but it's not part of a balanced diet. A little bit back Chris Taylor redesigned his blog. I'm picking on Chris because he's a nice guy. I've met him. Perfectly decent chap. Looking at him you'd assumed he was completely sane. Who designs his blog to look like a 1930s airline poster? One trumpeting the British Empire no less? I don't know but my first reactions was: "Holy crap this is sooooooo cool!" I actually did say that. The person sitting next to me - this was at work - replied: "You never say cool." It's not a Publius word. If you love Art Deco (broad non-academic use of the term) and the period between World War One and Woodstock (the latter being the precise moment Western Civilization lost it's sense of good taste and decency), you'll love looking at the blog. I don't know about the content yet, I'm sure it's all good stuff. I'm still admiring a gorgeous colour photograph of Stirling Moss looking very determined and very British. Two things I like.

There have always been eccentrics. Social conformity is never universal. A distinction should be made between ordinary quirkiness and genuine eccentricity. One of my favourite lines, from one of my favourite plays - it's not in the movie version - is "make the sort of trouble that's expected." It's from A Man For All Seasons. Sir Thomas More was a devout Catholic who died a martyr's death. He was the quintessential eccentric. The historical More is somewhat more complicated - isn't that always the case? - as he had others executed for their beliefs.  The image of More that we know, what Robert Bolt brilliantly captured, is of an individual who remained true to his personal beliefs. Bolt was a socialist and agnostic. Sam Spiegel, the legendary producer of Lawrence of Arabia, had to spring Bolt from jail because the latter had been protesting nuclear weapons illegally. Yet Bolt could see a fellow eccentric across the centuries and intellectual divide. Something more than the beliefs, the personality that adheres to something intangible yet vital. Beyond mere quirkiness. Not the trouble that's expected and accepted. Hopefully over the last five years I've provided the unexpected, or at least the interesting. In anycase, I know what I'll be doing for the next five years.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

GCH IV: Blogging the Voyage Home

Four years ago myself, and two other university colleagues, founded this blog.  One is now a semi-professional opera singer, the other will be entering graduate school in the fall, and here I am with you, gentle reader.  Who, among that long-ago triumvirate, have been the wisest in their extracurricular choices, I leave to you.  Four years is forever in the blogsphere.  The typical blog has a life expectancy of about two weeks.  Those who survive infancy die off by early toddlerdom, victims of that scourge of the blogsphere, boredom.  There is the odd blog that has lasted a decade.  We content ourselves, with this perspective in mind, here at GCH with a respectable and notable middle age.  Having covered what is now almost the entirety of Bush the Younger's second term, and every day of Stephen Harper's Prime Ministerial reign, and drawing upon a general knowledge of human history, we have come to several conclusions about political life and life in general.

1)  Nothing ever happens in Canada. 

2)  No matter how badly the American government screws things up, the American people will always save the day.

3)  You don't know what a woman is thinking, so don't even try.  Smile and nod and hope for the best.

4)  Europeans are decadent welfare junkies who have not, and probably never will, fully emerge from feudalism.

5)  Britain is always on the verge of collapse.  Even in its Victorian heyday, intelligent opinion on the Continent believed that the whole place was going to be destroyed by some kind of violent revolution, along the lines of the French Revolution.  We're still waiting.

6)  Always bet on Britain.  Between two countries, the former British colony has the edge.  Between two British ex-colonies the more British of the two will win out. 

7)  For all the tremendous genius of the Japanese people, they remain, essentially, what they were half a century ago:  clever adapters and improvers of other people's ideas - usually an American, a Briton, or German and occassionally a Canuck or Aussie.  For all the awesome power that seems to be awaiting China in this century they remain, like the Japanese, a deeply collectivist society.  True innovation comes from the individual mind, even when working in a team.

8)  You really, really, really don't know what she's thinking.

9)  The easiest, slowest moving target in the world is the Catholic Church.  You can blame it, with some plausibility, for pretty much everything.  It has, however, outlasted every single one of its major critics over the centuries - with the exception of the mainline Protestant churches, who are all close to death now.  It matters less why this is so, than that it is.  I say this as someone who was raised by people with a pretty strong distaste for Rome. 

10)  While I'm at heart a Whig, I'm too old to believe in Whig history.  I very much wish Macaulay was right, that history follows in a neat and straight line toward greater freedom and a higher standard of living.  It isn't true, however.  The reason we need political freedom is because the essential human attribute is free will, it is even more fundamental than our capacity to reason.  We must first choose to reason, choose to think.  It's a choice most men, in most eras, try desperately to avoid.  We have the freedom to choose freedom or slavery or serfdom.  The latter options being less demanding, they are most often followed.  This is why history never follows a straight line

11)  While I do not believe life begins at conception, and so cannot accept a total ban on abortion by the state, this doesn't mean I regard it as being moral, except in very extenuating circumstances.  If the anti-abortion advocates can be accused of fanaticism for their cause, the pro-abortion supporters can, in the main, be damned for evasion.  With the exception of the Objectivists, virtually no one explains why abortion is suppose to be moral, and they often do so in a very formulaic way.  This is the interesting aspect of the debate, and the essential one.  Saying you have a right to choose presupposes no conflicting rights or even claims.  Who's being simplistic now?

12)  A pragmatist isn't someone who is practical, as opposed to the impratical ideologues, but someone who is short-sighted.  The most politically pragmatic thing to do is usually the one with the worst long-term consequences.  Most supposed conflicts between the ideal and the practical are really conflicts between the short and the long term.  The flip side of this argument is being fanatically opposed to any form of compromise, even on non-essential issues.  Usually it isn't about freedom or serfdom, it's about the degrees in between, it's about capital gains tax rates.  Keep pushing in the right direction, get a few big things right - even if that means getting many small things wrong - and never, ever surrender the moral high ground.

13)  The simplest way I've found to explain freedom to most people is this:  Do you think the government knows how to run your life better than you?  Forget about the poor, no one - not even nasty old Ayn Rand, who was actually quite generous with her money - believes we should throw the poor and the sick to the wolves or the cold night air.  This is a smokescreen, a despicable one but very effective.  The most common argument for the welfare state boils down to this:  If you don't agree with my solution, or some variant thereof, you are a cold, heartless monster.  The response of many of those on the Right - who should know better - is to grovel and say that they very strongly believe in some variant thereof.  Let's be clear.  The welfare state is a bad thing, it is bad for those who pay for it, it is bad for those who live off it, and it is good only for the bureaucratic middlemen who take their big fat cut.

14) Again, fool, you don't know what she's thinking.

15)  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I urge one of our American friends to have dozens of large signs saying this printed up.  Volunteers should then carry these signs everywhere Senator Obama goes until November.  It's yet another part of Christian teachings he forgot to pay attention to, which is a pity because it's one of the best and wisest thing any Christian ever said.

16)  If you think the slippery slope is a cliche, ask Ezra Levant.  Societies, especially ones founded on the common law, are run on precedent.  This is why the slippery slope is a perfectly valid, though not decisive, argument.  Your opponent can always say, well what's wrong if we do slide down the slope?  Few statists and collectivists, however, are so brave as to be so obvious.

17)  In his first inaugural address, Jefferson famously observed:  " Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."  Replace kings with bureaucrats and you have the essence of the argument for minimal and limited government today.

I usually finish off these yearly commemorations with some long lament about the state of the world.  I think this blog's regular readers know pretty much where I stand on the state of the world.  As Cicero put it, O tempora o mores!

What follows is this past year's greatest hits, what I thought was pretty good, and even what others seemed to like.  As always let me thank all those who continue to read, comment and link to the Gods of the Copybook Headings.  The blogsphere is a lonely place, and it's always nice to know you have friends.  I have had the opportunity to meet some of you in person and have, so far, never been disappointed with your intelligence and genuine concern about the state of our country, the West and most importantly, the individual human soul.  It profits a man nothing indeed.  This is why the Victorian Liberal Party was an odd-ball collection of "heretics" and "fanatics,"  and why the modern Conservative Party is much the same.  Whatever our differences, we are concerned about how the state and culture seek to destroy the individual soul.  From those who tell us we are nothing more than animals, to those who tell us we are only fractions of some greater, mythical, whole.

The first thing ever posted on this blog, today four years ago, was a quote from the poem Recessional by Rudyard Kipling:

Far-called our navies melt away -- On dune and headland sinks the fire -- Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget -- lest we forget!

It may have seemed a pessimistic beginning, though I thought it a good warning and reminder.  What is now, is fleeting.  It is a thought that assuages us when we see evil, but serves notice, again, about the need to defend what is good about the world and those around us.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

GCH III: The Search for Brutus

Today we celebrate our third blogversary.  Please keep your applause to the end of the post.  In last year's long look back I observed:

When one of Paul Martin's top staffers derided the Conservative Party's child care proposals by saying that parents would spend the money on "beer and popcorn," both the Secular and Religious Right were outraged.  The comment strikes at the heart of the difference between Left and Right in Canada.  The Right sees Canadians as capable and self-sustaining.  As healthy human beings in a world they are capable of dealing with.  The Left's view is the opposite.  Canadians are weak and incompetent against the challenges of even everyday life, to say nothing of the wider problems of the age.  For the Right government is a servant for the Left a parent.  The former supposes the efficacy of the individual, the latter goes so far as to question its existence with such absurdities as multiculturalism. 

We are not, thankfully, who are grandparents were.  Canadians are part of a tradition but it is a Canadian tradition.  I have no desire to live in the traditional manner of my ancestors who lived as serfs to near absolute monarchs and authoritarian priests.  Neither do most of the Right.  An extension of a belief in individualism is a belief in free will.  That belief promises freedom and demands freedom's corollary, responsibility.  Put another way, you can and should pay your own way.  This isn't an atomistic individualism.  A community of socialist serfs is no community, it's a chain gang.  Family, community and nation are concepts that can only reach their true potential by recognizing their base, the sovereign individual.  That is the Western Tradition and it is the Canadian Tradition as well.

As in noted further along in that post, last year's Great White Hope was the election of the Harper Conservatives in January.  A year later there is not much cause for rejoicing nor all that much for condemnation either.  There seems to be signs that the Canadian public is sensing drift among our insistently "new" government in Ottawa.  The drive to the center has produced apathy among the centrists.  Currently the Conservatives' edge, so far as they have an edge, lies in their leader.  Stephane Dion, admittedly is a very weak, almost comically so, leader.  I can't recall a Grit chef with so little charisma and political savvy, not even Paulie Martin.  Harper is a highly competent politician and would look good compared to pretty much any recent national leader, excepting Trudeau or Mulroney, the former for his charisma and the latter for his political skills.  Compared to Dion the Tory leader looks like Rock Hudson competing for the affections of Doris Day against Jerry Lewis.  Offered a choice between two middle of the roaders the electorate will lean to the more personally palatable of the two.  This is not, however, how majority governments are won. 

The five priorities which brought the Tories to power, now more than a year and a half ago, were good and well targeted tactical strikes, undermining Liberal strengths, bolstering their own and setting the agenda.  They were, however, tactical efforts.  There was no grand agenda or idea and therefore a small minority and a limited mandate.  Majorities, for Conservatives at least, require calculated risks and moving back to the Right is a calculated risk for the Harper Conservatives, yet it should be a natural move.  Focus on one issue with a single theme, empowering Canadians to live their own lives as they see fit.  Freedom is perhaps too lofty an abstract, and sadly too alien a concept, for Canadians to embrace as readily as our American cousins.  Focus instead on the products of freedom, show what it means in concrete terms. 

The campaign against the Wheat Board is an excellent policy that fits well with this theme, but there are thousand of Wheat Board-like institutions across Canada that deny Canadians their freedom.  The CWB is a fairly blatant violation of the rights of mostly Western farmers.  The biggest violation of the rights of Canadians today, however, is Medicare.  A political visionary sees opportunity where others see only electoral suicide, recall Mulroney and free trade, an issue which had destroyed two Prime Ministerial careers and was so controversial that Mackenzie King merely proposing the idea in 1946 nearly lead to a cabinet revolt. 

Stephen Harper needs to look into a television camera lens and say that it's time to stop the meaningless rhetoric about American health care and say the obvious, Medicare is an aberration among the health care systems of the world.  More importantly he needs to argue that a nation as great as Canada can't be defined by a mere government program.  Medicare, peacekeeping and multiculturalism have all been nationalist crutches for a nation that still really hasn't figured out what its post-British identity is.  In a previous post, The New Pearson, I argued that Harper has an opportunity to become as influential a figure as Lester Pearson, but in a positive pro-freedom direction.  Pearson tried to define a post-British Canada and created a contradictory monstrosity, a reflection of everyone and everything then fashionable, but refusing to put forward something clearly and strongly our own. 

Canada belongs to everyone and everything, provided your beliefs are in harmony with the bien pensants of the age.  A nation cannot survive if it does not insist on itself to its people and the world.  It cannot survive if every change in intellectual fashion causes an intellectual crisis and period of crippling self doubt.  We need an idea that lasts.  It must be an idea because any other type of unifying force is both irrational and impractical in a country like Canada.  There has never been anything resembling an "ethnic or racial Canadian."  This is a good thing, it saves us from easy definitions of race and religion, it insists upon us a task of philosophical definition.  John Ralston Saul, among others, has counted it as one of our nation's strengths that we lack a "monolithic" definition, such as that of the United States.  That we are a nation of compromisers, as epitomized by Sir John A and Baldwin and Lafontaine.  Fair enough, but these gentlemen compromised within a historical and intellectual context. 

None doubted their allegiance to Crown and Empire, to British conceptions of rights and liberty and invocations of Edmund Burke were never too far from the lips of even the most devout compromisers of that era.  Had one asked those masterful politicians and compromisers Macdonald and Laurier whether they'd compromise to the point of declaring Canada a republic, or a welfare state or a thousand other compromises that their successors made, I suspect they would have stood their ground as firmly as any American Founding Father.  To say we are nation of compromisers is nonsense; to perpetuate the myth functions only to undercut debate on serious national issues.  This is perhaps its point, our national unity has at times depended on not asking hard questions, lest one region or another take grave offense.  The result is a kind of censorship.  We don't talk about certain things because it may upset some people and that might undermine our national unity. 

If Canada really was such a hot house creature it would have died years ago.  The cult of compromise serves one extremely useful function, as cover for establishing a consensus.  Propose a radical new idea, like socialized health care or abortion on demand, and then compromise.  Maybe a few health care controls, maybe a few less restrictions on abortion.  Since the methodology of debate is compromise, not an analysis of first principles and context, to change the context one merely has to make more radical demands to make the old radical demands seem less so.  Thus the policies of the CCF and NDP entered into the platforms of the Liberal and then Progressive Conservative parties, not because very many people really wanted them to, but because no one had the courage to oppose them, lest they fail to compromise.  It's a cycle that has to be broken and Stephen Harper is as good a man, and politician, to do it.  This is who we are, this why it matters, this where we need to go.  Without vision the people do indeed perish.  At a certain level it's not even about the ideas themselves but about the methodology, the rejection of the cult of compromise.

The John Ralston Saul thesis, echoed by many others, of Canada lacking a monolithic definition, of really our lack of definition at all as being a central strength, is a confession of utter intellectual and cultural bankruptcy.  If compromise is a central principle of action then there is nothing that prevents an individual or nation from compromising itself into oblivion.  Micheal Bliss' acid quip that Canada has become a multicultural hotel is the end point of this process.  But just as an individual cannot exist as devout non-entities lacking any form, so a nation cannot.  Lacking a definition by essentials it will seek one, in a panic, by seizing upon trivia.  Thus we witness the spectacle of a coffee franchise being elevated to a national icon and half-jokingly referred to as one of the things that sets us apart from the Americans.  As time progresses this may cease to become a joke.  Witness the famous beer commercial from a few years back, featuring a young man shouting "I Am Canadian."  It was frightening the number of people who took that catalogue of Canadian incidentals as something essential to our sense of nationhood.  This is what the cult of compromise has brought us to.

Saul thesis is useful, as noted above, as it disarmed, and continues to disarm, those who might defend an alternate definition of Canada.  For all his praising of compromise and consensus Saul, as does the Canadian Left in general, has an agenda that is quite ideological.  Trudeaupia was not a product of compromise but of a dedicated group of modern day Jacobins intent on re-creating the nation in their own image.  It was a neat trick to undermine the defenders of the Old Canada by saying there was no Canada to defend.  The trick, in the end, maybe on them.  If Canada has a fluid definition then why should the Left, born and breed of the 1960s, have its prejudices and values keep pride of place?  It's been said that Trudeau somewhat regretted his policy of multiculturalism toward the end.  He may have understood that it legitimized and empowered cultures whose values were very different from his own.  The Old Canada was a bigoted place - then again who wasn't then? - and it demanded assimilation of at least basic values and mores by new immigrants.  If all cultures are equal then all values are so.  The modern Left has invited its own destruction, sadly we're along for the ride.

Our American brethren have one tremendous advantage, they know their history and in the main consider it, rightly, to be noble and good.  Canadians do not know their history, a deliberate act on the part of generations of educators to create a tabula rasa for their social experiments, and what they do know they generally find boring, tragic or despicable.  An epic story spanning five centuries, a marvelous achievement of peace, freedom and prosperity against daunting odds, all this reduced to a kind of absurd caricature of the Innis Thesis - Fur, French, Aboriginals and Socialized Health Care.  A cottage industry of popular history has emerged, thankfully, examining and extolling Canadian accomplishments in both World Wars, a cottage industry, ironically, founded by one of cheerleaders of the Trudeaupian experiment, Pierre Berton. It isn't enough. 

In our first blogversary post I noted the goal of this blog:

The basic reason I blog, however arrogant this will sound to some, is not only that I want the Old Canada back, I want to continue where it left off.  I don't want to reverse the social progress in race and gender relations over the last forty years, which would have come with or without Trudeaupia.  I want that old energy and old benevolence that made Canada a beacon undo others.  I want to go back to 1967 and extrapolate that line into the future.  Not going back to the greatest that we were, but to the greatest we are destined to become.

History is the first step, philosophy is the second.  Without facts theories are hot air, no matter how well subsidized by the state. Without theory facts are just random bits of unorganized data.  We can't remind Canadians what the Old Canada was like, very few remember it.  It must be re-taught, always mindful that nostalgia is as much a distortion as giving the impression that every White Anglo Saxon Protestant before 1967 was a deranged sexist bigot itchy to rape, murder and pillage the weak and oppressed.  The message must be simple and is true:  Freedom is our tradition.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

 

GCH II: The Wrath of Publius

Begun two years ago as a drunken bar bet between three university acquaintances, The Gods of the Copybook Headings has remained true to its original intention: a useful and enlightened "waste of time."  Hailed by its admirers as "mildly interesting,"  "only occasionally pretentious" and "scatological,"  it has also attracted its fair share of criticism.  From "the product of an obsessed and warped mind" to "lacking in either coherence or humanity."  Truly a tradition to be proud of.  Still the question lingers.  Why?  Why write more than three quarters of a million words on everything from religion to capitalism to the new James Bond.  In last year's blogversary post I wrote:

Blogging is kind of like being blind on a city bus talking to yourself.  Once in a while someone comes up to you and says, "Dude, your talking to yourself, get help!"  Sometimes people come up and say, that's an interesting point, but really what about this...."    The former is both an occupational hazard, as far as this is an occupation, and a reality check.  The latter is pretty much why I or anyone else blogs.  We can all talk to ourselves, the question, and hope is that someone talks back.  Otherwise I'd be watching Lawrence of Arabia right now rather than writing out this confessional of sorts.

I've re-thought this point.  I certainly enjoy the talking back, which is usually very polite and mostly well informed.  What I really enjoy however is the thinking.  I think better when I write.  The James Joyce Theory of writing, the stream of consciousness approach, almost always produces a Mississippi flood of gibberish.  Saying whatever comes to mind isn't any more or less "natural" than properly edited prose.  I can't claim that everything here at GCH is properly edited to the standards I would like, but this isn't my job and I have other commitments on my time, other interests too.  One of my fellow inmates at the high school I attended, who is now an engineer, explained to me once that he understood math better after he had to explain it to someone else.  When we think we have little mental shorthands that allow us to reach conclusions quickly.  They however sometimes prevent us from thinking clearly and thoroughly.  When we write for others we have to do away with those shorthands.  In the process what goes on "upstairs" hopefully gets a little clearer.  As for the goal of this blog I rather ambitiously wrote last year:

The basic reason I blog, however arrogant this will sound to some, is not only that I want the Old Canada back, I want to continue where it left off.  I don't want to reverse the social progress in race and gender relations over the last forty years, which would have come with or without Trudeaupia.  I want that old energy and old benevolence that made Canada a beacon undo others.  I want to go back to 1967 and extrapolate that line into the future.  Not going back to the greatest that we were, but to the greatest we are destined to become.

I still believe that.  What happened on January 23rd is the most heartening thing to the enemies of Trudeaupia in decades, indeed probably since the Old Philosopher King took his long walk in the snow.  I recall once seeing an interview of an actress who did a one woman show on the life of the former Prime Minister.  Asked why he still fascinated people the actress responded, romance bubbling up from within her, that you never forget your first love.  Leaving aside the arrogance of the statement - we didn't all love him, surely - it captures one of the fundamental problems of Trudeaupia, puppy love gone on well past its move on by date. 

At some point people grow up, the high school infatuations are succeeded by something more tangible, more mature.  What was the Canadian Left's second love?  Aside from its own group vanity?  There wasn't any.  Nothing came after Trudeau because nothing could.  Trudeaupia is a dead end.  The next logical step would have been full blown democratic socialism.  Canadians, as it turned out, weren't really a bunch of Euro-commies with toques after all. 

Whether it was the ghost of George Brown, or American television or the plain common sense of a people deeply ingrained with freedom, we stepped back from the statist abyss.  We didn't elect Ed Broadbent in 1984 or 1988, we elected Brian Mulroney.  Even the Liberals, as if sense finally returned to them after sixteen years of madness, elected a solid Blue Grit to the leadership in the form of John Turner.  Yes, Turner went a little haywire over free trade but in 1984 he was the epitome of a Blue Grit.  The Left and the intellectuals wanted to go further.  The people of Canada didn't.  They didn't want to go back either.  The past was now more than another country, it was a horror without the warm embrace of the social safety net.  Still, for the first time in many years the intellectuals and the Left found themselves out of power and influence.  The nostalgia began soon after for the unconsummated love of Trudeau.  Those of us who did not love him, but have to live with what he gave us, are in a strange predicament.  How do we get rid of him?

There is no open revolt against the Trudeaupian legacy.  Trudeau the centralizer is seen as Trudeau the nationalist.  Trudeau the spendthrift is seen as Trudeau the compassionate.  The myth seems invincible, despite the starkness of what he left.  A frontal assault would be suicidal then.  Stephen Harper recognizes this.  Unlike Mulroney he is a reformer, not a better manager of the welfare state.  When Wellington was asked why he supported free trade he replied that he didn't, he supported its leading advocate in British political life at the time, Sir Robert Peel.  The old general expanded that he believed in men and not principles.  I believe in the opposite, but the Iron Duke, as he usually did, had a brilliant and profound point.  Men not ideas act.  They act within a context.  At some point you have to say that this is a good man and he will do the right thing when called upon, even if the right thing is only the best possible.  Stephen Harper is a good man. 

One doesn't spend an entire lifetime believing in something and wake up one morning believing something else.  Even a professional power luster can't pull off that trick.  Harper is playing a long and frustrating game and doing it about as well as possible.  The Radical Right, such as it is in Canada, is often critical of his cautious approach, as it should be.  Remember in attacking the Prime Minister for his timidity we are also acting as a cheering squad. 

If even his supporters and well wishers aren't pushing him further; what support will he encounter in the center for real change?  The Right in Canada, not just the political right, but the cultural, intellectual and spiritual Right need to "make noise."  A revolution, even one that looks more like an evolution, doesn't happen in a vacuum.  It needs that "chorus of opinion" the old textbooks used to talk about.  Mrs T once observed, as I have often cited, that the method of her revolution was economics, but the object was to change the soul. 

Whether the soul is supernatural or not is not the issue.  History has made the Canadian Right a rather motley alliance of secular libertarians and fiscal conservatives and Christians.  It is fashionable to say the Religious Right but this is a fiction.  There is only one religion on the Right in Canada, though there are signs that the Jews maybe drifting into the coalition.  As for the other faiths, there is little positive that can be said.  We on the Right are what's left of Western Civilization.  This shouldn't seem as odd as it does.  The West is a strange synthesis of Pagan and Christian spirits.  The two elements have often been antagonistic but they have also been complimentary. 

The Left has been declaring its hatred for the Western Tradition quite loudly for forty years.  If the Canadian Left seems less deranged than its American counterparts this is due more to its insularity and provincialism than any kind of wisdom or judgment.  Too busy patting itself on the back about the genius of Medicare to cheer on the death-cultists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  The Canadian Left is also less radicalized.  In America the Left knows that its values are a slap in the face of nearly two and a half centuries of American Tradition.  They are very much strangers in a strange land.  The Canadian Left, on the other hand, was able to fashion - i.e. distort - a narrative of Canadian history akin to the Whig histories of Victorian Britain.  The Whig historians believed that British history was an inevitable evolution toward classical liberalism.  The Canadian Left has sold Canadians the lie that Canadian history is a gradual evolution toward democratic socialism.  In this alternate history Trudeaupia receives the blessing of all the Holy Saints from at least Sir John A. onward.

We on the Right disagree.  We want the Old Canada back, but back without its vices.  What unites us isn't just nostalgia or hatred, it's a common belief in two things: reason and individualism.  Reason seems a strange bond between two elements - I'm ignoring the fiscal conservatives as they're philosophically irrelevant - that are divided on exactly that point.  The Secular Right is Secular because it doubts, either it doubts faith completely or at least its power and / or need in the public square.  The Religious Right believes in belief, to borrow E.M. Forster's formulation.  That given, now look around.  Look at the Left.  Look at the barbarism of most of humanity.  The supposed volte face the nations of the East have made toward freedom since 1945 must be viewed cautiously.  Could Japan retain its liberal democracy in the face of a 1930s style depression as we did?  Is freedom, and the long train of cultural values that it requires, more than skin deep in the East? 

We don't know but there is much to be skeptical about.  Europe has been in a strange slow motion suicide since Franz-Ferdinand's driver took that wrong turn in Sarajevo and found Gavrilo Principe waiting.  What remains is us, the English Speaking Right.  The typical religious conservative in Canada doesn't want a theocracy, agrees with the freedom of science to research on virtually all things, though not always to agree with the findings or methods.  The much derided evangelical Christians have a better grasp of freedom that their secular opponents on the Canadian Left. 

When one of Paul Martin's top staffers derided the Conservative Party's child care proposals by saying that parents would spend the money on "beer and popcorn," both the Secular and Relgious Right were outraged.  The comment strikes at the heart of the difference between Left and Right in Canada.  The Right sees Canadians as capable and self-sustaining.  As healthy human beings in a world they are capable of dealing with.  The Left's view is the opposite.  Canadians are weak and incompetent against the challenges of even everyday life, to say nothing of the wider problems of the age.  For the Right government is a servant for the Left a parent.  The former supposes the efficacy of the individual, the latter goes so far as to question its existence with such absurdities as multiculturalism. 

We are not, thankfully, who are grandparents were.  Canadians are part of a tradition but it is a Canadian tradition.  I have no desire to live in the traditional manner of my ancestors who lived as serfs to near absolute monarchs and authoritarian priests.  Neither do most of the Right.  An extension of a belief in individualism is a belief in free will.  That belief promises freedom and demands freedom's corollary, responsibility.  Put another way, you can and should pay your own way.  This isn't an atomistic individualism.  A community of socialist serfs is no community, it's a chain gang.  Family, community and nation are concepts that can only reach their true potential by recognizing their base, the sovereign individual.  That is the Western Tradition and it is the Canadian Tradition as well.

In the spirit of that Canadian Tradition, the one that would have built the CPR, but without government backing, that would have fought two World Wars, without the needless crisis of conscription.  Finding common ground does not mean surrendering one's values.  The common ground is where values overlap.  Neither the Secular nor Religious Right accept our current approach to crime, to education or to social welfare.  It could be said that the Right has faith in the individual, however no faith is required.  Freedom works, individualism, properly understood, works.  Collectivism and statism don't.  History and everyday life support that conclusion. 

What kind of individualism?  One that holds the rights of some cannot be sacrificed by the whims of a minority or a majority.  The 1960s gave individualism and freedom a bad name. It equated both with thoughtless hedonism.  What happened at the muck of Woodstock was not freedom or individualism, it was the negation of both.  Freedom is not anarchy and there can be no individualism without a self.  The "spaced out" manner of the Hippies was only partly due to drug abuse, the deeper reason was the gaping hole where there should have been a mind and a soul.  Doing whatever you feel like now is a pretty good recipe for suicide.

The other word the Sixties disgraced was reason.  Reason, to the Hippies, was the cold voice of arbitrary authority.  That it might be based in reality, that it might take into account emotions, though not as a primary, never crossed their minds, or what was left of them.  Reason became either just someone's opinion or something floating off in space, unanchored to the daily reality.  Freedom, reason, the Right, the West and in the best sense of the word, Tradition, not as a grab bag of the accidental but as values proven correct by time. 

Before leaving I would like to thank the usual suspects who continue to link to and read this at times seemingly eccentric collection of thoughts and observations.  Kevin of Trudeaupia, still MIA, but not forgotten.  Her laconic viciousness, Kate of SDA, long may she reign.  The Metis Mullah, as fun and lively in person as in virtual form.  The Foggers who escaped from Toronto in one piece, though went back to London for some reason.  The Last Amazon for living up to her name.  ElectEcon for not making fun of my undergraduate grasp of economics. The Unboundable Andrew, often cautious when many of the rest of us lose our perspective.  The Junk, its teeth firmly in the Islamists' rear end. Keith at Minority of One and Bruce at Autonomous, cases in point about engineers being more rational than most other people.  The Burkean Canuck not only for his blog but for helping to overthrow the Liberal hegemony.  Political change just doesn't "happen" because some of us pontificate about it.  The always Sober Paul Tuns.  I think I understand the Catholicism bit, but I'll never get the baseball.  Albera's greatest Hysterical Single Mother, proof my mother was right that Ukrainian girls were decent and sensible.  Strangely she never said that about Portuguese girls......  The Monarchist - Dieu et mon Droit! And as always the indispensable Nealenews.

Since this blog usually has a rather negative and critical tone I would like to end on a positive note today.  Leonard E. Read's classic story I, Pencil, tells the story of capitalism with a simple everday object.  The tremendous thought and effort that went into creating a bit of wood and lead.  It reminds me of what actually counts.  Not politics, not the Mad Mullahs of Tehran, but the practical business of life carried out by thoughtful men and women working together voluntarily.  Hopefully this blog is of some use to them.

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

The Gods of the Copybook Headings One Year Blogversary

It seems like yesterday I was trying to figure out how to embed links into the text of a post, rather than have ungainly URLs cluttering up the blog, and here I am over a half a million words later still blogging.  The impression of many is that bloggers are either unemployed or seriously underemployed, while that is sometimes the case I have felt the compulsion to blog even when by schedule was impossibly tight and no inclination when I had all the time in world.  It really is like a compulsion of sorts.  Some major crisis happens and you feel a desperate need to tell someone what you think, no matter how unoriginal or uninteresting your thoughts may be, or whether anyone is in fact listening as you talk to yourself.  Blogging is kind of like being blind on a city bus talking to yourself.  Once in a while someone comes up to you and says, "Dude, your talking to yourself, get help!"  Sometimes people come up and say, that's an interesting point, but really what about this...."    The former is both an occupational hazard, as far as this is an occupation, and a reality check.  The latter is pretty much why I or anyone else blogs.  We can all talk to ourselves, the question, and hope is that someone talks back.  Otherwise I'd be watching Lawrence of Arabia right now rather than writing out this confessional of sorts.

I would like to thank all those who have read and commented on this blog over the past year as well as those who have linked to Gods.  In particular I'd like to thank to Kevin Jaegar at Trudeaupia who was the first "major" blogger to link to us.  Even though I often didn't agree with Kevin his rather simple looking blog was one of the best out there, a fact testified to by the number of blog roles he's still on.  I would also like to thank the following bloggers with whom I've kept a fairly steady chatter over the last year:  Everyone over at the London Fog, in particular Lisa and the mysterious Mapmaster (though not as mysterious as regular commenter nomdenet).  One day I'll figure out exactly what "Mapmaster" refers to, unless that is his real name.  Which, if it is, is a very cruel name for a fellow.  More thanks to Darcey at Dust My Broom, everyone's favourite nude skiing Metis engineer.  Not that I want to stereotype.  Andrew Anderson at Bound By Gravity deserves a special mention.  He's the only blogger, aside from Mike Brock, that I have a clear visual image of.  He seemed taller on TV than he does on the blogsphere.  Something about the camera adding, I guess.  The tireless Brian Neale to whom we all owe our gratitude.  Without Brian there would be no Assorted Links, no Assorted Links and Publius would have to blog about the weather or Brutus' cats.  Pushkin maybe unhappy about this, but the rest of us are better off for having Nealenews.  Keith, who is another engineer, at Minority of One, also deserves a mention. 

For some strange reason engineers like reading this blog.  I don't know why, I seem to have a kind of animal magnetism when it comes to engineers.  Very ironic given my pathetic high school math average.  You'd think a History major would attract other History majors, but no.  Most humanities majors, in my experience, are a fairly woolly headed and left leaning lot.  They also know precious little about the subjects they studied in university.  The assumption by many science majors that humanities majors are just slackers trying to get out of doing real work at a university level, is pretty much dead on.  There are a few pikers like me who'd be arguing over the importance of John Sandfield MacDonald compared to John Alexander MacDonald regardless of anything else.  We're sadly a minority.  I have it on good intelligence that Jay Jardine is a very nice guy.  I can't tell you how disappointed I am.  Anyone who reads that much Spooner should be angry.  It's a screwed up world where it's crime to travel 140 down the QEW.  Still, I'll keep voting Conservative.  You either start with what you've got and move forward or just walk away.  I'm not ready to walk away, yet. 

Laurent at Le Blog Polyscopique has done wonders for my knowledge of stats, French and Quebec social demographics.  Kate at Small Dead Animals needs no introduction.  She is the wonderfully vicious Queen Bee of the Canadian Blogsphere.  If she ever were to leave us life would be far less fun.  My thanks to her for just being her - even when she goes too far.  I haven't had any real contact with Monte Solberg but I was a big supporter of the old Reform Party way back in 1993.  I remember Monte's god awful mustache, Preston Manning's glasses and high pitched voice and Stephen Harper's hair, which hasn't changed a bit.  They were in every sense amateurs.  Manning, for part of the 1993-1994 session of Parliament, sat not in the front row of the Reform benches but in the middle as an egalitarian gesture.  He also refused to live in Stornoway, the Official Residence of the Leader of the Opposition and disdained using even basic parliamentary tactics to put forward his points.  The Central Canadian media had a field day with these "hicks" but I knew, I don't know why, that the rustic mannerism would fade and the same basic prairie populism and sincerity would remain.  After nine years of Brian Mulroney slick I appreciated real people fighting a good fight.  Call it faith, for lack of a better word, but I still believe that the CPC carries forward that basic common decency represented by people by Deb Gray, Chuck Strahl, who was very sadly diagnosed with lung cancer yesterday, and Monte.  They're a good bunch and they've had my vote for sometime, even here is darkest Liberal Toronto. 

I would also like to extend my thanks to those "crazy" Christians Paul Tuns and Russ Kuykendall.  I can't call them religious conservatives anymore so I'll just say they're both solid chaps and I wish them all the best - no matter how many times I get annoyed at Paul when he shows up on Michael Coren's show.  Some of the more recent regular visitors to Gods have been Candace over at Waking Up On Planet X, a title that always reminds me of Duck Dodgers in the Twenty-Fourth and a Half Century. Celestial Junk Blog also deserves a hat nod, if only for his recent series on Canadian aboriginals.

Before I wrap up I'd like to make a few general comments as to why I blog.  I know this post is rather long, but if you've been reading this blog on anything like a regular basis you know brevity is not one of Publius' strong points.  When my father arrived in this country two things impressed him almost beyond words.  One was the quality of the physical infrastructure of Toronto.  Everything was so new, built to such a high standard and designed with a care a foresight that are occasionally forgotten by those who today use our roads, public transit and large commercial buildings.  We take this for granted but three decades ago, not very long ago at all, a city like Toronto was an exception on the world stage.  The city and Canada were quite literally a beacon unto others.  The other thing which impressed my father, much more so than the physical qualities of Canada, was the sense of life of its people. 

Canadian courtesy is a cliche now, and was even then, but it was very true then.  There was also a basic honesty about the people he meet.  The feel of the people he left in Old Portugal was of cynicism and resignation.  Everyone is out to get you, the system will keep you in your place and all you can do is suffer, pray and wait to die.  Anyone who has listened to the Fado music of the Portuguese will know their sense of life, what they call saudade, a kind of longing melancholy.  Fado is incomprehensible to Canadians, or indeed North Americans as a whole.  It's simply too tragic and too fatalistic.  Life isn't like that to Canadians today, and certainly wasn't in the 1970s.  The sense of life of Canadians is that of a quiet and unpretentious optimism.  It is an optimism that has faded in the last thirty years.  With it has gone that honesty and openness that was so characteristic of us as a nation then.  Certainly there were bigots and cynics before Trudeaupia.  Where in the world wasn't it so?  Whenever I hear or read about how bigoted White Anglo Saxon Protestants were in the past I always shake my head.  It misses entirely the point.  What other group of people has strived so hard to over come prejudice, indeed gone too far in the direction of tolerating behaviour from immigrants groups that threaten Canada's continued existence.  There are today in Lisbon large colonies of Punjabi and Central Asians.  I can assure you their reception and treatment is much less kind than that of Canadians toward the Portuguese thirty years ago.  There are many crimes in Canadian history, though all judgments of this kind are relative.  If Canada was wrong then, who was right?

The Trudeaupian Welfare State was established as part of a program to replace the traditional Anglo-French tensions that had characterized Canadian society since 1759.  Trudeau was not the first to see the dangers of this dualistic national personality, but most of his predecessors had taken it as a given, a problem to be managed.  The first Canadian leader to seek to overcome the Two Solitudes was John George Diefenbaker.  Dief was the first Prime Minister to be of neither British or French descent.  As an ethnic German he had been discriminated against during World War One and saw many of his Hungarian and Ukrainian friends interned during the war, an injustice far less well known than the internment of Japanese Canadians a generation later.  He grasped that what Canada needed was more individualism, that the tribalistic collectivism of the past was what was keeping Canada from becoming a truly great nation.  No anglophonies, no francophonies, Canadians first, last and always.  He was the only Prime Minister, aside from Laurier and Mackenzie, to regularly invoke individual rights as the corner stone of his policies. 

Dief, however, was an unphilosophical populist.  He had his heart in the right place but his ideas rarely reached any level of sophistication.  His lack of experience running anything larger than a small law office made his time as Prime Minister something close to a disaster.  Dief bungled so many things, the Bomarc missile, the SRC and Radio Canada strike, the Coyne Affair (involving Andrew's dad) and even the day to day management of the Public Service, that his basic message became obscure.  Somehow power just slipped into the hands of the Liberal mandarins and Pearson became PM in 1963.  A dithering and weak leader Pearson survived five years as first minister largely because of his sincerity and modest popularity.  Under his bland rule the under workings of Trudeaupia were established, most notably CPP and Medicare.  Canada, a growing consensus in government circles began to believe, needed to be kept together by an ever expanding federal government.  We would be bound together in statist chains.  The ethnic divide of French and English would not be conquered by an appeal to Canadians as individuals.  Individualism, after all, was the message of the past.  The bien pensants decided to fight collectivism with collectivism.  Two cultures could destroy Canada, but two hundred?  Being English or French would matter less because both groups would become minorities in their own country.  Tolerance would be both a necessity and an ideal.  The problem of course is that collectivism is still collectivism.  Two hundred cultures may not provoke a two way civil war, instead they may replicate the Balkans on a wider scale. 

The establishment of Trudeaupia was made possible by two basic forces of history, ideas and emotions.  The intellectual spirit of the age was toward greater government intervention, a belief that the problems of society could be re-engineered in ways not entirely dissimilar to those of the natural sciences.  At an emotional level the Trudeaupian state was an expression, however misguided, of the generosity of the Canadian people.  Why should some starve in the second richest nation on earth?  Why should there be hatred of others?  Was not brotherhood a noble ideal to be aspired to?  It's Christian origins being kept obscure, of course, religion being a divisive force its exclusion was seen as necessary for the new Canada to thrive.  Religion also provided an alternative to the state.  If you can't co-opted them, the separation of church and state now an unquestioned principle of free societies, just supplant them.  What few expected was that the Canadian character would be changed by the welfare state and multiculturalism. 

That basic energy and compassion that was so startling to those from other countries, even Britain, was drawn from a sense of economic independence.  When men no longer need, or even can, fend for themselves they lose far more of their self esteem than anything their parents might have done to them as children.  A confident optimism is not a character trait of a dependent, economically or psychologically.  Compassion also rested on independence.  In the Old Canada you had to choose to help some else.  Making it a duty, via the state, removed the element of free will.  In this I agree with Catholic teachings, though for very different reasons, free will is the essence of humanity.  When force is used against us, however "noble" the goal, part of our humanity is threatened.  Given enough time it can be destroyed.  The most generous societies have always been the most free.  This is not only because free societies are richer, it is also because they are more benevolent. 

When another human being is an unchosen obligation, a millstone round the neck, the natural tendency is toward resentment.  When we choose to help another person we are affirming our own personal values and our own sense of self.  Charity can, and should, be selfish, though not in the common understanding of selfishness.  The end result of free choice is benevolence toward our fellow man.  The end result of force is resentment and rebellion.  The sometimes nasty anger that underpinned Mike Harris' Common Sense Revolution, which was noticed and promptly distorted by outlets like the Red Star, was the end result of thirty years of the increasing application of force (the state) in private affairs.  A large group of "angry white men," who happen to pay the bulk of the taxes in this country, were fed up with being treated like blank cheques.  They did not so much object to helping others, nor were they quite so angry at the extent of what was being taken from them, they were angry at being taken for granted and used.  Atlas groaned in 1995.  Sadly he did little else. 

The basic reason I blog, however arrogant this will sound to some, is not only that I want the Old Canada back, I want to continue where it left off.  I don't want to reverse the social progress in race and gender relations over the last forty years, which would have come with or without Trudeaupia.  I want that old energy and old benevolence that made Canada a beacon undo others.  I want to go back to 1967 and extrapolate that line into the future.  Not going back to the greatest that we were, but to the greatest we are destined to become.

Regards,

Publius

The Gods of the Copybook Headings